Hullabaloo

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

 
Fairnbalanced

by digby

FOX News is refusing to air an ad critical of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, citing its lawyers' contention that the spot is factually incorrect.

Factually incorrect?



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digby 11/22/2005 01:38:00 PM |

Monday, November 21, 2005

 
Holding Their Feet To The Fire

Bob Woodward seems to think that he's been tough on the Bush administration:

WOODWARD: But you know, I would never compromise. You know, if I may, I brought some headlines in "The Washington Post." These -- do these make any sense?

KING: Hold them up a little.

WOODWARD: Yes, OK.

KING: So we can read them.

WOODWARD: This is -- yes, OK. This is November 2002 before -- as the Bush -- word came out about the war in Afghanistan. "A Struggle for the President's Heart and Mind." Struggle. It explains in great detail how Powell had different positions, there was a mass tension and difficulties in the war council. Let's see. This is the second part of that series. "Doubts and Debates Before Victory over the Taliban." Doubts and debate. Now, anyone who knows anything about the Bush administration, they'd rather keep doubts and debate off stage. I bring them on stage in this book.

I've -- you know, I don't want to go on, but "The New York Times," front page, when the book, "Plan of Attack," came out last year, "Airing of Powell's Misgivings Tests Cabinet Ties" and the book jolted the White House and aggravating long festering tensions in the Bush cabinet.

"Airing of Powell's misgivings." "Doubts and Debate before Victory." Man, that must have really freaked out the White House!

The Bushies never gave a shit about Powell and they were thrilled to portray Commander Codpiece treating the great General like a lackey. It's quite clear that Woodward doesn't understand why he is given all that access.



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digby 11/21/2005 06:29:00 PM |

 
Send In The Lobster

War-room spinners also hope to highlight whatever good news there is to be found in Iraq, and which, they say, doesn't make its way into the American media. They recently dispatched one of their best operatives, Steve Schmidt (no relation to the Ohio congresswoman), to Baghdad to look for ways generate positive press. His answer: build better relations with the reporters. But they may be preoccupied these days by the need to dodge terrorist attacks on their hotels.

I wonder why they haven't gone back to the tried and true. Via Somerby, here's Margaret Carlson talking about her time with the Bush campaign:

“There were Dove bars and designer water on demand,” she recalls, “and a bathroom stocked like Martha Stewart’s guest suite. Dinner at seven featured lobster ravioli.”

It wouldn't hurt for the administration to send over some Dove bars. It bought them oodles of good coverage in 2000.



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digby 11/21/2005 03:47:00 PM |

 
Stuck In Their Groove


It's amazing how the media gets stuck on certain narratives and how hard it is for them to change. On Hardball today, Matthews had on Charlie Cook and Stewart Rothenberg, both of whom are non-partisan, clear thinking political analysts. Chris began by bringing up the president's low poll ratings, the trouble the Republicans are having on the war, the bad press and all of it. Within minutes, as always happens on these shows, they were dissecting the deep, intractable problems .... with the Democrats.

Rothenberg, to his credit, did bring up that it wasn't actually necessary for the Democrats to have a single message right now since we are a year from the elections and the Republicans are imploding. This led to a discussion of how the Democrats are the captive of special interests.

It's clear that the gasbags haven't yet developed a vocabulary or a framework from which to describe and understand the new political reality. Matthews, in particular, can't wrap his arms aroud the idea that the Republicans are tanking. He compared Bush to Henry the Fifth today (yup) and got all brow furrowed and confused trying to understand how it could happen that Bush is so unpopular.

This is something that the elite media and the Bush administration have in common. They can't adjust to changing circumstances. Once their narrative/gameplan/talking points are set, you have to pry them out of their brains with a crowbar.

I hope that Democrats are prepared for the fact that they are going to have to wage the 06 election as if they are 30 points down and Bush is still astride his destrier cutting a swathe through every competitive district in the country. No matter how low he goes in the polls, or how much the public is disgruntled with republican rule, the media are going to portray the Democrats as even worse. We'll have to win a few "surprises" before they can adjust their plot line.



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digby 11/21/2005 03:02:00 PM |

 
Genie In A Bottle

by digby

Nobody is going to ask me who should be hired at The New York Times to replace Judith Miller, but if they did I would say that they should hire the best and most unsung national security reporter in the country --- Jason Vest. If you are unfamiliar with his work, do yourself a favor and have Mr Google look him up. He's a real reporter, not a stenographer, but he also has an impressive interest and grasp of the history of various groups, cabals and individuals who make up the current national security establishment and the Bush administration. And lo and behold, he actually writes about them. This is a huge key to understanding these otherwise inexplicable people and their motives. I highly recommend that you read his pieces wherever they come up and I will continue to bring them to your attention.

Today, he has written a piece on torture for the National Journal that is fascinating because he's spoken to old guard CIA who have had some experience with this stuff in the past. They all agree that the moral dimension is huge, but there are good practical reasons for not doing it as well. These range from the difficulty in getting allies to cooperate because of their distaste for such methods to the fact that the information is unreliable.

But the thing I found most interesting is the observation that it does something quite horrible to the perpetrators as well as the victims:

"If you talk to people who have been tortured, that gives you a pretty good idea not only as to what it does to them, but what it does to the people who do it," he said. "One of my main objections to torture is what it does to the guys who actually inflict the torture. It does bad things. I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, 'Why didn't you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?' They said that their torturers got so involved that they didn't even bother to ask questions." Ultimately, he said -- echoing Gerber's comments -- "torture becomes an end unto itself."

[...]

According to a 30-year CIA veteran currently working for the agency on contract, there is, in fact, some precedent showing that the "gloves-off" approach works -- but it was hotly debated at the time by those who knew about it, and shouldn't be emulated today. "I have been privy to some of what's going on now, but when I saw the Post story, I said to myself, 'The agency deserves every bad thing that's going to happen to it if it is doing this again,'" he said. "In the early 1980s, we did something like this in Lebanon -- technically, the facilities were run by our Christian Maronite allies, but they were really ours, and we had personnel doing the interrogations," he said. "I don't know how much violence was used -- it was really more putting people in underground rooms with a bare bulb for a long time, and for a certain kind of privileged person not used to that, that and some slapping around can be effective.

"But here's the important thing: When orders were given for that operation to stand down, some of the people involved wouldn't [emphasis mine --ed]. Disciplinary action was taken, but it brought us back to an argument in the agency that's never been settled, one that crops up and goes away -- do you fight the enemy in the gutter, the same way, or maintain some kind of moral high ground?

To some extent civilization is nothing more than leashing the beast within. When you go to the dark side, no matter what the motives, you run a terrible risk of destroying yourself in the process. I worry about the men and women who are engaging in this torture regime. This is dangerous to their psyches. But this is true on a larger sociological scale as well. For many, many moons, torture has been a simple taboo --- you didn't question its immorality any more than you would question the immorality of pedophilia. You know that it's wrong on a visceral, gut level. Now we are debating it as if there really is a question as to whether it's immoral --- and, more shockingly, whether it's a positive good. Our country is now openly discussing the efficacy of torture as a method for extracting information.

When Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase "defining deviancy down" he couldn't ever have dreamed that we would in a few short decades be at a place where torture is no longer considered a taboo. It certainly makes all of his concerns about changes to the nuclear family (and oral sex) seem trivial by comparison. We are now a society that on some official levels has decided that torture is no longer a deviant, unspeakable behavior, but rather a useful tool. It's not hidden. People publicly discuss whether torture is really torture if it features less than "pain equavalent to organ failure." People no longer instinctively recoil at the word --- it has become a launching pad for vigorous debate about whether people are deserving of certain universal human rights. It spirals down from there.

When the smoke finally clears, and we can see past that dramatic day on 9/11 and put the threat of islamic fundamentalism into its proper perspective, I wonder if we'll be able to go back to our old ethical framework? I'm not so sure we will even want to. It's not that it changed us so much as it revealed us, I think. A society that can so easily discard it's legal and ethical taboos against cruelty and barbarism, is an unstable society to begin with.

At this rather late stage in life, I'm realizing that the solid America I thought I knew may never have existed. Running very close, under the surface, was a frightened, somewhat hysterical culture that could lose its civilized moorings all at once. I had naively thought that there were some things that Americans would find unthinkable --- torture was one of them.

The old Lebanon hand that Vest quotes above concludes by saying this:

I think as late as a decade ago, there were enough of us around who had enough experience to constitute the majority view, which was that this was simply not the way we did business, and for good reasons of practicality or morality. It's not just about what it does or doesn't do, but about who, and where, we as a country want to be."

Now that we've let the torture genie out of the bottle, I wonder if we can put that beast back in. He looks and sounds an awful lot like an American.



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digby 11/21/2005 10:23:00 AM |

Sunday, November 20, 2005

 
The War Marketeer

by digby

A lot of people are linking to this fascinating Rolling Stone article on John Rendon, king of wartime propaganda. I've written extensively about the Office of Global Communications and the WHIG, but I didn't know that Rendon was involved. I should have. It's exactly his kind of gig.

I became aware of Rendon after Gulf War I, when it was revealed that he had had a big hand in "shaping the debate." But it shouldn't be assumed that he was the only PR firm involved in such things. Many of you will remember that none other PR giant Hill and Knowlton orchestrated one of the most amazing examples of prowar flackery ever documented:

... nothing quite compared to H&K's now infamous "baby atrocities" campaign. After convening a number of focus groups to try to figure out which buttons to press to make the public respond, H&K determined that presentations involving the mistreatment of infants, a tactic drawn straight from W.R. Hearst's playbook of the Spanish-American War, got the best reaction. So on October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill at which H&K, in coordination with California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter, introduced a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah. (Purportedly to safeguard against Iraqi reprisals, Nayirah's full name was not disclosed.) Weeping and shaking, the girl described a horrifying scene in Kuwait City. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," she testified. "While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming into the hospital with guns and going into the room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die." Allegedly, 312 infants were removed.

The tale got wide circulation, even winding up on the floor of the United Nations Security Council. Before Congress gave the green light to go to war, seven of the main pro-war senators brought up the baby-incubator allegations as a major component of their argument for passing the resolution to unleash the bombers. Ultimately, the motion for war passed by a narrow five-vote margin.

Only later was it discovered that the testimony was untrue. H&K had failed to reveal that Nayirah was not only a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, but also that her father, Saud Nasir al-Sabah, was Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S. H&K had prepped Nayirah in her presentation, according to Harper's publisher John R. MacArthur's book Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. Of the seven other witnesses who stepped up to the podium that day, five had been prepped by H&K and had used false names. When human rights organizations investigated later, they could not find that Nayirah had any connection to the hospital. Amnesty International, among those originally duped, eventually issued an embarrassing retraction.

They hate us because we're so good. God bless America.



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digby 11/20/2005 08:55:00 PM |

 
All Leaks Are Created Equal

by digby


This essay in today's LA Times makes my head hurt. It's by a professor of media studies and history at Rutgers and it is called "Attack secrets, not leaks:"

As a critic of both the Iraq war and the administration's political ruthlessness, I appreciate the satisfaction of seeing a White House operative nabbed for what seems like petty revenge. As a former and still-occasional journalist, I agree with the criticisms of Miller's credulous prewar reporting, which helped legitimize claims that Saddam Hussein posed a danger to the United States. As a former assistant (and still a friend) to Woodward, I've often heard the rap that he's too close to those in power.

However, I also believe that the frame that the news media have used for presenting this story is badly warped.

Instead of dwelling on horse-race details about who leaked what to whom and when, pundits should be debating the fundamental issue: Should leaking be criminalized in the first place? Instead of cheering the Plame investigation and vilifying the reporters caught in its web, we should be deploring the probe and applauding the reporters for gaining access to classified material, however ugly the leakers' motives.

I understand this principle. If you "criminalize" leaks then people will stop leaking and the public will be less informed. But that principle exists to serve the far more important principle of the public's right to know. That is what has become badly warped.

Why in the world should we applaud reporters for getting access to classified material but not writing a story about the powerful government leakers who leaked that classified information in order to obscure the facts and hide the truth? I'm not crying for Plame (although I think it's a traitorous act to cavalierly expose a WMD specialist for petty reasons at a time like this.) What I'm interested in is the fact that the executive branch used classified information to secretly discredit a critic and the press doesn't understand that withholding that story, not the identities of those who did it, is outrageous and worthy of condemnation.

The Fitzgerald probe is a peculiarity that is merely shining a light on a common practice among insiders that they clearly don't understand is wrong. In the case of both Miller and Woodward, they wrote nothing about the case until they were forced by the law and their lameass, tardy editors. Their protection of their sources actually superceded their larger obligation to inform the public. This happened throughout this saga to greater and lesser degress, wherein a number of reporters gave lawyerly answers and talked about the case as if they didn't know the answers to the questions they were asking, acting the part of journalist instead of actually being journalists. As I wrote earlier, as far as I can tell, Matt Cooper (and I should add, Knut Royce and Tim Phelps) were the only ones who actually understood what the story was.

Nobody is saying that they should have revealed the names of their sources, but they damned well should have revealed the substance of their conversations with those sources. Moreover they should have revealed to the public that the administration was using underhanded methods to discredit a critic. The fact Woodward and Miller (and others) wrote no stories is not a reason to excuse them --- it's the main reason to condemn them.

We hear a lot of whining about how they didn't write stories because they didn't want to be subpoenaed or the prosecutor asked them not to say anything (which is a genuinely baffling genuflect to government power.) I feel their pain, but that is the chance they take when they traffic in classified information. Their job is a risky business and while I'm sure they hope they aren't going to have to face a prosecutor for it, it's always got to be in the back of their mind that it could happen. The government tries to keep secrets and the press tries to dig them out.

Surely, everyone can see where that breaks down in this story, right? The idea that the "ugly motives" of government officials is irrelevant is preposterous in this case. The first question should have been, why is the powerful Scooter telling me this on backround? Why isn't the president's right hand man Rove saying this on the record? Would George Bush fire them if he knew they were revealing this information? If it's relevant to Wilson's report and casts doubt on his credibility, why aren't they saying this publicly?

There are only two possible reasons that Libby, Rove and the other leakers would not go on the record. The first is that they knew Plame's status was classified. The second is that they were trying to smear Wilson and didn't want the public to know that. Either way, reporters should have understood they were being used by powerful forces to obscure the truth, not reveal it.

There is no legitimate reason for a top administration official to anonymously leak classified information to support the administration's position. You can see a case in which a top official would legitimately leak classified information to cast doubt on the administration's policy with which he disagrees, but not the other way around. The executive branch classifies information in the first place, presumably because it's not supposed to be public. If they feel that the information is important and necessary to make public in order to support their policy, they can declassify it, call a press conference, give an interview, write a paper. Or they can shut up and find another way to advance their position. What they shouldn't be able to do is have it both ways --- use classified information to wage turf wars or discredit administration critics by having the press cover their asses. And yet that's what happened. Top members of the Bush administration know they can get away with this because they believe that the chumps in the press will even go to jail rather than reveal their dirty deeds (which they went to great pains to remind the press to do.) That is "up is downism" taken to an extreme.

I agree that it's not the job of the journalist to worry about the legal ramifications for Rove and Libby. Reporters are in the business of reporting classified information if it is in the public interest. (See: Pentagon Papers) However, reporters are not supposed to be in the business of advancing the administration's position through this means. That is an abuse of confidentiality. The highest level of government has both the power and the responsibility to debate its critics openly and honestly. If they refuse to do that, the press shouldn't do it for them behind a shield of anonymity. It subverts democracy.

Rove and Libby (and the others) may not have anonymously leaked because they knew Plame's status was classified. It is just as likely that they did it for the same reason they always do --- they were playing dirty pool and didn't want to attach their names to it. This is what all these jaded members of the beltway refer to as "hardball politics." And like hundreds of examples before this, the press docilely went along in order to preserve its access.

The reporter's privilege is a means to an end, not the end in itself. It exists to serve the public's right to know. And yet in this case, as in so many others in recent years, it's been used to obscure the truth, spin the facts, serve the powerful to the detriment of the public.

To pretend that motives don't matter, that all sources are equal, that it doesn't matter if a source lies or uses the reporter as a cover for unethical behavior, is to devalue the principle until it has no meaning. Apparently, many of the elite media are so "entangled" with their sources and so inured to dirty politics that they can't see this.

For the press to shield immensely powerful individuals from being responsible for these actions stands the entire principle underlying the reporter's grant of confidentiality on its head. The point of it is to allow people to criticize their government without fear of professional reprisals, not so that powerful government officials can discredit their critics without fear of public reprisals.



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digby 11/20/2005 06:16:00 PM |

 
Occam's Leak

by digby

Emptywheel at the Last Hurrah and Jane and ReddHedd at Firedoglake both have lengthy and interesting speculation on Woodward for the Plame obsessed among you.

I would only add that this morning it sounded as if the courtiers, as represented on the Stephanopoulos circle jerk and Newsweak, have decided that the source is Richard Armitage.

If this is so (and it may very well be --- Armitage was a major souce for "Plan of Attack") it doesn't impact Libby's legal case but it changes the focus of the narrative a bit. We have been operating under the assumption that the leak was coordinated directly out of Cheney's office, with some help from the WHIG, which included Karl Rove and Stephen Hadley. If Armitage was telling Woodward about Plame as "idle gossip" in a conversation at the State Department, the Bush apologists (and the elite media --- for different reasons) will call that coordinated leak scenario into question.

If it does turn out to be Armitage, regardless of the political implications, I think that it's actually quite likely that the Woodward leak probably happened just as he describes it --- passing on idle gossip. Via Talk Left's excellent rundown of the Armitage theory, we have an article from The LA Times last August that discusses Armitage's access to the information:

After a June 12 Washington Post story made reference to the Niger uranium inquiry, Armitage asked intelligence officers in the State Department for more information. He was forwarded a copy of a memo classified "Secret" that included a description of Wilson's trip for the CIA, his findings, a brief description of the origin of the trip and a reference to "Wilson's wife."

The memo was kept in a safe at the State Department along with notes from an analyst who attended the CIA meeting at which Wilson was suggested for the Niger assignment. Those with top security clearance at State, like their counterparts in the White House, had been trained in the rules about classified information. They could not be shared with anyone who did not have the same clearance.

Less than a month later, Wilson went public with his charges. The next day, July 7, this memo and the notes were removed from the safe and forwarded to Powell via a secure fax line to Air Force One. Powell was on the way to Africa with the president, and his aides knew the secretary would be getting questions.

Woodward says he had the conversation with his source in mid-June, so it fits that Armitage might have recently read this memo and shared the insider info with Woodward. The Bush administration observed no rules, as far as I can tell, about classified information when it came to Bob Woodward. It explains why Woodward would have been so adament about this not being anything more than idle gossip, because that's exactly how he heard it from his pal Dick. According to the article, that Armitage memo didn't leave the safe until Wilson went public so it could have easily been just a delicious tittilating tidbit Armitage threw out there, not realizing where this story was going. (Powerful administration sources discussing classified matters under the caveat that they must never reveal the information is apparently so common in DC now that reporters don't even understand what's wrong with it.)

If my simple scenario is true, then the wingnuts will claim that it proves there was no coordinated leak. If others in the Bush administration were gossiping about this then it wasn't a smear job at all, just simple socializing around the water cooler. This is, of course, nonsense. It would only mean that Woodward and Armitage were socializing around the water cooler (on deep backround.) We already know that Libby and Rove, on the other hand, were rabid dogs working overtime to discredit the CIA (Libby) and destroy "a Democrat" (Rove )through underhanded leaks and then lying about it under oath. One doesn't necessarily affect the other.

If Armitage was Novak's source as well, which Newsweak claims, then Occam's Leak doesn't apply. It's not believable that Armitage would have casually gossipped about this to both reporters. I'll withhold judgment until I see any evidence besides Isikoff's observation that Armitage isn't a "partisan gunsliger" to back that up.



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digby 11/20/2005 07:50:00 AM |

Saturday, November 19, 2005

 
All In The Family

by digby


Bruce Reed writes:

Back in August, when George W. Bush crossed the Mendoza Line with a disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll of 56 percent, he still had four men left to pass for the title of most unpopular president in modern history: Jimmy Carter (59 percent), George H. W. Bush (60 percent) Richard Nixon (66 percent), and Harry Truman (67 percent). I predicted that the way things were going, he could speed past Carter and Bush 41 "within the next month."

I was wrong—it took the president two months.This week's Gallup puts his disapproval at 60 percent, which means father and son share third place on the all-time list. Bush 43 always said he learned an important political lesson from Bush 41, and now we know what it was: Don't hit bottom too early. If you're going to be the third-most unpopular president, do it in your second term, so you have some time to stop and smell the Rose Garden.

It's an awesome achievement for one family to produce two of the four most unpopular presidents in modern times. If there were a Mount Rushmore for rejection, the Bushes would have half the place to themselves.

If I had an advanced degree from Ratfucking U, the minute that Bush announces his election year phony drawdown I'd start the "Read My Lips - Not On My Watch" Bush Family Travelling band. Like father like son.




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digby 11/19/2005 10:36:00 AM |

 
Report From Afghanistan

by tristero

RAWA - the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan - was one of the most vocal groups speaking out against the Taliban when no one was listening. Now, one of their members responds to the bromides being wholesaled by a Republican observer to the recent elections. Since those of us in the US have been fed news about Afghanistan that is entirely propaganda, these words probably will read as shrill, hysterical, and suspiciously "radical." I wish they were, but they are not. I followed international news reports pretty closely of the first Loya Jirga after the Taliban fell, the one which first "elected" Karzai. It was a total sham. The US did everything possible to undermine the proceedings, not that they would have been much less corrupt if the US had stayed away. And RAWA's description of the Northern Alliance, the drug farmers,the warlords, and the abuse of women's rights also jibes with numerous reports that fly under the radar of mainstream American news. And for all the suffering the Afghans have endured since what even The Nation described as the "just war" of invasion, the US failed to achieve its prime objective: Bring Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Mullah Omar to justice.

The US started the fracas by not replacing religious tyranny with democracy, by not relying on the people, but rather by siding with the NA, the very worst enemies of our people. It goes without saying that Afghans will not see as their “liberators” those who drove the Taliban wolves through one door and unchained the rabid dogs of the NA through another. How a nation “sees as liberators” those who have blown to shred not the terrorists but thousands of innocents? How can simple Afghans “see Americans as liberators” while the “liberators” are going to woo their men in the government and in the parliament to approve the establishment of the US bases on our soil for decades, which obviously goes contrary to the independence of the country? Our people say that if Americans were their liberators, they should have not allowed about 200 criminals and arch enemies of democracy to pave their way to the parliament and provincial council. After four years the people see that the “liberators'” promises for them were all lies. And bear it in mind, Ms. Tebelius, that our ruined people have no doubt that those with the disgraceful stories of Abu Ghraib cannot be their “liberators”. Do we need to recite abuses of the “liberators” in Afghanistan?

...

After 9/11 when the U.S. resorted to bomb our wounded country and take the lives of several thousands innocent civilians it helped the bloodthirsty NA seize power. The NA is comprised of those millionaire rapists busy in the opium trade under the very nose of the US troops. They are the people behind the insecurity, kidnappings, embezzlement of billions of dollars of foreign aids, injustices, anti-women constraints, covering up of the day light murders, and so on and so forth.

They include the likes of Dr Abdullah, Younis Qanooni, Zia Massud, Karim Khalili, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Mohaqiq, Sarwar Danish, Ms. Mosouda Jalal, Nematullah Shahrani, Ismail Khan, Ms. Sediqa Balkhi, Rasul Sayyaf, Ikram Masoomi, Rashid Dostum, Mullah Fazil Hadi Shinwari, Ms. Amena Afzali and others are stained with the blood of tens of thousands of Kabul residents. All of these ladies and gentlemen have the disgraceful scar of inhuman brutalities against our people in the blackest years of 1992-1996. They are “our” ministers, vice presidents and advisors to the president. Most of the Afghan ambassadors, governors, secretaries and other high ranking officials are also affiliated with NA mafia.

...

It is not difficult to predict what will be the result of the “miracle” election about which you take comfort. A parliament filled with the most cruel, misogynist, anti-democracy, and reactionary fundamentalists headed by such disgusting drug traders as Sayyaf, Qanoni, Rabbani, Mohaqqiq, Pairam Qul, Hazrat Ali, and their likes. These U.S. backed religious fascists will never “spread democracy”, but rather try to “legitimate” and perpetuate their bloody domination on our people by sitting in the legislature as “lawmakers”.

Ms. Tebelius, anybody who wants to be regarded as a friend of the people of Afghanistan and not of the present regime, she/he has to expose the fundamentalists and their dangerous agenda and avoid to dance to the tune of the US government or its blue-eyed boys in Afghanistan. As Aldous Huxley wrote, “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human”. Please don’t play the role of a propagandist.

Moreover by naming the most scandalous elections in the world “the miracle of Afghanistan”, you have insulted millions of Afghans who didn’t vote for the murderers of their beloved ones. Can’t you feel how painful and disgusting it is to propagate such nonsense?

Update: Jen in comments linked to these beautiful pictures of Afghanistan. It certainly is one of the most photogenic countries in the world.
tristero 11/19/2005 03:13:00 AM |

Friday, November 18, 2005

 
Dear God

by digby

Half of those surveyed said President George W. Bush was right to suggest that "intelligent design" -- the notion that God played a role in evolution -- be taught alongside Charles's Darwin's theory in public schools while 37 percent thought he was wrong to do so.

The Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll found that 69 percent agreed that "evolution is what most scientists believe, so it should be taught in public science classes." Twenty percent said they believe "scientists are wrong, so evolution should not be taught" while 11 percent suggested teaching both views or were undecided.

Just 23 percent of those surveyed said "humans evolved from other animal species through natural selection" while 54 percent said they believe "God created the universe and humans in a six-day period," Seventeen percent said "God caused humans to evolve from other species." Six percent were undecided, the Cincinnati Post, a Scripps Howard paper, reported.

A sizeable majority believe that the earth was literally created in six days. But they also think that kids should be taught "what most scientists believe" even though they don't believe it themselves. Huh?

And only 11% think that ID should be taught alongside evolution but 50% think the president was right to suggest that it should be.

We are obviously dealing with a very confused public on this subject. I think the way to deal with this may be to take a positive stand for teaching comparative religion in public schools. That may just satisfy the majority who clearly don't want to say they believe in evolution but know in their hearts that their kids need to understand it if they don't want to be mullet-headed morons unable to function in modern society.

I took comparitive religion in high school and it was a very interesting class --- not to mention a really easy A. I'm sure the kids would get behind this too.



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digby 11/18/2005 08:23:00 PM |

 
Hawks Fly Away

by digby

Kevin at Catch reads Little Green Footballs so I don't have to poke my eyes out with an ice pick:

Has anyone here tried to phone, e-mail, fax, or otherwise contact the political slut, John "the coward" Murtha? You, know, the maggot who is being quoted by Al-Jazeera (see nationalreview.com)? I have attempted to call this creature since last night (phone still busy), fax him (busy yesterday and today), and he does not accept e-mails from people outside of his district. This man is a tumor, a slime, a piece of shit and I don't give a DAMN that he served in Vietnam! My Dad served in Korea, my father-in-law in Vietnam, and my cousin in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite their courage and service, NONE of them can tell me (who has not served) or any other American citizen that I cannot hold an opinion regarding US-based military operations. Murtha, GO FUCK YOURSELF!

Somebody needs a nap. The Republican caucus needs a nap too. Mean Jean Schmidt called John Murtha a coward on the House floor and then had to withdraw her remarks. As we speak they are staging a strange enraged kabuki vote supposedly designed to embarrass the Democrats. And according to Roll Call they are going to go after Murtha on ethics:

Republicans acknowledge that Murtha's Iraq statement — coming from a Member with strong military credentials — is driving their renewed focus on the ethics questions surrounding the veteran Democratic lawmaker.

"It strikes at the heart of his credibility on [military] issues," said the GOP lawmaker. "He's put himself on the frontline."

Murtha's statement has completely driven them round the bend, from LGFers to members of congress. It's interesting because it's not like others haven't been saying this stuff. He's just one congressman from Pennsylvania. Why all the drama? I think it's because he symbolizes a particular constituent --- the war hawk who recognizes that we aren't winning and that the "war" is, in fact, unwinnable. They are suddenly sweating and agitated because they know that if they are losing guys like him, they are losing the whole enchilada.



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digby 11/18/2005 06:17:00 PM |

 
Just Trying To Help

by digby

So it was Woodward who picked up the phone after Fitzgerald's press conference and reminded his White House insider source that, contrary to Fitzgeralds apparent belief that Libby was the first to spill the beans to a reporter, the source had told Woodward about Plame sometime earlier.

In his press conference announcing Libby’s indictment, Fitzgerald noted that, "Mr. Libby was the first official known to have told a reporter when he talked to Judith Miller in June of 2003 about Valerie Wilson." Woodward realized, given that the indictment stated Libby disclosed the information to New York Times reporter Miller on June 23, that Libby was not the first official to talk about Wilson's wife to a reporter. Woodward himself had received the information earlier.

According to Woodward, that triggered a call to his source. "I said it was clear to me that the source had told me [about Wilson's wife] in mid-June," says Woodward, "and this person could check his or her records and see that it was mid-June. My source said he or she had no alternative but to go to the prosecutor. I said, 'If you do, am I released?'", referring to the confidentiality agreement between the two. The source said yes, but only for purposes of discussing it with Fitzgerald, not for publication.

Kevin Drum wonders why Woodward would do such a thing since it doesn't legally impact Libby's case. My guess is that he and his source thought it would impact the Libby case and that they were consciously tripping up the shameful junkyard dog prosecutor. After all, the entire DC press corps dutifully reported that it had tripped up Fitzgerald when it was revealed --- even though it didn't.

Woodward believed that Fitzgerald was on a Ken Starr fishing expedition:

Woodward expressed some surprise that Fitzgerald hadn't contacted him earlier in the probe, but had high praise for the prosecutor whose investigation he has openly criticized on television. During his time with the prosecutor, Woodward said, he found Fitzgerald "incredibly sensitive to what we do. He didn't infringe on my other reporting, which frankly surprised me. He said 'This is what I need, I don't need any more.'"

This should not have surprised him. Fitzgerald has not been reported to have coerced any journalists to talk about anything but the Plame case and within strict agreed upon limits (despite many of our fondest hopes.) Woodward thought he was out of control because he has been listening to administration spin. But then, that's what he does.



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digby 11/18/2005 03:49:00 PM |

 
Churl Girl

by digby

I just had a very unpleasant experience. I watched Chris Matthews and Maureen Dowd have the most fatuous discussion of gender and politics I've ever had the misfortune to witness. Don't cry for poor Maureen being taken to task for her shallow interpretation of modern sex roles. She deserves every bit of disapprobation she gets.

I knew that Matthews was a masculine virtues obsessed sexist, what with his endless carping about how Hillary comes off as cold and humorless and how real men will lie to their wives and say they support her but won't have the stomach to do the dirty deed when they get in the voting booth. I did not know that Maureen agreed with him.

Here was her adorable sign-off (approvingly quoting someone else) as Matthews drooled into his cuffs, making the point that women don't necessarily vote for women:

"Take 11 men and you get a football team. Take 11 women and you get a riot."

Dizzy broads. Next thing you know they'll be driving and everything.


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digby 11/18/2005 03:00:00 PM |

 
Chicken Or The Egg

by digby

From FAIR:

During an interview with conservative MSNBC host Tucker Carlson, Wright responded to Carlson's question about offering a left-leaning channel by saying that progressives "don't listen to a lot of radio and they don't watch a lot of television" (Broadcasting & Cable, 11/13/05).

I don't know where he gets his information, but I suspect he's relying on some absurd stereotype. It's also likely that his impression that "the left" isn't relevant comes from the statistics that only 20% of the country identifies as liberal while everyone else is a moderate or a conservative. This is not true. That is branding, something a Network TV guy should know all about.

The Republicans have spent decades branding the word liberal (and now progressive) as bad and the word conservative as good. "Moderate" has become a default self-designation in situations where you don't want to carry the baggage of the GOP's demonization of the words liberal or progressive in public. (I've done it myself.) It is useless to use those words to designate anything of substance and I wish that people would even stop trying. Many people who think of themselves as moderate aren't and many people who think of themselves as liberal, progressive or conservative are actually moderates. These are value laden terms that have little actual function anymore. They mean too many different things. The only useful designations at this point are from voting patterns and party ID --- Democrat, Republican and Independent.

Considering the political divide as it really is, Bob Wright, the president of NBC News is saying that the 50% of the public who vote for the Democrats don't watch television or listen to the radio. That's ridiculous. The only logical explanation as to why "the left" doesn't watch his news programs is because they are dominated by screaming Republican shills.

I'm such a ridiculous political junkie, I even watch FOXNews. But if I didn't write this blog I wouldn't bother. I don't blame any Democratic voter for not tuning in --- it's like watching people from another planet most of the time.

This is why I'd like to call your attention to this diary over at Daily Kos by JustWinBaby that points out that Keith Olbermann's show is now the highest rated show on MSNBC. If you don't watch it already, give it a try. He's found the sweet spot between The Daily Show's fake news and the absurdity of the Real News. He tells the stories that need to be told --- and he understands the difference between humor and Rovian character assassination.

If Robert Wright is in the business of making money instead of kissing the GOP establishment's ass on behalf of GE, perhaps he will reevaluate his belief that "liberals don't watch TV" and see that there is a rather large cadre among the 50 million Democratic voters who are dying to see their politics well represented --- and the real stories of what's happening in our political system -- on television. Up until now all we've had is a choice of GOP fiction to choose from. Might as well watch the good looking actors instead of the ugly ones.



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digby 11/18/2005 12:59:00 PM |

 
Missing The Story

by digby


This little chat with Len Downie from the Post this morning is far less revealing than the "water-cooler" message board of yesterday, but it's interesting in one respect. (Check out this excellent analysis of that embarrassing inside look at the WaPo social and professional hierarchy from Glen Greenwald.)

Downie does a great Scott McLellan impression by being robotically unresponsive, but nobody really asks the right question either. Woodward's public statements were egregious but not because he was stating his personal opinion and breaking the Washington Post's rules --- they were egregious because of the opinions themselves. It's clear that he's on the side of the social climbing tut-tutters like that mincing fop Richard Cohen:

COHEN: I‘ve said for a long time—I‘ve agreed with Bob on this. I didn‘t know why Bob was feeling so strongly about it.

But no matter what, it‘s a silly case—it‘s a silly case about nothing much and it‘s doing a lot of damage. I mean, you now have to worry about getting subpoenaed for doing routine reporting, you have to worry about your sources worrying that they‘re going to be revealed. It‘s done nobody any good.

