Hullabaloo

Monday, December 12, 2005

 
Bada Bing

by digby


The reporter editor who raises questions about the appropriateness of Dan Froomkin's column is John Harris --- the same guy featured in this interview:

Paul McLeary: You covered the Clinton presidency for the Washington Post from 1995 to 2001, and during that contentious second term, what was your general take on the mood of the press corps in response to Clinton and his policies?

John F. Harris: The mood of the press corps was oftentimes kind of sour -- sour in both directions. People tend to forget, for understandable reasons because the Lewinsky scandal was such a sensational affair, that 1997 was in its own way a very sullen, snippy, disagreeable year in the relationship between the White House and the press. Most news organizations -- the Washington Post included -- were devoting lots of resources, lots of coverage, to the campaign fund-raising scandal which grew out of the '96 campaign, and there were a lot of very tantalizing leads in those initial controversies. In the end they didn't seem to lead anyplace all that great.But there were tons of questions raised that certainly, to my mind, merited aggressive coverage.

Now who exactly, was asking all those "questions" do you suppose? And who, exactly, is giving John Harris and the rest of the Washington Post a hard time about Dan Froomkin today? If you guess that it's Republicans, you'd undoubtedly be right.

Here's a fun example of how this works:

Russert: Libby called me to complain about something he had seen on MSNBC...

Imus: What did he complain about on MSNBC, do you remember?

Russert: I haven't gone into it,--you know-publicly-cause I just didn't want to get involved with all that viewer complaints, but I do remember it because of his language that he chose and that's why- I actually called Ben Shapiro, the president of NBC news and said I just gave your direct line to this guy named Lewis Scooter Libby, who is upset about something he watched on TV and you may hear from him.

I understand that the press comes under tremendous pressure when they write negative things about the administration. Their access dries up. They are frozen out of the scoops. Their bosses are called and they are asked to explain themselves. The other day when all the news outlets were gleefully reporting that Bush had come back up in the polls a bit, I could understand that the reporters were tremendously relieved to get the Republican attack dogs off their backs with a little good news for their boy.

That's how things work. We get that. But please don't blow smoke up our asses about "credibility" ok? We know what's going on. The Republicans operate like the Sopranos. And they're just as dumb. If the media would report this crap up front, we could put an end to this nonsense.


Update: Harris shakes out his lace cuff, takes a long whiff of snuff and puts Froomkin in his slaggardly, bloggy place.

Fine. Fuck it. Change the name if it bothers the "real" white house reporters so much. Call it The Whorehouse Report. It amounts to the same thing.


.
digby 12/12/2005 03:13:00 PM |

 
Novakula Rises

Via Kos, I see that Bob Novak is reporting that Republicans are begging Katherine Harris to drop out of the Florida senate race. Wasn't that the issue that old Bob and James Carville were bantering about when Novak lost it on the air?

ED HENRY: katherine harris went onto the house of representatives. now she wants to move over to the united states senate. today she got the news that the speaker of the florida house won't challenge her for the republican nomination. she is blaming unnamed newspapers for tarnishing her image by doctoring her makeup with photo shop. that computer program. bob, have you been investigating this story?

BOB NOVAK: no, but i've had the same experience that she did. a lot of my trouble in the world is they've doctored my makeup and the colorized me in a lot of newspapers on my picture. i sympathize with her.

HENRY: who did it?

NOVAK: i can't tell you.

JAMES CARVILL: yeah, the two happiest people in america today about this decision is bill nelson and jay leno. i mean --

HENRY: bill nelson the democratic senator.

CARVILLE: and jay leno. they're going to go nuts over this. they're messing with my makeup. you don't know who it is. i mean, let's say this. she's going to be good for the humor circuit and the speech circuit. she's good for a lot. i think that nelson, it's no secret the white house wanted the speaker to run. i suspect the nelson people are feeling pretty good here today.

NOVAK: a couple of points here. the first place, don't be too sure she's going to lose. all the establishment's against her. i've seen these republican -- anti-establishment candidates do pretty well. ronald reagan, i guarantee you the establishment wasn't for him. we just elected a senator from oklahoma, senator tom colebert, everybody in the establishment was against him. she might get elected. [CROSS TALK]

NOVAK: let me finish what i'm going to say, james. i know you hate to hear me

CARVILLE: he's got to show she is right wingers he's got backbone. show them you're tough.