The prosecutor didn‘t bring an indictment relating to the original underlying crime. It‘s an indictment about a cover-up. I mean, it‘s the Martha Stewart thing all over again. It‘s not the crime itself, it‘s not admitting to the crime or the alleged crime or whatever it is...

think in this case—I mean, maybe then I‘m as ignorant as the next guy, but I read that original Novak column and I said so. I didn‘t think a big deal about it. So she was a CIA operative. It didn‘t jump out at me that there was a possible violation of the law.

I think there were a lot of people in Washington, clearly there were a lot of people in Washington and at the White House who were saying, “Hey, if you really want to know why Wilson went to Africa, it was because his wife sent him.”

It seems to me routine dirty politics. It is what Washington does all the time.

Pittsburgh used to do steel; Washington does character assassination.

I'm surprised he didn't pull out a snuff box and take a big 'ol snort right there on TV. Not since Leona Helmsley have we seen such bored contempt for bourgeois notions like open government and honest political discourse. (Cohen agrees with his soul mate Karl Rove on that,by the way, who testified before the grand jury that "discrediting" Wilson with a full on character assassination was SOP.)

If politicians and the press want to know why they get no respect from the people, this is why. They openly defend dirty politics, pooh-pooh our outrage against it, and then expect us to look up to them.

Bob Woodward and Richard Cohen think that Fitzgerald is some sort of obsessed Javert chasing down the poor journalists and their sources over a little loaf of DC's staff of life --- the politics of personal destruction. To the rest of us, it's clear that the law is the only institution left capable of sorting out the truth now that the press and the politicians are so cozy that it literally takes a threat of jail to get journalists to report important stories about our most powerful leaders.

Bob Woodward very likely knew on the day that Novak revealed that Wilson's wife was CIA that this was a coordinated leak, not idle gossip. He most certainly knew that it was a coordinated leak when he found out that Libby and Rove had both "idly gossipped" about this to other reporters. Yet in his media appearances he made it quite clear that he believes that it was a trivial matter. I think we must take him at his word.

The elite press corps see the Nixonian dirty politics that have completely distorted our political discourse over the last 30 years as social currency. Swift-boating and McCain's black daughter and Linda Trip's tapes and Al Gore's suits are entertainment to them and the dissemination of this entertainment buys them access for what they think are their "serious" stories. We are told to just "get over" partisan impeachments, stolen elections and even lying about nuclear weapons.

Richard Cohen and his ilk believed that dirty politics are what Washington "does" the way that Hollywood makes movies or Detroit makes cars while the rest of us rubes maintained the strange belief that Washington is supposed to serve the people. That's the heart of this crisis in journalism. The elite press corps have completely missed the biggest political story of the last quarter century because they were having so much fun laughing and cavorting with their Republican sources that they failed to see that a powerful, criminal political machine was built upon the "trivial" acts of character assassination they found so amusing.


Update: I just realized I got a little nod in Howard Kurtz's column this morning on this point. I guess I won't be getting any invitations to the Christmas party at the Bradlee's. (Just the thought of that ever even being considered makes me chuckle.)


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digby 11/18/2005 10:18:00 AM |

Thursday, November 17, 2005

 
Testy Woody

by digby

Here's an interesting account of a close encounter with Bob Woodward on November 6th (after Libby was indicted and before the Woodster testified) by a reporter with the Toronto Star:

Interestingly, on Sunday, Nov. 6, Woodward was in Toronto, giving a speech to major donors to the UJA. Before the gala dinner at the Royal York Hotel, he spoke to half a dozen reporters, including myself. Here's my treeware column about it.

But I left stuff out.

You see, I had come loaded for bear, wondering why Woodward had been minimizing the Plame investigation in the previous week. So, while we were waiting for Woodward, who was more than half an hour late, I asked the other reporters if they had prepared ''a line of attack." None of them had. It was a Sunday, a slow news day, there was no real news hook, and these were fairly young general assignment journos not particularly immersed in these matters. None of them protested against my wanting to dominate the non-news news conference.

So I pounced, firing off three questions at the top, asking about Libby and Plame and the scandal. Among the questions was, knowing what he knows now, would anything have changed in his book about the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Plan of Attack? He replied:

None of the facts that I know of I would change.

The indictment against Scooter Libby has to do with things he told the Grand Jury and the FBI in an investigation that took place really after all of the decision to go to war had been finalized, and I think after I had finished my book.

Not quite, since the book wasn't published until 2004, some ten months after Woodward and his unnamed administration offical had that conversation about Plame, and nine months before the scandal broke.

Still Woodward continued:

How would I have known that Scooter Libby allegedly lied to the FBI?
There’s nothing in that if it was possible to know, you know, it doesn’t change anything.

I guess that, strictly speaking, that's accurate -- but there's no doubt that Woodward knew that the White House was spinning like mad about members of the Bush administration not being ''knowingly'' involved.

Anyway, Woodward bristled at my questions, and actually accused me of ''conducting an interrogation." He pointedly asked the others if they had any questions. I politely backed off, only to return later to ask about how he felt about the recent blog attack regarding his brushing aside of the Plame case. He said he paid no attention to blogs. He cut off the Q&A and made a super-patronizing comment about us being happy little reporters. (No, I did not like him.)

He made these comments on November 6th. He says in his "statement" to the Wapo yesterday:

The interviews were mostly confidential background interviews for my 2004 book "Plan of Attack" about the leadup to the Iraq war, ongoing reporting for The Washington Post and research for a book on Bush's second term to be published in 2006. The testimony was given under an agreement with Fitzgerald that he would only ask about specific matters directly relating to his investigation.

[...]

I was first contacted by Fitzgerald's office on Nov. 3 after one of these officials went to Fitzgerald to discuss an interview with me in mid-June 2003 during which the person told me Wilson's wife worked for the CIA on weapons of mass destruction as a WMD analyst.

You can understand why Woodward was so testy. He was three days into the realization that his reputation was about to be flushed down the toilet.

And he was being dishonest about the timeline. He knew very well he'd been interviewing the players for his book.

I continue to find it amusing that these journalists get so testy when they find themselves on the receiving end of hard questions. You'd think they, of all people, would know what to expect and know how to handle it. Of course, the WoodMill types are above all that. They just tell the stories their confidential sources give them. If their sources are wrong, what has that to dow with them?



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digby 11/17/2005 07:25:00 PM |

 
Fool You, Shame On You

by digby

Garance Franke-Ruta over at TAPPED says:

Did fear of being sent to jail keep Woodward from coming forward? If so, this may be an instance of Patrick Fitzgerald's aggressive approach to journalists backfiring on him in the worst possible way. If subpoenaed, Woodward, given his historic commitment to protecting sources, would almost certainly have refused to testify before the grand jury without a waiver of confidentiality from his source, whom he reports repeatedly refused to give him one. (The source continues to deny Woodward permission to name him publicly.) Which means that Woodward, had he come forward, may well have found himself imprisoned like Judith Miller.

I'd be extremely sympathetic to Bob's fear of jail time, intrepid reporter that he is, except for this

If the judge would permit it, I would go serve some of her jail time, because I think the principle is that important, and it should be underscored. It's not a casual idea that we have confidential sources. It is absolutely vital. And I'll bet there are all kinds of reporters out there, if we could divvy up this four-month jail sentence -- I suspect the judge would not permit that, but if he would, I'll be first in line. It's that important to our business.

It just breaks my heart that top reporters need to fear jail time for protecting powerful white house officials from being held accountable for their actions. I can hardly hold back the tears. The only thing I can think of for them to do is stop agreeing to listen to the White House's lies under confidentiality agreements and force them to go on the record with their smears and character assassination. I know that's a bold step in a new direction but it would alleviate all this fear and trepidation journalists like WoodMill feel when they are forced to "protect" the most powerful peopple on the planet from public disapproval and legal accountability for their actions.

Here's a good rule of thumb. Don't shield powerful government officials who use the press for sleazy partisan activity they know the public would disapprove of. Oh, and write the real story, not the sleazy partisan smear job your valued "sources" are feeding you for the privilege of future access. It will pay off in the long run. You'll find yourself facing subpoenas and jail time far less often.



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digby 11/17/2005 02:52:00 PM |

 
Optics

by digby

Paul Begala:

I want to see Dick Cheney in his fat tuxedo on TV all day long.






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digby 11/17/2005 01:56:00 PM |

 
Hardballer

by digby

I urge everyone who can to tune into Hardball today. John Murtha is one of Tweety's favorite manly pin-ups. He'll be slavering all over the fact that Murtha has called for immediate withdrawal. (Count how many times he says "stand-up guy.")

In all seriousness, this may be a turning point. Murtha has said the unthinkable: "It is evident that continued military action is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region." Yep. We've made a mess alright. But our continued presence is making things worse --- for everybody.

And the Republicans are predictably lashing out wildly with shrill accusations of "surrender." They are getting very nervous. This isn't 2002 and the codpiece isn't riding an 80% approval rating. The GOP still haven't yet absorbed the fact that his manufactured popularity was always a mile wide and an eighth of an inch thick.

Their patented jingo schtick is suddenly as starkly out of fashion as The Macarena. Woodwardian Bushism is revealed to be nothing more than a fad that people are now vaguely embarrassed to have embraced in public.

What a shame about all the death and destruction. Thanks Bob.


Update: Uh oh. That hot manly flyboy, JJ McCain, is on. Tweety is squirmy --- McCain is defending the administration on Iraq. It's so hard to love a man when he's full of shit.


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digby 11/17/2005 12:59:00 PM |

 
What Does One Wear To Armageddon?

by digby

It appears that Sally Quinn is more than just a society martinet. She's DC's Doyenne of Doom:

On the evening of Nov. 14, Quinn took her message to the grass roots, addressing approximately 70 folks at a meeting of the Citizens Association of Georgetown. Speaking from the pulpit of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Quinn said that she had gathered enough information to “scare you a lot.”

[...]

Your N95 Mask: The Building Block of Emergency Prep. At her talk, Quinn held this particle-filtering device to her mouth and said that she’s “never without it.” She also stuffs one into the briefcase of her husband, former Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, who she says “grouses” about the precaution.

Pick a Room and Stock It. You need water and food to last a week, a battery-powered radio and flashlight, planned emergency routes, contact numbers for the family, the antibiotics Cipro and doxycycline, a first-aid kit, and plastic sheeting and duct tape. Quinn herself keeps all these things in her home’s laundry room, because it’s “easy to seal off.” Also, her food supply is heavy on the beans, “because they’re nutritious.”

Watch That Gas Gauge. If Quinn’s Georgetown neighbors have spotted her frequently at the gas station recently, it’s not necessarily because she’s doing a lot of traveling. The Postie always keeps her tank full in case catastrophe strikes. In practice, that means that when the needle on her Mercedes-Benz station wagon drops by a fourth, it’s back to the filling station. “Three-quarters is pretty much the rule,” she says.

Two Words: Peanut Butter. Along with a supply of water, Quinn keeps a “large jar” of peanut butter in her car, primarily for the protein. Even a small amount of this staple, says Quinn, will sustain the terrorism victim for quite some time.

Keep the Kayak in the Garage. In a 2003 Post piece, Quinn advocated the use of inflatable kayaks as an evacuation mode for those who live near water. The mass hysteria following Hurricane Katrina, though, has apparently soured Quinn on riparian retreat. “Somebody would stick you up with a gun,” said Quinn of an evacuee headed to the river with a portable craft.

Don’t Bother Putting Masks on Your Dog. At the Georgetown speech, an audience member suggested placing masks on pets to keep them from spreading contagions. Quinn responded that she’d tried putting an N95 on Sparky, her now-deceased Shih Tzu, but it didn’t work.

Don’t Trust Public Officials. In a wide-ranging critique of local and federal preparations for terrorist attacks, Quinn made the following contentions:

•Police and fire officials in the District don’t want to warn residents about the hazards posed by chlorine tankers on D.C. railroad tracks out of fear of causing hysteria.

•Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson’s contention that the nation is prepared for a biological or chemical weapons attack is “the biggest lie.”

•Federal emergency authorities “not only lie, they don’t tell the truth.”

My oh my. Somebody's speaking a little bit out of turn on that lying business. I have it on good authoirity that all the best administrations lie to the little people for their own good. (Oh, and if Barney and Spot have trouble with their gas masks you can always wrap your pashmina over their little faces and rush them to the heli-pad. Paris and Nikki say it works like a charm.)

I'm a bit surprised that Sally didn't share with her little Georgetown ladies club the single greatest terrorist precautionary device all the better people have --- advance notice.





Hat tip to reader chicken little



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digby 11/17/2005 10:39:00 AM |

 
Harmony

by tristero


Via The Daou Report, I learned that courageous investigative journalist and Bush-fluffer Stephen Hayes is trying to obtain access to documents in Harmony, a database of purported Saddam-era documents from Iraq that was developed by the Pentagon. The documents have some very intriguing titles as they appear to be evidence of efforts by Saddam to hide wmd before the Bush invasion. Here are a few, according the intrepid Mr. Hayes:

Possible al Qaeda Terror Members in Iraq
Money Transfers from Iraq to Afghanistan
Iraqi Intel report on Kurdish Activities: Mention of Kurdish Report on al Qaeda--reference to al Qaeda presence in Salman Pak
Locations of Weapons/Ammunition Storage (with map)
Iraqi Effort to Cooperate with Saudi Opposition Groups and Individuals
Formulas and information about Iraq's Chemical Weapons Agents
Denial and Deception of WMD and Killing of POWs
Fedayeen Saddam Responds to IIS regarding rumors of citizens aiding Afghanistan
Document from Uday Hussein regarding Taliban activity
Chemical Gear for Fedayeen Saddam
Memo from the IIS to Hide Information from a U.N. Inspection team (1997)
Chemical Agent Purchase Orders (Dec. 2001)
Correspondence between various Iraq organizations giving instructions to hide chemicals and equipment
Cleaning chemical suits and how to hide chemicals
Secret Meeting with Taliban Group Member and Iraqi Government (Nov. 2000)

Now, I know, folks, you think this is just moonbat nonsense. We'd have heard of this stuff by now if there was any there there and even Hayes admits that "most" of the documents retrieved in Iraq were forgeries. And I'll bet some of you are even thinking, "Don't let Hayes pollute the discourse any more than it's already been by reprinting this trash."

But I agree with Hayes for once, especially since most of these docs, he says, are unclassified. Let's see them, all of them. Let's see the originals. All the originals.

Now I'm not saying we will find copies of the Niger forgeries among these documents - I frankly doubt it. Nor am I saying that the Harmony database is evidence of a conspiracy to forge massive documentation to "prove" the Bush case for war, documentation which was never, or only partly, deployed. Or that Harmony was simply an organized campaign of disinformation. Or that the name of the collection supports that kind of interpretation as it sounds like one of those spy jokes: documents in "harmony" with the "case for war."

But I wouldn't dream of distrusting my Pentagon that much. I'd just like to see exactly what's in Harmony. And if it turns out they are a collection of Pentagon forgeries - or more likely, simply category titles with no or little reliable or interesting documentation collected under them, I expect Stephen to tell us in the Weekly Standard loudly and clearly. And long before the next election.

Good luck, Stephen. Keep us posted. Oh, and if you come to New York, I'd love to take you on a tour of Times Square. We can play the shell game. You can make a fortune if you guess right!

UPDATE: Stephen Hayes has now been correctly credited with the information about Harmony.
tristero 11/17/2005 10:04:00 AM |

 
The Greatest Doughy Pantload

by digby

It's a sad day when Jonah Goldberg's shallow little musings are in Robert Sheer's space on the LA Times op-ed page. His first column features the word "moonbats" and compares FDR to Bush explaining that great presidents lie to us for our own good. He even tells us that we didn't know WWII was a "good war" until the Holocaust and Hollywood showed us this was true. History, you see, will show that George W. Bush, like FDR, will be remembered as a great president even though he lied because of his bold action in the middle east.

Apparently, he remains blind to the fact that Iraq threatened no one at the time we invaded --- and that post world war II, the main legal argument against Germany was that it engaged in a war of aggression. (Germans could have disagreed, of course, arguing that they were only following the "Hitler Pre-emption Doctrine." We would not have found that persuasive.)

I think it's rather sad that these doughy little boys dream so of being a Greater Generation that they have to pretend that Iraq, or even the threat of Islamic terrorism, is on the scale of WWII. If FDR lied about WWII, at least we knew at the time that the German and Japanese threat to Europe and China was real --- they were invading all over the place; the argument was always about whether it was real to the US until Pearl Harbor. In those days "the national interest" was a fetish for the right. Today, not so much.



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digby 11/17/2005 08:31:00 AM |

 
Meanwhile, Outside The Beltway

by tristero

Juan Cole rounds up the latest about the consequences of all the lies and distortions that finally the msm noticed. "Noticed?" Hell, one of the most damning themes in the Woodward story is the extent to which the msm actively contributed to the lies, distortions, and serial failures of this administration. But I digress, here's the latest from Iraq:

Al-Quds al-Arabi: First, the Pentagon was forced to admit that it had in fact used white phosphorus as a weapon (and not just as a smokescreen) in Fallujah, though it insisted that it was used only against combatants, not civilians. (When you attack a civilian city, how could you be sure who was who?)

Then there was more bad news when 8 GIs were killed within 24 hours. They included 5 Marines killed while fighting in al-Ubaidi in western Iraq near the Syrian border. The Marines killed 16 guerrillas in the battle. Also on Wednesday, the US Department of Defense announced that 3 GIs were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad.

In a third wave of bad news, the scandal of the tortured Iraqi prisoners has continued to grow. The Iraqi Islamic Party demanded an international investigation, and also called on Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual guide of the Shiites, to condemn the torture.

[Snip]

A major contracting scandal is breaking that involves enormous graft on the part of officials of the Coalition Provisional Administration, the American government of Iraq in 2003-2004

And that's just one day's news, from just one of the monumental catastrophes this administration has created. No one can claim the past five years have been boring. Nail biting, terrifying, infuriating but never a dull moment.

And still, slightly more than 1/3 of Americans approve of Bush. Think about it, like what that number actually means, mull it over in your mind, come up with thought experiments to make 34% concrete for you. And then marvel as full understanding of how incredibly high that number really is dawns upon you.

Man, that's a shitload of ignorant morons running around.
tristero 11/17/2005 06:19:00 AM |

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

 
Fallen Hero

by digby

Here's a very nice essay by Will Bunch about Woodward and what he meant to a generation of reporters. I didn't become a journalist like he did, but I became a political junkie, watching the Watergate hearings that summer so long ago. I too was a Watergate geek --- and Woodstein were my heroes.

I haven't revered Woodward in a long time. And I still mourn the loss of my youthful faith in what Woodstein stood for --- that the truth will out. Woodmill (hat tip to my pal) has been the sad reality ever since.



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digby 11/16/2005 07:43:00 PM |

 
Too Many Marts

by digby

I think it's really great that Bob Woodward is such a stand up guy who refuses to divulge his sources no matter what the consequences. He has always shown excellent journalistic judgement in these things so we can trust him to know what is important and what isn't.

For instance, in his examination of the presidency "Shadow : Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate" he discusses how dumb it was for Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton not to just tell what they knew right away and get it all over with:

After Watergate, I never expected another impeachment investigation in my lifetime, let alone an actual impeachment and a Senate trial. Nixon's succesesors, I thought, would recognize the price of scandal and learn the two fundamental lessons of Watergate. First, if there is questionable activity, release the facts whatever they are, as early and completely as possible. Second, do not allow outside inquiries, whether conducted by prosecutors, congressmen or reporters, to harden into a permanent state of suspicion and warfare.

Good advice, I'm sure. Yet somehow this high minded cautionary tale devolved in the second half into a full-on insider tabloid expose of President Clinton's dick. Literally:

"Bennett had tried ... to obtain the details from the statement Jones had made about Clinton allegedly having 'distinguishing characteristics' in his genital area. It hadn't worked, but Bennett wanted to make sure there were no such characteristics.

At first Bennett thought it might be a mole or birthmark. So he started asking longtime male Clinton friends who might have seen him in the shower at one point or another in his life. Had they seen anything? No one had.

Later, Bennett was in the Oval Office with Clinton, and the president had to go to the washroom. For a moment, Bennett thought of following the president into the Oval Office bathroom to see what he might see, but he decided against it. 'We can't have president of the United States' penis on trial,' Bennett finally said to Clinton directly. 'There is an ugh factor in politics.' 'It's an outrage,' Clinton replied. 'It's totally not true. Go to all my doctors. It's just false...[Bennett said]"The only step that was not taken was to ask the doctor to induce an erection to reduplicate the circumstances that Jones had alleged. That was unthinkable."'

That's the good judgment I'm talking about. Woody's very good at keeping secrets. He prides himself on it. But this particular bit of information was essential for the public to know. Apparently, he believed that if only Clinton had dropped his pants on national TV, he could have moved beyond his problems.

Frank Rich wrote a review of this book back in 1999 in which he excoriated Woodward for his insider bloviating, making the case that Woodward and the Quinn contingent were reflexive antagonists of every president. Little did he know that Woodward would take his criticism so to heart that he would become a mindless hagiographer for the most callow, vacuous leader this country would ever produce.

In his review he discusses at some length Woodward's prudish judgmentalism toward the presidents:

Ford is chastised for bringing into the White House ''a Congressional lifestyle, which often included alcohol at lunch.'' Woodward uncovers one scandalous occasion in Denver when the President ''skipped several dozen pages of his remarks because he had what his aides called a few 'marts,' for martinis, before speaking.'' You'd think that Ford's skipping several dozen pages of luncheon remarks would be a blessing for those in attendance, or at least something less than an indictable offense. But in ''Shadow,'' it's another cue for Woodward to seize the moral high ground and condemn a benighted President Who Did Not Escape the Shadow of Watergate.

Similarly, the Carter Administration becomes an excuse for Woodward to rehash ancient charges of cocaine possession against the White House aide Hamilton Jordan. Though Jordan was ultimately cleared, he was not ''totally innocent'' after all -- for he ''liked to drink beer and loved chasing women'' and ''did go to places like . . . Studio 54,'' where other patrons might have behaved naughtily, thereby making Jordan ''a magnet for allegations.'' Jordan, it seems, is guilty by association with nightspots.

Under Woodward's moral tutelage, Jordan recants his past in ''Shadow,'' belatedly seeing the errors of his partying ways of two decades ago. But Jordan's real problem back then, Woodward suggests without irony, may have been partying with noninsiders. ''Shadow'' reports that Jordan ''stiffed the Washington establishment and its dinner-party circuit with particular relish'' -- apparently a hanging offense. The punishment, Woodward reports, was a long 1977 article in The Washington Post Style section ''about the strain between the Carterites and Washington.''

And then along came Clinton's penis.

Woodward, like Broder and Sally and Richard Cohen and Cokie and the rest of the moribund DC establishment, are obsessed with the social and personal activities of their King (and their own relationships to him) and have absolutely no interest or insight into the corrupt, depraved, malevolent political force the Republican Washington establishment has become. (It's hardball politics!) As long as they are getting their due deference and nobody's slip is showing, they are more than happy to keep any behavior that the unwashed masses might find unpalatable under wraps --- things like war or institutionalized character assassination. The only scandals worth reporting are "too many marts" and "trashing the place" --- behaviors that imply the courtier's social mores are unimportant. Tsk tsk tsk.


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digby 11/16/2005 04:31:00 PM |

 
Harper's Is Good This Month

by tristero

I'm reluctant to take the focus off Woodward's incredible behavior - and for the record, I think Digby is absolutely right regarding his suspicions as to where Woody learned Plame's name - but I want to urge folks to be on the lookout for the latest issue of Harper's on the newsstand. They usually don't post the articles online so you're gonna have to buy it (or got to a library) but it's worth it.

Lewis Lapham has a rant against the Bush Cheney administration's corruption in the Katrina reconstruction that is so blisteringly furious it makes The Rude Pundit appear like that Gautama Buddha. Lapham collects in one place all the sickening details. The corruption is endemic, and the absence of simple human decency so profound, it's enough to make a grown man weep.

In addition, Stanley Fish gives the clearest exposition I've come across of the intellectual and rhetorical hijinks behind the marketing of "intelligent design" creationism. He makes the point many of us have made, that there's a cynical hijacking (and distortion) of postmodern arguments by the rightwing, but he is able to provide far more information on how this is accomplished than I've seen before. The article is probably similar to this lecture Fish has been giving entitled "Three on a Match: Intelligent Design, Holocaust Denial, Postmodernism."

As I've discussed numerous times, the marketing techniques on display in the "intelligent design" wars are the template for numerous other far right cultural battles. Really, you shouldn't miss what Fish has to say.
tristero 11/16/2005 03:14:00 PM |

 
Waiver-ing

by digby

Dick Stauber, Matt Coopers lawyer, just made a very good point on Hardball.

Woodward's souce apparently came forward and told the prosecutor about their conversation. Yet Woodward still says that he is under a confidentiality agreement and needs special permission to reveal what he knows. Stauber asks, "if coming forward and admitting something to a US Attorney isn't waiving confidentiality, then what is?"

Truly, Woody no longer has to worry about crawling up on that cross with Saint Judy. His source spilled the beans to the law. Whatever jeopardy he would be in by revealing his name (and certainly the contents of the conversation) legally or professionally, no longer applies. This means that nothing other than perhaps public embarrassment or some sort of backroom deal between Woodward and the Bush administration are at stake. That is not good enough. There is no reason for Woodward not to report this story.

Matthews and everybody else seems to think that Woodward is protecting Cheney. Jane thinks it's Fleitz. Jeralynn thinks it's Wurmser. I'm intrigued by the idea that Fitz was seen visiting Bush's lawyer during this period. Among all the beltway courtiers, Woodward is the one who has the most direct access to the president. And Junior trusts him.

WDTPKAWDHKI?



Update:

In his most recent book, Bush at War, Bob Woodward brags that he was given access to the deeply classified minutes of National Security Council meetings. He also noted, not long ago, that the President sat for lengthy interviews, often speaking candidly about classified information. This surprised even Woodward, who observed, "Certainly Richard Nixon would not have allowed reporters to question him like that. Bush's father wouldn't allow it. Clinton wouldn't allow it.''

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digby 11/16/2005 02:23:00 PM |

 
Hard Target

by digby

Woodward, who has had lengthy interviews with President Bush for his last two books, dismissed criticism that he has grown too close to White House officials. He said he prods them into providing a fuller picture of the administration's workings because of the time he devotes to the books.

"The net to readers," Woodward said, "is a voluminous amount of quality, balanced information that explains the hardest target in Washington," the Bush administration.

Here's some of that quality, balanced information from "Plan of Attack":

Rove said he wanted the president to start that February or March and begin raising the money, probably $200 million. He had a schedule. In February, March and April 2003, there would be between 12 and 16 fundraisers.

"We got a war coming," the president told Rove flatly, "and you're just going to have to wait." He had decided. "The moment is coming." The president did not give a date, but he left the impression with Rove that it would be January or February or March at the latest.

"Remember the problem with your dad's campaign," Rove replied. "A lot of people said he got started too late."

"I understand," Bush said. "I'll tell you when I'm comfortable with you starting."

And then his codpiece exploded all over the living room.

I've been hearing all the television gasbags try to explain what impact this "bombshell" is going to have on Fitzgerald's case. Victoria Toensing is on CNN pushing the Libby line that Fitzgerald is inept because he didn't know about this Woodward conversation. (She's making very little sense because she doiesn't know what to make of this revelation and can't figure out quite how to play it.)
But one thing seems obvious to me that nobody is mentioning. We know Libby leaked about Plame to reporters. We know Rove leaked about Plame to reporters. We now know that some other administration figure leaked to Woodward and another one (perhaps the same one) leaked to Novak. What is it going to take for the media to start calling this what it was --- a conspiracy?

I don't know if Fitz can prove such a thing. But common sense says that if a bunch of different White House sources are talking to the most powerful journalists in Washington about the same subject, it isn't just idle gossip. Woodward knew that. So did every other top reporter in town. They just preferred to pretend otherwise.

At the next blogger ethics panel we should call upon some of these great sages of journalism and ask them why it took a special prosecutor to back up Wilson's story that that the White House had engaged in a coordinated smear campaign. What other kinds of sleazy behavior are they covering up for their masters ... er, sources?

I do not buy the fact that Woodward didn't have an obligation to come forward publicly. He's a reporter. His job is to tell the public what he knows. With all of his great sources, you'd think that he of all people could have done some actual reporting and gotten to the bottom of the story two years ago.

It's my fervent belief that when the government is spinning the press, whether it's Ken Starr selectively leaking like a sieve or Scooter and his grubby little friends smearing Joe Wilson, it is the duty of journalists to report what they are doing. If their ever so valuable sources dry up because of that, then all the better. The sources are using them for a political agenda, not to get important information out to the public. These are not whistleblowers --- they are flaks and what they are doing is fundamentally dishonest.

If all the administration wanted to do was shed light on Wilson's alleged lack of credibility they could have called a fucking press conference and offered their evidence. It's not like they can't get anybody's attention. The very fact that they were dropping this into the ether like it was idle gossip is the reason that Bob Woodward, Judy Miller and all the rest should have written front page stories about it. It's not difficult. They could do what Matt Cooper did. He wrote that the White House was engaging in an underground war on Wilson. That is and was the story.

This crap about protecting anonymous sources is simply cover for the fact that these people are protecting their access to official lies. It's bullshit and it's why they are in trouble today.

Update: I just watched Wolf Blitzer try to pin Len Downie down on the fact that Woodward never bothered to write that he knew of another source. Blitzer asked him why, after Woodward revealed his information to Downie on October 28th that the paper didn't write about it then --- without revealing the source. Downie dance around, saying that the prosecutor got involved and then they couldn't talk. Blitzer pressed and said that they had several days before this "source" inexplicably (and we are apparently supposed to believe coincidentally) went to the prosecutor with the news that he had spoken to Woodward. Downie had no good answer for that and just hemmed and hawed his way through it, ending with his story that they must protect their sources.

Protecting sources in Washington apparently means not only protecting their identities, it's also means not revealing information they impart. I have to ask then --- what's the fucking point? Apparently the reporter's privilege is like a priest's or a shrink's. It's not the identity that's sacrosanct, which is what I always assumed. It's the information. And there is evidently no obligation to do more investigation so that you can get the story out.

At least until you get a big fat seven figure advance --- at which time it's ok to let the world know what you know, even as you protect your sources.

Deep Throat was misnamed. It's Bob himself who specializes in that particular act.

Woodward said today:

"I hunkered down. I'm in the habit of keeping secrets."

Funny, here I thought that reporters were supposed to be in the habit of revealing secrets.

Update II: Atrios has the transcript of the Blitzer Downie exchange. WTF.



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digby 11/16/2005 12:52:00 PM |

 
All The Presidents Stooges

by digby

I can't tell you how impressed I continue to be with the elite journalists in this country. After finding out that top reporters from The NY Times, The Washington Post and NBC all withheld information from the public about their leaders, I can only wonder what else they may be keeping back because of their cozy relationships, book deals, or political sympathies. This is a crisis in journalism.

Matt Cooper was leaked to by Karl Rove in the summer of 2003 and he fought to keep from revealing his source. But he fulfilled his responsibility as a journalist by writing a story and it was the real story about what was going on. Here's the first paragraph of Cooper's first article on the subject back in 2003:

Has the Bush Administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium? Perhaps.

I don't know why all the other reporters who were being leaked this nasty bit of business didn't write articles with that lead, but they should have. As we all know, that was the story then and it's the story now. Instead it's only after the long arm of the law reaches into the newsrooms that we find out dozens of reporters, including some of the most famous and powerful, were involved in this little episode.

It turns out that Bob Woodward, who worked hand in glove with the administration to create the hagiography of the codpiece, has known for years that the White House was engaged in a coordinated smear campaign against Joe Wilson. Indeed, he was right in the middle of it. In the beginning he may have thought that it was idle gossip, but by the time he was on Larry King defending it as such he knew damned well that it had been leaked by Rove, Libby and his own source all within a short period of time. He's been around Washington long enough to know a coordinated leak when he sees one.

Novak took the bait and dutifully regurgitated the information. Matt Cooper smelled a rat and wrote about it. It's amazing how many other journalists heard the tale and dismissed the significance or went out of their way to "protect" sources by talking about the case on television every chance they got while pretending they were uninvolved. But none pooh-poohed the story and its significance in public with quite the same fervor as Bush's friend Woody.

I had thought that Tim Russert and Andrea Mitchell were the Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh of this story with their endless "speculation" about an investigation in which they had information that could clear up many of the questions they were fielding. Woody takes the cake. His has been an Oscar worthy performance to rival Meryl Streep. He chewed the scenery so many times on Larry King that he should be given a lifetime achievement award:

(Cue "Battle Hymn of the Republic")

WOODWARD: If the judge would permit it, I would go serve some of her jail time, because I think the principle is that important, and it should be underscored. It's not a casual idea that we have confidential sources. It is absolutely vital. And I'll bet there are all kinds of reporters out there, if we could divvy up this four-month jail sentence -- I suspect the judge would not permit that, but if he would, I'll be first in line. It's that important to our business.

I don't think they could have made a cross big enough for the both of them.

Woodward and Miller have been willing tools of this administration from the get. Bob Novak was an open partisan on television, so everybody knew that they funneled information to him and he printed it for political purposes. These two (and their supporting players in television news) were the most important journalists in Washington working for the two most important papers in the country and the national news outlets. Among all the journalistic players in this, the only one who wrote the real story, in real time, was Matt Cooper. He's the one who should be getting the journalism awards, not Judy Miller. He's the only one who fulfilled his duty as a journalist and told his readers what their leaders were doing.

Perhaps this is the natural outcome of the press corps joining the entertainment industrial complex. It's ironic that one of the men who kicked off this new celebrity journalism with Watergate should emerge as one of the major players in this era's biggest "gate" scandal. I suspect that this time he'll have it in his contract to play himself in the film. After all, he's now bigger than Redford. And he's proven over the last couple of years that he's one of the best actors of his generation.



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digby 11/16/2005 08:13:00 AM |

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

 
Call Anyway

From what I gather, the two new proposed compromises to the Lindsey Graham Cojones Project are recondite and vague.

I agree with Marty Lederman at SCOTUS blog that this is surely a case for testimony from experts and a thorough discussion. Pushing through changes to the most fundamental underpinnings of our system of government in order to meet arbitrary deadlines is a very bad idea. The compromises seem to be better than what came before, but that really isn't good enough. History shows that cutting deals on fundamental liberties is dangerous business.

It looks as though it's going to happen, but it is probably still worthwhile to call your representatives and ask for a delay so that the congress can give this important legislation due consideration.



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digby 11/15/2005 09:49:00 AM |

 
Fighting The Last War

by digby

While agreeing with E.J. Dionne's basic premise in his op-ed this morning --- that the Cheney administration acted like a bunch of rabid dogs back in 2002, making it extremely difficult to even debate, much less vote against the decisions to go to war --- Michael Crowley makes the point that I mentioned earlier, which is that the Democratic leadership, particularly the Presidential Hopeful Club, were fighting the last war:

The 2002 debate was filled with discussions about who got the Gulf War "right" and who was "wrong," and how the anti-war folks--who predicted all sorts of disasters that never came to pass--could have miscalculated so badly. Back in '91, anti-war votes killed the near-term presidential aspirations of some key Democratic senators, which may help to explain why ambitious people like John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and even Hillary Clinton all voted the way they did (pro-war) in 2002. Scare tactics or not, they may have felt they couldn't afford, politically, to risk the sort of damage incurred by people like Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, who wound up on the "wrong" side of the 1991 vote and retired soon after instead of running for president as once expected.

Republicans had used the Gulf War I votes of various Senators as a cudgel to beat them over the head with throughout the 90's adding significantly to the lore that Democrats are mincing cowards. Gulf War I was perceieved as an unalloyed success for the USA and people don't like killjoys.

I wrote the other day that Democrats' political instincts proved to be wrong both times, which may actually be at the root of the problem. My answer to this is that in the case of war, perhaps Democratic politicians should just vote their consciences and defend their decision on that basis. Deal making and bet hedging has not paid off for us anyway. Maybe we should simply do what we think is right in these matters and let the chips fall where they may. It's possible that had we done this in 91 we would have ended up exactly where we did --- on the Killjoy side of the equation. It's hard to argue with a glorious victory. But had we done it in 2002, we would have ended up with credibility.

You can't tell the future. When it comes to the big stuff, it's best to do what you think is right and let the chips fall where they may. Democrats have shown that they aren't partocularly good at playing politics with war anyway. If they simply do what they think is right at least they can sleep at night. And after all, if they'd voted against the Iraq war resolution, they would have been on the same side as pretty much everyone on the planet except the Republicna party.



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digby 11/15/2005 07:51:00 AM |

 
Support Bingaman Amendment: List Of Key Senators And Petition

by tristero

A brief addition to Digby's post on supporting the Bingaman amendment.

Here are the names/phones of the key Senators to call, but call your own as well. There is also a petition to sign. It's vitally important. And yes, every phone call and signature does make a difference.

Also, write to your local newspapers.
tristero 11/15/2005 12:44:00 AM |

 
How To Win Friends, Influence People, Topple Musharaff, And Acquire A Few Nukes

by tristero

Steve Coll on location in Kashmir:

The success of jihadi groups in providing earthquake relief have only strengthened their claims to legitimacy in Pakistan.

'Nuff said.
tristero 11/15/2005 12:27:00 AM |

Monday, November 14, 2005

 
Back Room Benedict Arnolds

by digby

I just spent the last hour reading this series of posts on Obsidion Wings about the reprehensible Lindsey Graham amendment to limit habeas corpus. I feel sick.

I suppose that everyone has certain nightmares that haunt them deeply in some far corner of their consciousness. My most vivid one is being imprisoned for something I didn't do and having no hope of ever being freed. (I'm certain it comes from growing up with an authoritarian father who refused to hear explanations for perceived transgressions.) The Darkness At Noon scenario literally terrifies me. It's one of the main reasons I'm a liberal.

This widely circulated Washington Post article from today, in which a lawyer describes his indisputably innocent client's incarceration in Guantanamo is chilling. I would hope that it would make at least a handful of Senators consider supporting the Bingaman Amendment, which will undo at least some of the damage.

The Republican senate is using habeas corpus as a political football. South Carolinian Lindsay Graham, the sponsor, is undoubtedly feeling tremendous pressure because of his "soft" stance on torture (I still can't believe we are even talking about it) and this is his way of restoring some manly credentials. But there is no excuse for the Democrats who signed on to this. Nor is there any excuse for the Blue state moderates either.

There was obviously some back room dickering on this bit of legislation and that makes me about as sick as anything about this whole thing. They're playing politics with habeas corpus for Gawd's sake. This isn't some fucking highway bill or a farm subsidy. It's the very foundation of our system of government and the single most important element of liberty. If the state can just declare someone an "unlawful combatant" and lock them up forever, we have voted ourselves into tyranny.

I know it's bad form to bring this up, but it's worth mentioning at this moment. Historian Alan Bullock put it this way:

"Hitler came to office in 1933 as the result, not of any irresistible revolutionary or national movement sweeping him into power, nor even of a popular victory at the polls, but as part of a shoddy political deal with the 'Old Gang' whom he had been attacking for months… Hitler did not seize power; he was jobbed into office by a backstairs intrigue.

You don't make back-room deals in which you fuck with the very basis of our system of government. It is irresponsible in the extreme. Considering the people we are dealing with, it's especially risky. You just don't know what they are going to do.

It's bad enough to do it when the administration is riding on a wave of popularity. To do it when there is no good political reason is mind-boggling. Like I said, it's one thing for little Lindsay to have to prove he's not a Democratic eunuch. It's quite another for anybody who isn't a Republican from the deep south to feel the need to back this horror.

Katherine at Obsidion Wings concludes her (and Hilzoy's) masterful series with this:

[I]f you agree, if not with our conclusions, than at least that this is maybe important and complicated enough that we could stand to wait a few weeks, please call your senators, and ask them to vote for Jeff Bingaman's S. AMDT 2517 to bill S. 1042. And please consider asking other people to do the same.

This one is worth making a call for. it's important.



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digby 11/14/2005 03:20:00 PM |

 
Bush Called War Critics Irresponsible, Sending "Mixed Signals"

by tristero

If you say Bush lied, Bush says you are aiding and abetting the enemy and ruining troop morale. That, of course, is just one more Bush-style non-lie lie.

It just ain't gonna fly, George. You're a liar. You lied about Iraqi intelligence and deliberately mislead Congress. Your soul was already burdened by your disgraceful negligence that contributed to the deaths of over 3000 Americans on 9/11. And to date you've added the deaths of 2000 plus American military and uncounted Iraqi civilians to that shameful sum.

You're a liar, George. And an incompetent. And the majority of the American people, who you duped for so long, and whose children you are needlessly sending to their deaths, are beginning to understand that. Loud and clear.
tristero 11/14/2005 02:53:00 PM |

 
Sacrificing Kirby In The Retail Culture War

by digby

In all this talk of boycotting Target today, I am reminded of this little gem from over the week-end. Wal-Mart supposedly beat back a boycott threat from the Catholic League by firing an employee who failed to properly toe the conservative Christian line:

Boycott Is Called Off After Retailer's Apology

A Roman Catholic civil rights group[wha?---ed.] called off a boycott of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Friday after the world's largest retailer apologized for an employee's e-mail that called Christmas a mix of world religions.

"This is a sweet victory for the Catholic League, Christians in general and people of all faiths," said Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, in a statement on the group's website.

Wal-Mart said Thursday that a customer service employee named Kirby had written an inappropriate e-mail to a woman who complained that the retailer had replaced a "Merry Christmas" greeting with "happy holidays." The company, based in Bentonville, Ark., also said Kirby no longer worked for Wal-Mart.

Kirby wrote that Christmas resulted from traditions such as Siberian shamanism and Visigoth calendars.

"Santa is also borrowed from the [Caucasus], mistletoe from the Celts, yule log from the Goths, the time from the Visigoth and the tree from the worship of Baal. It is a wide wide world," Kirby wrote.

Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Fogleman said the e-mail — sent without review by other employees — did not represent Wal-Mart's policies.

He said employees would continue to wish people "happy holidays" because the greeting was more inclusive.

Donohue of the Catholic League said the practice, although "dumb," was never part of his group's complaint.

"We only trigger boycotts when we've been grossly offended," he said.

We don't know the whole story, of course, but what Kirby said was the truth. Are they going to argue that Santa was one of the three wise men? Is the Christmas tree an old middle eastern phallic symbol celebrating the virgin birth? What do they tell their kids when they ask about this stuff, that it's all in a lost book in the Bible? What nonsense. What the Irish cretin twins (Big Bills Donohue and O'Reilly) are so exercised about is the "Happy Holidays" thing. And WalMart didn't budge on that. They just sacrificed Poor Kirby --- and Donohue was magically no longer "grossly offended" (by the facts.) Sure.

Everybody just keep in mind when the radical Christian right start bellyaching about "Happy Holidays" this season that their favorite retailer doesn't give a shit.

The truth is that their little boycott threat was nothing more than kabuki in the first place. It turns out that Wal-mart and the churches are much more entwined than I realized. (I have long joked that shopping is America's true religion, but this is ridiculous.) And anti-Wal-Mart forces are on to them and are fighting fire with fire.

We have entered a new era in the culture war. It's no longer just church and state. Religion and retail is the new front:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and its critics have been fighting for the hearts and minds of the American public, through advertising, media outreach, worker testimonials and public debate. Now the two sides are fighting for souls.

The world's largest retailer and its adversaries are hoping to sway religious leaders to their respective causes, seeking to use the clergy's powerful influence to reach flocks that may not respond to mere public relations or media-driven pitches.

Wal-Mart has quietly reached out to church officials with invitations to visit its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to serve on leadership committees and to open a dialogue with the company.

Across the aisle, one of the company's chief foes, Wal-Mart Watch, this weekend is launching seven days of anti-Wal-Mart consciousness-raising at more than 200 churches, synagogues and mosques in 100 cities, where leaders have agreed to sermonize about what they see as moral problems with the company.

"They are each probing for weaknesses behind enemy lines," said Nelson Lichtenstein, professor of history at UC Santa Barbara and editor of the forthcoming book "Wal-Mart: The Face of 21st Century Capitalism." "The liberals are trying to go into the churches even in conservative Republican neighborhoods. And then Wal-Mart goes into black churches and poor neighborhoods and says, 'Look, on this question, you should be with us because we provide jobs.' "

Wal-Mart Watch's religious efforts are part of the group's Higher Expectations Week, a series of nationwide events at churches, clubs, colleges and other organizations that highlight criticism of the retailer. The activities include free screenings of Robert Greenwald's recently released documentary, "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," a critical look at how the company, the largest private employer in the U.S., treats workers.

Wal-Mart declined to comment on its outreach to clergy. But church leaders from around the country said the retailer had contacted them to encourage their support — or to respond to their criticism — of the company.

The Rev. Ron Stief, director of the Washington office of the United Church of Christ, said a Wal-Mart representative telephoned him about six weeks ago after he criticized the company in a church newspaper article about Greenwald's documentary. After years of writing letters to the company to complain about Wal-Mart's conduct, Stief said, he finally received an invitation to Bentonville.

"They wanted me to come see their side of it," he said. Stief said he hoped to take the retailer up on the offer after he and other church members see the film.

The Rev. Clarence Pemberton Jr., pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Philadelphia, said a Wal-Mart representative attended Tuesday's regular meeting of about 75 Baptist ministers in that city.

"It appeared that what he was trying to do was to influence us or put us in opposition to this film that is coming out and will be in the churches," Pemberton said, referring to the documentary. "It was implied very strongly that it was about some sort of cash rewards for people who would become partners with Wal-Mart and what they were trying to do."

Bishop Edward L. Brown, a regional leader of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, said a Wal-Mart representative attended a CME bishops meeting last spring in Memphis, Tenn.

[...]

Wal-Mart Watch, in reaching out to churches, has opened a new front in its campaign, hoping to win converts among those who are not natural allies of labor and environmental activists, the mainstays of the group's support.

"In order to make the impact we wish to make, we need to have breadth and depth of supporters, and we've been discovering that one way of developing that is with communities of faith," said Wal-Mart Watch spokeswoman Tracy Sefl. "The notion of justice, fairness and opportunity is a message that is powerful from the pulpit and is a message that really transcends simply talking about the stores in familiar ways."

[...]

The Rev. Frank Alton of Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Koreatown said he could not recall ever sermonizing about a specific company in his 10 1/2 years in his pulpit. But asking his 250 members to consider the ethical implications of Wal-Mart, he said, was worth making an exception.

"They are a leader, and they are multiplying around the world — they have a responsibility as a leader and an innovator and pioneer to set a standard since others are following them," Alton said. "They are destroying community, which is a value of Jesus; they are exercising greed, which is against the values of Jesus; and they are promoting a culture of greed and extending a culture of poverty, which are against the values of Jesus.

I don't know quite what to think about all this. I'm so determinedly secular that it's beyond my ken. But, if Wal-mart is passing out currency to conservative churches, I think it's only right that the liberal churches get in on the act by at least making the very logical argument that exploitation of the poor for obscene profit isn't exactly Christian. (But, can someone tell me on what basis Wal-Mart can make an explicitly Christian argument in its favor? Where in the Bible is selling cheap Chinese crap for Jesus mentioned?)

This looks to be a real red state blue state battle shaping up. These companies must grow or die. The blue states are where the people are. We can make a difference here by keeping Wal-Mart out (or atl east contained) and Target in line. We can reward companies like Costco that treat their workers like human beings.

If the culture war is going retail, we libs have some serious clout There isn't some stupid structural impediment involved in this battle --- an electoral college or federalist system that dilutes our influence. This one's all about the numbers.

Target needs to understand that this latest is not a battle over the morning after pill, it is about birth control in general, and that the majority isn't going to stand for it. Here's a handy list of articles that explains the position of these "pharmacists of conscience" and what is their real agenda. Here's one:

There are mainly three types of drugs that are causing me to feel a tremendous amount of guilt after I have dispensed them. These three are misoprostol, birth control pills, and "morning after pills."

A little education might go a long way with the corporate cowards at Target. They may not unbderstand entirely what they are getting into by allowing themselves to start picking and choosing among different religions and personal beliefs. If they fail to get it, then boycott 'em. This is the new front in the culture war and we've got the advantage this time if we choose to use it.



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digby 11/14/2005 12:03:00 PM |

 
Incompetent On All Levels

by digby

Those of us who've been writing about the torture regime for a long while already knew that the DOD had decided to use the SERE techniques to "interrogate" prisoners. This NY Times article reveals something about this I didn't know before --- the SERE techniques were developed for special forces to learn to resist the harsh torture techniques of the totalitarian communist regimes:

SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.

[...]

The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE's teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went "up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques" for "high-profile, high-value" detainees. General Hill had sent this list - which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees' phobias - to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.

[...]

the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America's image. That's because the techniques designed by communist interrogators were created to control a prisoner's will rather than to extract useful intelligence.

Can you believe it? It's not just that torture doesn't work generally, which it doesn't. And it's not just that torture is morally repugnant and stains all who are involved with it. It does. The most amazingly thing about this (Commie) torture regime is that it's specifically designed to extract false confessions for propaganda purposes. Dear gawd, can they really be so incompetent that they didn't understand the difference between creating propaganda and gaining intelligence?

Sadly, yes. I keep forgetting that the GWOT is really a massive mind-fuck for these deluded neocon fabulists. They have long been convinced that the major problem for the US is that the wogs think we are a bunch of weaklings. Here's what Bush said about this just last Friday:

We know the vision of the radicals because they have openly stated it -- in videos and audiotapes and letters and declarations and on websites.

First, these extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace, and stand in the way of their ambitions. Al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, has called on Muslims to dedicate, their "resources, their sons and money to driving the infidels out of our lands." The tactics of al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists have been consistent for a quarter of a century: They hit us, and expect us to run.

Last month, the world learned of a letter written by al Qaeda's number two leader, a guy named Zawahiri. And he wrote this letter to his chief deputy in Iraq -- the terrorist Zarqawi. In it, Zawahiri points to the Vietnam War as a model for al Qaeda. This is what he said: "The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam -- and how they ran and left their agents -- is noteworthy." The terrorists witnessed a similar response after the attacks on American troops in Beirut in 1983 and Mogadishu in 1993. They believe that America can be made to run again -- only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.

This is the very heart of the neocon view of this issue. The United States has behaved like a bunch of bed-wetters for decades in the face of this horrific threat. The godfather Normon Podhoretz put it like this, in his remarkable essay called "World War IV":

to the extent that American passivity and inaction opened the door to 9/11, neither Democrats nor Republicans, and neither liberals nor conservatives, are in a position to derive any partisan or ideological advantage. The reason, quite simply, is that much the same methods for dealing with terrorism were employed by the administrations of both parties, stretching as far back as Richard Nixon in 1970 and proceeding through Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan (yes, Ronald Reagan), George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and right up to the pre-9/11 George W. Bush.

Unsurprisingly, he traces our wimpification all the way back to 1970 when a couple of diplomats were killed in the Sudan by the PLO. If we'd nipped that damned Palestinian bullshit in the bud by dropping some well placed nukes where they were most needed (The USSR), the world trade center would be standing today. We've never been tough enough for these guys.

This is the consciousness that pervades the inner sanctum of the Bush foreign policy and defense cabal. (Or, at least, it did. It's hard to know what they are thinking now.) But considering the way they arrange the world and its history in their strange minds, it's possible that they didn't stop to think what the torture regime they so eagerly adopted was actually designed to do before they gave the order to use it.

But, you cannot discount the idea that they may have consciously sought to elicit false confessions through some misplaced fourth generation "mindwar" wet dream in which we would psych out the terrorists by being so macho that they would run like rabbits back into their caves and spidey-holes. Who knows? These guys could have originally thought we could prove how tough we really are by showing footage of al Qaeda opeatives confessing to non-existent crimes on FoxNews. With Cheney and Rumsfeld in charge, it's entirely possible that this whole torture regime may have sprung from a late night viewing of "The Manchurian Candidate" and "The Battle of Algiers" over cigars and a six pack of Zima. That's about as strategically sophisticated as these guys get.



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digby 11/14/2005 09:15:00 AM |

 
Does "All Things Considered" Mean NPR Should Practice Fellatio On Creationists?

Pharyngula asks How could you, NPR? He's right.

There are several things that are exceedingly sleazy about this report that you won't learn from the NPR story, but PZ Meyers will tell you. First, Sternberg is an Old Earth Creationist. Second of all, the reporter, Barbara Hagerty, has connections to nutty Howard Ahmanson, a follower of the racist Rushdoony who also advocated a US theocracy, and Ahmanson is a major funder of the "intelligent design" creationism con developed at Discovery Institute.

Most importantly, the paper which Sternberg published, and sparked the controversy was, as PZ writes, "an excellent example of garbage pseudoscience that was slipped through the peer review process with the aid of a little cronyism from the acting editor, Sternberg, and is representative of the level of trash we get from the Designists...And in particular, this kind of bad science is being peddled for political ends, which makes it especially pressing to deplore it."

Exactly.

The report claims that untenured professors who believe in "intelligent design" creationism risk not getting tenure. I certainly hope that's true.

But to NPR, that's a restriction of academic freedom. I fail to see how. Look, if a young astronomy professor believed the moon was made of green cheese, she shouldn't get tenure, either. And there is just as much evidence that the moon is made of green cheese as there is for "intelligent design" creationism: none at all.

NPR should be ashamed of itself.

[NOTE To "intelligent design" creationists who wish to argue with me that it actually is a scientific idea: Please go to Pharyngula and argue with Dr. Myers. When you convince him that you are right, by all means let me know and I will be happy to dicuss your ideas. Until then, bugger off.]
tristero 11/14/2005 07:51:00 AM |

 
Rinse And Repeat

It is vitally important to distinguish between the methods used to establish that a fact is a fact and the tactics used to persuade the larger public to accept that fact. They are not one and the same.

For example, it is beyond dispute, by reasonable people, that contrary to the assertions of Bo and Ti of the Heaven's Gate cult, there really was no UFO hiding behind the tail of Comet Hale-Bopp. However, if you had a child who was in thrall to these dangerous crazies, no amount of logic or reason would convince them otherwise:

The New Yorker...reported on a camera shop in Southern California that had sold an expensive 3 1/2" Questar Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope (a favorite of amateur astronomers for decades) to two of the Heaven's Gate cult members, who said that they wanted to see the UFO following Hale-Bopp. They came back weeks later to return the telescope, disappointed that it could not reveal the UFO and was thus obviously a defective instrument.

So how do you save your child from such crazies, when they are beyond reason? Well, you don't have too many choices. Most boil down to, "Shut up and get in the car. We're taking you away from these idiots before you piss your life away. Get in the car, now." And some people get so desperate they kidnap their kids and hire a deprogrammer to reverse the brainwashing.

Now all this raises a host of ethical questions which can keep the blogosphere humming till the pixels all come home. But let's change the example slightly. What happens when an entire country is convinced there's a UFO behind Hale-Bopp? Abandoning the metaphor, how do you bring the country to its senses when it's been programmed to trust the serial lies and distortions of a compulsive liar of a president?

That is the tactical problem that many of us* have faced since the fall of 2000, when Bush's Texas-sized lies and distortions went global and the American people, bless their trusting hearts, fell for 'em. Reason, ultimately, is not that effective on people whose brains have been set to refuse admittance to reality. Sooner or later, you need to follow a variation of Sean-Paul's intelligent advice:

The President is a liar. The Democrats did not have the same intelligence as the White House did.

And that's all any Democrat has to say. Don't try to explain it. Don't let the Republicans misdirect you into the details or distract you in any way. Just keep hammering the same line over and over and over because the public already knows it's true: The President is misleading the American people. The Democrats did not have the same intelligence as the White House did.

Rinse and repeat all the way to 2006.

Again, establishing a fact is not the same as persuading others to accept that fact. The fact - the president is a liar - has long been established. Now, how do you get others to accept it? Say it: The president is a liar. Say it again: The president is a liar. And when someone demands proof, you repeat: The president is a liar.

Now, suppose they say, "But you've shown me no proof. That's just your opinion. Prove it." Now what? You say, "The president is liar."

Now to us liberals, this may appear at first to be a bit, how shall I say it, irrational and unfair. It is not. First of all, the person you are trying to convince is perfectly capable and in fact probably has read many of the same articles you have read, in which the lies of Bush are so painfully apparent. Their ability to reason is skewed, not their ability to read. Attempts to "set their reason straight" by advancing reasoned arguments merely reinforces the delusion.

The important thing to remember is that a deeply-held delusion is invested with deep emotional attachment. One's self-esteem, one's positive opinion of oneself, has become deliberately entertwined with maintaining that delusion at all costs. Dangerously so. It is that emotional attachment you must confront. When that has been dealt with, the ability to reason is freed to arrive at the obivious conclusion: The president is a liar.

Now in dealing with someone on the emotional level, there's no reason to be cruel, but you need to be firm. You need to weaken, in the face of enormous resistance, the emotional glue that binds the deluded to his/her delusion. You don't humiliate as in, "Schmuck! Any moron can see the president is lying through his teeth. WTF is wrong with you?" That further binds the delusion to the person's sense of self, which now feels attacked and therefore becomes defensive. Instead, you simply repeat, "The president is a liar."

Eventually, the repetition will permit the idea to seep enough into their consciousness to make the deluded start to wonder whether it is worthwhile investing their sense of self so deeply in someone who just may be, in fact, a liar. Your clue that this is happening is a change in the way the way the discourse is conducted. Instead of, "Oh yeah? Prove he's a liar!" you'll start to hear things like, "I guess he did cherrypick the intelligence a bit and in a sense, that's a lie. But you don't think Bush made stuff up out of whole cloth, do you?"

At which point, you respond, "The president is a liar" but, as Sean-Paul says, don't go into the details. Remember, they've already heard them but they can't reason about them properly yet and the problem they are having is emotional, not intellectual. They've started to wake up, but they are still entangling their own sense of integrity with Bush's.

It's only when they respond, "Okay, he's a liar. He lied and manipulated intelligence to get us into the war. But we have to support Bush now if we are not going to embolden the enemy" that you ease up slightly. You say, "The president is a liar. He lied to your face. Over and over. He lied to the soliders who are now fighting for their lives over there. The president is a liar. You owe him nothing. He owes you the truth."

Dig?

*Yes, many of us were quite immune from the start to the Bush administration's assault on reality. While I can't help feeling that maybe we are a bit smarter than the rubes, reason informs me it's not that simple. For one thing, some very smart people - eg Kevin - were gulled for the longest time, before they finally woke up, and I'm certain that on any fair intelligence test Kevin would trump me easily. I think it's more the draw of the cards. For example, Lincoln was a tee-totaler, but unlike the moralizing prigs that surrounded him, he didn't believe his alcoholic abstinence showed strength of character. "I never had a taste for it," was about all he said.

Likewise, I think that we never had a predisposition to believe what government officials say. And while I think that's a good thing, all in all, I can also understand where that kind of skepticism, carried to an extreme, can lead into trouble. It is for that reason that I am not opposed to having those more gullible - like George Packer - publish their thoughts for serious consideration. But it stands to reason that those of us who are more skeptical must also be provided a seat at the table of mainstream discourse. The fact that we are not is an exceedingly dangerous situation as it skews the spectrum of acceptable opinion far too much towards unquestioned belief in a government's willingness to be honest.
tristero 11/14/2005 06:07:00 AM |

 
Miserable Failure For Rice, Again

Rice Fails to Broker Deal on Monitoring Gaza Extremists

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pressed Israel and the Palestinians today to accept a compromise proposal over who should monitor the passage of potential extremists in and out of Gaza, but she failed to achieve a breakthrough to end a bitter two-month-old impasse on the issue.

Between the failure of the recent Latin America adventure and the Middle East Democracy Conference , it looks like Amercian diplomatic efforts by Rice and Bush are batting 0.

I wonder why? Surely they're not mistaking the moral superiority of American values for unbridled, dangerous arrogance. I mean, it's so obvious we're the best and everyone in the world envys us and wants to be an American or live like an American. What is their problem?
tristero 11/14/2005 05:35:00 AM |

Sunday, November 13, 2005

 
Cleared

Via Talk left, I see that Murray Waas is reporting that Richard Shelby has been cleared by the Senate ethics committee of leaking classified information to the press. This doesn't mean he wasn't guilty, merely that he didn't break any Senate ethics rules. Of course, if the Shelby Amendment had not been vetoed by President Clinton, Shelby would have likely faced serious jail time for what he did.

I wrote a long post about Shelby the leaking Republican hypocrite a year or so ago. During the Clinton years the Republicans were all hopped up about leaking classified information. Today, not so much.


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digby 11/13/2005 08:40:00 PM |

 
Shuffling Toward Their Revolution

In today's LA Times, Gregory Rodriguez says "Blame it On The Boomers" hypothesizing that we boomers have been arguing amongst ourselves since we were kids and are responsible for the polarization of American politics:

While it is amusing to caricaturize all boomers as pot-smoking, free-loving veterans of Woodstock, one only needs to glance at Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s 1971 Princeton yearbook photo to recall that there were plenty of clean-cut young people who preferred to lead traditional lives.

As in any revolution, the values revolution of the 1960s propelled Americans into two different directions. While many embraced the new values of the era, just as many preferred the old ones. Then there were those, like President Bush, who indulged in the permissiveness of the times only to reverse course later and champion the virtues of tradition.

[...]

Clearly, the boomer generation is not the first to divide over conflicting political visions. But unlike others, boomers cannot look to a shared sacrifice or experience that provided them with a sense of common values and shared purpose. On the contrary, the political consciousness of the boomers was forged by terribly divisive battles over Vietnam, the civil rights movement and Watergate.

If the 2004 presidential election between John Kerry and George W. Bush taught us anything, it was that the wounds of Vietnam and the 1960s have still not healed. As a result, the 1960s generation has come to power remarkably split, and this division has paralyzed American politics

Rodriguez also says, "perhaps the most profound political division in the country is generational. No, not young versus old this time, but rather baby boomer versus baby boomer."

It's still about Young vs Old --- young boomers vs old boomers.

It's not just that liberals and conservatives of my generation preferred to live different lifestyles. It's that the largest age cohort in history had some choices to make --- and those choices shaped our leadership class in very different ways. The young liberals were combative and revolutionary in their zeal --- idealistic and naive also. The conservatives were those who identified with the conformity of their elders, withdrawn, inward and repressed. They have devolved into revolutionary zeal as they aged.

I am very interested in this topic and took a stab at writing about this a while back:

We are dealing with a group of right wing glory seekers who chose long ago to eschew putting themselves on the line in favor of tough talk and empty posturing --- the Vietnam chickenhawks and their recently hatched offspring of the new Global War On Terrorism. These are men (mostly) driven by the desire to prove their manhood but who refuse to actually test their physical courage. Neither are they able to prove their virility as they are held hostage by prudish theocrats and their own shortcomings. So they adopt the pose of warrior but never actually place themselves under fire. This is a psychologically difficult position to uphold. Bullshitting yourself is never without a cost.

And I think there is an even deeper layer to this as well and one which is vital to understanding why the right wing baby boomers and their political offspring are so pathologically irrational about dealing with terrorism. Vietnam, as we were all just mercilessly reminded in the presidential election, was the crucible of the baby boom generation, perhaps the crucible of America as a mature world power.

The war provided two very distinct tribal pathways to manhood. One was to join "the revolution" which included the perk of having equally revolutionary women at their sides, freely joining in sexual as well as political adventure as part of the broader cultural revolution. (The 60's leftist got laid. A lot.) And he was also deeply engaged in the major issue of his age, the war in Vietnam, in a way that was not, at the time, seen as cowardly, but rather quite threatening. His masculine image encompassed both sides of the male archetypal coin --- he was both virile and heroic.

The other pathway to prove your manhood was to test your physical courage in battle. There was an actual bloody fight going on in Vietnam, after all. Plenty of young men volunteered and plenty more were drafted. And despite the fact that it may be illogical on some level to say that if you support a war you must fight it, certainly if your self-image is that of a warrior, tradition requires that you put yourself in the line of fire to prove your courage if the opportunity presents itself. You simply cannot be a warrior if you are not willing to fight. This, I think, is deeply understood by people at a primitive level and all cultures have some version of it deeply embedded in the DNA. It's not just the willingness to die it also involves the willingness to kill. Men who went to Vietnam and faced their fears of killing and dying, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, put themselves to this test.

And then there were the chickenhawks. They were neither part of the revolution nor did they take the obvious step of volunteering to fight the war they supported. Indeed, due to the draft, they allowed others to fight and die in their place despite the fact that they believed heartily that the best response to communism was to aggressively fight it "over there" so we wouldn't have to fight it here.

These were empty boys, unwilling to put themselves on the line at the moment of truth, yet they held the masculine virtues as the highest form of human experience and have portrayed themselves ever since as tough, uncompromising manly men while portraying liberals as weak and effeminate. (Bill Clinton was able to thwart this image because of his reputation as a womanizer. You simply couldn't say he was effeminate.)

Now it must be pointed out that there were many men, and many more women, who didn't buy into any of this "manhood" stuff and felt no need to join in tribal rituals or bloody wars to prove anything. Most of those men, however, didn't aspire to political leadership. Among the revolutionaries, the warriors and the chickenhawks, there were many who did. Indeed, these manhood rituals are more often than not a requirement for leadership. (Perhaps having more women in power will finally change that.)

The only political aspirants among those three groups who failed to meet the test of their generation were the chickenhawks. And our problem today is that they are the ones in charge of the government as we face a national security threat. These unfulfilled men still have something to prove

.

I agree with Rodriguez that the boomer cohort bears some responsibility for the polarization of America. The liberal boomers are responsible for the polarization of the first 20 years of our generation's adulthood --- the last 20 years are the responsiblity of the conservatives.

We liberal baby boomers were massively full of shit in many ways when we were trying to change the world. But then we were young. The conservative boomers have no such excuse. Last night I heard Tony Blankley on the Mclaughlin report say something like "we needed to completely dismantle the middle east in order to remake it." I haven't heard a liberal spout such crazed revolutionary crapola since Jimmy Carter wore sideburns. I have a feeling that if Tony had spent a little more time in dorm room bull sessions drinking Gallo and smoking pot instead of nursing his rightwing resentment, he might have gotten over such hairbrained notions sometime before he turned 50.




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digby 11/13/2005 06:28:00 PM |

 
Spinning The Bloviators

Back in 1998 and 1999, it seemed a day didn't go by when the Washington punditocrisy didn't tell the American people that the American people were appalled by Bill Clinton's lying, skirt chasing ways and that he would never survive and that the impeachment was a result of a national disgust with his behavior. If the news media had a vote, George Stephanopoulos,Bob Barr, Tim Russert and Henry Hyde would have marched down to the White House to demand Clinton's resignation for the good of the country. Even today we have David Brooks and countless other gasbags still selling the hogwash that Clinton was enormously unpopular during Monicagate, despite the fact that his approval ratings consistently hung around 60% throughout the scandal and actually increased after he was impeached. It was the Republicans who lost seats during this period.

It's this kind of thing that proves that the beltway courtiers truly live in a bubble. Politicians and strategists simply have to stop listening to them and listen to the rest of the country.

For instance, Media Matters discusses how two NPR reporters mischaracterize Tim Kaine's position on abortion:

For the second day in a row, National Public Radio's (NPR) Morning Edition misrepresented Virginia Governor-elect Timothy M. Kaine's position on abortion. On November 10, NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson falsely described Kaine -- who supports legal access to abortion -- as "pro-life." On November 11, NPR religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty drew a false dichotomy between Kaine's position on abortion and that of the Democratic Party. Bradley labeled Kaine "an unusual candidate," claiming that "he opposes abortion in a party that supports it." In fact, while Kaine has expressed opposition to abortion as a matter of personal faith, he made it clear during his campaign that he supports legal access to abortion and highlighted the issue as one distinguishing him and his Republican opponent, former Virginia attorney general Jerry W. Kilgore.

Bradley went a step beyond Liasson, asserting that Kaine's position on abortion was the opposite of his party's position. Bradley's and Liasson's mischaracterization has the effect of advancing the notion, promoted by Republicans, that Kaine won because he ran on a "strategy sharply at odds with the approach of leading national Democrats." That assertion -- which is The Washington Post's paraphrase of RNC chairman Ken Mehlman's characterization -- may or may not be true as a general matter, but what is not true is that Kaine's position on abortion is the opposite of his party's. The Democratic Party supports access to legal abortions; Kaine supports access to legal abortions. While Democrats may differ over the degree to which they think that abortion should be regulated, they belong to the party that supports abortion rights, while the GOP opposes them.

Kaine's position on abortion was also John Kerry's position on abortion. There are many pro-choice Democrats, a lot of them Catholics, who would not personally have an abortion or want one of their loved ones to have one but they are pro-choice because they believe that this is a personal matter and that abortion should not be illegal. That is the very essence of the pro-choice stance --- being allowed to make your own decision free of state interference, subject to certain agreed upon, constitutional restrictions. Why the pundits don't understand the meaning of the word "choice" is puzzling considering how hilarious they found it when Clinton parsed the question about the meaning of "is." Choice is a pretty clear cut concept not subject to tense or time.

These reporters mischaracterize not only the position of the Democratic Party, but they mischaracterize the position of the American people. If you watch the bloviators on any given show or read the op-ed pages of major newspapers, you would think that all Democratic politicians must be personally for "abortion on demand" and that the majority of the country disagrees with them. Being pro-choice is spun as a dramatically unpopular position that is costing the Democrats elections. And just as the punditocrisy was completely out of step with the country on the Lewinsky matter, they are out of step with the country on this:

From Donkey Rising, here's the disconnect:

It’s Definitely a Pro-Choice, Pro–Roe v. Wade Country

Lest we harbor any doubt about that, as debate on the Alito Supreme Court nomination heats up, consider these data.