NOVAK: i think that's bullshit and i hate that. just let it go.

I don't know that this has anything to do with anything. I just thought it would be fun to relive the moment when Novak was forced to go back into his coffin for the duration.



Transcript via Wonkette.


.
digby 12/12/2005 02:50:00 PM |

 
Closure

I have turned off all the cable news stations for the rest of the day. Watching the macabre death watch of Stanley Williams gives me the same sick feeling in my gut that seeing those videos of hostages in Iraq does. The endless slide show of pictures of the guy while a little clock in the corner counts down the hours until he will be killed is beyond my ken. I just don't see how this helps anything. Life without parole sounds like civilized justice to me. This state sanctioned cold-blooded execution stuff is something else entirely.

In other news, Mexico just outlawed the death penalty, leaving the United States among the following countries that allow it:


* Afghanistan
* Antigua and Barbuda
* Bahamas
* Bahrain
* Bangladesh
* Barbados
* Belarus
* Belize
* Botswana
* Burundi
* Cameroon
* Chad
* China (People's Republic)
* Comoros
* Congo (Democratic Republic)
* Cuba
* Dominica
* Egypt
* Equatorial Guinea
* Eritrea
* Ethiopia
* Gabon
* Ghana
* Guatemala
* Guinea
* Guyana
* India
* Indonesia
* Iran
* Iraq
* Jamaica
* Japan
* Jordan
* Kazakhstan
* Korea, North
* Korea, South
* Kuwait
* Kyrgyzstan
* Laos
* Lebanon
* Lesotho
* Liberia
* Libya
* Malawi
* Malaysia
* Mongolia
* Nigeria
* Oman
* Pakistan
* Palestinian Authority
* Philippines
* Qatar
* Rwanda
* St. Kitts and Nevis
* St. Lucia
* St. Vincent and the Grenadines
* Saudi Arabia
* Sierra Leone
* Singapore
* Somalia
* Sudan
* Swaziland
* Syria
* Taiwan
* Tajikistan
* Tanzania
* Thailand
* Trinidad and Tobago
* Uganda
* United Arab Emirates
* United States
* Uzbekistan
* Vietnam
* Yemen
* Zambia
* Zimbabwe


Interesting company, isn't it? With the exception of Belize, Guatamala and some Caribbean islands we are the only country in North America, South America or Europe to have the death penalty.

Can someone explain to me again about how we are defending western civilization against the barbarians. I don't think I quite understand it.


Update: Guyana is in S. America and Belarus is in Eastern Europe. My bad. Point stays the same.


.
digby 12/12/2005 02:45:00 PM |

 
Push Back

by digby

Is it really true that it's ethical for one journalist to reveal a colleague's confidential source to a third source?

I'm in desperate need of an emergency panel on blogger ethics because I'm confused. David Corn says that Viveca Novak screwed up by not telling her editors that Luskin was using a conversation she'd never mentioned to anyone as a get out of jail card for Karl Rove. That sounds right to me. She really should have told her editors. This was a big story and had they known about Luskin's reaction perhaps they would have pursued the story differently and gotten the truth out to the public.

But Corn also says that she did nothing wrong when she told Luskin that Rove being Matt Cooper's source was all over TIME magazine, which I really don't understand at all. Novak herself admits that it was a mistake:

Toward the end of one of our meetings, I remember Luskin looking at me and saying something to the effect of "Karl doesn't have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt." I responded instinctively, thinking he was trying to spin me, and said something like, "Are you sure about that? That's not what I hear around TIME." He looked surprised and very serious. "There's nothing in the phone logs," he said. In the course of the investigation, the logs of all Rove's calls around the July 2003 time period--when two stories, including Matt's, were published mentioning that Plame was Wilson's wife--had been combed, and Luskin was telling me there were no references to Matt. (Cooper called via the White House switchboard, which may be why there is no record.)