1. In a SurveyUSA fifty-state poll, 56 percent nationwide described themselves as pro-choice, compared to 38 percent who said they were pro-life. Only thirteen states were pro-life; the rest were pro-choice and include Pennsylvania (+7), Michigan (+13), Montana (+11), Ohio (+10), Iowa (+15), Arizona (+17), Minnesota (+17), New Mexico (+17), Wisconsin (+18), Florida (+22), Colorado (+27), Oregon (+29) and Nevada (+32).

2. In a recent Gallup poll, the public, by 53 percent to 37 percent, said the Senate should not confirm Alito if it was likely he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

3. The Pew poll cited above asked two slightly versions of a question on whether Roe v. Wade should be overturned. The replies averaged 61 percent to 29 percent against overturning Roe v. Wade.

4. In Washington Post/ABC News poll cited above, 64 percent said that, if a case testing Roe v. Wade came before the Supreme Court, the Court should vote to uphold it, compared to just 31 percent who believe the Court should vote to overturn it.

30% believe that Roe should be overturned! Ferchistsake, why are we even talking about this except to say that our politicians should run as supporters of Roe vs Wade, period. It isn't even controversial.

Yet, if you listen to Cokie and Monsignor Tim and read the various scribblers on the op-ed pages around the country you would think that this is the Democrats' biggest problem.

The allegedly liberal beltway gasbags and stenographers are being spun just as they were spun by the Republican establishment back in the Clinton era. We must get our politicians and strategists to stop listening to them. They are killing us.


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digby 11/13/2005 02:33:00 PM |

 
Showing His Colors

In the post below I write a little bit about how the Nixonian politics of resentment are at the heart of the Republican electoral success these past 35 years. I mention the fact that it is crippling oppugnancy that is their achilles heel. Here's an article in this week's LA Weekly by Lou Dubose the author of "Boy Genius" in which he speculates that Rove got himself in trouble before the Grand Jury because he is an arrogant prick. He bases this on Rove's past performance the few times he's ever allowed himself to go under oath. It seems that he always lies:

In the course of questioning, Rove told the attorney representing the trial lawyers that he had a firm agreement with the governor to recuse himself from anything having to do with tobacco. A “Chinese wall” separated his tobacco consulting from his work for Bush. The lawyers knew the answers to some of the questions before they asked them. They knew that Rove had been involved in polling funded by the tobacco lobby. One of the polls was a piece of political trash, a push poll asking respondents how they would vote if they knew the Democratic attorney general had provided financial support to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan — which he never had. The day the results were released, Rove attended a tobacco-lobby meeting and immediately took the poll to Bush chief of staff Joe Allbaugh.

Caught in a lie about keeping Bush and Big Tobacco separate, Rove retreated. Rather than give it to Bush, he delivered the poll to Allbaugh, he said, knowing Allbaugh would throw it away without looking at it. The answer didn’t wash. Rove was not a party to the lawsuit, so he faced little immediate risk. But the trial lawyers had what they wanted. When Bush, acting in his capacity as governor, set out to take their fees away from them, they could stand before federal Judge David Folsom in Texarkana and point to the intellectual author of a lawsuit that would ultimately embarrass Bush.

There was a second case in which Rove was under oath before the Texas State Senate when he was appointed to a University Board of Regents:

Appearing before the Senate Nominations Committee, Rove again was both unprepared and dishonest. Since 1986, Rove had been providing tips and information to an FBI agent named Greg Rampton, who was conducting serial investigations of the finances of statewide Democratic officeholders. On one occasion Rove even announced in Washington the coming indictments of two lieutenants of Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower in Austin — more than a week before the Department of Justice unsealed the indictments.

Rove had met Rampton under unusual circumstances. In 1986, as a Democratic opponent was closing in on Rove’s candidate, the incumbent governor, Rove held a press conference to announce that a bug had been planted in his office. It was a brilliant tactic, pointing to the Democratic challenger’s desperation. Special Agent Greg Rampton investigated the bugging and no charges were filed. A source close to the Travis County district attorney told me they investigated before the FBI and concluded it was a political stunt. Rove or someone working for him had had his own office bugged. Five years later, stumbling under questioning from a Democratic senator, Rove said he didn’t exactly know Rampton. When pressed, he resorted to a Clintonesque parsing of terms: “Ah, senator, it depends. Would you define ‘know’ for me?” He then qualified his response, saying he wouldn’t recognize Rampton “if he walked in the door.” His dishonest response provided Senate Democrats a sufficient pretext to deny Rove his university board position.

I remember when I read Murray Waas' report of Rove's testimony to the grand jury thinking that he was incredibly obtuse if he behaved as arrogantly as it seemed he had:

... Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak's column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

In Rove's world this is normal behavior. In the real world, disseminating derogatory information about a man and his wife for political purposes is something that even if you do it, you do not argue that it is "legitimate." Normal people would have the decency to be a little bit chagrined by these actions, even if what they did was not strictly illegal.

I wonder if he had the nerve to repeat to the middle aged African American women of the DC Grand Jury that he went after Wilson purely because he was a Democrat. I wouldn't be surprised. That powerful Nixonian ressentiment almost surely came through in any case. It's who he is. To a group of average citizens serving on a Grand Jury, this powerful man serving in the white house describing such behavior as being perfectly normal must have sounded terribly distasteful.

Fitzgerald, of course, has seen it all before. But he had to have hated seeing this powerful jerk admit that this government believes this behavior is business as usual. Plame was, after all, a CIA employees and these powerful politicos at the very least, acted with a total lack of responsibility or integrity in trafficking her name around for political purposes. And he knew from the get, of course, that Rove was one of Novak's sources. If he said all that stuff as clearly and as obviously as the Waas article says he did, then Patrick Fitzgerald had no problem figuring out Karl Rove's motive.



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digby 11/13/2005 12:50:00 PM |

 
Deconstructing Jane

I read this morning that Warren Beatty is "taking credit" for Schwarzenneger's defeat last week:

Warren Beatty, the veteran Hollywood actor who helped to deliver the first big blow to Arnold Schwarzenegger's political career, said last night that the Terminator star had got his come-uppance for fooling voters.

Four days after California voters rejected a series of reforms put forward by the Republican governor, Beatty boasted that his own high-profile eve-of-poll campaigning had helped to save America from the ripple effect of Mr Schwarzenegger's "reactionary measures"

He also said,"Actors do not necessarily make good politicians." That's certainly true, but you have to wonder sometimes whether actors even make good activists.

I have always had a soft spot for the earnest do-gooding that leads famous entertainers to potentially derail their carefully crafted images by getting involved in partisan politics. It's much safer to become the spokesperson for a popular cause like literacy or fundraise to find the cure for a dreaded disease. Hollywood executives are notoriously gun shy when it comes to any controversy other than the tittilating "bradnangelina" style tabloid gossip that entertains the masses. If someone becomes too unpopular or controversial he or she can lose work and money. It's risky.

Beatty was always the most savvy of Hollywood activists. He used his celebrity to glamourize politics and used his activism to make him something more than just a pretty face in Hollywood. The glamor project didn't do much to help the cause (in fact it probably hurt it), but the political activism actually helped his career immeasurably by giving him the substance and clout to do political projects, something that a good looking playboy would not normally be allowed. I think his contribution to progressive politics was far more substantial in the entertainment arena than in the political arena and ultimately I think that's where show biz activists can really make a difference. It's helpful that they raise money and awareness of partisan politics, but if you can make a musical recording, movie or television show that imparts liberal attitudes and philosophy, you have done far more long-lasting good than any rabble rousing speech could ever do. And it's not something that anyone else can do --- use art and pop culture to awaken people's political instincts. That actually takes talent.

The most famous Hollywood activist, and the one who still creates hysteria on the right is, of course, Jane Fonda. In an era of liberal, even radical, show business activists, she was the living symbol of everything the conformist right hated about the left. Rick Perlstein reviews the new biography of Fonda in this edition of The London Review of Books in which we find that Jane was actually quite a serious, sedulous worker bee rather than a shrieking Commie Diva. But she became a very special, very famous object of ire for very complicated reasons. And she was the focusof some very special government treatment long before she ever went to Hanoi:

Another important detail: opposing the war, at this particular time, was not a radical thing to do. Vietnam was widely recognised across the political spectrum as a disaster.

[...]

The security establishment began its battle against Fonda almost as soon as she started speaking out. Teams of FBI informants reported her every word, combed her speeches for violations of the 1917 Espionage Act, which criminalises incitement to ‘insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty in the military’, and ‘disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States’. She proved a disappointment. Profanity was not her style. As for incitement, we learn from one informant – a chaplain’s assistant – that she thought it ‘would not help the cause of peace’. He added that nothing she said ‘could be construed to be undermining the US government’.

The government got desperate. At Cleveland airport the FBI arranged for her to be stopped at customs. During her interrogation she pushed aside agents who refused her access to the bathroom, so they arrested her for assaulting an officer. She had in her possession mysterious pills marked B, L and D, so they also charged her with narcotics smuggling – for carrying vitamins to be taken with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Her daughter was followed to kindergarten. (America needed to know: did her school teach ‘an anti-law enforcement attitude’?) They investigated her bank accounts. They tapped their network of friendly media propagandists, like the future Senator Jesse Helms, then a TV editorialist, who supplied an invented quotation that still circulates as part of the Fonda cult’s liturgy. Supposedly asked – it isn’t clear where or by whom – how far America should go to the left, she said, according to Helms: ‘If everyone knew what it meant, we would all be on our knees praying that we would, as soon as possible, be able to live under . . . within a Communist structure.’ A death threat against her was sent to Henry Fonda’s house with a demand for $50,000. He took the letter to the same FBI office that was directing the campaign against his daughter. ‘The FBI files reveal no effort to find the sender of the letter,’ Hershberger remarks.

The campaign appears to have been co-ordinated with the White House, and underway long before Fonda went to Hanoi. Hershberger is an assiduous researcher, but she could have got a better idea of the extent of this co-ordination by studying the Nixon Oval Office tapes at the National Archives. On 2 May 1970, Nixon told his aides that protesters were to be accused of ‘giving aid and comfort to the enemy’. On 9 May, Nixon’s enforcer Chuck Colson told the FBI to send its Fonda files directly to the White House. ‘What Brezhnev and Jane Fonda said got about the same treatment,’ an aide later recalled.

Perlstein goes on to ask "why the obsession?" He answers by noting that this happened in 1970 a "moment of maximum danger" just as Nixon was revealed to have expanded the war into Cambodia, and that it was through heretofore loveable figures like Fonda and Dr Spock that the public and, more problematic, soldiers themselves would be turned against the war. This is surely true. Tom Joad's daughter coming out against the war had to feel threatening. (The blacklist, after all, had only broken 11 years before. This played into their darkest paranoid fantasies about Hollywood.) But I think a great part of it was simple sexism and confused sexual feelings. As Perlstein points out, Barbarella was a favorite GI pin-up girl. As the US showed itself impotent in Southeast Asia, the jerk-off fantasy of millions of young men was basically calling them losers to their faces. I've long thought that the irrational anger at Jane Fonda, then and now, has had the character of some sort of primal hatred that cannot be explained by politics alone. I think she's seen by certain American males as a female praying mantis.

However interesting all this psychological and political deconstruction of the Jane Fonda phenomenon is (and it's fascinating) what Perlstein nails in this piece is something that is overlooked and terribly important if we are to understand modern politics:

It’s remarkable how many things that we think of as permanent features of American culture can be traced back to specific political operations by the Nixon White House. We now take it as given, for example, that blue-collar voters have always been easy pickings for conservatives appealing to their cultural grievances. But Jefferson Cowie, among others, has shown the extent to which this was the result of a specific political strategy, worked out in response to a specific political problem. Without taking workers’ votes from the Democrats, Nixon would never have been able to achieve the ‘New Majority’ he dreamed of. But to do so by means of economic concessions – previously the only way politicians imagined working-class voters might be wooed – would threaten his business constituency. So Nixon ‘stood the problem on its head’, as Cowie says in Nixon’s Class Struggle (2002), ‘by making workers’ economic interests secondary to an appeal to their allegedly superior moral backbone and patriotic rectitude’. (One part of the strategy was arranging for members of the Teamsters to descend ‘spontaneously’ on protesters carrying Vietcong flags at Nixon appearances. Of course it’s quite possible that the protesters too were hired for the occasion.) It’s not that the potential for that sort of behaviour wasn’t always there. But Nixon had a gift for looking beneath social surfaces to see and exploit subterranean anxieties.

That is the nub of Republican success, whether it was exploiting the sexual anxieties of displaced insecure males in a newly feminized workplace, or convincing conservative evangelical voters that "liberals" were trying to repress their religion and force them to adopt lifestyles they found repugnant. Nixon wasn't the first dirty politician in American history, but he was the most successful at discerning the churning undercurrent of fear and anger in a rapidly changing society and using his personal brand of dark political arts to exploit it. The conservative movement of Barry Goldwater made a Faustian bargain with the Nixonian black operatives more than 35 years ago. The natural result of that soul selling deal is George W. Bush and Karl Rove.

Until we recognize that the modern Republican Party is the party of Richard Nixon and that the allegedly masterful Rovian vision of a permanent political majority is a rather simple outgrowth of Nixon's uncanny understanding of how to exploit the dark side of populist fear and loathing, we will continue to be stymied. It won't be enough to discredit George W. Bush and his cock-up of an administration. They will simply say he wasn't the "real thing" and move past it like rapacious sharks, doing what they've been doing to the last 35 years. We have to come to grips with the fact that they have built their party by wrangling a free-floating resentment and anxiety and turning it into a political formula. It wasn't an accident and it wasn't the result of peering into a crystal ball. It was the result of counting the votes available and developing a strategy for getting enough of them to gain power.

And they were very successful at doing it. They are great at campaign politics. The problem is that they built a political machine so captive of business interests and so bereft of pragmatic policy acumen that they are unable to govern. And like the great Godfather of the modern Republican party, their propensity for crude revenge and crippling oppugnancy tripped them up.

I urge you to read Perlstein's entire review. Jane Fonda is more than gal with a good figure and a good haircut. And she's more than a radical Hollywood activist, work-out goddess or trophy wife. She's the quintessential sin-eater who absorbed all the seething animus toward the agents of change in latter 20th century American society. She was the perfect target of Nixon's seething resentment strategy. It's a testament to her strange power that they still hate her so, even today.



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digby 11/13/2005 11:26:00 AM |

Saturday, November 12, 2005

 
Bulletin From The Department Of Miserable Failure, Mideast Democracy Division

Mideast Democracy Summit Ends With No Deal

A U.S.-backed summit meant to promote political freedom and economic change in the Middle East ended Saturday without agreement, a blow to President Bush's goals for the troubled region.

A draft declaration on democratic and economic principle was shelved after Egypt insisted on language that would have given Arab governments greater control over which democracy groups receive money from a new fund.

[snip]

The White House had hoped the conference would showcase political progress in a part of the world long dominated by monarchies and single-party rule, and spread goodwill for the U.S.

[snip]

The disappointing outcome at the conference followed a rocky summit a week ago in Argentina, when Bush got a cold shoulder from some Latin American leaders, failed to win consensus on a free trading bloc for the Western Hemisphere and endured biting criticism from anti-U.S. protesters and Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chavez.

This is Rice's failure, as well as Bush's. Something to remember as the myth of Condi the Competent remains uncontested in the msm.
tristero 11/12/2005 10:39:00 PM |

 
International Relations Is A Prime Habitat For Struthio Camelus*

Kevin Drum links to this post by Abu Aardvark:

The dominant theoretical trends in the international relations field have been strikingly absent from the mountains of paper expended on analysis of al-Qaeda, Islamism, and the war on terror. Most of the dominant theoretical approaches were not so much wrong as irrelevant.

[SNIP]

But is that true? Has IR theory been irrelevant to the debates? To find out, I just spent a few hours looking at the contents of the last four years of the six leading journals for International Relations theory (International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies - see the end of the post for discussion of these choices), along with the American Political Science Review. I used an exceedingly loose definition of "about al-Qaeda" - i.e. I included everything about terrorism and counter-terrorism, even if it barely touched at all on al-Qaeda or Islamism itself; and I included review essays, even if they did not include any original research.

The results were even more striking than I expected. All told, these seven journals published 796 articles between 2002-2005. I found a total of 25 articles dealing even loosely with al-Qaeda, Islamism, or terrorism. That's just over 3% of the articles. Now, there's lots of important stuff out there in the world, and there's no reason for the whole field to be following the headlines, but still... 3%?

[SNIP]

One obvious objection [to the methodology used in the review of IR literature] would be that I excluded policy-oriented journals such as Foreign Affairs, International Security, and The Washington Quarterly, which do tend to publish much more on the topic. I did that intentionally, because that best captures the prestige value within the field of International Relations. The policy journals are generally undervalued within the International Relations profession, to the extent that many top Political Science Departments wouldn't even consider a Foreign Affairs publication suitable for a tenure file. In other words, the fact that there is a lot more on Islamism and al-Qaeda in those journals only strengthens my claim - even though political scientists have a lot to say on the subject, they can't or don't say it in the most prestigious, theory oriented journals.

Oh, and I didn't even say anything about the quality of those 25 articles... all I'll say is that of them, I would count about 7 of them as actually useful in any meaningful way...

Hmm.

Now, the good Aardvark also makes the point that the reason that al Qaeda has been ignored is that the theoretical paradigms which prevail in International Relations, like "realism," "idealism," "liberalism," and "constructivism" are not terribly conducive to analysing a non-state Islamist super-terrorist organization. Who knew?

Adherence to any ideological position, especially ones as crude as "realism," "idealism," "isolationism," or "Jacksonianism" is a mistake. In fact this kind of terminology obscures the necessary complexity of decision making in foreign affairs.

Far more sophisticated and flexible models within which to discuss foreign affairs decision making are desperately needed.

I suppose I should make these recent thoughts apply in a more general way to the American foreign policy/international relations discourse:

[While liberal interventionists] have been discussing ever so "reasonably" how best to adjust the "calculus" of America's Manifest Destiny so "we" will continue to be a force of good in the world, they have, almost to a person, demonstrated their profound inability merely to look outside their own goddamn windows and respond with simple human decency and commonsense to the real world. And once again, they've demonstrated how alarmingly limited American foreign policy discourse has become.

In any event, I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice how poorly adjusted to reality most American intellectual debate on the world has become. And I'm very glad this is being quantified by scholars like AA.

[UPDATE: An interesting reference in the comments to the field of comparative politics jogged my memory regarding another bete noire that hounds my thoughts, namely the lack of a truly compelling translation of either the Qu'ran or the hadith. I would assume that since this is the case (or was, the last time I checked), many other texts of vital importance to undertstanding the various Islams are also unavailable, or available only in bad editions (the assertion that the Qu'ran can never be translated is a religious belief, not an intellectual claim, and must not be permitted to stand in the way of making the fundamental documents of Islam available to non-Muslims in the best possible way). Now even if one assumes that the finest scholars are honest and they actually can read the Qu'ran in the original - not an entirely warranted assumption - the lack of a good English Qu'ran translation is as telling a symbol as I can imagine of the epidemic level of stultifying mediocrity that permeates international studies regarding Islam, Islamism, and related areas of politics and culture in the Middle East and other states where Islamic belief wields enormous influence.

One can only hope that truly excellent scholars, like Juan Cole who is well-known in the blogosphere, soon become the rule. But right now, they are not only exceptional, but the rare exception.]

*You can look up Struthio camelus here, and so endeth my dabbling in Latin. For now.
tristero 11/12/2005 02:50:00 PM |

Friday, November 11, 2005

 
Habeas Corpus Est Mortuus?

(Latin freaks: Is that right?)

I blogged about this last night when I first read Jeralyn's shocking post but Blogger ate it. Anyway, the attack on habeas corpus is extremely serious in more ways than I can count, so go read TalkLeft's latest and it wouldn't be such a bad idea to write your congresscritters and point out that habeas corpus is, you know, kind of a bedrock principle for civilized jurisprudence.
tristero 11/11/2005 12:26:00 PM |

 
Author of Upcoming "Hillary Equals Hitler" Book Hired By LA Times

Robert Scheer replaced by ignorant slimeball:

The Los Angeles Times announced a major shake-up of its op-ed page today. Gone are cartoonist Michael Ramirez and liberal columnist Robert Scheer.

In their place, you won’t find any committed progressives like Scheer. Instead, L.A. Times editors chose National Review contributing editor and “Liberal Fascism” author Jonah Goldberg. Below, some of our favorite Jonah jems, coming to a “liberal media” near you:

On McCarthy’s wisdom:

What makes McCarthyism so hard to discuss is that McCarthy behaved like a jerk, but he was also right. [False: McCarthyism is easy to discuss: It's bad. False: McCarthy behaved far worse than a jerk knows how to behave. False: he was also wrong. ]

Banning books:

Now, I’m not in favor of pulling Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn from libraries, but let’s at least give a small nod to the fact that some material actually can be banned from libraries without the sky falling. [Note to librarians: Mr. Goldberg is not suggesting you ban his own book. That would be...censorship.]

[SNIP]

In praise of “The Bell Curve”:

[Charles Murray crunches] the numbers with the sort of élan and sophistication we’ve come to expect from the author of “Losing Ground” and coauthor of “The Bell Curve.” [Ah yes, I can see Dr. Murray right now, elegantly crunching those numbers with one hand, swirling a snifter of rare brandy in the other, all the while his colored valet anxiously hovers over the great man, ready to light a superb Cuban cigar for him when his master so signals. The height of sophisticated élan.]

[SNIP]

And, of course, Goldberg’s explanation for why he can’t be troubled with serving in Iraq:

As for why my sorry a** isn’t in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give — I’m 35 years old, my family couldn’t afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few — ever seem to suffice. ["I'm a hypocrite" would, in fact, cover it, Jonah]

tristero 11/11/2005 11:57:00 AM |

 
Slanted Much?

The new Fox poll has Bush down to 36%. They can't lie about the numbers. But you have to read the story they've written about them to get the full flavor of how difficult it is for them to grapple with the fact that their hero is a big, fat failure:

Another way to assess if Iraq has been worthwhile is whether it has prevented attacks in the United States. One quarter of Americans (24 percent) think homeland security measures have prevented new Al Qaeda attacks from happening since Sept. 11, and about one in seven (16 percent) think the military action in Iraq has prevented them. Another 19 percent think it is because no new attacks were planned and 26 percent think it is a combination of factors.

I suspect that the 16 percent of people who believe that the war in Iraq has prevented attacks by Al Qaeda are all regular FOX viewers. Nobody else has bought that line in some time.



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digby 11/11/2005 06:50:00 AM |

 
Animalia

Cat Show Plans Memorial Service for Dog

Iowa Woman Finds Dead Turtle in Coffee

Calif. Motorist Struck by Flying Deer
tristero 11/11/2005 04:41:00 AM |

Thursday, November 10, 2005

 
Open Letter To Pat Robertson's Mescaline Supplier

To Whom It May Concern,

It's time to stop supplying Reverend Pat Robertson with hallucinogens. He clearly has tripped out once too often and it's kind of giving the phrase "zonked totally out of your mind" a bad rap:

On today’s 700 Club, Rev. Pat Robertson took the opportunity to strongly rebuke voters in Dover, PA who removed from office school board members who supported teaching faith-based “intelligent design” and instead elected Democrats who opposed bringing up the possibility of a Creator in the school system’s science curriculum.

Rev. Robertson warned the people of Dover that God might forsake the town because of the vote.

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there.”

via Pharyngula
tristero 11/10/2005 01:42:00 PM |

 
The Final Throes

Suicide Bomber Kills at Least 29 in Crowded Baghdad Restaurant

A man wearing a suicide bomb belt walked into a bustling breakfast restaurant in the heart of the capital this morning and blew himself up, killing at least 29 people and wounding 30, many of them police officers, officials said.

Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a group that tracks Islamic militant postings. The attack was the most lethal in the capital in two months, and came a day after three suicide bombings killed 57 people in Amman, Jordan, in a coordinated attack also claimed by Al Qaeda.

It was the worst strike in a day of violence in Iraq that left at least 35 dead and more than 50 people wounded. Police officials also found 27 corpses in the southern city of Kut.

tristero 11/10/2005 12:18:00 PM |

 
All American Suckers

Unbelievable. Thirty-eight percent of this country still approves of Bush. Man, that's a lot of rubes.

Y'know, a halfway intelligent and utterly unscrupulous con artist could do very well for himself here.
tristero 11/10/2005 10:43:00 AM |

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

 
"Al Qaeda Is Having A Field Day"

There has been a lot of hand wringing amongst the liberal hawks these days regarding Iraq. And this has overlapped with an extremely abstract, prolonged -and frankly idiotic- argument over "the future of liberal interventionism" in the wake of the Iraq disaster.

And while all these great minds have been discussing ever so "reasonably" how best to adjust the "calculus" of America's Manifest Destiny so "we" will continue to be a force of good in the world, they have, almost to a person, demonstrated their profound inability merely to look outside their own goddamn windows and respond with simple human decency and commonsense to the real world. And once again, they've demonstrated how alarmingly limited American foreign policy discourse has become. Why? Because, regarding the recent catastrophe in Kashmir, most of the pseudo-intellectual liberal interventionists have joined the Bush administration once again in failing to pay attention to the patently obvious:

The poor response of the international community to the victims of Kashmir was underscored by the United Nations saying that it had received only 27% of the $312 million of its flash appeal for quake relief - compared with 80% pledged within 10 days of a similar appeal to international donors after the tsunami of December 26.

The government of Pakistan's own response to this massive human tragedy has also been described as slow and inadequate. One leader of Pakistan-administered Kashmir stated, "It's a shame as the government on the other side [Indian-administered Kashmir] acted promptly and provided relief and rescue in all the affected areas ... People are angry here as they think Islamabad has double standards, even in handling natural disasters."

What about the Islamist organizations of Pakistan; how did they respond? The same Kashmir leader told Reuters, "The jihadi groups are more sincerely taking part in relief operations. Those groups, which were branded bad by the government, are no doubt doing well and will influence people's sympathy in the future."

A number of earthquake victims attested to this reality by stating that the only prompt help they have gotten has been from Islamist groups. (See Asia Times Online Waging jihad against disaster, October 20.) Even Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf agreed with the performance of the Islamist groups related to post-earthquake assistance.

Examine the above realities from the perspective of al-Qaeda's version of public diplomacy. Considering the publicity given by the Western media to all statements that al-Qaeda issues, Zawahiri's appeal for aid for Pakistani victims was heard all over the world.

The immediate danger that this appeal poses is to Musharraf's own regime.

And given that Pakistan has nukes, well? But let's read on:

Al-Qaeda is having a field day watching the community of nations perform so deplorably in regard to the human tragedy in Pakistan. It can, quite effectively, underscore three perspectives. First, that the illegitimacy of current Muslim governments in the wake of their failure to come to the rescue of a Muslim tragedy of epic proportions does not require any further debate, from the perspectives of al-Qaeda.

Second, the seeming lack of Western concern only underscores al-Qaeda's claim that the West does not really care about what happens to Muslims, as long as the compliant and sycophant Muslim regimes continue to preside over the political status that ensures the dominance of the West. Third, given the preceding two reasons, al-Qaeda's own unrelenting insistence on the violent overthrow of all extant Muslim regimes is further established, at least in the minds of everyone who is mildly sympathetic to that organization's criticisms.

What emerges from the preceding is a transnational pan-jihadi entity carefully studying the twists and turns of the US and Western responses to countering terrorism and coming up with its own countermeasures.

Despite the dismantlement of the Taliban regime, al-Qaeda knows that the battle for control of Afghanistan has barely begun. It will continue its guerrilla-type skirmishes with US-led and Afghan forces. But the most important concomitant battle is to influence the hearts and minds of the Muslims of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

A weak Afghanistan remains under constant threat of major political turbulence. At the same time, an unstable Pakistan serves as an even more significant target than Afghanistan. The centers of gravity to win its war against the "enemies of Islam" - a phrase that al-Qaeda uses to depict all forces that oppose it and its objectives - are located in those two countries.

All it must do is keep the focus of rhetorical barrages on all Muslim tragedies and grievances and persistently highlight the sustained ineptness of the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan. A highly charged environment thus created would be vastly conducive to even greater instability in the region. That is the essence of al-Qaeda's battle to win the hearts and minds of Muslims, not only in South Asia, but also in the rest of the world of Islam.

I hate to say it again, but I told you so.

Again, boys and girls: The American mainstream media must make room for those of us in the reality-based community. I'm talking about those people who realized on 9/11/01 the Bush administration had to have been asleep at the switch; those people who understood after bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora that the Afghanistan war was a catastrophic military failure; those of us who heard of Bush/Iraq in spring, 2002 and were utterly appalled anyone would take seriously an idea so plainly bonkers; and those of us who immediately grasped that a catastrophic earthquake in a land that just happened to be at the center of several overlapping nuclear confrontations was an emergency - both human and political- that those nations committed to defeating al Qaeda simply had no choice but to pay serious attention to.

I mean, why can't we hear from experts who are right on a regular basis? Where the hell are they? Does Richard Clarke have an op-ed column? Is he provided the same access to tubed eyeballs -and the same courtesy- that the Swift Boaters and the crazy generals Digby described yesterday? Anyone recently see Rand Beers in the news two days in a row?
tristero 11/09/2005 06:56:00 PM |

 
I Almost Feel Sorry For Him

I'M A GENIUS [Jonah Goldberg]
I scored 100% my first time out on this timewaster.
Posted at 09:22 AM

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digby 11/09/2005 09:38:00 AM |

 
Very Good News

Expanding on tristero's good news below, may I just say how pleased I am that California voted down every single initiative yesterday, thereby shoving Schwarzenegger's useless 70 million dollar special election down his throat. Even the parental notification for minors seeking abortion went down.

Schwarzenegger is toast. After watching Bush and him in action maybe people are finally beginning to move beyond the "dumbshit guy I'd like to hang out with" and "movie stars are, like, awesome" methods of choosing our leaders.



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digby 11/09/2005 07:12:00 AM |

 
Win Some, Lose Some

Good news:

All eight members up for re-election to the Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy.

[SNIP]

The election will not alter the facts on which the judge must decide the case. But if the intelligent design policy is defeated in court, the new school board could refuse to pursue an appeal. It could also withdraw the policy, a step that many challengers said they intended to take.

"We are all for it being discussed, but we do not want to see it in biology class," said Judy McIlvaine, a member of the winning slate. "It is not a science."

Bad news:

The fiercely split Kansas Board of Education voted 6 to 4 on Tuesday to adopt new science standards that are the most far-reaching in the nation in challenging Darwin's theory of evolution in the classroom.

[SNIP]

Among the most controversial changes was a redefinition of science itself, so that it would not be explicitly limited to natural explanations.

[SNIP]

"This is a sad day, not just for Kansas kids, but for Kansas," Janet Waugh of Kansas City, Kan., one of four dissenting board members, said before the vote. "We're becoming a laughingstock not only of the nation but of the world."

[SNIP]

In the standing-room-only crowd in the small board room for Tuesday's session were two dozen high school students fulfilling an assignment for government class by attending the public meeting. They shook their heads at the decision.

"We're glad we're seniors," said Hannah Teeter, 17, from Shawnee Mission West, a high school in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City. "I feel bad for all the kids that are younger than us that they have to be taught things that aren't science in science class."

Good news, good news:

The Republican loss in Virginia, which President Bush carried with 54 percent just a year ago, came after an 11th-hour campaign stop by Mr. Bush and the kind of all-out Republican effort to mobilize the vote that reaped rich rewards last year.

Republicans argued on Tuesday that Virginia was a local election driven by local events, with little long-term national significance. But the loss clearly stung, as did the double-digit defeat in New Jersey, a blue state that had seemed within reach for the Republicans.

Good news:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was dealt a stinging rebuke on Tuesday by voters who rejected the centerpiece of his efforts to change the balance of power in Sacramento, an initiative to cap state spending and grant sweeping new budget powers to the governor.

Bad news:

Jerry Sanders, a former police chief, outpolled a surf-shop owner and City Council member on Tuesday to be elected mayor of San Diego, a city that has been tainted by corruption and fiscal mismanagement.

With 90 percent of the precincts reporting, Mr. Sanders, a Republican, had 54 percent of the vote, to 46 percent for Donna Frye, his Democratic opponent.

Bad news, good news, bad news:

Doctors would have to tell women seeking abortions in their 20th week of pregnancy or later that their fetuses might feel pain -- an assertion debated in the medical community -- under a bill passed by Wisconsin lawmakers.

Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, promised to veto the legislation, which the Assembly passed 61-34 Tuesday and the Senate passed earlier.

[snip]

Three states have similar requirements and federal legislation is pending in Congress, the National Conference of State Legislatures said.

Bad news:

Texans voted overwhelmingly to add a prohibition of same-sex marriage to their constitution on Tuesday, becoming the 19th U.S. state to do so.

Good news:

[I]n St. Paul, Randy Kelly became the city's first incumbent mayor in more than 30 years to lose a re-election campaign.

Polls suggested that Mr. Kelly's endorsement of President Bush last fall was a factor in his loss to a fellow Democrat, Chris Coleman, by 70 percent to 30 percent.

"I have never seen anything quite like this," Lawrence Jacobs, director of the University of Minnesota Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, said about what he called a firestorm over the endorsement.

A poll conducted by Mr. Jacobs found that more than half of likely voters in the city said Mr. Kelly's endorsement would influence their votes. Most of those respondents said it would lead them to vote for Mr. Coleman, a former City Council member.

tristero 11/09/2005 03:24:00 AM |

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

 
Confiding in Vic

It looks like DC is just crawling with wingnuts claiming to have spotted Elvis er... claiming that Joseph Wilson told them that his wife was CIA while they were waiting to go on one News show or another. Oddly, none of them ever came forward to support poor little Scooter and Karl during their ordeal. How selfish of them.

From last July, here's a friend of Victor Davis Hanson, regaling the Freepers with lurid stories of Wilson's crass materialism and bragging about his hot blonde wife in the make-up room:

Based upon a personal conversation (we were in a small group eating; it was NOT an "off the record") I had with eminent historian Victor Davis Hanson (we were at a luncheon table together during a trip to Europe), it appeared entirely possible that Joe Wilson himself was the (or one source, if not the original one) possible source in revealing his own wife's status as a CIA agent or employee.

Victor Davis Hanson (Wilson presumably knew Victor Davis Hanson wrote regularly for NRO (National Review Online), had done OpEds for the Wall street Journal, and other publications, and had his own Website with a widespread following) said he (VDH) & Joe Wilson were both in the same "Green Room" before a televised debate-discussion on Iraq, etc. and Joe first warned the TV make-up person not to get powder on his $14,000 Rolex watch, then he bragged to Victor about several things (possessions and trips to Aspen, etc.), like his expensive car (I think it was a Mercedes), and then bragged about his beautiful wife who, Joe Wilson said (braggingly) was a CIA operative.

I asked Victor Davis Hanson Why he didn't write up this account.(?) He replied that Joe Wilson would probably simply deny it, since only he (VDH) & Joe Wilson were in the Green Room together before the broadcast.

Fitzgerald is going to have to round up every wingnut in Washington. Seems they've all been holding out on him, allowing him to spend years investigating and hundreds of thousands of dollars and now he's going to have to start from scratch. After all, he is under the impression that Wilson's CIA status was classified and not known outside intelligence circles. Apparently, Wilson spilled his guts with uncommon frequency in the Green Rooms of television studios.

For those of you who need a primer on the hard, masculine, manliness of the brave Victor Dave, (who was evidently much too busy tucking into his terrine of duck confit whilst entertaining his little friends with insider tales of crass nouveau riches clods to step up and help out his pals Scoot and Turdblossom) here's James Wolcott on the subject.

By the way, did I ever tell you that I once heard Dick Cheney recite the codes to the nuclear football over tacos at Michael Ledeen's house? He did. And while he was doing it he was picking off the neighborhood cats with a bb gun and bragging about his three-way with Lynn and John Bolton. I never said anything before because he would just deny it. We were alone together in the bathroom at the time.


Crooks and Liars has a whole list of interesting links on the Valelly/McIntyre Swift boat smear.



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digby 11/08/2005 07:15:00 PM |

 
Whole Lotta Love

Wow. CNN is reporting that Trent Lott just said that the Washington Post leak was probably perpetrated by a Republican Senator! Apparently, the gulag was discussed at the Republican-Senator-only meeting last week in which Cheney begged them to back-off the anti-torture policy.

Lott said, "we have met the enemy and he is us." Man a majority leader scorned is fearsome creature, ain't he?

I do find it fascinating that Cheney was discussing this Gulag opernly in front of the GOP caucus after they had just recently voted 90-0 for the anti-torture amendment. Seems old Dick is a little slow on the uptake. He didn't learn a thing from his earlier leaking campaign, did he?

Update: Think Progress has the video.


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digby 11/08/2005 12:05:00 PM |

 
Losing On Defense

As Dear Leader would say, I think it's a "faahbulous" idea to hold hearings into how the Washington Post found out that we have established an illegal gulag (yes, a gulag) in countries around the world where we are holding and torturing prisoners indefinitely and with impugnity. I hope it creates headlines every single day for months as we explore this issue of how reporters found out that we are behaving in an illegal and immoral fashion along the lines of the Soviet Union. We need to get to the bottom of how such a thing happened and if it requires days and weeks of media coverage discussing how we torture and imprison people in foreign countries, so be it.

This Republican implosion is really becoming interesting to watch. These people lose their wits when they are forced to play defense. They think they are being clever and "turning the tables" on the Democrats by holding hearings into a leak but they apparently don't understand that they are playing right into the Democratic narrative about Republican secrecy, lies and incompetence.

As Terry at Nitpicker says:

If Republicans think this is a good idea for the political health of their party, they're stupider than I've ever thought they were. First, they're all but admitting to the world that we do have such sites, especially when someone on the Hill tells Drudge the leak "damaged national security."

More importantly, we're finally going to get to talk about issues that we should have been talking about all along. The Geneva Convention debate will be renewed. Dick Cheney's walk on the "dark side" will show. Eventually, leaders in countries that haven't avoided the International Criminal Court will go on trial and save their own asses by ratting out the Bushies.

We'll probably also get to see a real First Amendment debate, which will demonstrate just how ridiculous Judith Miller's claims of higher moral purpose were. The honesty of journalism "shield law" advocates like Sen. Dick Lugar and Rep. Mike Pence will likewise be tested.

This could be an all-out, to-the-mattresses fight over the values that we Americans truly hold dear and, in the process, we might even save our country's soul.

digby 11/08/2005 11:09:00 AM |

 
General Wacko and General Crackpot

Via Americablog: I see that the GOP attack machine is swift-boating Joe Wilson, saying that he casually spilled his wife's CIA status in the FOX greenroom back in 2002. I kid you not. They got two wingnut ex-generals to say that Wilson told them about his wife before they were about to go on television.

I suspect they might get a visit from the FBI about this because the last I heard, there was still an ongoing investigation into the matter of how reporters found out about Plame's employment. Patrick Fitzgerald might just be interested to know why these fellows haven't come forward before. After all, the story sounds a little bit wierd considering the fact that Joe never let it slip to his own friends and neighbors that Valerie was CIA, yet he supposedly blabbed to a couple of total strangers in the greenroom of a news network.

See, Fitz will wonder if after they heard this juicy little nugget about about a CIA spy married to an ex-Ambassador that they, in turn, told a FOX news reporter who might have then slipped it to Karl or Scooter sometime later. After all, both of those guys have very faulty memories and have said that they don't remember exactly where they heard about Plame.

I think somebody needs to get on the horn and let Pat Fitzgerald know that there are a couple of witnesses going around on right wing talk radio who could blow his case wide open. He needs to get the FBI out to talk to them right away.


Just in case anyone is wondering about these two guys' political orientation, here's an excerpt of the Publisher's Weekly review of these two patriots' Regnery book called "Endgame: The Blueprint For Victory in The War On Terror"

As the authors would have it, North Korea must dismantle its nuclear program or face U.S. invasion. Syria, unless it stops supporting terrorism and coughs up the Iraqi WMDs the authors say it’s hiding, should also be invaded. Saudi Arabia should be nudged toward a diversified economy and political reform, but if Islamic radicals take over, it too must be invaded. Iran, too big to invade, should be slapped with an embargo and naval blockade,[that view is no longer operative. Iran should now be tactically nuked -- ed] while Pakistan should be enticed with aid packages into curbing its nuclear proliferation and cracking down on the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The authors’ ambitious schedule of ultimatums and conquests leads them to focus almost exclusively on the U.S. military, for which they recommend the Rumsfeld doctrine of light, mobile forces, supplemented by additional weapons spending.

.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Considering what we know about Dick Cheney, it is not surprising that these two fellows would come to his defense. Let's consider General Paul Vallely, Fox news analyst and certified Strangelovian freakshow. From Newshounds November 2004:

Colmes questioned the wisdom of a Judeo/Christian holy war against Muslims. "That's what's going on," Vallely said. "If you don't understand that, then you don't get it."

But that's not General Vallely's claim to fame. He is known for a paper he wrote with a military intelligence officer named Michael Aquino in the late 1980's called From PSYOP to Mindwar: The Psychology of Victory. Aquino is also the founder of a Satanic cult called "The Temple of Set" which has had many run-ins with the law regarding satanic pedophile rings on military bases. I still kid you not. You can find a copy of this paper on the Temple web-site. He founded the cult in the mid-1970's more than a decade before he wrote this paper with our friend Vallely. I'm not big on guilt by association -- but really.

Vallely and Aquino's views are a bit eccentric, to say the least:

In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe - neither through primitive "battlefield" leaflets and loudspeakers of PSYOP nor through the weak, imprecise, and narrow effort of psychotronics - but through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth. These media are, of course, the electronic media -- television and radio. State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasts made possible a penetration of the minds of the worlds such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. Like the sword Excalibur, we have but to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have the courage and the integrity to civilization with it. If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they then desire moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.

[...]

Unlike PSYOP, MindWar has nothing to do with deception or even with "selected" - and therefore misleading - truth. Rather it states a whole truth that, if it does not now exist, will be forced into existence by the will of the United States. The examples of Kennedy's ultimatum to Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Hitler's stance at Munich might be cited. A MindWar message does not have to fit conditions of abstract credibility as do PSYOP there; its source makes it credible.

[...]

"MindWar must target all participants to be effective. It must not only weaken the enemy; it must strengthen the United States. It strengthens the United States by denying enemy propaganda access to our people, and by explaining and emphasizing to our people the rationale for our national interest in a specific war."

As Rigorous Intuition notes here, that sounds remarkably like the comment made to journalist Ron Susskind about "creating reality:"

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

This "Mindwar" paper evidently made the rounds in the military when it was published and informed a lot of wingnut thinking. What are the odds that Sec Def Cheney wasn't impressed? He's the guy who wanted to use tactical nukes use during Gulf War One, after all.

Mcinerney is only slightly less kooky than Vallely. He is heavily involved in neocon circles, particularly the Iran Policy Group with more famous notables like Gaffney, Ledeen and Pipes. He is also an influential board member of NetStar, a very interesting global communications company. Jim Stanton at the Agonist reported:

At the Intelcon blast held this past February, McInerney chaired a panel on Securing Intelligence Networks. As a director of NetStar Systems, that subject matter is an important part of his job. According to NetStar's website, it is "a fast-growing Virginia corporation with headquarters in Vienna, Virginia. It was founded in 1998 and most of our employees are cleared at the Top Secret or higher levels. NetStar is growing rapidly in the Intel and DOD sectors and has provided numerous solutions and staff to many of the Intelligence agencies in the DC metro area." Clients include the NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI, DHS and the Office of Naval Intelligence. NetStar is a member of the National Military Intelligence Association (NMIA). Most of NetStar's clients were at Intelcon 2005 including General Jim Williams, USA (Ret.), former director of DIA, and NMIA's current director.

[...]

"He [Bush] doesn't have any choice [but to attack Iran because] he understands [the Iranians] are the king of terror right now. They are striving for nuclear weapons that can get into the hands of terrorists and then it's too late. B-2 stealth bombers, armed with the huge penetrating bombs commonly called bunker busters, would be able to pierce Iran's aging air defenses and hit 20 or more sites. They have not updated that very, very old air defense system. McInerney said that as a colonel in 1977 he went to Iran and conducted a war exercise against various Iranian targets during the rule of the United States' ally, the Shah of Iran. They were not very good then, and they have clearly just gotten worse...I can tell you from my personal experience we would have no problem there."

Vallely is also a major neocon player. He was quoted back in February saying:

"Negotiations will not work," said Maj. Gen. (ret.) Paul Vallely, chairman of the military committee of the neoconservative Center for Security Policy, who described the Iranian regime as a "house of cards."

And who else but Dick Cheney was right in the middle of all this:

... the voices in favor of an "engagement" policy are being drowned out by crescendo of calls to adopt "regime change" as U.S. policy.

The latest such urging was released here Thursday by the Iran Policy Committee (IPC), a group headed by a former National Security Council staffer Ray Tanter, several retired senior military officers, and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

The 30-page document, "U.S. Policy Options for Iran" by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Clare Lopez, appears to reflect the views of the administration's most radical hawks among the Pentagon's civilian leadership and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

It was Cheney who launched the latest bout of saber-rattling when he told a radio interviewer last month that Tehran was "right at the top of the list" of the world's trouble spots and that Israel may strike at suspected Iranian nuclear sites even before the U.S.

These are all extremely creepy people involved in all kinds of neocon cloak and dagger fantasies. Just like Dick Cheney, whose idea of military leadership was gleaned from watching movies and TV series. They are part of the crackpot Cheney cabal.

These two men specifically are Jack D. Ripper and Buck Turgidson come to life. I think Pat Fitzgerald needs to talk to them. Immediately.



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digby 11/08/2005 10:27:00 AM |

 
Sickening

Reuters:.

U.S. forces in Iraq have used incendiary white phosphorus against civilians and a firebomb similar to napalm against military targets, Italian state-run broadcaster RAI reported on Tuesday.

A RAI documentary showed images of bodies recovered after a November 2004 offensive by U.S. troops on the town of Falluja, which it said proved the use of white phosphorus against men, women and children who were burned to the bone.

"I do know that white phosphorus was used," said Jeff Englehart in the RAI documentary, which identified him as a former soldier in the U.S. 1st Infantry Division in Iraq.

The U.S. military says white phosphorus is a conventional weapon and says it does not use any chemical arms.

"Burned bodies. Burned children and burned women," said Englehart, who RAI said had taken part in the Falluja offensive. "White phosphorus kills indiscriminately."

A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad said he did not recall white phosphorus being used in Falluja. "I do not recall the use of white phosphorus during the offensive operations in Falluja in the fall of 2004," Lieutenant Colonel Steven Boylan said.

An incendiary device, white phosphorus is used by the military to conceal troop movements with smoke, mark targets or light up combat areas. The use of incendiary weapons against civilians has been banned by the Geneva Convention since 1980.

The United States did not sign the relevant protocol to the convention, a U.N. official in New York said.

This report may be wrong, or a malicious attempt to make the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld military look truly monstrous.* But given everything else that we know about - Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, the black sites, the murders and "renditions" and refusal to abide by any law other than the president's will - I can only assume this is probably true. And note: white phosphorous, an incendiary, is classified as a conventional, ie non-chemical, weapon. Well, since ketchup's been a vegetable since the Reagan administration, I suppose napalm-like substances can be classified as little worse than rubber darts.

What will it take to stop these horrors? When will this country demand, with one voice, that torture and atrocities committed by the US stop, and stop, now, today?


*For the benefit of the rightwingers amongst us, who assume that those of us opposed to Bush/Iraq hate the military and think all soldiers are sadistic beasts, I don't believe the majority of American soldiers behave like the Abu Ghraib torturers. Obviosuly.

But I do believe that soldiers must follow orders from their higher ups and are often in no position to question what may be morally questionable orders. The sadistic beasts are the ones who condoned and ordered atrocities, not the soldiers who have been placed in an untenable position and cannot refuse without risking court martial or perhaps even summary execution.
tristero 11/08/2005 09:50:00 AM |

 
Is Crucifixion Legal Under Bush And Cheney?

Jane Mayer, who along with Jill Abramson wrote Strange Justice, a definitive account of how Anita Hill was smeared and ridiculed during the Clarence Thomas hearing, has written a searing account of the death of a prisoner in Iraq.

Jamadi’s bruises, [a forensic pathologist who examined the case records] said, were no doubt painful, but they were not life-threatening. Baden went on, “He also had injuries to his ribs. You don’t die from broken ribs. But if he had been hung up in this way [with his hands tied behind him in a painful position known as a "Palestinian Hanging"] and had broken ribs, that’s different.” In his judgment, “asphyxia is what he died from—as in a crucifixion.”

As in a crucifixion. At the hands of Americans. And it may not be against the law anymore:

The Bush Administration has resisted disclosing the contents of two Justice Department memos that established a detailed interrogation policy for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. A March, 2003, classified memo was “breathtaking,” the same source said. The document dismissed virtually all national and international laws regulating the treatment of prisoners, including war-crimes and assault statutes, and it was radical in its view that in wartime the President can fight enemies by whatever means he sees fit. According to the memo, Congress has no constitutional right to interfere with the President in his role as Commander-in-Chief, including making laws that limit the ways in which prisoners may be interrogated. Another classified Justice Department memo, issued in August, 2002, is said to authorize numerous “enhanced” interrogation techniques for the C.I.A. These two memos sanction such extreme measures that, even if the agency wanted to discipline or prosecute agents who stray beyond its own comfort level, the legal tools to do so may no longer exist.

So, is the "right to crucify" behind the objections of the Bush administration to McCain's bill banning torture overseas? Someone should ask Scott McClellan. Today.
tristero 11/08/2005 01:33:00 AM |

Monday, November 07, 2005

 
This is Not A Good Man

Kevin Drum says:

As a wise man said back in January 2003 regarding Cheney and his curiously enduring reputation for competence even in the face of mountains of contrary evidence, "his terrible judgment will, at some point, become impossible even for the Beltway crowd not to see." Looking back, perhaps historians will say that November 2005 was when they finally saw it.

I agree. It's finally coming into focus that every single one of this administration's so-called grown-ups are idiots. There were people who knew that the avuncular Dick Cheney was something of a nut, but nobody believed them. He just seemed so darned competent compared to the callow Junior, there was no need to look any further.

Frances Fitzgerald pointed out back in 2002 that Cheney was a bit of freak, in her fascinating article in the New York review of Books called "Bush and the World:"

In “A World Transformed,” the memoir that he and Bush senior published in 1998, [Brent] Scowcroft makes it clear that while all Bush senior's top advisers had different perspectives, the fundamental division lay between Defense Secretary Richard Cheney and everyone else. By his account, and by those of others in the administration, Cheney never trusted Gorbachev. In 1989 Cheney maintained that Gorbachev's reforms were largely cosmetic and that, rather than engage with the Soviet leader, the US should stand firm and keep up cold war pressures. In September 1991 Cheney argued that the administration should take measures to speed the breakup of the Soviet Union—even at the risk of encouraging violence and incurring long-term Russian hostility. He opposed the idea, which originated with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, that the US should withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe and South Korea. As a part of the preparations for the Gulf War he asked Powell for a study on how small nuclear weapons might be used against Iraqi troops in the desert.

The man is clearly a fool and always has been. Larry Johnson wrote about Cheney and torture today over on TPM cafe and mentions that the real CIA guys aren't all that into torture because it doesn't work. He suggests that Cheney and his minions got their ideas about all this from the movies.

That certainly does ring true to me. Here's an old favorite, that's amazingly illustrative of the incredible shallowness of Big Time, the man who was supposed to help little Junior get over his lack of foreign policy sophistication:

Following one White House meeting at which he'd asked for more time and more troops, Stormin' Norman reports; Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell called to warn the Desert Storm commander that he was being loudly compared, by a top administration official, to George McClellan. "My God," the official supposedly complained. "He's got all the force he needs. Why won't he just attack?" Schwarzkopf notes that the unnamed official who'd made the comment "was a civilian who knew next to nothing about military affairs, but he'd been watching the Civil War documentary on public television and was now an expert."

And then, twenty pages later, Schwarzkopf casually drops the information that he got an inspirational gift from Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney right before the air war finally got under way. Cheney was presenting a gift to a military man, and he chose something with an appropriate theme: "(A) complete set of videotapes of Ken Burns's PBS series, The Civil War."

But that wasn't the only gift that Dick Cheney had for Norman Schwarzkopf. Having figured out that the general was being too cautious with his fourth combat command in three decades of soldiering, Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being "as bad as it could possibly be... But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn't die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney's staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait." (Throw in a Pete Rose rookie card?) None of this Walter Mitty posturing especially surprised Schwarzkopf, who points out that he'd already known Cheney as "one of the fiercest cold warriors in Congress.

Remember the adoring crowds and nearly hysterical screaming for this kook during last years election? What in gawd's name were those people drinking?



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digby 11/07/2005 06:47:00 PM |

 
Ever Rightward

It is a wierd goddam day when Elliott "El Mozote" Abrams turns out to be the dove in the administration. (Check out Elliott's link there if you aren't familiar with his litany of crimes.) In fact, I can hardly believe it. It's either a testimony to how radical Bush and Cheney really are or how mellow and peaceful Abrams has become. I'm pretty confident it's the former.

I remember how dumb and scary I thought Reagan was. Compared to Junior, he was Einstein. What will they shove at us next?

What "compassionate conservative" are they going to foist on this country to take it even further to the right than we can imagine today? I'm thinking it has to be a Dobson or a Robertson Armageddonist. There's nowhere else to go.



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digby 11/07/2005 05:10:00 PM |

 
The Worst Of The Worst

Sen. Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his vote against the ban doesn't mean he favors torture. He rejected Durbin's comments as ''not really relevant to what we are trying to do to detain and interrogate the worst of the worst so that we can save American lives.''

Roberts said that success with detention and interrogation depends on the detainee's fear of the unknown. He suggested that passing a law and putting U.S. policies into a manual would tell detainees too much about what to expect.

''As long as you're following the Constitution and there's no torture and no inhumane treatment, I see nothing wrong with saying here is the worst of the worst. We know they have specific information to save American lives in terrorist attacks around the world. That's what we're talking about,'' Roberts said.

People like Pat Roberts make that fatuous argument all the time. They always say we only capture the "worst of the worst" whom soldiers and CIA agents KNOW beforehand have information that they stubbornly refuse to share (unless we make him sit on an exhaust pipe causing softball size blisters on their backside.) We don't need to apply any rules or laws because they deserve whatever they get. Of course, we don't torture and wouldn't dream of it and we always follow the constitution. But when we do it's only because they are the worst of the worst.

Once again I'm drawn to ponder why we have all this pesky due process here at home if it is possible to know before hand that someone is undoubtedly guilty so whatever punishment they are premptively given is only what they deserve. In the US, we have cops and prosecutors who investigate in scrupulous detail before somebody is tried. We go through a whole lot of gyrations weighing the evidence and making arguments according to laws that have been made to ensure we come as close an approximation of the truth as we can find. We do this because it turns out that sometimes all those cops and prosecutors make mistakes or are corrupt or are anxious to catch a fearsome killer so they get the wrong man.

It's quite cumbersome, but civilization determined some time ago that not only are torture and cruel and unusual punishment wrong --- and it has been millenia since anyone has argued that condoning the torture, punishment or imprisonment of an innocent man is anything but immoral. Yet, that is essentially what this argument does. It must condone the imprisonment and torture of innocent people. It is impossible that we are always capturing only the worst of the worst. In fact, we know that we aren't. Unless Senator Roberts is even dumber than he sounds, he has decided that torturing the occasional innocent person is just collateral damage.

The military code of justice, the Geneva conventions and the army code of conduct have all been designed to keep some sort of due process alive even in wartime so that we don't descend into depravity and chaos. They are designed to keep us moored to the idea of justice and morality in the midst of violence. It makes it possible for us to explain what we are doing -- to ourselves and others.

I recall during the great Clinton panty raid, the constant refrain about "what will we tell the children?" Everyone was concerned about the moral health of the next generation. How in the hell are people explaining to their children why we need a system of justice when we don't need it to figure out who is "the worst of the worst." How do you explain that torture is wrong except when it isn't?


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digby 11/07/2005 10:39:00 AM |

 
Republican Albatross

Laura Rozen calls out Pat Roberts and she tells quite a tale.

Still, I think it's important to remember that we are pursuing phase II of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation for purely political purposes. We will get nothing substantive out of it as long as Senator Pat Roberts is the Chairman.

In Phase I you can see that whoever actually wrote the thing for the Republicans is quite skilled with language (perhaps they hired the romance novelist who penned the Starr report). In this case, it wasn't bodice ripping sexual adventure, it was a masterful work of subliminal innuendo. The Democrats were either too lazy or too weak to fight this word for the word they way they should have done. Without the underlying information on which the conclusions were based, there is no way to understand what the hell really went on.

This is from the main body of the report, not the separate Hatch, Bond, Roberts addendum hatchet job:

( )Some CPD officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador's wife "offered up his name" and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador's wife says, "my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." This was just one day before CPD sent a cable DELETED requesting concurrence with CPD's idea to send the former ambassador to Niger and requesting any additional information from the foreign government service on their uranium reports. The former ambassador's wife told Committee staff that when CPD decided it would like to send the former ambassador to Niger, she approached her husband on behalf of the CIA and told him "there's this crazy report" on a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq.

This sounds innocuous. However, when you read the report carefully you realize the only time that any person is directly quoted it's done to create a certain impression. In that paragraph we see that Wilson "offered up" her husband to investigate a "crazy report." This shows that she has an agenda. Here's another example:

An INR analyst's notes indicate that the meeting was "apparently convened by [the former ambassador's] wife who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue." The former ambassador's wife told Committee staff that she only attended the meeting to introduce her husband and left after about three minutes.

Notice they don't quote Valerie Wilson there, only the INR analyst. They do not reveal what she said about the "idea to dispatch him" in this passage, but leave it hanging there, unrefuted. There is plenty of information in the report itself and elsewhere from which to support a different view of events, but the report is subtly slanted throughout to give the impression that Plame sent her husband to Niger to knock down a claim that didn't fit with her pre-conceived beliefs. (Of course, even if that were true, she would have been right. The Iraq Survey Group report put that one to bed.)

It happens throughout the otherwise rather dry, difficult report. By using selective quotes to promote a certain point of view while dissents are buried in expository language, they cleverly give weight to their conclusions while pretending to be even-handed. We can expect more of this for Phase II. (I have little faith that Jay Rockefeller can deal with this any more effectively now than he did before.)

Pat Roberts is the worst possible choice to be the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He is a partisan first and last. His predecessor, Richard Shelby of Alabama was no moderate (and he has his own problems with disseminating classified information) but he operated independently of the White House and took his job seriously. In combination with Bob Graham on the Democratic side, they were able to maintain at least some bi-partisan integrity. There is no integrity on the Republican side of the Intelligence Committee at present.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't press for the second phase of the investigation and more. We are about to go into an election year in which it may be possible to take control of the congress if we play our cards right. A huge part of that is laying this cover-up at the feet of these congressional enablers as much as the White House. They have been covering for the Dick Cheney show for years now and it's time for the public to hold them responsible.

Here's an early example of Roberts doing a bang up job of congressional oversight, from March of 2003:

Sarah Ross, a spokeswoman for Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts, said the committee will look into the forgery, but Roberts believes it is inappropriate for the FBI to investigate at this point.

The documents indicated that Iraq tried to by uranium from Niger, the West African nation that is the third-largest producer of mined uranium, Niger's largest export. The documents had been provided to U.S. officials by a third country, which has not been identified.

A U.S. government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it was unclear who first created the documents. The official said American suspicions remain about an Iraq-Niger uranium connection because of other, still-credible evidence that the official refused to specify.

In December, the State Department used the information to support its case that Iraq was lying about its weapons programs. But on March 7, Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents were forgeries.

Rockefeller said U.S. worries about Iraqi nuclear weapons were not based primarily on the documents, but "there is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq."

Then in November of 2003, look how they handled reports that the Democrats wanted to investigate how the White House used the intelligence. Frist had one of his patented hissy fits:

Angry about a leaked Democratic memo, the Republican leadership of the Senate yesterday took the unusual step of canceling all business of the committee investigating prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) called on the author of the memo -- which laid out a possible Democratic strategy to extend the investigation to include the White House and executive branch -- to "identify himself or herself . . . disavow this partisan attack in its entirety" and deliver "a personal apology" to Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence.

Only if those steps are taken, Frist said, "will it be possible for the committee to resume its work in an effective and bipartisan manner -- a manner deserving of the confidence of other members of the Senate and the executive branch."

Roberts followed Frist on the floor and said that unless the Democratic members "properly" address the issue, "I am afraid that it will be impossible to return to 'business as usual' in the committee."

A committee meeting scheduled for yesterday was canceled, and none has been scheduled for next week, according to a senior committee staff member.

I would suggest that we use their own language against them instead of against ourselves, for once. Who are the real spineless politicians in Washington, after all? Is it the opposition Democrats who flailed unsuccessfully at a president who says that he'd prefer to be a dictator? Or are the GOP Senators and Congressmen who have spent the last five years as servile yes men and women to every single insane thing the president asked of them the real wimps in all this?

They have covered and excused and enabled and supported President Bush and Vice President Cheney no matter what cockamamie acheme they came up with at the expense of their duty as an equal branch of government. What kind of mealy-mouthed little bed-wetters are these Republicans who stood by while this president took this country down the path to perdition.

George W. Bush would be nothing today if it weren't for the unified unquestioning support of the GOP congress of the United States. We need to make sure that he's hung like a dead soaring eagle around the necks of every single Republican running for office next year. It isn't just Codpiece and his mad dog Cheney. It's the legislative branch who checked their consciences and their responsibilities at the doors to become brown-nosing sycophants for the most incompetent, radical, corrupt administration in history. It's their Party and they can cry if they want to ---- but it won't do any good.



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digby 11/07/2005 07:52:00 AM |

Friday, November 04, 2005

 
Back On The Chain Gang

Are there any Republican political types who aren't crooks? Any? I think that may be there are one or two, there have to be, but I honestly can't think of any.

It turns out that Kenneth Tomlinson, the ousted head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is being investigated for "misuse of federal money and the use of phantom or unqualified employees."

People involved in the inquiry said that investigators had already interviewed a significant number of officials at the agency and that, if the accusations were substantiated, they could involve criminal violations.

Last July, the inspector general at the State Department opened an inquiry into Mr. Tomlinson's work at the board of governors after Representative Howard L. Berman, Democrat of California, and Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, forwarded accusations of misuse of money.

The lawmakers requested the inquiry after Mr. Berman received complaints about Mr. Tomlinson from at least one employee at the board, officials said. People involved in the inquiry said it involved accusations that Mr. Tomlinson was spending federal money for personal purposes, using board money for corporation activities, using board employees to do corporation work and hiring ghost employees or improperly qualified employees.

Through an aide at the broadcasting board, Mr. Tomlinson declined to comment Friday about the State Department inquiry.

And guess who's one of Ken's good friends?

In recent weeks, State Department investigators have seized records and e-mail from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, officials said. They have shared some material with the inspector general at the corporation, including e-mail traffic between Mr. Tomlinson and White House officials including Karl Rove, a senior adviser to President Bush and a close friend of Mr. Tomlinson.

Mr. Rove and Mr. Tomlinson became friends in the 1990's when they served on the Board for International Broadcasting, the predecessor agency to the board of governors. Mr. Rove played an important role in Mr. Tomlinson's appointment as chairman of the broadcasting board.

The content of the e-mail between the two officials has not been made public but could become available when the corporation's inspector general sends his report to members of Congress this month.

The turning of public broadcasting into a cog in the GOP noise machine was undoubtedly part of Rove's master plan. One of the beautiful things about controlling the government was the availability of taxpayer money to pay for partisan propaganda. Why bleed your friends when you can bleed the saps who are paying the bills? I'm sure Rupert Murdoch and Dick Scaife would be very grateful if they didn't have to underwrite the entire thing. Why, if they played thier cards right, in a decade or two, the private sector could be completely out of the propaganda business.


Update: Never Mind. Bush has solved the problem. He's a leader cuz he knows how ta lead. Back to codpiece worship for everyone:

President Bush has ordered White House staff to attend mandatory briefings beginning next week on ethical behavior and the handling of classified material after the indictment last week of a senior administration official in the CIA leak probe.

The mandatory ethics primer is the first step Bush plans to take in coming weeks in response to the CIA leak probe that led to the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, and which still threatens Karl Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff.

[...]

A senior aide said Bush decided to mandate the ethics course during private meetings last weekend with Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and counsel Harriet Miers. Miers's office will conduct the ethics briefings.

Is it mandatory for Rove and Cheney, do you suppose? It seems kind of pointless otherwise.


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digby 11/04/2005 09:00:00 PM |

 
Their Cheatin' Hearts

The Stranger is reporting more voter manipulation by Republicans in Seattle, trying to suppress the vote, as usual:

Steven Lacey is a regular voter whose plan for Election Day next Tuesday was to walk a few blocks from his Belltown apartment building and cast his vote, as usual, at his local precinct. At least, that was his plan until he received a letter last night informing him that his right to vote had been challenged by a woman from the east side named Lori D. Sotelo.

The letter reported that Sotelo had declared to King County election officials, “under penalty of perjury,” that Lacey’s voter registration was not valid because he couldn’t possibly be living at the address he was claiming. “Which is insane,” Lacey said. The 35-year-old insurance company account manager lives at the Watermark, a 60-unit downtown apartment building built in 1908. However, Sotelo appeared to believe the Watermark was a storage unit, a P.O. box, or some other location that Lacey could not legally be using as an address of record.

Furious, Lacey did a quick web search and realized that Sotelo was a leader in the King County Republican Party. He couldn’t understand how she came to think he was illegally registered, since the Watermark, Lacey said, “couldn’t more clearly be a physical residence.” He left Sotelo a phone message telling her as much, but he never heard back.

Then he asked around, and found that many people in his building had received the same letter, informing them that their votes would not be counted until they proved, at a hearing or through a signed affidavit, that they were legally registered.

“A lot of the people that live in the building are over 50 and have voted in dozens of elections and are incredibly pissed,” he said. “Everybody’s pretty pissed.”

It turns out that Lacey and his neighbors were just a few among at least 140 King County voters who were wrongly challenged by Sotelo, who chairs the King County Republican Party’s “Voter Registration Integrity Project.” Sotelo could not be reached for comment on Friday morning, when The Stranger first reported the mistakes on our blog, but Chris Vance, chairman of the state Republican Party later confirmed for The Stranger that a serious mistake had been made.

“We are withdrawing those challenges today and apologizing to those folks,” he said. He added that it is “just coincidence” that a significant number of the wrongly challenged voters live in a strongly Democratic neighborhood.

They do this all the time:

Oct. 30, 2004

Citing a new list of more than 37,000 questionable addresses, the state Republican Party demanded Saturday that Milwaukee city officials require identification from all of those voters Tuesday.

If the city doesn't, the party says it is prepared to have volunteers challenge each individual - including thousands who might be missing an apartment number on their registration - at the polls.

The move, which dramatically escalates the party's claims of bad addresses and potential fraud, was condemned by Democrats as a last-minute effort to suppress turnout in the city by creating long delays at the polls.

City officials, who already were trying to establish safeguards in response to the party's claim of 5,619 bad addresses, were surprised by the 37,180 number, nearly seven times larger.

"It's not a leap at all to say the potential for voter fraud is high in the city, and the integrity of the entire election, frankly, is at stake," said Rick Graber, state GOP chairman. "The city's records are in horrible shape."

Any inaccurate address, he said, is an opening for someone to cast a fraudulent vote. However, many of the new addresses now cited might be eligible voters who have voted for years without problems.

City Attorney Grant Langley labeled the GOP request "outrageous."

"We have already uncovered hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of addresses on their (original list) that do exist," said Langley, who holds a non-partisan office. "Why should I take their word for the fact this new list is good? I'm out of the politics on this, but this is purely political."

They cheat on an institutional level. Operatives are taught to do it when they are just political pups:

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.

[...]

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.

Republican party operatives are trained to cheat. They first cheat each other in the minors and then they take their skills to the show. This is a cog of the GOP machine that needs to be exposed and dealt with.

Prepare yourself to defend every Democratic win, because they are going to go batshit crazy if they start to lose and you will see an "electoral reform" movement like we could only dream of. It will be based upon spurious claims of massive, national voter fraud.



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digby 11/04/2005 07:27:00 PM |

 
Lawyers In The Case

This article doesn't state specifically when it took place, so it's hard to know if it's referring to the meeting I found so puzzling, but according to a Rove associate, Fitzgerald at some point met with James Sharp, Bush lawyer, about whether or not Rove misrepresented his role in the leak case to the president. That's a bit more believable than Fitzgerald making a personal pilgrimage to Sharp's office to get word to the president that Rove is out of danger, as Michael Isikoff would have had us believe.

"Lawyers in the case" also said that Fitzgerald has narrowed his focus as to whether Rove lied about his conversation with Matthew Cooper.

And:

Mr. Fitzgerald no longer seems to be actively examining some of the more incendiary questions involving Mr. Rove.