I was taken aback that he seemed so surprised. I had been pushing back against what I thought was his attempt to lead me astray. I hadn't believed that I was disclosing anything he didn't already know. Maybe this was a feint. Maybe his client was lying to him. But at any rate, I immediately felt uncomfortable. I hadn't intended to tip Luskin off to anything. I was supposed to be the information gatherer. It's true that reporters and sources often trade information, but that's not what this was about. If I could have a do-over, I would have kept my mouth shut; since I didn't, I wish I had told my bureau chief about the exchange. Luskin walked me to my car and said something like, "Thank you. This is important."

She says she was uncomfortable. She hadn't intended to "tip Luskin off." If she had a do-over, she would have kept her mouth shut. Yet Corn insists that she did nothing wrong.

Although Corn expends a great deal of energy lighting up the straw man, I haven't seen anyone accusing her of being a right wing operative. It's not her politics that are at issue. It's her ethics. "Pushing back" shouldn't include exposing her colleague Matt Cooper's source to a third party. She ended up becoming part of the story and the investigation because of that. It's a major screw up that shines yet another bright light on the curious ethical habits of the DC establishment.

Apparently others at TIME magazine, not just Cooper and his editors, knew that Karl Rove was personally blabbing to the press that Plame was CIA. (Half of Washington seems to have known it.) Viveca Novak knew and blabbed it to Karl Rove's lawyer over drinks at Cafe Deluxe, Lawrence O'Donnell knew and kept it secret for months because he didn't want to be subpoenaed and God knows how many other people knew it and passed it on to other privileged insiders or kept it to themselves for selfish reasons. Can't reporters like Corn understand why we poor hapless rubes out here in the hinterlands (not to mention the Justice department) find their shrieking for the last year and half about the sanctity of the confidential source just a little bit self-serving?

I've never quarrelled with Matt Cooper taking his promise to keep Karl Rove's name confidential all the way to the Supreme Court. (I wondered about Judith Miller being entitled to the reporter's privilege when it was clear that she had not written a story and had not been assigned one, however.) I understand that reporters need to keep their sources identities secret at times. What I don't understand is the practice of going back to powerful sources who lie to you again and again and granting them anonymity so that they can spread scurrilous stories without having to take responsibility for them. I don't understand why it's ok for a reporter to spill the name of a colleague's confidential source over drinks at Cafe Deluxe or why the public should accept that a newsroom and friends and cocktail party guests should know the names of these confidential sources, but the people (even "the people" as represented by the government) should not. I don't know why a reporter can keep important information on ice for months and years because they want to break the news in a book long after it has any relevance. It seems to me that the Beltway press corps wants it both ways. They don't want to be forced to tell the law or the public who their confidential sources are but they reserve for themselves the pleasure of blabbing it to their friends, other sources and each other.

The DC press corps has no idea how they look to the rest of the country after more than a decade of running with GOP trumped up scandals, pimping for impeachment, trivializing the effects of an unorthodox presidential election in 2000, and then saluting smartly and following Dick Cheney over the cliff on Iraq. We liberals never thought of the press as particularly partisan. We thought of it as competent or incompetent. But for a lot of reasons, for the last 15 years the DC press corps have far too often aligned themselves with a manipulative GOP political establishment to the point where it's been hard to see where one ends and the other begins. It's not a matter of political preference. It's insiderism. And when you become an insider in a corrupt system, for money, access, fame, fun whatever ... you become corrupt yourself.

I'm not surprised that the WaPo staffers don't like links to bloggers and others on the WaPo site. We are very critical. And I'm sure that we are often unfair and often flat wrong. But it would behoove these guys to stop consoling themselves with the notion that they "must be doing something right" if both sides are mad at them, and take a good look at the nature of these complaints. The right has spent the last quarter century in an organized campaign to work the refs and push the dialog to the right. The complaints coming from the left are the result of pent-up frustration at the tabloidization, the celebrity chasing, the insiderism. We have no organized campaign and we don't see the media as being politically biased. We see it as abdicating its duty to sort out the important from the trivial and connect the dots in these confusing times that are ruled by spin, PR and marketing on all sides.