They "seem" to have come to this conclusion based upon the fact that Rove and Cooper's lawyers are talking and nobody else is. In other words, they don't really know shit. It may be that he's only considering the Cooper e-mail lie or it may be that he's trying to nail down the Cooper e-mail lie as part of something else that he is no longer actively investigating --- because he already has the goods.

You can't tell what is going to happen based upon what he has been investigating this last week. Luskin's bombshell, exculpatory, pause-giving evidence notwithstanding, we are still in the dark about "Official A's" real exposure in all this.

I'm in "I'll believe it when I see it" mode. Nobody knows nothin'.



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digby 11/04/2005 05:56:00 PM |

 
Turdblossom Special


Via Pre$$titutes

If it comes to pass that Karl Rove is indicted, or even if he loses his security clearance (which he damned well should) I would hope that someone in Washington has the guts to smash this fellatory daydream in Mark Helperin's face and twist it like a grapefruit until he screams for mercy. I'm not sure if "The Note" think this is funny or if they seriously believe that Karl Rove was just an innocent bystander in the Plame outing, but either way their little fantasy is ludicrous.

Pretending that they are writing in the future on a day when Rove comes to the podium and finally speaks, they write Rove's speech for him:

"I have a statement to make before taking your questions."

"Now that the special counsel has informed me that I will not be charged in his investigation, I thought I should come to this podium and tell you the straight Texas truth about my role in this case."

"In short, my counsel advises me that there is no controlling legal authority that says that any of my activities violated any law."

"Just kidding. Lighten up, Plante."

"When news reports began regarding allegations that Valerie Wilson's name was improperly released to the media, I was asked by several colleagues here at the White House if I had played a role in illegally releasing the name of Mrs. Wilson. I said at the time that I had not. That was my best recollection at the time I was asked."

"Subsequently, three things occurred. One, the special counsel's investigation began, and both he and the President — as well as the White House counsel — asked those of us working in the government not to speak publicly about the case in any way."

"Two, my colleague and friend Scott McClellan on several occasions repeated what I had in good faith told him — that I had not played any part in breaking the law and disclosing her name. As a result, he mislead you more often than my lawyer, Luskin, which is really something when you think about it."

"Third, after an e-mail was belatedly discovered through the normal search process at the White House, my recollection was refreshed and I recalled that I did have one brief conversation with one reporter in which I mentioned Mrs. Wilson's role in her husband's trip to Niger."

"Because of the first development — the absolute barrier to speaking about the case — I was unable to deal in a timely manner with the second two developments in a public way. This had the unfortunate effect of bringing into question the credibility of the White House and my own public credibility. For that, I am sorry."

There was, of course, no absolute barrier about talking about the case. Indeed, his lawyer discussed it constantly both on backround and in the open. This is nonsense.

Furthermore, Karl Rove has a photographic memory. He did not forget speaking to Cooper and he did not forget speaking to Libby about Novak writing a story about "Wilson's wife." Sure, Karl could say this, but nobody would believe it except his little cheerleading squad at The Note. The partisan shills might dutifully repeat it, but they wouldn't believe it either. This is because it's completely unbelievable.

Karl has cultivated quite a mystique over the years. He is considered by one and all, on both the right and the left, to be a Machiavellian genius, or as ex-Democrat and media maven Mark McKinnon, his most devoted sycophant, puts it, "a chess master who always sees 12 steps ahead." He worked very hard to create that image and playing the dizzy blond won't work now.

Why, everyone knows that Bush's Brain's tactical brilliance is legendary. It's obvious that Boy Genius's political skills are unparalleled. He has been lauded for his special brand of slash and burn politics since his earliest days, doing dirty tricks in the college Republicans. He doesn't play hardball politics, he plays beanball politics. He cannot play innocent. Ever.

In this case, regardless of any illegality, his tactics were no different than usual --- low, partisan and ruthlessly over the top. Here is what he reportedly said to the grand jury:

President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel's investigation of the matter.

But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak's column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

This is what the man does and it's how he got his creature George W. Bush in the white house. From whisper campaigns about Ann Richards being a lesbian to siccing the FBI on Jim Hightower, he honed his skills as an assassin for more than 20 years in Texas. He's proud of it.

The LA Times reported last summer that Rove was just as obsessed as Libby and for trivial reasons by comparison:

Prosecutors investigating whether White House officials illegally leaked the identity of Wilson's wife, a CIA officer who had worked undercover, have been told that Bush's top political strategist, Karl Rove, and I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, were especially intent on undercutting Wilson's credibility, according to a person familiar with the inquiry.

While lower-level White House staff members typically handle most contacts with the media, Rove and Libby began personally communicating with reporters about Wilson, prosecutors were told.

A source directly familiar with information provided to prosecutors said Rove's interest was so strong that it prompted questions in the White House. When asked at one point why he was pursuing the diplomat so aggressively, Rove responded: "He's a Democrat."

Karl Rove was in the middle of a ruthless, partisan campaign to "discredit" Joe Wilson with leaks. He, as "Official A," went to Libby and told him that Robert Novak was going to write a column "about Wilson's wife." He told Chris Matthews that Wilson's wife was "fair game."

Yet The Note wants us to actually swallow this utter bullshit that the brilliant, masterful, political genius Karl Rove "forgot" his conversation with Matt Cooper in which he spilled the beans about Wilson's wife. In a court of law, perhaps Pat Fitzgerald would not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rove lied about that. In the court of public opinion, it is as ridiculous as the idea that OJ didn't do it.

Perhaps Karl can spend the rest of his tenure in the White House looking for the real leakers.


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digby 11/04/2005 01:52:00 PM |

 
It's Confirmed: Dog Bites Man.

You may recall Colonel Laurence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell who recently caused a...hullabaloo when he shocked, shocked everyone with his report of the existence of a cabal that has hijacked foreign policy under Bush. Well, Colonel Wilkerson now tell us the orders to torture prisoners came from the highest levels of government, specifically Cheney's office.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad the good Colonel's been able to put two and two together, but among others, investigative journalist Mark Danner's been saying much the same thing all along, long before Bush's ratings tanked (to still dismayingly high levels). Danner's reporting on the torture scandal has been detailed, meticulous, superb, accurate, and ignored.

By the way, does Danner appear regularly on major network TV news or panels? Any rumors he might replace David Brooks at the Times, who has been screwing up royally (unless Brooks's purpose has been to increase Friedman's relative stature at the Times as a prose stylist and deep thinker)?

No harm in asking.
tristero 11/04/2005 01:02:00 PM |

 
Ken, We Hardly Knew Ye. But That Was Enough.

Tomlinson resigns from the CPB board. Remember? He's the guy who hired someone to watch Bill Moyers and report on all the heinous liberalism going on. Among those dastardly, "anti-administration" liberals were Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska), and ex-congressman Bob Barr (R-Hypocrite). Unfortunately, Tomlinson remains head of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. So it's too early to breathe a sigh of relief, but it is a step in the right... excuse me, proper direction.

Update: Kevin K. in comments reminds us that there's many more where Tomlinson came from still on the board, and that There's some majorly awful programming coming up. If I didn't know better, I'd think Bush was deliberately trying to destroy PBS. But he wouldn't do that, would he?

Interestingly, in the midst of all of the attention to the CPB’s fight against liberal bias, the agency quietly announced a round of grantees for its “America at a Crossroads” project (6/27/05). Among the projects receiving CPB support are The Case for War, a film about neoconservative Richard Perle made by Perle’s longtime friend Brian Lapping; The Sound of the Guns, a film about former CIA director William Colby made by Colby’s son; Soldiers of the Future, which “will tell the story of Donald Rumsfeld’s recent efforts to transform America’s military”; Warriors, in which American Enterprise editor Karl Zinsmeister argues that the U.S. military “attracts a cross-section of citizens motivated by idealism and patriotism”; and Studying Hatred, a film by David Horowitz co-author Peter Collier.

And in Spring, 2006, be sure to watch the much anticipated documentary, "Big 'Behind': A Profile of Tim LaHaye."
tristero 11/04/2005 05:34:00 AM |

Thursday, November 03, 2005

 
The Rhetoric Was Part Of The Policy


All this nonsense about Clinton and other Democrats saying the same thing as Bush, so Bush couldn't have been lying is driving me nuts. It's bad enough that they trot this out as an excuse for their own fuck-up, but when they conveniently forget that they were against the action Clinton took at the time to meet the threat (because it interefered with their blow-job trial) it's infuriating.

Seetheforest has Trent Lott's famous quote after Clinton announced Operation Desert Fox, but I've got another one:

Armey said in a statement. "After months of lies, the president has given millions of people around the world reason to doubt that he has sent Americans into battle for the right reasons."

I won't say it.

Here's the real problem. Clinton said the usual boilerplate about Saddam being a dangerous guy and how he wanted to get weapons of mass destruction and how we had to be credible with our threats of force to keep him in line. And when Saddam stepped way out of line in 1998 he ordered the massive bombing operation that got all the Republicans' panties in a twist because it happened at the time of the all important fellatio impeachment.

On the night he ordered the bombing, here is how Clinton explained American policy:

...we will pursue a long-term strategy to contain Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction and work toward the day when Iraq has a government worthy of its people.

First, we must be prepared to use force again if Saddam takes threatening actions, such as trying to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction or their delivery systems, threatening his neighbors, challenging allied aircraft over Iraq or moving against his own Kurdish citizens.

The credible threat to use force, and when necessary, the actual use of force, is the surest way to contain Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program, curtail his aggression and prevent another Gulf War.

Clinton said that American policy was that if Saddam took certain threatening actions, we would use force.

Bush and Cheney said that Saddam might take threatening actions, so they had to invade.

That's quite a different threat assessment. Clinton never suggested an invasion and occupation to deal with Saddam, his policy was to contain him with threats and judicious use of force when he provoked us. And apparently it worked. There were, after all, no weapons of mass destruction and he had perpetrated none of the other actions that would have led to a need for further use of force as of 2002.

General Zinni ran Operation Desert Fox and believed that it had crippled Saddam's weapons capabilities. Inspectors, of course, could have verified that fact and Saddam allowed them back into the country in 2002 under the "threat of force."

Even I wondered for a bit if Bush might actually be bluffing about invasion in the beginning, because 9/11 gave us some momentum to saber rattle to get inspectors back in. I suspect that some of the Senators who voted for the Iraq resolution held out some hope that this was what Bush had in mind --- it had, after all, been Bush I and Clinton's policy and it had kept Saddam contained and toothless for a decade. After about five mionutes of pondering the question I realized that Bush was deadly serious and there wsn't a chance in hell that he could have the necessary finesse to pull something like that off. He wasn't, after all, "into nuance."

There was a lot of bellicose talk for years about Saddam because a public show of serious intent was part of the containment strategy. But until Commander Codpiece came along and empowered his neocon cabal of Iraq nuts, nobody was suggesting that the US military invade and occupy the country. Indeed, nobody thought it would be necessary in order to keep Saddam in check.

A lot of Democrats (including both Clintons) made a political gamble that after 9/11 they had to support the invasion because if it was successful they would have been tagged as soft. They were fighting the last war, Gulf War I, in which many Democrats looked foolish for having objected to such a painless, inexpensive, glorious victory. I'm afraid that many of the Democratic leadership bet on the wrong horse ---- again. It is, sadly, a testament to how badly they deal with foreign policy that they got it wrong both times. A lot of us out here in Real Murika didn't because we weren't playing politics --- just assessing the situation and deciding whether it made sense.

Still, it was undoubtedly difficult. 9/11 had cast a spell on our country, abetted by a media that turned the "war on terror" into an epic pageant of national pride and patriotism to such an extent that to question, much less oppose, was an act of political courage. There are very few politicans of either party with much of that:

Akaka (D-HI)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Boxer (D-CA)
Byrd (D-WV)
Chafee (R-RI)
Conrad (D-ND)
Corzine (D-NJ)
Dayton (D-MN)
Durbin (D-IL)
Feingold (D-WI)
Graham (D-FL)
Inouye (D-HI)
Jeffords (I-VT)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Leahy (D-VT)
Levin (D-MI)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Murray (D-WA)
Reed (D-RI)
Sarbanes (D-MD)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Wellstone (D-MN)
Wyden (D-OR)

Those were the Senators who voted against the resolution. How good, smart and prescient they appear today. The ones who didn't showed lousy instincts. When the president is an idiot, it should be easy to conclude that he is not going to make good decisions about the need for war --- or anything else. Millions of us knew the constant blathering about Bush's great "leadership" after 9/11 was hype. They should have too.

But still, even the most craven Democratic opportunist cannot be held responsible for the administration's repeated assertion's that Saddam was a "grave and gathering danger" or that the Bush Doctrine was dutifully printed out from the PNAC web-site and distributed after 9/11 without any serious consideration of its ramifications. Bush was pushing a line that had many people wondering if he didn't know something thast the rest of us didn't. It was incomprehensible to a lot of Americans that an American president would be so reckless as to launch a war on unverified information.

There was no good reason to stage an invasion based upon the threat assessment we had. 9/11 actually made that proposition more dangerous and short sighted than it would have been before. They knew this, which is why they hyped the threat with visions of mushroom clouds and nefarious drone planes disguised a crop dusters. They knew that if we relied solely upon the threat assessment that the Clinton administration relied upon, the country would not back their war. So they lied.

The true irony is that it now appears that Clinton managed to accomplish what Bush said needed to be done, with a heavy bombing campaign during his own impeachment. (Talk about multi-tasking.) Bush came along and spent billions of dollars, stretched our military beyond its capabilities, destroyed our international credibility and got tens of thousands killed to accomplish something that had already been done in 1998. What a cock-up.



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digby 11/03/2005 08:38:00 AM |

 
Foreign Policy Magazine And A Little From Foreign Affairs, For Extra Measure.

I've been subscribing to Foreign Policy for a few years now, but ever since they gave Newt Gingrich several pages to propose an American Ministry of Propaganda, I haven't had much desire to do much more than glance at it. The current issue is different. It's terrific, doing precisely what I hoped the zine would do. Not that I agree with everything, far from it, but it stirs the pot and gets some lesser-known stories out in provocative ways.

Take, for instance, this good news story about Iraq. Or so it seems at first. Commander James Gavrilis captured/liberated/whatever Ar Rutbah less than a month after the official start of the war. Spending around $3000 and relying on what sounds like a reality-based perspective on the situation, he managed to get the town back on its feet:

My initial approach to governing was very authoritative; it eliminated anarchy and allowed Iraqis to debate the details of democracy rather than survival. What the Iraqis needed was an interim authority to get them back on their feet. While the interim mayor and I provided this stability, the city council’s role was to oversee the mayor and to provide input, not necessarily to make policy. The laws and values of their society and culture were just fine. All we needed to do was enforce them. The city council was an important body for dialogue, debate, and legitimacy. But by initially limiting its decision-making power, we made sure the council couldn’t paralyze our progress.


Representatives in the city council included teachers and doctors, lawyers and merchants. At one town-hall meeting, a few of these professionals asked me about elections. They said the tribal sheiks and imams did not represent their interests, and they wanted to have a say in their government. I explained that they couldn’t vote right away because we had no election monitors or ballot boxes. Still, they insisted. Two rudimentary elections were held in the grand mosque to reconfirm the interim mayor—and Americans were not involved in either vote.

As an alternative to Saddam’s regime, the particular form of democracy was not as important as the concept of a polity that provided for the individual. That was really what Iraqis missed under Saddam. Good governance had to precede the form or type of democracy. Because we were effective in providing services, were responsive to individual concerns, and improved their lives, the Iraqis gravitated toward us and the changes we introduced. However, we didn’t have to change much. Ar Rutbah already had a secular structure that worked. We just put good people in office and changed the character of governance, not the entire infrastructure.

[snip]

One day, a few tribal sheiks came to complain of looting at night in some parts of the city. So, knowing that some of the sheiks were behind some of the looting, I established a neighborhood watch. I put them in charge and had their men act as the watchmen. And the sheiks were held accountable if the looting continued. I also had a team patrol those areas at night at random. The stealing ended abruptly.

[Snip]

n the end, I spent only about $3,000. This sum included the salaries of the police, the mayor, the army colonel, and a few soldiers and public officials. We paid for the crane and the flatbed trailers to move the generators to the city for electricity, and for fuel to run the generators. And we picked up the tab for other necessities, such as painting, tea, and copies of the renunciation form. But the change did not depend on the influx of funds; the Iraqis did a lot themselves. The real progress was the efficient and decent government and the environment we established. Without a lot of money to invest, we made assessments and established priorities, and talked with the Iraqis, exchanging ideas and visions of the future.


We intended to work ourselves out of our jobs, and when conditions were right we took steps back.

A very moving, hopeful story, and I'm not being anything other than sincere in saying so. But there's just one teensy little problem with making this a textbook case example of why Iraq should have been invaded, which becomes obvious as the article winds down.

You see, unfortunately, Commander Gavrilis and his band of brothers were there for all of two weeks, and then they left. And then:

Although the Iraqis continued the work we started, the follow-up coalition forces did not. The distance between the locals and the troops widened. The Iraqis were eventually exposed and vulnerable to regime loyalists’ retribution and intimidation by foreign fighters. The local Iraqi security forces never developed to the point where they were stronger than the gangs of insurgents; they were never brought into a larger political or security framework of an Iraqi government so that they could be part of a collective security system. Left alone, the Iraqis simply couldn’t hold off the foreign fighters who passed through the city, using Ar Rutbah as a way station en route to Baghdad and Ramadi.

Now, you might think at first that this helps the argument of the liberal hawks, that Bush/Iraq could have worked had the occupation simply been more competent. Actually it doesn't. Here's part of the reason why.

As it happens, a few days earlier, I had read this remarkably bad article about Vietnam by Melvin Laird in Foreign Affairs about his tenure as Secretary of Defense during Nixon. Short version: "Don't blame me for Vietnam. The guys before me got us into that mess, I did a great job, but I didn't have time to finish, and the guys who came after me totally fucked it up."

Now, there are major differences between Vietnam and Iraq, to be sure. Among them is that Commander Gavrilis seems like an intelligent, down to earth man, justly proud of his competence in a difficult situation while Secretary Laird reminds us what an arrogant, mistaken, paranoid son of a bitch he was thirty plus years ago. But the trajectory of failure is the same and, I'm afraid, entirely predictable. Let's, for argument's sake, take both men at their word, that they did a good job (a stretch with Laird, but bear with me). The problem is that no matter how good a job they could do, inevitably someone would replace them who wouldn't do as good a good job, who didn't care as much, who wasn't as informed, who didn't have the same combination of street instincts, commonsense, and decency that led to a temporary positive outcome. The main point is this: As Commander Gavrilis himself notes, any positive development was temporary and highly contingent. Because so little can be depended upon in such a volatile, and little understood, situation - be it Vietnam or a town in occupied Iraq - reversals due to incompetence and unexpected problems are all but certain. And let's not forget that incompetence during occupation was only one of many areas that had to go well in Iraq. There was national and international law and opinion, the economy, the insurgency, and the prospect that major US armed forces could be required elsewhere. Many of these did go well (despite Bolton's efforts to create total havoc, US forces didn't have to relocate to Korea, thank God) but Iraq still failed. The problem was that nearly all contingencies had to go well, and unless you're Bill Bennett on a roll, that's impossible.

In any event, it surely would have taken more good luck than even Andrew Lloyd Webber possesses to have pulled off Ar Rutbah for another two weeks. Amd to imagine that democracy could actually take root then and flourish 2 1/2 years later is a pie in the sky fantasy. Not even Commander Gavrlis could have kept the situation moving forward that long. Not after Abu Ghraib, for instance.

As with Vietnam, (which despite Laird's assertions did not in any way benefit from his clear-eyed genius as Defense Secretary, simply because there was no benefit to be had except to morticians and artificial limb manufacturers), Iraq could not work out. Incompetence, or insurgency, coalition atrocities, or sheer ignorance, or a combination of all four, was inevitable, and predictable.

And finally, I say with genuine sorrow: Commander Gavrilis' efforts, no matter how admirable, were, in any significant sense, predictably doomed never to last long enough to make much difference in avoiding the tragic reality of Iraq's people today.

Now, there are several other articles in Foreign Policy well worth reading that are equally interesting and subtle. For example, here's a profile of Zarqawi. What makes this article important is not only that we learn who Zarqawi is, but his significance. He is no rare anomaly, like the fabulously wealthy and fanatical bin Laden. Zarqawi is just a halfway smart lowlife thug, warped by 7 years of imprisonment with torture, transformed into a committed jihadist, originally only a reluctant an ally of al Qaeda, and finally, as a result of the American invasion/occupation, advanced to the position of "emir" for al Qaeda in Iraq. Now, guess what? As Peter Bergen and Alec Reynolds make clear in a brilliant article in the same issue of Foreign Affairs where the odious Laird held forth, there are likely to many, many more Zarqawis in Iraq's, and America's, future. And that, too, was predictable, and predicted.

Another article from Foreign Policy, seemingly just an innocuous roundup and overview of scholars is equally subtle and chilling. Take a look at this chart of the leading lights in foreign policy studies. As the article notes, "nearly all are white men older than 50." I'll add to that that there is not a single native Arab speaker on that list and at least two of the so-called wise men in foreign policy -Huntington and Fukuyama - hold what can only be described, in the kindest terms, mostly worthless opinions. Women may join the list soon, the article notes. That's all to the good, but the level of sheer mediocrity of the "scholars" on this list is astonishing, and is not likely to change much if one or two of the worst names are replaced by capable women.

Another part of this deceptively bland-seeming article notes a very scary statistic:

When asked what region was most strategically important to the United States today, a resounding 58 percent answered the Middle East and North Africa. Yet, only 7 percent of U.S. international relations scholars specialize in the region. This gap may explain why the American intelligence community is still advertising for Arabic speakers.

Well, yes, it just might explain it. That, and the fact that openly gay specialists in Arabic aren't welcome, too.
tristero 11/03/2005 06:51:00 AM |

 
35% Of The American Public Living In Alternate Reality

Be afraid, be very afraid. After all that is happened, more than 1/3 of all Americans "approve" of Bush's presidency. What will it take to wake these people up? What horrible things would Bush and his gang have to do - or not do - to drive his poll numbers further south?

And let's try to be creative here. As enjoyable as fellatio, cunnilingus and its many delicious variations are for most of us, suggesting Bush get caught in flagrante delicto with Official A - or a horse, or whomever - just simply is not that original. Allow yourself to think way, way, outside the box (and the bedroom, and the bathroom), and let your imagination roam: What more could Bush inflict on us that he hasn't already done, to make matters so bad his approval ratings would fall to a more reasonable, but still alarmingly high, number, say 10%?

Would he have to publicly declare his desire to be dictator? Nope, been there, done that. How about establish gulags in Eastern Europe? He's beaten you to the punch.

Any ideas? It's not that easy.
tristero 11/03/2005 02:24:00 AM |

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

 
The Geography Of The Psyche

I was puttering around earlier working on something else and I came across this hilarious paper dealing with the spousal notification issue from the "men's rights" perspective.

Writing jointly for the Court on this aspect of the [Casey] decision, Justices O’Conner, Kennedy and Souter struck down the spousal notification requirement as in impermissible infringement on a woman’s right to privacy. The Court offered three basic reasons for holding that a wife could not be compelled to inform her husband of her intent to abort.

1. First, the Court discounted the husband’s interests by pointing to the realities of nature:

"[i]t is an inescapable biological fact that state regulation with respect to the child a woman is carrying will have a far greater impact on the mother’s liberty than on the father’s

In other words, because the fetus is in the woman and not the man, the woman’s interests trump.

This makes sense. I would even fo so far as to say that because the fetus is in the woman, the woman's interests trump --- the fetus. This fellow disagrees:

This reasoning might be questioned on several fronts. First, it is not the case that the biology is all with the women. As dozens of studies of couvade syndrome indicate, expectant fathers experience biological symptoms of pregnancy along with their partners. Both partners may feel nausea, irritability, food cravings, indigestion, and so on. Both can anticipate discomforts from pregnancy and the stresses of infant care. While the man’s aches and pains are "psychosomatic," and are likely to be less intense than the woman’s, they are not inconsequential. Men and women both experience biological effects of pregnancy.

And they both have that glow...

In any event, the right to privacy recognized in Roe v. Wade is not based on biology only, but also on issues of emotion and identity. Justices O’Conner, Kennedy and Souter stated as much in Casey, observing that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy. These choices include the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. This is not the language of biology, but of religion or philosophy.

And if men choose to define their "concept of existence, of meaning, of the mystery of life" as being pregnant, the law should give them equal rights to the female body that is actually, you know, biologically pregnant. That's called equality.

The greater maternal involvement in biological pregnancy cannot by itself resolve these larger issues. What matters, in addition to the physical effects on the body, are the consequences of abortion for the individual’s basic value structure and self-concept. Once the liberty interest protected by the Fourteenth Amendment is phrased in terms of choices and a concept of the self, rather than biology alone, the argument that the woman’s interests should trump the man’s requires further elaboration. Both men and women face choices about their roles as parents and their concepts of their own identities. Both men and women become bonded with the fetus. The fetus may be physically growing in the woman’s belly, but in the geography of the psyche, it is inside the man as well. To exclude expectant fathers from juridical notice on grounds of biology is to miss the importance of pregnancy in a man’s concept of himself as a parent and a procreative being and his vision of the meaning of his life.

I suspect that this guy's concept of himself would be less enthusiastic about sharing the burden of pregnancy if the geography of the testicles were squeezed in a vise for 18 hours as he tried to expel a cantaloupe through his penis. It would very likely change his vision of the meaning of his life, as well.



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digby 11/02/2005 07:55:00 PM |

 
A Most Convenient Escape

Turns out a "top al Qaeda operative" escaped before he could testify to "abuse" by an American soldier. Of course, I believe it. No doubt in my mind. I mean, it's not like they would lie about something like that, right? Permit a prisoner to escape or hide him (or worse) to prevent more embarassing revelations of torture. No, they just wouldn't do that. That's not what Americans - who live in a democracy and value freedom - do.

[Update: More misinformation...sorry, I meant details... about the escape here.]
tristero 11/02/2005 09:06:00 AM |

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

 
Excellent

What Reid did was a superb variation of the strategy I was talking about yesterday. But Reid, brilliant fellow, ignored my suggestion simply to focus back on Traitorgate. No,he broadened it to our advantage, stressing the notion that Digby and others have emphasized, that the real subject of Traitorgate is the systematic, deliberate lying about Saddam's WMD before the war. Excellent, excellent, excellent.

Now, whatever it was Bush was talking about yesterday - does anyone remember? - well, Reid has the opportunity get to that when he's good and ready. And this gives me hope that when he does, Reid won't just roll over and surrender. Excellent, excellent, excellent.

Extra unexpected bonus: Watching Frist lose it today in real time, it's clear Reid's unmasked the true face of Cat Mengele. Oh, the embarassing soundbites tonight! Meow!!!

[Update: The gift keeps on giving. Reid's action also puts considerable pressure on Cheney, because, as I just recalled, Cheney's new security adviser, John Hannah, was linked to bogus information on Iraq. This means that some enterprising reporter might just think to ask whether it was all that appropriate for Cheney to hire Hannah as it really appears Cheney is just trying to extend the coverup about the prewar intelliegence.

Amazing how much good a touch of spine can do.

One final thought. When Bush, et al, get over their shock, their retaliation is gonna be quite ugly. And just as surprising. Watch out, Harry. You can expect that what Bush did to McCain will be just a mild foretaste of what's gonna happen.]
tristero 11/01/2005 01:59:00 PM |

 
Secret Session!

So Harry Reid has called for the long awaited Phase II investigation into the Iraq debacle and they are going into a closed secret session to discuss it. The Republicans are squealing like pigs in a slaughter house.

Kyra and Ed Henry on CNN are characterizing it as "bickering" and "working against the interest of the American people." Interestingly, Frist is calling it a "stunt" and "uncivil." (No word yet from anyone about the substance.)

The Democrats should not back down on this. The Republicans are going to portray themselves a victimized and martyred, weeping like little bitty babies about "betrayal." Oh mercy me, pass the smelling salts -- that mean Harry Reid has "stabbed" Scarlett O'Frist in the back!

Fuck them. This is what an opposition party does and it's long overdue. You want to change the subject, motherfuckers? Think again.



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digby 11/01/2005 11:53:00 AM |

 
The Liberty Platform

Yesterday I got chastised by at least one reader for never offering any solutions, just criticisms. It reminded me that I haven't gotten on my personal soapbox lately and harrangued my audience with the notion that I think we should adopt a western and southwest red state strategy using a platform of personal liberty, economic responsibility, land conservation, energy independence and effective national security. If you've heard this before, feel free to move on. Otherwise, here is my super-duper message package to capture at least a couple of western red states and tip the balance to our side.

I understand that building a coalition of rural western states and big city blue states has its problems. But we have to find common ground with some red states somewhere and this seems like the most fertile ground requiring the least compromise on matters of primary importance to both. That's the only way a coalition can be successful. You can't force people into a mold, you have to mold the coalition around shared principles.

In a great post discussing the Alito nomination, Barbara at Mahablog articulates one part of this platform as she talks about the paternalist right wing:

The provision represents another rightie tendency, which is that righties essentially distrust human beings to make their own decisions. We saw that during the Terri Schiavo flap, when all manner of legislation was proposed that would have allowed government to intrude in a family’s end-of-life decisions. To a rightie, human beings are mindless beasts who need to be controlled by Big Brother so they don’t make “bad” decisions; i.e., decisions with which the rightie disagrees. And righties always assume that people who make these “bad” decisions have done so because they don’t think. Notice all the legislation imposed by states intended to make women reflect on a decision to abort, as if women can’t think for themselves. It’s beyond their comprehension that most women who decide to abort do understand exactly what a pregnancy is and realize that abortion is a serious matter.

"Republicans don't trust people to make their own decisions." It's that simple. They want to tell people how to live. I believe that is a simple argument that plays ever so subtly on the Republican mantra that says "they don't trust you with your own money!" We should steal it since they've already trained the ears of Americans to hear that formulation.

Survey USA found that while Utah and Idaho are among the most conservative on social issues in the country, many of the other western red states are quite liberal. Here's a breakdown on choice:

23. Montana 53 percent "Pro-choice"
26. Arizona 56%
27. New Mexico 56%
30. Wyoming 57%
34. Colorado 61%
38. Oregon 62%
38. Nevada 64%
41. Washington 63%
46. California 65%

We do not need to pander on choice in order to win elections. In fact, we end up being mealy-mouthed and unappetising to both sides. Choice is a majority position and we should consistently articulate it as trusting people to make their own decisions about their personal lives. Period. Don't get into religious interpretations. Don't talk about the fetus. Just simply and straightforwardly say that people should be trusted to make their own decisions about complicated personal matters, that it's nobody else's business. It will make some people mad, to be sure. But it's simple and it gets to the heart of the matter. People want to know where we stand and that is where we stand.

People should be able to freely practice their religion as long as they don't expect anyone else to practice it or pay for it. People should be able to feel secure that their their homes, health and families are in the private sphere, where government has the least interest.

The western and southwestern states are far less amenable to intrusions on personal liberty, far less likely to be hyper-religious, far more "live and let live" than the southern red states. There is less history of racism than in either the south or the big cities (that's not saying all that much) and they have been leaders in women's equality. As the Republican party becomes a Christian dominated party of big government, this group is becoming unmoored from the GOP and is open to a new message from us.

They don't like taxes, which is why economics have to be presented in terms of responsibility rather than entitlement, which they are. Nobody likes taxes, but responsible people recognise that taxes are unavoidable if we are to have a decent society. "It is irresponsible to burden business with outrageous health care costs and individuals with the fear of imminent catastrophe --- the government needs to fix this problem." "It's irresponsible for the wealthy not to accept their rightful share of the burden to keep this country strong." "It's irresponsible for the government not to keep our promises to each generation by ensuring that social security stays healthy and that we don't leave behind a mountain of debt for our children."

They also don't like corruption and cronyism. It goes against the western ethos of both rugged individualism and communitarian necessity. The dishonest Republican political machine has to be grating at their very marrow. This issue is, of course, central to our critique of the Republicans generally, but I think it carries extra weight with the anti-authoritarian west. They don't like Washington much anyway. Washington corruption is particularly distasteful.

They are growing increasingly concerned about environmental degradation. Global warming affects people who work and live on the land --- people in the west are more concerned with the environment in general than those in the south. This is an area of common cause. Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana has set forth some ideas about liquid coal that should be explored. Alternative energy is, in my opinion, a winning issue for us all around.

On national security, I think the simple answer is to point out that Republican unilateralism is creating enemies and bankrupting the country. There is a lot of evidence that people are resenting the amount of money that's being spent on Iraq. The way to deal with this is to say that if the Republicans had followed the model of Bush's father and worked with a real coalition toward goals that everyone could agree upon, we would not be bearing this kind of financial burden alone. We will never hesitate to act alone if the national security of the US is at stake. With Iraq, the administration claimed that we were in danger from a threat that didn't exist and we took on the enormous cost of that mistake alone because the vast majority of the world didn't agree with that assessment. We need to make sure that never happens again.

A few of the areas that are problematic for this coalition are guns, business regulation, unions and immigration. On the first I would adopt a states' rights position and use governor Dean's formulation that the rural areas have different concerns about guns than the cities and so there can be no national, one size fits all solution. Big city cops have different concerns than those in Montana.

We should argue that if business acts responsibly toward its community, its customers and its employees, they have no beef with us. Our society depends upon business being successful and there are many millions of them around the country that are both responsible and profitable. They should be rewarded, not penalized, for doing the right thing.

Unions need to take a page from California. They have been enormously successful in re-casting thier image here by simply pointing out that union members aren't "special interests" they are cops, firefighters, nurses, teachers, state employees. Once people see unions again as average working people instead of the stereotype of mobbed-up "On the Waterfront" crooks or ridiculous patronage machines, they tend to look at the whole issue differently. We should encourage the unions to work together to send out this message of average working people you depend upon every day to take care of you when you are in need. It's worked extremely well in California and I think it can work everywhere.

Immigration is going to be tough. I think we will have to look at the southwestern governors Napolitano and Richardson for some guidance. This issue is the canary in a coalmine of a faltering economy and it must be dealt with wisely. It's becoming huge around the country and the Democrats have to find the proper balance. I don't have the answers on this one.

The other side of all this is that the mountain red state voters need to recognise that the blue states are not the enemy of Real America. It's a two way street. We should ask them for some consideration of our culture just as they ask us for theirs. These are the live and let live people. If we let them know that we have no interest in turning Helena or Las Vegas into San Francisco, maybe they will grant that it's ok for San Francisco and Boston to have their own ways too. We have more in common than we have differences.

This discussion of what "real America" is, is a good starting point for launching this coalition. Despite what the GOP is trying to sell, Real America is all of us. The red state west is one element of the current Republican coalition that may just agree with that. We need them --- and frankly they need us. Their unique culture of independence and self-sufficiency is far more threatened by what the modern Republicans are doing than anything the Democrats have ever done.