This country cannot survive without proper journalism. Blogs can't do it. We need newspapers and news broadcasters who keep foremost in their minds the fact that they are indispensible to a functioning democracy. For the last fifteen years Washington politics have been covered as if they are high school with money. The DC press corps needs to reacquaint themselves with the idea that their purpose is not to have drinks with powerful insiders so they can keep their confidences. Their job is to have drinks with powerful insiders so they can get to the truth and write about it.


Update: Firedoglake has more on the WaPo ombudsman letter linked above that discusses the dissatisfaction of the staffers about linking and Dan Froomkin. Jane sets the story straight as only she can.

Crooks and Liars weighs in too.

Update II:

Thank you Dan Froomkin:

There is undeniably a certain irreverence to the column. But I do not advocate policy, liberal or otherwise. My agenda, such as it is, is accountability and transparency. I believe that the president of the United States, no matter what his party, should be subject to the most intense journalistic scrutiny imaginable. And he should be able to easily withstand that scrutiny. I was prepared to take the same approach with John Kerry, had he become president.

This column’s advocacy is in defense of the public’s right to know what its leader is doing and why. To that end, it calls attention to times when reasonable, important questions are ducked; when disingenuous talking points are substituted for honest explanations; and when the president won’t confront his critics -- or their criticisms -- head on.

The journalists who cover Washington and the White House should be holding the president accountable. When they do, I bear witness to their work. And the answer is for more of them to do so -- not for me to be dismissed as highly opinionated and liberal because I do.

Update: For those who don't understand why it is wrong to reveal Cooper's source to the source's lawyer, it's called the law of unintended consequences, which I think this story illustrates quite well. She had no way of knowing how blurting that information out would affect the story, or the case, but she does now. The rule of thumb is that if you know the name of your colleague's source, keep your mouth shut. Period. She could have "pushed back" in any number of ways that didn't include revealing Rove's name. It was careless and cavalier and she's paying for it (and the proverbial cover-up) now.


UpdateII: More here

.
digby 12/12/2005 10:17:00 AM |

Sunday, December 11, 2005

 
Father Knows Best

Aside from being a bad son (like his hero, Junior Bush) and publicly disrespecting his much more accomplished father, Chris Wallace is an idiot. Via Americablog:

Asked about DNC chair Howard Dean's recent prediction that the U.S. would lose the war in Iraq, Wallace told Carr:

"We are in a war. We do have 150,000-plus American soldiers over there. I mean, it's Tokyo Rose, for God sakes, going on radio saying we can't win the war."

I guess he's unaware of Tokyo Rose's story (which is typical because he's a rightwing moron):

Iva Ikuko Toguri is the woman who was tried as Tokyo Rose. She is a first-generation Japanese-American who happened to be visiting a sick relative in Japan in 1941. When war was declared between Japan and the U.S., Toguri was trapped in Japan and pressured by Japanese military police to renounce her American citizenship. She refused. Instead, she learned Japanese and took two jobs to support herself while she sought a way to return home.

One of her jobs was as a typist for Radio Tokyo. There she met American and Australian prisoners of war who were being forced to broadcast radio propaganda. Toguri scavenged black-market food, medicine, and supplies for these POWs. When Radio Tokyo wanted a female voice for their propaganda shows, the POWs selected Toguri. She was one of many female, English-speaking voices on Radio Tokyo, and she took the radio name of "Orphan Ann." Her POW friends wrote her scripts and tried to sneak in pro-American messages whenever possible.

After the war, several reporters went to Japan to find and interview the infamous Tokyo Rose, offering a large cash payment for an interview. A woman at Radio Tokyo pointed the reporters to Iva Toguri, and Toguri, thinking that she and her new husband, Felipe d'Aquino, could use the money, agreed to be interviewed. She even signed a contract stating that she was the infamous Tokyo Rose. A reporter gave the interview notes to U.S. Army Counter Intelligence, and in 1945, the U.S. arrested and imprisoned Toguri in Japan. She was released in 1946, but was arrested again in 1948, and taken to the U.S. to be tried for treason.

Her trial was considered the most expensive in American history at that time. The U.S. government stacked the deck against Toguri and her meager defense, and the judge later admitted he was prejudiced against her from the start. Toguri was found guilty of only one of the eight treason charges -- "That she did speak into a microphone concerning the loss of ships." She was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10,000. Because she was a model prisoner, Toguri was released early in 1956, although she was served with a deportation order which took two years to fight.

In 1976, the TV news show 60 Minutes told the Tokyo Rose story from Toguri's point of view. This led to a full pardon for Toguri from President Gerald Ford in 1977.

Chris should have listened to his father. He might have learned something.


.
digby 12/11/2005 05:30:00 PM |

 
CRS* Disease

by digby


In the spring of '04, responding to to Karl Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin saying out of the blue over drinks one night, "Karl doesn't have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt," Viveca Novak just happened to let it slip that it was all over TIME magazine that Karl Rove was the leaker. Luskin said "thank you. This is important."

She didn't tell her editors or the public during the entire time a first amendment challenge was being waged against her magazine all the way to the Supreme Court. She said nothing as her colleague Cooper faced jail time up until the last possible moment, not even when Rove's lawyer essentially AGAIN, more than a year after she told him otherwise, said those magic words --- this time to the Wall Street Journal ("If Matt Cooper's going to jail, it's not for Karl Rove.")

She didn't tell her editors or the public when Luskin informed her that she was going to be called by the prosecutor nor did she tell them when she hired a lawyer and gave the prosecutor a statement. It was only when she was actually called to give a deposition under oath that she decided that she needed to reveal that Luskin had proferred her as Rove's alibi.

She made no notes of her numerous conversations with Luskin even though she claims that she was working on the Rove story. And she can't remember when the conversations specifically took place. Apparently, she didn't think it was important to make a note of it, even though she was allegedly working on the story at the time.

She wishes she could have a do-over. She says she would do it differently. Like, for instance, she wouldn't go around revealing Matt Cooper's sources. Cuz, it's like mortifying. Totally.

Most amazingly, after she had already talked to the prosecutor for the first time and still not told her editors of her own involvement (or had told them that day) she wrote her story about about Bob Woodward:

But he said nothing then or in the months that followed as Fitzgerald launched his investigation and all Washington was consumed by a debate over spies and secrets and sources. Woodward kept what he knew secret even from Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. But as the case heated up this fall and Woodward joined in the reporting, "I learned something more" about the leak, he told TIME, which prompted him to finally tell Downie of his 2003 conversation.

[...]

Challenged on his public statements as well as his private conduct, Woodward explained that he had "hunkered down" out of fear of being subpoenaed at a time when reporters like Miller and TIME's Matthew Cooper were being jailed or threatened with jail unless they revealed their sources. Elsewhere in the newsroom, Post colleagues were none too happy. On an internal chat board, columnist Jonathan Yardley argued that "this is the logical and perhaps inevitable outcome when an institution permits an individual to become larger than the institution itself."

I can guess what the internal TIME chat board will be saying tomorrow: "Oh, and fuck you very much Viv. Your glass house needs cleaning."

She continued:

It was a rough week all around. The White House confronted another twist that could only prolong a politically damaging case. Fitzgerald confirmed that he would be presenting evidence to a new grand jury. Other possible targets had to be worried that there is still an aggressive investigation going on with the possibility of further indictments to come. And Fitzgerald, a tireless prosecutor with a reputation for thoroughness, had to wonder, after two years and millions of dollars and countless hours of hunting, what else is out there that he missed.

Yes, Fitzgerald was being uncharacteristically sloppy. Clearly, he should have rendered the entire press corps to Gitmo and injected them with sodium pentathol. After all, nobody in Washington takes any notes or has any conscious memory of any conversations they ever have, so there really isn't any other way to get the facts.

Truthfully, I suspect that Fitzgerald was as sadly mistaken about how the media functions in this country as the public was. We all thought that journalists were chomping at the bit to reveal news and when they got a tip they worked hard to find a way to report it. In Viveca Novak's case, had she just shared what she knew with her editors, for instance, they might have put it together with other information they had from other reporters and maybe found a way to publish a story.