I'm sure there are huge holes in my plan. I've never sat down and really worked on it. But others have, people who are in the trenches looking at how we can build a Democratic majority now that the Republicans have a total lock on the south. I'm not saying that we should abandon the south --- but we cannot depend upon it. History shows that the south is a voting block unto itself and almost always goes together. It's a very tough nut for us to crack, particularly if we wish to keep any principles. There are better ways.


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digby 11/01/2005 08:13:00 AM |

 
Porter Goss Or The Higgs Boson?

When it comes to punishment of those who dare to disagree with the White House, the Wilsons are but the tip of the iceberg. Robert Dreyfuss has a vitally important article in American Prospect about the evisceration of CIA under Porter Goss. Take the time to read it all. Here is a short quote from the end, but you really must read the details Dreyfuss prints to understand the full meaning of the disaster:

Without a doubt, Goss’ team is the most highly partisan ever to run the CIA. The ex–HPSCI staffers were notorious for taking a Republican Party–oriented stance on many issues, especially Murray, who once tried to get classified information released so it could be used against the Democrats. Under Goss, the CIA public-affairs office has been nearly shut down, under the tight control of Jennifer Millerwise -- not an intelligence person, but a political operative who worked on the Bush-Cheney election campaigns and for Goss at the HPSCI. The partisan, pro-Bush nature of the current regime at the CIA was underlined when Goss issued a widely leaked memorandum telling agency employees to “support the administration and its policies in our work,” adding, “As agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”

The import of Goss’ memo to staff was not lost on agency veterans. “The meaning was that from now on, there is only one acceptable view, and that’s the neocon view,” said one. For many it was the final straw, convincing them that there was no hope of salvaging independent analysis. “At the [Directorate of Intelligence], they’re wondering, ‘What is our job now, now that our boss doesn’t seem to care about us anyway?’” says Gregory Treverton, who served on the National Intelligence Council under Bill Clinton.

That's right. Bush's familiar is systematically undermining the reliability of a president's main source of proprietary information. Oh, I can easily understand the gray areas where intelligence can be couched for or against a particular policy. But this is different. What Goss is doing, with Bush's evidently enthusiastic approval, is eliminating from CIA any data gathering and analyses that do not support the presumptions and policy wishes of the Bush White House.

In other words, what Bush is creating is a CIA that, had it existed in 2002, would have been far more wrong about WMD and Saddam/al Qaeda connections than it actually was.

Now, dear friends, for many weeks now, I have been reading a marvelous book by Dr. Lisa Randall entitled Warped Passages which is all about the new physics of branes, strings, and infinite hidden dimensions. Having done some of the most exciting work in this area, Randall not only knows what she is talking about but her explanations are as clear as a bell. Now, that doesn't mean branes, bulk, and infinite invisible 5th dimensions are easy to comprehend, they're not and Randall is too honest to spare us (which is great, you can actually learn something new about the world if you can keep an open mind and persist). You can spend several days, if you're an amateur science lover with little math, just trying to get a slight sense of exactly how a massless neutrino, which is emitted after an interaction with a weak gauge boson, can help resolve an apparent violation of the law of the conservation of energy.

But as mind-bogglingly hard as the new physics is to grasp, it is child's play next to trying to grok the reasoning behind Porter Goss's destruction of CIA. Y'see, concepts like branes and asymmetrical elementary particles that only accept a charge when they're right-handed (or is it left-handed?) get easier to understand the more you think about them. But the more you ponder why any Director would deliberately eliminate from CIA the objective gathering and assessment of data - rather than trying to improve it - the weirder it all sounds, the more incomprehensible it gets.

After a while my head starts to hurt real bad and I feel the only way to clear it is to try to understand something easy. Like modern string theory.
tristero 11/01/2005 06:50:00 AM |

Monday, October 31, 2005

 
Unleashing The Id

Can somebody explain to me why American interrogation techniques seem to always involve sticking objects up prisoners' asses? This has got to be some sort of "method" because it is reported over and over again:

"He had two, 10-hour beatings from the Americans and I said to David, 'Sure they were Americans?' (because) he said he had a bag over his head and he said, 'Oh look ... I know their accents, they were definitely American'," Mr Hicks told Four Corners.

"Some pretty horrific things ... were done to him."

The program reported the abuse had included Hicks being injected and then penetrated anally with various objects.

Hicks' lawyers say they have witnesses relating to the abuse and that the United States has photographic evidence.

His American lawyer, Major Michael Mori, would not comment on the specifics of what information he had.

"I'd say it's an area that I'm investigating and that I've already found some evidence and witnesses that support that occurring," he told Four Corners.

Former Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee, Mamdouh Habib, who was released earlier this year, has also claimed that he was abused while on foreign soil.

In February, Mr Habib detailed how he was tortured in a military airport in Pakistan.

During a particular episode of abuse, Mr Habib said 15 men stripped him, inserted something into his anus, put him in a nappy and tied him up.

Is this some sort of American sexual panic or is it official policy that sexual violence is the best way to "interrogate" prisoners?

Every time I read this stuff it makes my stomach churn. What is being described is depraved sexual violence--- rape. And I wonder about the men and women who are perpetrating these horrifying acts. This is a license to unleash the darkness which I assume exists to some extent or another in most people --- and then they are going to come back into society and we are going to expect them to behave like decent people.

I'm beginning to think that we're not dealing with interrogation at all. We're dealing with something insidious and familiar: rape camps. It appears that based upon some strange reading of Islam that says being raped is unusually unpleasant for Muslims, we are using rape as a military strategy. The same thing happened in Bosnia to Muslim women:

...the Mission accepted the view that rape is part of a pattern of abuse, usually perpetrated with the conscious intention of demoralising and terrorising communities, driving them from their home regions and demonstrating the power of the invading forces. Viewed in this way, rape cannot be seen as incidental to the main purposes of the aggression but at serving a strategic purpose in itself

Americans are apparently doing the same thing --- to men. There is just too much evidence of this wierd sexual violence and humiliation for it to be a coincidence. We have become the Serbs.



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digby 10/31/2005 07:41:00 PM |

 
Catastrophe Strategy

I'm reading a lot of comments in the blogosphere saying things like this today:

"...we'd be far better off politically if Roe were overturned and Griswold were curbed. And if a couple states -- say Kansas and Alabama -- enacted medieval restrictions that made the rest of the country puke."

This is a great idea and I don't know why we don't use it for everything. For instance, why don't we stop talking about torture. Our position is "soft" and it turns off the NASCAR dads we need to reach. Certainly, the prohibition against torture, which nobody even considered was in danger of being repealed until a couple of years ago, cannot be easily abandoned. Once people become aware of this medieval behavior, they will "puke" and step in to do something about it, right? Isn't that how it works? When the right pulls some outrageous stunt, the country stands up en masse and rejects it.

There is a lot of action on the right these days about due process. If we just keep very quiet about the threat to habeas corpus and the right to confront your accuser, trial by jury of your peers --- all of these fundamental constitutional rights, people will see how bad it is when our system of justice becomes "medieval" and then they will rebel.

Following this strategy, we should allow the Republicans to have their way on tort reform and consumer rights. Once people get ripped off badly enough they will look at the Republicans and see that they don't have their best interests at heart and they will vote for us instead. Indeed, I think that we should carefully consider whether or not it's smart to keep harping on tax policy too, for that matter. If we let the Republicans completely bankrupt the country so that we have a catastrophic economic meltdown, destroy social security and medicare, all those old, poor and unemployed people on the streets will surely wake people up. It will probably make them puke.

I'm not sure why that would lead to anyone voting for the Democrats, though. After all, we'll have sat idly by and let these things happen without fighting because we thought it would be politically helpful to our cause to force women to have back alley abortions, enable torture, destroy our judicial system, let common citizens be conned out of their hard earned money, and their lives destroyed in economic calamity --- in order to make a political point. But hey, it's a good plan anyway. We'll run on the "we told you so" platform and everyone will love us.


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digby 10/31/2005 11:36:00 AM |

 
Generative Consequences

"Men's liberation" aside, there are many many people, both male and female, who believe that a woman should be required to inform her husband that she is pregnant -- after all, they reason, the baby is his too, right?

I don't believe that women should have to inform anyone of their decision to have an abortion because it infringes on her fundamental right to personal autonomy. But even those who disagree with that should recognise that it's not always so simple:

The name of the woman pictured below is Gerri Twerdy Santoro. She was just 28 years old. She was a sister, a daughter, and she was the mother of two daughters when she died a very painful and frightening death.

This New York coroner's picture first appeared in MS Magazine in April 1973. When Gerri's picture appeared in MS, no one knew her name or all the circumstances that surrounded her death from an illegal abortion. While it was assumed that she died at the hands of a back alley butcher, the family later confirmed that she died the way most women died before Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion in this country in 1973; she died from a self-induced abortion attempt.

Gerri was estranged from her abusive husband when she met Clyde Dixon and became pregnant by him. Terrified that once her abusive husband returned to town and learned it was Dixon's baby she was carrying, he would kill her. She was determined and desperate to end her unintended pregnancy. That desperation and determination made her akin to thousands upon thousands of women in those days that were desperate and determined enough to terminate their unintended pregnancies in spite of the fact that abortion was illegal. Illegality affected the safety of abortion but it never affected the number of abortions that were performed.

Gerri was 6 ½ months pregnant in June 1964. Gerri's boyfriend obtained a medical book and borrowed some surgical equipment. They went to a motel where Dixon tried to perform the abortion. When the attempt failed, when it all went terribly wrong, Dixon fled the scene, leaving her there to die, alone, in this cold impersonal hotel room. She was bleeding profusely and tried with towels to stop it but she couldn't. How frightened she must have been, knowing she was going to die. She was found like this, on her stomach with her knees under her, her face not visible, bloody, nude, alone and dead.

You can go to the link to see the picture, if you need to see the horror.

The new nominee for the Supreme Court voted that a woman today, in the same position this woman was in in 1964, would probably have to do the same thing Gerri Santoro did. Informing her husband would put her in the exact position she is desperate to avoid. And that woman might very well end up the same way Gerri Santoro did.

Now, I'm sure there are many on the right who believe that this poor woman deserved what she got for being unfaithful to her abusive husband. Her crime was having unauthorized sex and she should have had to "pay the price" by bringing a child into an angry abusive marriage --- or perhaps being killed by her violent husband.

Indeed, great thinkers on the right are now saying this right out loud.

From Pandagon I find out that Leon Kass is dead serious about outlawing birth control, because it has unhinged women's "desire" from its "consequences:"

The sexual revolution that liberated (especially) female sexual desire from the confines of marriage, and even from love and intimacy, would almost certainly not have occurred had there not been available cheap and effective female birth control — the pill — which for the first time severed female sexual activity from its generative consequences.

[...]

Her menstrual cycle, since puberty a regular reminder of her natural maternal destiny, is now anovulatory and directed instead by her will and her medications, serving goals only of pleasure and convenience, enjoyable without apparent risk to personal health and safet

[...]

Her sexuality unlinked to procreation, its exercise no longer needs to be concerned with the character of her partner and whether he is suitable to be the father and co-rearer of her yet-to-be-born children.

How touching. If it weren't for birth control we could pretend we're in Victorian England and have a nice cup of tea. Sadly, his little fantasy wasn't even true during that time for any but the richest Mayfair heiresses (who were also bartered off like cattle) and it sure wasn't true for women who had no means.

I think it's time to call upon some down home wisdom from somebody red staters revere about the "character" of partners and the "generative consequences" for women in a life without repropductive freedom:

You wined me and dined me
When I was your girl
Promised if I'd be your wife
You'd show me the world
But all I've seen of this old world
Is a bed and a doctor bill
I'm tearin' down your brooder house
'Cause now I've got the pill

All these years I've stayed at home
While you had all your fun
And every year thats gone by
Another babys come
There's a gonna be some changes made
Right here on nursery hill
You've set this chicken your last time
'Cause now I've got the pill

This old maternity dress I've got
Is goin' in the garbage
The clothes I'm wearin' from now on
Won't take up so much yardage
Miniskirts, hot pants and a few little fancy frills
Yeah I'm makin' up for all those years
Since I've got the pill

I'm tired of all your crowin'
How you and your hens play
While holdin' a couple in my arms
Another's on the way
This chicken's done tore up her nest
And I'm ready to make a deal
And ya can't afford to turn it down
'Cause you know I've got the pill

This incubator is overused
Because you've kept it filled
The feelin' good comes easy now
Since I've got the pill
It's gettin' dark it's roostin' time
Tonight's too good to be real
Oh but daddy don't you worry none
'Cause mama's got the pill
Oh daddy don't you worry none
'Cause mama's got the pill

Loretta Lynn 1972

Scalito doesn't want women to have family leave when they get pregnant, and he thinks that women should have to inform their husbands if they want an abortion (at least until he can outlaw it all together.) Considering his views are considered to be in the same ballpark as Scalia, I assume that he thinks that Griswold should be overturned as well -- all the best right wing fascists do.

Good luck with this. If these guys have their way it's going to be a rude awakening for the women in this country.




Update: Excuse me, I just found out that Scalito believes that there should have been an exception to the "inform the husband" provision --- she would have had to go to court and reveal all of her private business to a judge in order to get permission not to tell her estranged, abusive husband. The supreme court found that to be an undue burden. I'm sure he and Nino will take care of that nonsense the first chance they get.



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digby 10/31/2005 09:21:00 AM |

 
It's Traitorgate, Stupid.

Alito, schmalito. Of course, he stinks, and stinks worse than usual. You expected a reasonable nominee from Bush? Are you joking?

Now look. Of course, if Alito isn't vigorously opposed and if he gets to the court, the extreme right will advance one more ominous giant step along the road to establishing the US as a Christian Taliban state (and no, rightwing nuts: I don't think they'll convert baseball stadiums for use as mass execution centers of heretics, liberals, abortion doctors, their patients, and gays. Well, at least not for a few more years, anyway.)

But look at where we were up to 1 second before Bush announced Alito's name, and where we still are. Bush is perceived by the press and politicos as wounded. And the wound is serious: The perception of his administration's ability to protect us, to keep our secrets, and to tell us the truth is heavily, perhaps permanently damaged. With Bush injured, now is the time to press harder exactly where it hurts, and vigorously rub it with salt.

By contrast, Alito is for Bush as Oxycontin is for Limbaugh. Alito is intended to ease the pain of Fitzgerald's indictments and continuing investigation by changing the subject. Bush, Cheney and Rove expect us to play along on their timetable, which requires that the country get distracted quickly from the brief glimpse Fitzgerald provided everyone, even Kristof, of the enormously fetid swamp of crimes and traitorous behavior behind the sealed gates of the Bush White House. No one, except Bush's base, can be anything but disgusted at what was revealed on Friday.

And Bush's base will rally around Alito no matter what. They have their carefully honed defenses of Alito ready to roll out. But they are not planning on having the country stay focused on Traitorgate. And that is why I'm saying we must.

I'm NOT saying ignore Alito. What I'm saying is DON'T LET BUSH CHANGE THE SUBJECT. Yes, we should attack Alito hard, but only when it's entirely to our advantage to do so, and not when Bush thinks we will, when it he expects it to work mostly to his advantage. And so, don't forget:

It's Traitorgate, stupid.

It's the foul stench of betrayal of country that will follow Libby around for the rest of his life. And in the mainstream (and even some places on the right), the sense that Rove and even Cheney have engaged in utterly unacceptable, if not outright criminal, behavior has begun to catch on as within the bounds of acceptable discourse. Look at what Reid said, he's calling for Rove to resign regardless of indictment! (And he's right.)

And so, it is on Traitorgate we should push. Alito can wait a bit for that heavy concerted effort to oppose him. Please, folks, think twice before jumping whenever Bush snaps. It's Traitorgate right now, not rightwing courtpacking. Let's make sure no one forgets it.
tristero 10/31/2005 08:21:00 AM |

 
Krugman

Sing it:

Let me be frank: it has been a long political nightmare. For some of us, daily life has remained safe and comfortable, so the nightmare has merely been intellectual: we realized early on that this administration was cynical, dishonest and incompetent, but spent a long time unable to get others to see the obvious. For others - above all, of course, those Americans risking their lives in a war whose real rationale has never been explained - the nightmare has been all too concrete.

[SNIP]

So the Bush administration has lost the myths that sustained its mojo, and with them much of its power to do harm. But the nightmare won't be fully over until two things happen.

First, politicians will have to admit that they were misled. Second, the news media will have to face up to their role in allowing incompetents to pose as leaders and political apparatchiks to pose as patriots.

It's a sad commentary on the timidity of most Democrats that even now, with Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, telling us how policy was "hijacked" by the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal," it's hard to get leading figures to admit that they were misled into supporting the Iraq war. Kudos to John Kerry for finally saying just that last week.

And as for the media: these days, there is much harsh, justified criticism of the failure of major news organizations, this one included, to exert due diligence on rationales for the war. But the failures that made the long nightmare possible began much earlier, during the weeks after 9/11, when the media eagerly helped our political leaders build up a completely false picture of who they were.

So the long nightmare won't really be over until journalists ask themselves: what did we know, when did we know it, and why didn't we tell the public?

It's hard to believe how isolated a voice Krugman was from, say, about Spring 2000 to about January, 2004. There was all but nowhere else in the mainstream press where Bush's total absence of presidential qualifications, his incompetence, and his lack of personal integrity were being honestly discussed.

And no one believed him. He was ignored and ridiculed by fellow journalists as shrill, he went mostly unread by mainstream politicians. He was disbelieved by ordinary readers including literally all of my milieu, who seemed desperate to believe that Bush - whose negligence and incompetence were crystal clear to me even when the towers were still smoking and the networks were overwhelmed with ominous reports and rumours - would actually save and protect us from the horrible fate that befell our fellow New Yorkers.

So now, if Krugman wants to tell the country and especially his colleagues, "I told you so," he deserves to. He told us exactly so. When no one else dared.

Paul, I owe you. Big time.

(Edited slightly after original posting.)
tristero 10/31/2005 12:01:00 AM |

Sunday, October 30, 2005

 
Fitz In The Tank?

Michael Isikoff reports:

Fitzgerald made another visit early Friday morning—shortly before the grand jury voted to indict Dick Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby—to the office of James Sharp, President George W. Bush's own lawyer in the case, to tell him the president's closest aide would not be charged.

Holy Shit. Can someone tell me why Fitzgerald would go to President Bush's personal lawyer on Friday to tell him that Bush's "closest aide wouldn't be charged?" Is it in any possible sense ethical for the prosecutor to be telling the president's lawyer information that isn't available to the public about members of the president's staff in the middle of an investigation?

If this is true, I think Mr Fitzgerald has some splainin' to do, otherwise it might look like he's got some back channel communication with the White House about a case that directly affects it. This would not seem in character for Mr Fitzgerald, who is by all acounts a very ethical prosecutor. If this is true, it's a bomb shell. Fitzgerald has no business discussing Karl Rove with anyone but Karl Rove and Karl Rove's lawyer.

Michael Isikoff repeats this line as if it is a matter of objective truth, but there is no way to know that, of course. This prosecutor doesn't leak so this is coming from Rove's lawyer, Luskin, or Bush's lawyer, Sharp. I'm unaware of any leaking from Sharp but there has been a ton of it from Luskin over the past few months. I think reporters like Isikoff should probably take a little inventory of all the blind alleys they've been led down by Robert Luskin these past few months. Here are just a few of the highlights:

"Karl has truthfully told everyone who's asked him that he did not circulate Valerie Plame's name to punish her husband, Joe Wilson," Luskin said. Asked if that included President Bush, Luskin said, "Everyone is everyone."


Added Luskin, "Karl did nothing wrong. Karl didn't disclose Valerie Plame's identity to Mr. Cooper or anybody else ... Who outed this woman? ... It wasn't Karl."
Luskin said Rove "certainly did not disclose to Matt Cooper or anybody else any confidential information."

"If Matt Cooper is going to jail to protect a source, it's not Karl he's protecting."

Luskin is a defense lawyer. It's part of his job. I'm not criticising him for it. But, he and Rove are working overtime to get Rove out of this jam -- and prepare the ground for a big PR push if Rove is indicted --- and all reporters should think carefully about credulously repeating what they are saying.

You'd think Luskin would be very careful before he charges Fitzgerald with unauthorized discussions of the case with Bush's lawyer. If it isn't true, Fitzgerald might just get a little testy about it.
digby 10/30/2005 12:29:00 PM |

 
Turdblossom In The Punchbowl

Karl Rove is spinning like Tanya Harding at the nationals right now, telling everyone who will listen that he wasn't part of any conspiracy to leak Plame's identity to the press, that he has a major case of CRS disease (can't remember shit.) But it just doesn't hold water.

One thing we do know is that Official A in LIbby's indictment has been acknowledged to be Rove. Here's the passage that refers to him:

On or about July 10 or July 11, 2003, LIBBY spoke to a senior official in the White House ("Official A") who advised LIBBY of a conversation Official A had earlier that week with columnist Robert Novak in which Wilson's wife was discussed as a CIA employee involved in Wilson's trip. LIBBY was advised by Official A that Novak would be writing a story about Wilson's wife.

Interesting phrasing, isn't it? Rove knew that Novak was writing a story "about Wilson's wife" --- not about Cheney's non-involvement, not about Joe Wilson never submitting a report, but "about Wilson's wife."

And here I thought Karl was just trying to warn reporters off Wilson's allegations and mentioned Wilson's wife to Cooper as an afterthought. Byron York interviewed Rove's lawyer Luskin back in July:

"Look at the Cooper e-mail," Luskin continues. "Karl speaks to him on double super secret background...I don't think that you can read that e-mail and conclude that what Karl was trying to do was to get Cooper to publish the name of Wilson's wife."

According to Luskin, the fact that Rove did not call Cooper; that the original purpose of the call, as Cooper told Rove, was welfare reform; that only after Cooper brought the WMD issue up did Rove discuss Wilson — all are "indications that this was not a calculated effort by the White House to get this story out."

Yet Karl "Official A" Rove specifically informed Libby that Novak would be writing a story "about Wilson's wife." Perhaps they were just idly sharing small tid-bits of their conversations with journalists over the urinals, but it certainly would seem that Karl had an interest in "Wilson's wife" as opposed to Wilson's alleged misstatements.

I am not a lawyer so I'm probably missing something vitally important here, but can someone explain to me why this item is included in the obstruction count? From what I gather the obstruction charge rests on the fact that he lied so often and so completely that the Grand Jury concluded that he was actively obstructing the investigation. But it does not appear that he lied about this conversation, or at least it isn't mentioned in the enumerated lies in the perjury counts. So, what does this conversation with Rove have to do with Libby's obstruction activities?

Karl, of course, has been telling everyone who will listen that he's only potentially on the hook for perjury about Matt Cooper and that he just forgot. Luskin has been spinning this as Karl presenting evidence at the eleventh hour that gave Fitzgerald "pause" because Karl never mentioned his conversation with Cooper to his flunky so he must not have remembered it. (I think Jane has the best take on that silly defense.)

Karl has a history of memory lapses about his ratfucking activity going way back. But it's always been a little bit hard to swallow, since he can recall the most arcane electoral information for any district in the country and can recite passages of books he's read verbatim. You see, Karl doesn't just have a good memory, or a prodigious memory --- he has a photographic memory.

[His sister Reba] told journalist Miriam Rozen the family used to rely on Rove's photographic memory for evening entertainment.

"The game was, "see if you can stump Karl," she said in an interview published in the Dallas Observer. His older brother Eric would read a passafe from abook Karl had read the week before. That challenge was to guess which word his brother had intentionally left out. (Bush's Brain, p.116)

Once people with photographic memories see something they remember it. If Karl Rove wrote an e-mail, he remembered it.



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digby 10/30/2005 11:40:00 AM |

 
Pakistan

Ann-Marie Slaughter reprints a letter from Pakistan:

The situation is, as per any and all analyses, profoundly dire. The statistics speak for themselves, both in terms of the damage done and the lives lost, but more importantly, for the people still at risk (at least 3.5 million). By UN estimates, the relief challenge is three times that of the tsunami.

As we have discussed, my family is actively involved in social and development work in Northern Pakistan; I myself have spent much time working in the region. I am writing to you because, having just visited the region and spoken to many community leaders across the NWFP and Pakistani-held Kashmir, it is apparent that there is a tremendous strategic opportunity for the United States and its allies. For a fraction of the cost of what is spent in other arenas of the War on Terror, an extremely volatile region and country's hearts and minds can be won over. All that is required is a very substantial, very visible US relief effort. [Emphasis added.]

'Nuff said. And needless to say, if the US doesn't help in a substantive way, it will be interpreted as the worst kind of punishment and abandonment.
tristero 10/30/2005 09:23:00 AM |

 
39% Approval? After Everything That's Happened?!?

What is wrong with this country? Bush's approval is at 39%. True, it's the lowest ever for the Post/ABC survey but think about it. How could more than 1/3 of the people think this president, whose performance in office makes it clear that Yale was already cursed with serious grade inflation when they gave him a C+, be so clueless? Look at it this way.

We just got a wonderful puppy who loves everyone; he's trusting, affectionate, and was easily housetrained. But what if I was so negligent that I let a known dog hater from the next block attack him so violently that two of his legs had to be amputated? What if I forced him through obedience training to sit, to beg, to rollover, and then as a reward, I gave all the well-fed dogs on the block delicious yummy treats while putting my puppy on a starvation diet? What if, then, on the hottest days of the year, I arranged for my dog to participate in a totally pointlesss cockfight with no end, a fight which left him bleeding, exhausted, and humiliated? What if I grabbed other dogs off the street and tortured them right in front of my dog, so they associated their pain with my dog's loving face? What if I then nearly drowned my dog in a clogged sewer, leaving him there for half a week while I joked about how I once partied hard down there, when it was an elegant cabana?

Yes, the average puppy scores twice as high as Jeb Bush on scholastic aptitude tests, but let's face it: there are smarter critters out there. But even so, don't you think that any puppy, if they endured what I've imagined mine enduring, would just about now start thinking there was something majorly seriously wrong with the guy tugging his leash? Don't you think that any puppy would snap and bite whenever I came within 10 feet of him? Or snarl menacingly whenever I pretended once again to feed him but gave his food away to the big fat dogs who regularly stomp on him at the dog run?

Am I saying that over 1/3 of the American public is dumber and more complacent than my 10 month old puppy? Not at all. Here's another possible explanation.
tristero 10/30/2005 03:44:00 AM |

Saturday, October 29, 2005

 
Headline of the Year



tristero 10/29/2005 01:14:00 PM |

 
On or about September 26, 2003

the Department of Justice authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") to commence a criminal investigation into the possible unauthorized disclosure of classified information regarding the disclosure of Valerie Wilson's affiliation with the CIA to various reporters in the spring of 2003.

On or about October 7, 2003.

Karl Rove says to George W. Bush, "Reporters do a very good job of protecting leakers, Mr President. Don't worry."

October 8, 2003:

I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is, partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers," he said. "You tell me: How many sources have you had that's leaked information that you've exposed or had been exposed? Probably none. I mean, this town is a town full of people who like to leak information.

October 14, 2003

LIBBY stated to FBI Special Agents that:

a. During a conversation with Tim Russert of NBC News on July 10 or 11, 2003, Russert asked LIBBY if LIBBY was aware that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. LIBBY responded to Russert that he did not know that, and Russert replied that all the reporters knew it. LIBBY was surprised by this statement because, while speaking with Russert, LIBBY did not recall that he previously had learned about Wilson's wife's employment from the Vice President.

b. During a conversation with Matthew Cooper of Time magazine on or about July 12, 2003, LIBBY told Cooper that reporters were telling the administration that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, but that LIBBY did not know if this was true; and

c. LIBBY did not discuss Wilson's wife with New York Times reporter Judith Miller during a meeting with Miller on or about July 8, 2003.

Can there be any doubt that the Bush administration bet the farm on the idea that the press would keep their mouths shut? And can we all see that they were very close to being right? If Fitzgerald hadn't been willing to take it to the mat, they would have gotten off scott free.

The Republican (Washington) estabishment very wisely have figured out that they can use the press to disseminate anything they choose and the press will either eagerly report it or "decline" to follow up. They consider the press a cog in their noise machine and the press is willing to be a cog as long as they are given access.

It's not just Judy Miller. It's the whole lot of them.

Recall, if you will, the unbelivable performance of reporters at the presidential and department of defense press conferences in which they laughed uproariously at every lame joke as if it were Robin Williams at Carnegie Hall. Remember the way they reported the president's halting, ignorant, inarticulate answersd to questions as if they were handed down from the Oracle of Delphi. Remember how they dutifully reported every single lie the administration spewed forth in the run up to the war --- between khaki safari jacket fittings and salute lessons in anticipation of their thrilling (em)bedding with the he-men of the American military. It was enough to make you sick.

The Bush administration must be reeling with betrayal. I can certainly understand why they believed that the press would do exactly as they were told. They always had before.

They didn't realize that for Tim Russert, it was a matter of picking which government official he would keep silent for. And they couldn't have anticipated that Pat Fitzgerald would see that since reporters were first hand witnesses to a crime of national security that he would put the squeeze on them so hard they had to cooperate.

I have no doubt that Karl and Scooter gave their bosses complete assurance that the press would never talk. They wouldn't have received any more official leaks on backround if they didn't and then they would have to do real reporting. Nobody could imagine such a thing.



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digby 10/29/2005 11:47:00 AM |

 
No Hero

Now that Tim Russert has finally told his story --- and it appears to be central to the case --- a lot of people are saying that we owe him an apology for giving him grief.

While I certainly agree with Atrios that this notion of default confidentiality any time you speak to a government official is mind-boggling (and I give Russert some credit for not being a total Bush toady on this) but I don't think Russert gets any kudos for his behavior. I know that Fitzgerald asked him to keep quiet, but I don't think it's any more ethical for a reporter not to report what he knows for that reason, than if he kept quiet because he allowed Scooter to assume that he had confidentiality. There is no secrecy required for Grand Jury witnesses and there certainly is no secrecy required for discussions with the prosecutor. Where there is no secrecy required, which should be a little as possible, reporters should report. We are all better off if these people don't go around deciding whether the government is doing the right thing by keeping secrets. We the people are the government and we have a right to know.

NBC put put out a lawyerly press release which turns out to be pretty much the extent of Russert's testimony. In the context of the case it became ripe for parsing, using such words as it did about"the name" and the word "operative" which had been discussed in great depth in the context of Novak's column. By never clarifying what he meant by those words --- by never ever even addressing them --- he allowed misconceptions and speculation to simmer for months. He failed in his job as a journalist by not clearing that up.

But Russert's biggest crime was consistently discussing this case, and grilling those involved, without ever mentioning his own involvement. For two years he has been reporting this story and leaving out relevant information (as it turns out extremely relevant information) about this case. He grilled Joe Wilson like a criminal, he never challenged the Vice president, he had Bob Novak right in front of him and he talked about the case and speculated grandly while never (except in one very bizarre instance) coming clean about what he knew.

Here's the one bizarre instance from July 25, 2005:

MR. GREGORY: ... There's a political problem and then potentially a legal problem because I think what the special prosecutor is looking at right now is who might have actually blown Valerie Plame's cover, or did somebody lie, in their testimony, about their conversations with reporters? The White House defense has been that they learned about Valerie Plame from reporters. There is now information, including a classified State Department memo, that may contradict that. There at least is the potential that White House officials were aware of who she was, what she did and her role in sending her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger to investigate this uranium-Iraq thing.

MR. RUSSERT: There has to be an original source, somebody.

MR. GREGORY: Yes.

MS. TOTENBERG: Right.

MR. RUSSERT: Even if it came from a reporter...

MR. GREGORY: Right.

MR. RUSSERT: ...the reporter got it from someplace.

MS. TOTENBERG: Right. And...

MR. RUSSERT: But I was asked what I said. I did not know.

I have no idea what he meant by that, but it certainly didn't inform the discussion. (And, of course, nobody followed up. Russert is godhead.)

Unless Russert had an explicit legal obligation to stay quiet, he should not have done it. His job is to inform the public of what he knows, period. By not clearing up the press release and speaking up in various roundtables and interviews he passively misinformed the public for months.

The bottom line is that a reporter's obligation is not to the government, it's to his readers or viewers, whether the government is represented by Scooter Libby or Patrick Fitzgerald. They are the Fourth Estate, empowered by a heavy duty constitutional right --- freedom of the press, which was not put in the bill of rights so that reporters could get delicious gossip about people with whom they socialize along with their tasty official propaganda. It also wasn't put into the Bill of Rights so that they could help prosecutors. Our democracy will not function if they do not operate in a separate sphere of responsibility from the government they cover.

I'm reminded of this little exhange between Russert and the Dean from a few months back:

Russert: David Broder, explain to our viewers what you have observed, and why journalists have this code where they simply will not divulge their sources.

Broder: The principle is pretty simple. It is the government’s responsibility to keep the government’s secrets secret. It is not the press’ responsibility. Our inclination, once we have information, is to try to verify it, to amplify as much as we can, the background and the context. But our basic obligation, then, is to share information with the public.

It seems that many members of the Washington press corpse believe that the story stops with printing what their favored confidential sources feed them. Then they go back for more. They've been doing this for a long time and the result has been a disasterous kind of incentuous amplification of the political establishment's efforts to guide the discourse in the direction they choose.

In this case, even after all this manipulation and lying on the part of the administration, even blaming reporters for their own misdeeds and using the threat of betraying omerta to silence them, the press is still serving as little more than conduits for the target's lawyers' public relations roll out. Their reporting on the underlying issues about the war is perfunctory at best, thrown in at the end of each article like so much filler, and calling it "context."

I heard John Dean last night on Keith Olbermann make an interesting claim: that the Nixon administration as part of their Stonewall Defense had wanted the case to be investigated in the Grand Jury because of the secrecy requirement. (Remenber Nixon's famous words on the tape: "I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment; cover-up or anything else, if it'll save it; save the plan.") Dean said that if congress hadn't investigated Watergate, it would have died behind the wall of Grand Jury secrecy and the facts behind this case may die there too.

However, there was at the time, some intrepid reporting taking place as well, some of which was aggressive interviewing of reluctant Grand Jury witnesses --- former employees of CREEP and the like. Reporters worked hard to get them to tell their tales and it was the constant revelations coming out in the Washington Post, informed by Mark Feldt but reported with shoe leather investigative work, that propelled the congress to act. Today, we have reporters who are actually part of the story refusing to tell their tales all because they are protecting, in one way or another, the government.(Andsadly, one of the reporters involved in that story is now a total whore for the Bush administration.)

This is one of the most perverse aspects of this entire story. The culture of Washington has become so insular that reporters are in the business of protecting the government's secrets on a constant basis. (The only secrets they refuse to keep are lurid tales of people's private sex lives.)

I'm glad that Fitzgerald was able to make a perjury case against Scooter Libby, since he is obviously covering up something bigger than gossip or he wouldn't have done something so uncharacteristically dumb.("Stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment; cover-up or anything else, if it'll save it; save the plan.") He deserves to be prosecuted. But I can't help but wonder how I would look at this if the prosecutor were Ken Starr and Tim Russert had helped him rather than do his job.

Oh wait, I forgot. He did.



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digby 10/29/2005 09:32:00 AM |

Friday, October 28, 2005

 
It's All Good

With yesterday's indictment of Vice President Cheney's top aide, President Bush's administration has become a textbook example of what can go wrong in a second term. Along with ineffectiveness, overreaching, intraparty rebellion, plunging public confidence and plain bad luck, scandal has now touched the highest levels of the White House staff.

Read the whole thing. When you see it all together you realize just how much trouble this administration is in.

Best Quote:

Noting that Clinton's approval ratings remained above 60 percent throughout the impeachment battle, while Bush's are in the low 40s, Podesta said, "When Clinton said, 'I'm going back to do my work,' people cheered," Podesta said. "When Bush says, 'I'm going to do the job I've been doing,' people say, 'Oh, no.' "

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digby 10/28/2005 09:23:00 PM |

 
Shaken Not Stirred

To those who want to trivialize these perjury and obstruction charges against Scooter Libby, I would just suggest they take a quick look at the report that was filed publicly by Kenneth Starr against President Clinton (and which served as the basis of an impeachment in the House of Representatives.) Here's a little excerpt in case you've forgotten what a restrained and dignified legal document it was:

According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President had ten sexual encounters, eight while she worked at the White House and two thereafter. The sexual encounters generally occurred in or near the private study off the Oval Office -- most often in the windowless hallway outside the study. During many of their sexual encounters, the President stood leaning against the doorway of the bathroom across from the study, which, he told Ms. Lewinsky, eased his sore back.

Ms. Lewinsky testified that her physical relationship with the President included oral sex but not sexual intercourse. According to Ms. Lewinsky, she performed oral sex on the President; he never performed oral sex on her. Initially, according to Ms. Lewinsky, the President would not let her perform oral sex to completion. In Ms. Lewinsky's understanding, his refusal was related to "trust and not knowing me well enough." During their last two sexual encounters, both in 1997, he did ejaculate.

According to Ms. Lewinsky, she performed oral sex on the President on nine occasions. On all nine of those occasions, the President fondled and kissed her bare breasts. He touched her genitals, both through her underwear and directly, bringing her to orgasm on two occasions. On one occasion, the President inserted a cigar into her vagina. On another occasion, she and the President had brief genital-to-genital contact.

Whereas the President testified that "what began as a friendship came to include [intimate contact]," Ms. Lewinsky explained that the relationship moved in the opposite direction: "[T]he emotional and friendship aspects . . . developed after the beginning of our sexual relationship."

As the relationship developed over time, Ms. Lewinsky grew emotionally attached to President Clinton. She testified: "I never expected to fall in love with the President. I was surprised that I did." Ms. Lewinsky told him of her feelings. At times, she believed that he loved her too. They were physically affectionate: "A lot of hugging, holding hands sometimes. He always used to push the hair out of my face." She called him "Handsome"; on occasion, he called her "Sweetie," "Baby," or sometimes "Dear." He told her that he enjoyed talking to her -- she recalled his saying that the two of them were "emotive and full of fire," and she made him feel young. He said he wished he could spend more time with her.

Ms. Lewinsky told confidants of the emotional underpinnings of the relationship as it evolved. According to her mother, Marcia Lewis, the President once told Ms. Lewinsky that she "had been hurt a lot or something by different men and that he would be her friend or he would help her, not hurt her." According to Ms. Lewinsky's friend Neysa Erbland, President Clinton once confided in Ms. Lewinsky that he was uncertain whether he would remain married after he left the White House. He said in essence, "[W]ho knows what will happen four years from now when I am out of office?" Ms. Lewinsky thought, according to Ms. Erbland, that "maybe she will be his wife."

That's how a responsible prosecutor works. He writes a bodice ripping yarn as an indictment. You can certainly understand why everyone was expecting something a little bit more James Bondish in this spy thriller. No wonder everyone's expectations are dashed. What a shame that Pat Fitzgerald is just a prosecutor instead of an all 'round entertainer like Ken Starr, eh?



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digby 10/28/2005 04:18:00 PM |

 
Talking Point Tryout

Crooks and Liars has the footage I posted about yesterday in which Mr (Ed) Rogers says that government officials lying about their sex lives is worse than lying about whether they outed a CIA agent to discredit a critic.



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digby 10/28/2005 03:39:00 PM |

 
The Big Picture

I wrote previously that I believed Fitzgerald was investigating a fairly narrow case and would not get into all the bigger issues of the lead up to the war. I also wrote that what is important is that the story of how we got bamboozled into the war by a corrupt, venal Republican political machine is finally told. This case is the hook that allows those stories to be told. It's all tied into the same thing --- dishonesty, secrecy, revenge and dirty politics at the highest levels in both large and small ways.

If the Republican leadership of congress weren't spineless Bush toadies and insane religious fanatics they would do their job and investigate this honestly for the good of the country. But they won't. They are nothing more than braindead fatcats gorging at the pork barrel with a fistfull of C-notes in one hand and a bible in the other. (If you want to read a purely political document, spend a little time with the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Iraq. Rush Limbaugh is more subtle.)

We are left with a timorous press and an honest prosecutor to get to the bottom of what these people have done to us.

If they care to do it, this case is a way for the media to save its soul after its outrageous conduct helping the administration make its case for war on lies. It is the responsibility of the NY Times and the Washington Post and NBC and all the rest to revisit what this administration has done ever since 1999 when the national press overlooked its sleazy and dangerous behavior. If they care to salvage their reputations they have the chance right here, right now.

And if nothing else, Fitzgerald is doing this country a huge, vastly important service simply by being honest and apolitical, proving that its still possible. Taking Libby to task (and possibly Rove) for being reprehensible pieces of shit and then lying about it is extremely meaningful after the way that Republicans have behaved for the last 15 years. Exposing the way they work to smear and destroy anyone who gets in their way, whether that's his purpose or not, is important work. This case is a window into a high level Republican smear job and cover up.

The Republicans will do anything to advance their agenda. They are fundamentally undemocratic --- they do not believe that the people have a right to vote, to see their elected politicians allowed to serve a full term, to know the reasons for their government's policies or even why they are going to war. They believe that they can do anything. That's what this case is about.


Update: I also wrote the other day that prosecutors hate perjury and obstruction because when someone covers up a crime they tend to make it more difficult to prosecute it. Fitz's "sand in the face" comments were saying exactly that.

There is no reason to think that anyone else is out of the woods, though. In the Governor Ryan case remember, Ryan was the 66th person indicted --- partially on the basis of testimony of his closest aide:

“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.

[...]

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.

Stay tuned.



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digby 10/28/2005 12:32:00 PM |

 
Rove Must Resign, Too

Since Rove is under investigation and since the potential crime is so serious - compromising the status of a CIA agent - Rove simply must resign. Now, I won't remind everyone again of Bush's remarks in 2000 about creating an atmosphere of probity and changing the tone of Washington, yadda yadda. They are unnecessary, especially when it comes to national security, because they are assumed. If there is even a hint that Rove cannot be trusted with access to government secrets, and there is more than a hint, he must immediately step down.

Karl, stop wasting my taxes and go back to whatever rock you crawled out from under. Oh, and one more thing. Fuck you, traitor.
tristero 10/28/2005 12:29:00 PM |

 
Scooter's Replacement

From MYDD

Where there has been controversy over the past four years, there has often been Addington. He was a principal author of the White House memo justifying torture of terrorism suspects. He was a prime advocate of arguments supporting the holding of terrorism suspects without access to courts.

Addington also led the fight with Congress and environmentalists over access to information about corporations that advised the White House on energy policy. He was instrumental in the series of fights with the Sept. 11 commission and its requests for information.

[...]


Colleagues say Addington stands out for his devotion to secrecy in an administration noted for its confidentiality.

[...]

Even in a White House known for its dedication to conservative philosophy, Addington is known as an ideologue, an adherent of an obscure philosophy called the unitary executive theory that favors an extraordinarily powerful president.

If this is the game plan, I think we can expect to see Randall Terry nominated to replace Harriet Miers.



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digby 10/28/2005 10:54:00 AM |

 
Still Under Investigation

Official A, also known as Karl Rove, has to be worried. He should probably be very, very nice to everyone involved, especially Scooter. Very nice.



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digby 10/28/2005 10:46:00 AM |

 
Libby Indicted

This is the first time in 130 years that a sitting White House official has been indicted. The last time was in the Grant administration.

Honesty. Integrity. Honor. Dignity.



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digby 10/28/2005 09:47:00 AM |

 
Shiverin' In Our Boots

Joe DiGenova just pulled a Mark Levin on CNN threatening everybody that the movement conservatives (which he says he isn't) will unleash hell if this issue of lying about intelligence becomes a part of the discussion because the CIA was scheming against the president and they just won't stand for it.

This is the old, "better behave or I'll tell your father" bullshit. Fuck them.

The neocons and and the movement conservatives, remember, have been at war with the CIA for decades. The CIA hasn't always been right, but the Neocons have always, always been wrong about everything.

The answer to this crap is --- show us the WMD, bitches.



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digby 10/28/2005 09:19:00 AM |

 
Pure As The Driven Snow

Reminder:

Karl Rove’s animus toward Wilson was so intense that curiosity arose within the White House about it. When asked about this, Rove reportedly said, “He’s a Democrat.”

Reminder:

Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak's column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

Reminder:

In my administration, we will ask not only what is legal, but also what is right - not just what the lawyers allow, but what the public deserves.

In my administration we will make it clear there is the controlling authority of conscience. We will make people proud again - so that Americans who love their country can once again respect their government.

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digby 10/28/2005 08:38:00 AM |

 
Rove Roll

Jeralyn at Talk Left has been right over and over again on Plamegate. This makes sense, since she is a criminal defense lawyer and knows how to read between the lines of these things.

She has been convinced for some time that Karl Rove cut a deal. She still thinks so:

As I noted earlier, the news reports on Rove are conflicting. But this statement by one "non-legal" member of his team, who I assume is the P.R. specialist Mark Carballo who signed on to Rove's team the other day, leads me to believe Rove took a deal and Fitzgerald has agreed not to announce it immediately

It would be prefectly in keeping with Rove's PR style to have portrayed himself these last few days as fighting the charges with everything he's got while he's actually rolling on Libby.

Everything Rove does from now on must be seen through the prism of spin.



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digby 10/28/2005 08:11:00 AM |

 
Standards Of Official Conduct

Memorandum
January 20, 2001

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

SUBJECT: Standards of Official Conduct

Everyone who enters into public service for the United States has a duty to the American people to maintain the highest standards of integrity in Government. I ask you to ensure that all personnel within your departments and agencies are familiar with, and faithfully observe, applicable ethics laws and regulations, including the following general principles from the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch:

(1) Public service is a public trust, requiring employees to place loyalty to the Constitution, the laws, and ethical principles above private gain.

(7) Employees shall not use public office for private gain.

(11) Employees shall disclose waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption to appropriate authorities.

(12) Employees shall satisfy in good faith their obligations as citizens, including all just financial obligations, especially those -- such as Federal, State, or local taxes -- that are imposed by law.

(14) Employees shall endeavor to avoid any actions creating the appearance that they are violating applicable law or the ethical standards in applicable regulations.

Please thank the personnel of your departments and agencies for their commitment to maintain the highest standards of integrity in Government as we serve the American people.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Via Mike Liddell
digby 10/28/2005 08:04:00 AM |

 
More Fearsome than Al Qaeda

Ok, we'll just have to be patient and wait until two o'clock, it seems. Meanwhile, I learned something very, very disturbing.

There is a group operating freely in the United States that strikes so much terror in the hearts of Americans, they fear them more than al Qaeda. Who could they be? Saddamists? A coalition of renegades from Peru's Shining Path and the Tamil Tigers? And my God, what are they planning?!??! Will they attack tomorrow and blow up Mt. Rushmore or Las Vegas or Boca Raton? Is anyone safe from these Mega-Terrorists????

Learn the facts here, if you can stand the truth. We must all be forewarned against them.
tristero 10/28/2005 07:52:00 AM |

Thursday, October 27, 2005

 
The Clinton Defense

I just heard a Republican mouthpiece on Matthews' show pull out the old "how dare you compare these silly charges to the reprehensible behavior of Bill Clinton!" He went on to defend Rove and Libby by exclaiming that Clinton "wasn't indicted!" as if the second impeachment in history was a trivial matter and nothing compared to the persecution of poor powerless Karl and Scooter.

Matthews and the Dem on the panel dropped their jaws in disbelief, but I think we should expect more of this. They will drag out their old talking points because they want to make this appear to be the same as the Lewinsky scandal --- only this time they are the victims, their favorite role. Poor Karl is being tormented by an out of control jack booted thug for doing things that anyone can understand. Karl was just forgetful, he's a busy man and he's being strung up for just doing what any man might do in his position --- he misspoke. How dare they torture this fine public servant this way?

To that end, it appears that they have been lining up some help from those who have experience in Republican witchhunts:

The presidential aide's legal team has made contingency plans to defend him in both court and in public. They've consulted with former Justice Department official Mark Corallo and G-O-P strategist Ed Gillespie.

Marc Corallo is a very interesting person for the Rovians to consult on these matters. He was a major player in the impeachment:

Via Mithras

In a surprising disclosure, Baker says that shortly before the impeachment drive went to the House floor in December 1998, Republican House Speaker-elect Bob Livingston wanted to call the whole thing off.

Livingston, who would soon be forced to resign over his own marital infidelities, told an aide, Mark Corallo, "We've got to stop this. This is crazy. We're about to impeach the president of the United States."

Corallo convinced Livingston to reconsider. "Boss, we have a rapist in the White House," he said, a reference to allegations against Mr. Clinton by a woman named Juanita Broaddrick about a 1978 incident. Broaddrick's calims were not included in the House impeachment findings.

He went on to become Ashcroft's spokesman at Justice. He's a professional partisan flak with very relevant experience in scandal management. But here's an interesting little post from The American Spectator Blog that we should all tuck into a folder for later use if he becomes a member of the team:

Attacking the Prosecutor? Bad Idea - Tuesday, October 25, 2005 @ 9:39:12 AM

Message to Republicans: Whoever is generating the "Attack Pat Fitzgerald" talking points needs to cease and desist. This veteran (and some might say "victim") of the Impeachment in '98, finds it highly hypocritical to hear the same attacks that the left leveled at Ken Starr now being floated by the right to discredit Pat Fitzgerald -- Sen. Kay Baily Hutchison called perjury a "technicality." What has separated US from THEM is our adherence to intellectual honesty and principle even when it costs us politically. The Ds made excuse after excuse for Slick Willie while demonizing Ken Starr. If Fitzgerald indicts anyone, not for violating any of the statutes governing the handling of classified information, but for obstruction or perjury, Republicans must refrain from trivializing the charges or defending the indicted.

All should be thoroughly mindful of the FACT that Pat Fitzgerald is arguably the best prosecutor in the country. Nobody knows more about Al Qaeda, their methods and the way they finance their operations. America is safer from terrorism because of him.

The many recent profiles extolling his blue-collar upbringing, his brilliance, his record and his unrivaled work ethic neglect one of his core character traits: he is also eminently reasonable. This is not Javert, bent on getting his man no matter the consequences or the "triviality" of the crime. This is a servant of the law who has, to his credit, a thick vein of common sense and an understanding of what motivates usually law abiding people to violate the law. He is not out to get anyone.

I know Pat. Simply put, he is a really good guy.

If we are honest about the impeachment of Mr. Clinton, then we are acutely aware that he alone, by simply telling the truth from day one (or even day 20) could have saved the country from 2 years of insanity. While the Plame imbroglio does not rise to that level of seriousness, the same can be said (assuming there are charges for perjury or obstruction) of the indicted in this case. Pat Fitzgerald, like Ken Starr, was simply doing his job with honor, integrity and from the look of it, an inordinate amount of patience.

Posted By: Mark Corallo

If anyone thinks that's what Rove heard from Carollo yesterday, I've got a nice bridge to nowhere to sell you.





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digby 10/27/2005 03:06:00 PM |

 
Death By A Thousand Cuts

To anyone who thinks either Bush or the GOP are wounded and no longer able to concentrate on their agenda to wreck the government - oh, I'm sorry, I meant reduce the role of government - think again:

House Republicans voted to cut student loan subsidies, child support enforcement and aid to firms hurt by unfair trade practices as various committees scrambled to piece together $50 billion in budget cuts.

More politically difficult votes [!!!!!!] -- to cut Medicaid, food stamps and farm subsidies -- are on tap Thursday as more panels weigh in on the bill.

It was originally intended to cut $35 billion in spending over five years, but after pressure from conservatives, GOP leaders directed committees to cut another $15 billion to help pay the cost of hurricane recovery.

President Bush met with House and Senate GOP leaders and said he was pleased with the progress.

No doubt.
tristero 10/27/2005 03:06:00 PM |

 
"Very Serious" Indeed

To add a couple of observations to Digby's last post...

Please recall that recently Bush described the Fitzgerald investigation as "very serious." I took this originally to mean that Bush thought the charges were substantive and needed a "very serious" investigation, but a little bit of reflection makes it clear that's not what he meant at all.

Bush was issuing a threat. He deems Fitzgerald's probe to be a "very serious" danger to his presidency. We can expect him and his attack ghouls to act accordingly. They will treat the indictments as attacks on the United States, as a kind of terrorism. It is imperative, as Digby notes, for anyone who goes up against the Bush administration to be prepared for the worst. They have both the will and the power to destroy careers and lives. And they will surely do so if they believe their power is threatened. Proof? Valerie Plame Wilson.

Also, let us not forget the proximate causes for the Fitzgerald investigation, a serious suspicion which is now a terrible certainty. There existed a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Bush administration to expose the identity of an undercover CIA agent. That is a crime. That crime was covered-up. The ongoing cover-up entailed more crimes. But all these actions are more than crimes.

These people betrayed their country. Regardless of whether the evidence rises to the level of legal proof, the people who participated in this conspiracy cannot be permitted to stay. As difficult as it might be to unseat some of the worst of them, they must go. Will they? Put it this way: your physical safety may depend on it.

These sleazebags hindered and subverted the covert gathering of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. If the damage of Plame's outing is minimal, that is a lucky accident- not for them, but for the country. That in no way diminishes the "very serious" havoc these scoundrels were prepared to accept if Plame's work was vital, danger far worse than that of 9/11. Had Plame's undercover status not been transitional but still deep, there is no public evidence that any of these people would have hesitated one nano-second in their efforts to expose and destroy her, out of retribution for her husband's actions.

Digby is right. This is going to be an ugly fight. But it is a fight that is entirely the fault of those who betrayed their country, not those who refuse to be their victims. We should make sure that it is crystal clear that this is not Fitzgerald's fault, not the CIA's fault, not the Democrats' fault. It is their fault - Rove's, Libby's, and all who aided and abetted their multiple betrayals. They failed us and they can no longer be entrusted with our safety and governance.

We should never let the media get away with spinning this as anything trivial. Even if you haven't done so before, after Fitzgerald's report comes out, please consider taking a few valuable moments of your time to write letters to papers and electronic media, to your representatives both local and national, and let them know how important it is to you that these people go.
tristero 10/27/2005 12:23:00 PM |

 
Unleashing The Furies


Kevin says:

MIERS REACTION....I fear that Mark Levin's reaction to the Harriet Miers withdrawal might be unnervingly on the money:

It's time for our liberals friends to worry. If the president picks a solid nominee, the base — meaning Republican Party loyalists and conservative activists — will be united, reinvigorated, and ready for battle. At least that's the indication from my radio audience. And frankly, as an aside, there's another event that is uniting them, and that's their growing resentment toward Patrick Fitzgerald. Positive press profiles aside, they increasingly view him as a threat to the presidency, and are not much impressed with all the talk in the media about possible indictments for perjury or false statements over emails or memory lapses.

There's nothing that movement conservatives like more than redemption, and if Bush chooses a God-fearing, fire-breathing conservative to replace Miers, then not only will all be forgiven, but Bush's support from the base might well be redoubled. They'll be primed and ready to go after Patrick Fitzgerald and the hated liberal lynch mob who are gunning for their newly repentant savior.

To which I reply, no kidding? Is there anyone on the planet who thought that the wingnuts were going to sit idly by and let the White House go down in flames without marshalling a feral response? It's their MO about everything. Cross them and they turn into shrieking harpies swooping and swirling in inchoate fury.

Guys, this is Karl Rove we are talking about here. He made his bones more than 30 years ago destroying his Republican opponent. This is what he does. Pat Fitzgerald had better be prepared to be portrayed as a jack-booted, cross-dressing, gay Torquemada willing to do anything to please his Stalinist masters. Anyone who thought differently has not been paying attention.

This is why we shove their previous mantras about perjury and obstruction and "rule of law" in their faces. This is why we repeat the words that Bush used in the 2000 campaign about "not only doing what is legal but what is right." This is why we always, always, bring this back to the fact that 2000 Americans are dead and tens of thousands are disabled because of a war that the administration lied about --- lies that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby tried to cover up.

And when they go after Joe Wilson, we simply say every single time --- "Joe Wilson was right. There were no WMD." That is the lie that is really killing them and that is the lie that they sputter and trip over trying to explain. Democrats should never let a conversation go by in which the public is not reminded that there were no WMD. When the Dem spokesman is (inevitably) confronted by he fact that some of our leading lights voted for the war resolution, they should just say, "the Democrats took the president at his word. They won't make that mistake again."

This is going to be a huge battle, don't ever think it won't. Pat Fitzgerald is going to be destroyed as if he were a Democrat. I hope that the real Democrats who appear on television are preparing for this and are ready to respond. It won't be pretty.




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digby 10/27/2005 11:20:00 AM |

 
Owned By The Base

Yesterday I wrote that the Beltway Boys were all saying that in order to weather the current storms, Bush needs to run to his base and it looks like Bush heard it. (They only listen to Fox in the White House, you know.)

I'm glad to see that the Democrats seem to be saying the obvious about the Miers nomination, which is that Bush is the right wing's love slave. This is important because it looks as though the "base strategy" is going to be the way Bush will govern for the rest of his term as well. The LA Times has an interesting article this morning discussing the White House strategy for dealing with the scandals --- push "tax reform" and "immigration." (Oh, and he's going to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict, too) Good luck with all that. You can run but you can't hide.

The right wing has been empowered by this "win." They are going to be more demanding than ever and Bush is going to have to accomodate them. This is both an opportunity and a danger for Democrats. If we frame the Republican party as being taken over by extremists who want to force average Americans to keep their 90 year old father alive on machines, then we can set ourselves up as the rational alternative. If, on the other hand, we position ourselves as simply against the "far right" it will be seen as a pissing match between the "far right and "far left," (which is anyone to the left of Ann Coulter.)

The Dems badly need to start using real stories to explain their positions. The rhetoric has become so abstract that nobody really understands what it means to them anymore. The president's base, the "right wing," are people who want to outlaw birth control and interfere with your medical decisions on religious grounds. I don't think people really realize that.

Bush is in real trouble, with his only option apparently to try to appease a base that is basically unappeasable. He's Phyllis Schlaffly's houseboy now. And with this taste of blood, the whole party is going to be more in the thrall of this minority than ever. But we won't be able to take advantage of it if we don't explain in terms people can understand why that is a problem.

The big national issues, of course, remain corruption and incompetence. But this is an issue that has salience in the congressional races where a little straight talk about the extreme right could go a long way. We need to develop some effective rhetoric for our candidates to use to illustrate the problem.

Update: Kos has an interesting tick-tock from the Hotline that suggests it really was Miers incompetence that did her in. Kos says:

It seems to me that Miers wasn't done in from a lack of conservative cred as the wingers want to believe. Bush was convinced she was like him and would've fought for her all the way through. She was done in from simple incompetence. Her responses to committee questions betrayed a complete lack of understanding of constitutional law. Her meager writings were incoherent. She was unable to articulate competence in meetings with senators

.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the wingnuts don't believe they won. We need to make sure the public believes they did. The narrative of the Miers nomination is that Bush nominated an incompetent crony that the right wing didn't believe was enough of a religious zealot.


Update II: Perhaps we could quote this guy:

Former Republican Sen. John Danforth said Wednesday that the political influence of evangelical Christians is hurting the Republican Party and dividing the country.

[...]

"I think that the Republican Party fairly recently has been taken over by the Christian conservatives, by the Christian right," he said in an interview. "I don't think that this is a permanent condition, but I think this has happened, and that it's divisive for the country."

He also said the evangelical Christian influence would be bad for the party in the long run.

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digby 10/27/2005 09:07:00 AM |

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

 
Confidence Man

Steve Clemons reports:

The one interesting tidbit that came my way by way of an unnamed senior American journalist is this:

My sense is that the Rove team is feeling more confident today, the Libby team despondent

I would just remind everyone that Rove has a faith based belief in the psych-out. He believes that if you can influence events by acting as if you have knowledge they do not have. (See: bandwagon effect, election 2000, final swing through California.)

If he's still negotiating with Fitzgerald, he could easily have issued an edict to his people (or even lied to them) to give a certain impression of confidence to the press. That's the kind of thing he does.

The thing is, the bandwagon effect is bullshit and cost him 2000. If it hadn't been for good company men on the Supreme Court, instead of having the reputation as the most brilliant political strategist the world has ever known, he would have been remembered as the man who blew the most expensive presidential race in history because of his arrogant belief that he could shape events just by acting like he knew things that nobody else knew.

Like everyone else I'm ODing on speculation, and he may very well have gotten some good news. But let's just say that when I hear that Karl Rove is acting like a winner before the score is posted, I'm skeptical.



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digby 10/26/2005 09:24:00 PM |

 
Good As Gold

Via tribe34 at DKos, I see that Condi is a little bit on edge these days:

Rice bristled when asked how the U.S. could be trusted when it doesn't live up to its international agreements.

"Well, I think the word of the United States has been as good as gold in its international dealings and its agreements," she snapped.

Good as gold means withdrawal from the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, refusing to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and abrogating the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, I guess.

And then there's this:

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 1997, Bolton articulated his dismissive view of international treaties. “Treaties are law only for U.S. domestic purposes,” he wrote, “In their international operation, treaties are simply political obligations.”

[...]

Bolton called the moment he signed the letter abrogating Clinton’s approval of the ICC “the happiest moment in my government service.”

[...]

Following the 1999 Senate vote rejecting the treaty, Bolton said that the vote marked “the beginning of a new realism on the issue of weapons of mass destruction and their global proliferation. The Senate vote is an unmistakable signal that America rejects the illusionary protections of unenforceable treaties.”

And she bristles when other countries question whether a treaty with our signature on it is worth more than toilet paper.

According to MikeCan over at DKos, after this little snit:

"...local media in Ottawa reported this morning that Condi Rice canceled some interviews etc and rushed back to Washington based upon a phone call."

What ever could that be about?


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digby 10/26/2005 05:19:00 PM |

 
What A Good Boy! Mama's Real Proud

Taking the blame for your messed up brother one more time:

Gov. Jeb Bush took the blame Wednesday for frustrating delays at centers distributing supplies to victims of Hurricane Wilma, saying criticism of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was misdirected. "Don't blame FEMA. This is our responsibility," Bush said at a news conference in Tallahassee with federal Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who oversees the agency.

And then he added, "Chertie, yer doin' a heckuva job."



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digby 10/26/2005 04:31:00 PM |

 
The Kids Who Couldn't Wait For Fitzmas

It's driving me crazy too. But we need to take a longer view of this, I think. If we get sealed indictments, if the grand jury is extended, if a new grand jury is empaneled it is only our nerves that are stretched.

Mark Kleiman writes, and I agree:

Yes, I'm as eager as everyone else to know what Fitzgerald is going to do. But today's delay strikes me as both a Good Thing in itself and a good sign as to the eventual outcome.

It's a Good Thing because it keeps the Plame scandal on the front page and keeps the bad guys paralyzed with fear. Moreover, after two years of steady drumbeat of conservative propaganda about no crime having been committed and no charges forthcoming, the more time the commentariat and the public have to wrap their heads around the idea of All the President's Men going to stir over burning a CIA NOC, the better.

Most of the country is only beginning to wake up to the fact that this is a Big Deal and the Bush administration is in big trouble over it. It doesn't hurt a bit to keep the White House off balance, the press salivating and the story percolating for a little while.


You'll have to excuse me while I have a pacemaker installed, however.



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digby 10/26/2005 04:03:00 PM |

 
What is this investigation you speak of?

If you want to have a little laugh, watch Faux not cover the Plame story today. Harriet Mieres is the only story in Washington, apparently.

Oh, and the Democrats are ruining America, as usual.

Update: The Beltway Boyz are waxing nostalgic about how well Reagan handled his problems with Iran Contra. They all agree, including Mara Liasson, that Bush needs to appeal more to his base. (Maybe he can name James Dobson to replace Karl Rove?)

But enough of all that unpleasantness. Let's talk about how well things are going in Iraq and how great the economy is. Move along citizens.



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digby 10/26/2005 03:30:00 PM |

 
Flirting With Moneypenny

People seem to be wondering why Fitz had FBI agents out asking the Wilsons' neighbors if they knew she was an undercover agent. Why would he do this so late in the game?

I suspect it came from a grand juror's question. In presenting the case for violation of the identities protection act, one of them may have wondered how, dispute the CIA's clear assertion that she was undercover, she could live an every day life while keeping her job a secret. There seems to be a perception, born of Hollywood, that undercover agents are all glamorous, cloak and dagger figures who are very different from ordinary people. Perhaps the earlier interviews with her neighbors were a bit vague about that and so Fitz had them re-interview them with the specific intent to show she led a very normal life but told no one that she worked with the CIA.

As to the fact that she went to Langley every day to work, even if you see the spook world only through the prism of Hollywood, you can't help but notice that even James Bond shows up at headquarters between assignments to have a face to face with M. He wouldn't even know Miss Moneypenny otherwise.



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digby 10/26/2005 02:20:00 PM |

 
Pakistan Disaster Toll May Double To Over 100,000

Like Katrina, but far more extensive, it's a disaster after a disaster, and it's preventible:

Doctors are having to amputate the limbs of many survivors because they have gone so long without help, he said. Many more lack shelter as night temperatures plunge below freezing, with the full force of winter only a few weeks away.

"This disaster may have the number of people who died after the disaster bigger than those killed by the earthquake," U.N. chief aid coordinator Rashid Khalikov said at his tent office in the wrecked city of Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir.
Bad weather in the mountains grounded the vital helicopter fleet at the main airbase near Islamabad on Wednesday.

With the known quake death toll at more than 54,000, relief workers had until the end of November to provide shelter, treat the countless injured and supply food, Khalikov said.

"What these communities will have by December 1 is what they will have to live with," he said.

"We basically have four weeks to deliver."

There was a time when this was considered a moving statement of some moral truths about humankind's obligations. But that wasn't good enough. We now have this expression of sympathy for the less fortunate to guide us.

And what is our Compassionate Leader doing? Well, it turns out the US has pledged a whopping 50 million bucks for earthquake relief. Who says Bush is stingy? That's nothing to sneeze about. Why, that's at least 1/3 the cost of a Hollywood blockbuster these days and let's face it: where's that money better spent, huh?

Oh, and Pakistan estimates that it will take 100 times the current US committment of funds to rebuild the earthquake area (see here. )
tristero 10/26/2005 12:50:00 PM |

 
Whoa

Richard Sale is not an idle nobody conspiracy blogger like me. He is a seasoned intelligence coorespondent with impeccable sources. And he is writing some amazing, amazing stuff today, which, if true, is going to blow the lid off this government:

Although most press accounts emphasized that Fitzgerald was likely to concentrate on attempts by Libby Rove and others to cover-up wrongdoing by means of perjury before the grand jury, lying to federal officials, conspiring to obstruct justice, etc. But federal law enforcement officials told this reporter that Fitzgerald was likely to charge the people indicted with violating Joe Wilson's civil rights, smearing his name in an attempt to destroy his ability to earn a living in Washington as a consultant.

The civil rights charge is said to include "the conspiracy was committed using U.S. government offices, buildings, personnel and funds," one federal law enforcement official said.

Other charges could include possible violations of U.S. espionage laws, including the mishandling of U.S. classified information, these sources said.

That Vice President Cheney is at the center of the controversy comes is no surprise. Last Friday, Fitzgerald investigators were talking to Cheney's attorneys, and detailied questionaires, designed to pin down in meticulous sequence what Cheney knew, when he knew it, and what he told his aides,, were delivered to the White House on Monday, these sources said.

The probe is far from being at an end. According to this reporter's sources, Fitzgerald approached the judge in charge of the case and asked that a new grand jury be empaneled. The old grand jury, which has been sitting for two years, will expire on October 28.

Thanks to a letter of February, 2004 which Fitzgerald asked for and obtained expaneed authority, the Special Prosecutor is now in possession of an Italian parliament nvestigationi into the forged Niger documents alleging Iraq's interest in purchasing Niger uranium, sources said.

They said that Fitzgerald is looking into such individuals as former CIA agent, Duane Claridge, military consultant to the Iraqi National Congress, Gen. Wayne Downing, another military consultant for INC, and Francis Brooke, head of INC's Washingfton office in an effort to determine if they played any role in the forgeriese or their dissiemination. Also included in this group is long-time neoconservative Michael Ledeen, these federal sources said.

First of all, the fact that there have been recent contacts with Cheney suggests that something really big is up. Second, the fact that he is going to empanel a new grand jury is also huge.

I have long believed that this investigation was going to be rather narrow. It seemed to me that Fitzgerald would have explicitly asked for permission to expand the scope of his investigation into areas that did not touch upon the Plame leak.

But if this is true, all bets are off. There is little doubt that the Niger forgeries are becoming salient all of a sudden. It may be a coincidence and it may not be. But, if someone could possible put that nutball Micael Ledeen in the crosshairs it would be a beautiful thing to see.

Gird yourselves for shrieks coming from the right so cacophanous that you will have permanent hearing damage if Fitz files civil rights charges. Their heads will start spinning like Linda Blair's and the words "criminalization of politics" are going to be bursting forth like green pea soup. Richard Cohen and Nick Kristoff will sit shiva around Robert Novak's decaying corpse.

I have serious doubts that Fitz will do it, but if he does I'll say a silent prayer that somebody, somewhere has finally noticed that character assassination is wrong.


Update: To clarify, when I say character assassination is wrong, I'm speaking here of
using the pwoer of the government, as the Republicans did with their partisan hearings and bogus impeachment and now with the officia