I suppose we were all led astray by "All The President's Men" (ironically) which showed journalists using anonymously sourced information as a tip to pursue stories further or confirmation of facts they already knew, not as social currency or exclusive information for a book to be published long after the information means anything. Our bad. Apparently, it's fine for reporters to "gossip" freely among their fellow insiders about their sacred anonymous sources, but a federal crime to tell the public about it. We rubes are supposed to uncritically read their dispatches and buy their books so they can be well paid --- and leave the democracy business to our betters.



*Can't Remember Shit




Update: In retrospect, TIME should have pulled that story she wrote on Woodward or reported immediately that she had been called to testify. It looks bad. She was writing that story on November 18th and she knew she was even more implicated than Woodward. She told her editor on Sunday the 20th so perhaps they couldn't pull it back by that point. I'm surprised she wasn't fired on the spot, to tell you the truth. Her behavior is more egregious than Miller's.

(And once again, why in the hell did Woodward pick her to talk to?)

Update II: James Wolcott calls for another panel on blogger ethics



.
digby 12/11/2005 12:28:00 PM |

 
Who's Wanking Now

In case anyone still wonder why the cheese eating surrender monkeys and the ungrateful bastards we liberated from Hitler didn't join in our war party, here's the reason:

More than a year before President Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.

The previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French, described in interviews last week by the retired chief of the French counterintelligence service and a former CIA official, came on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002.

The French conclusions were reached after extensive on-the-ground investigations in Niger and other former French colonies, where the uranium mines are controlled by French companies, said Alain Chouet, the French former official. He said the French investigated at the CIA's request.

Chouet's account was "at odds with our understanding of the issue," a U.S. government official said. The U.S. official declined to elaborate and spoke only on condition that neither he nor his agency be named.

However, the essence of Chouet's account — that the French repeatedly investigated the Niger claim, found no evidence to support it, and warned the CIA — was extensively corroborated by the former CIA official and a current French government official, who both spoke on condition of anonymity.

The repeated warnings from France's Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure did not prevent the Bush administration from making the case aggressively that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons materials.

It was not the first time a foreign government tried to warn U.S. officials off of dubious prewar intelligence.

In the notorious "Curveball" case, an Iraqi who defected to Germany claimed to have knowledge of Iraqi biological weapons. Bush and other U.S. officials repeatedly cited Curveball's claims even as German intelligence officials argued that he was unstable and might be a fabricator.

And remember, even our closest ally in the coalition of the willing was saying this at the time:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Let's hear again about how every foreign government agreed with our assessment that Iraq had WMD.


Oh, and not that it matters, but let's also remember what Karl Rove was telling Time magazine in July of 2003 about this:

"not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger ... "

.
digby 12/11/2005 10:29:00 AM |

Saturday, December 10, 2005

 
R.I.P. R.P.

by digby


If you would like to have a surreal experience akin to the effects of downing ten shots of cheap tequila, tune in to FoxNews as they eulogize Richard Pryor. Apparently he invented dirty words. (It's going to come as a helluva surprise to Lenny Bruce --- not to mention Redd Foxx.) He rejected the comedy of the good comedian, Bill Cosby, and went down the "wrong path" that led us to where we are today with all this R rated badness. One of the commentators said that when he went on TV in the mid 70's he "wasn't ready for prime time." (Actually, prime time wasn't ready for him.) Another said that "every black comic owes him something."

(Is it possible that right wingers are all actually zombies who died sometime before the 60's and have been walking among us as the undead ever since then? I just don't know what else can explain their terminal cultural obtuseness.)

I saw Richard Pryor in concert in 1974 at the Circle Star Theatre in San Carlos, California. I just realized that he was only 34 years old at the time. (Of course, I was only 18, so everyone seemed pretty old to me then.) He was on the cusp of achieving huge mainstream fame that year from his album "That Nigger's Crazy."

I'd never seen anything like Pryor before. It was more than comedy, and it sure as hell was more than "R" rated. It was cultural observation so universal and so penetrating that I saw the world differently from that night on. He didn't just talk about race, although he talked about it a lot and in the most bracing, uncompromising terms possible. He also talked about men and women, age, relationships, family, politics and culture so hilariously that my jaw literally ached the next day. He was rude, profane and sexist. But there was also this undercurrent of vulnerability and melancholy running beneath the comedy that exposed a canny understanding of human foible. His personal angst seemed to me to be almost uncomfortably plain.

I looked around me in that theatre that night, in which I and my little friend Kathy were among a fair minority of whites, and I realized that we were all laughing uproariously together at this shocking, dirty, racially charged stuff. As someone who grew up in a racist household (and had always had a visceral reaction against it) it was an enormous, overwhelming relief. I understood Richard Pryor, the African Americans in the audience understood Richard Pryor and Richard Pryor and the African Americans understood me. He was right up front, saying it all clearly and without restraint. He wasn't being polite and pretending that race wasn't an issue. And it didn't matter. Nobody, not one person, in that audience was angry. In fact, not one person in that audience was anything but doubled over in paroxysms of hysterical laughter. He had our number, all of us, the whole flawed species.

He's been sick a long time and so it's no surprise that he died a a sadly early death. I've been missing him for quite a while. If you haven't ever had a chance to see him in concert when he was in his prime, check it out on DVD. Maybe it won't be funny or salient to people today, I don't know. At the time, it was a revelation.



.
digby 12/10/2005 01:42:00 PM |

 
Who's In Disarray?

by digby

In its relentless quest to abdicate global leadership and assume the role of rogue nation, the Bush administration is making a complete ass of itself in the global warming talks:

In a sign of its growing isolation on climate issues, the Bush administration had come under sharp criticism for walking out of informal discussions on finding new ways to reduce emissions under the United Nations' 1992 treaty on climate change.

The walkout, by Harlan L. Watson, the chief American negotiator here, came Friday, shortly after midnight, on what was to have been the last day of the talks, during which the administration has been repeatedly assailed by the leaders of other wealthy industrialized nations for refusing to negotiate to advance the goals of that treaty, and in which former President Bill Clinton chided both sides for lack of flexibility.

At a closed session of about 50 delegates, Dr. Watson objected to the proposed title of a statement calling for long-term international cooperation to carry out the 1992 climate treaty, participants said. He then got up from the table and departed.

Environmentalists here called his actions the capstone of two weeks of American efforts to prevent any fresh initiatives from being discussed. "This shows just how willing the U.S. administration is to walk away from a healthy planet and its responsibilities to its own people," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate change project at the World Wildlife Fund.

In the end, though, some adjustments of wording - including a shift from "mechanisms" to the softer word "opportunities" in one statement - ended the dispute.

Hey, I like breathing dirt and I assume that everyone else in the world likes breathing dirt too. Good for us.

But that's not all. This is downright absurd:

In his Friday speech, Clinton blasted the Bush administration’s opposition as “flat wrong.”

But the speech almost didn’t happen.

The contretemps started late Thursday afternoon, when the Associated Press ran a story saying that Clinton had been added at the last minute to the gathering’s speaking schedule at the request of conference organizers. According to the source, barely minutes after the news leaked, conference organizers called Clinton aides and told them that Bush-administration officials were displeased.

“The organizers said the Bush people were threatening to pull out of the deal,” the source said. After some deliberation between Clinton and his aides, Clinton decided he wouldn’t speak, added the source: “President Clinton immediately said, ‘There’s no way that I’m gonna let petty politics get in the way of the deal. So I’m not gonna come.’ That’s the message [the Clinton people] sent back to the organizers.”

But the organizers of the conference didn’t want to accept a Bush-administration dictum. They asked Clinton that he go ahead with the speech. “The organizers decided to call the administration’s bluff,” the source said. “They said, ‘We’re gonna push [the Bush people] back on this.’”

Several hours went by, and at the Clinton Foundation’s holiday party on Thursday night, the former president and his aides still thought they weren’t going to Montreal. “The staff that was supposed to go with him had canceled their travel plans,” the source said.

At around 8:30 p.m., organizers called Clinton aides and said that they’d successfully called the bluff of Bush officials, adding that Bush’s aides had backed off and indicated that Clinton’s appearance wouldn’t in fact have adverse diplomatic consequences.

Karl had a bad week. You can always tell.



.
digby 12/10/2005 09:15:00 AM |

Friday, December 09, 2005

 
So, Like, Totally Funny

by digby


Via Wolcott I see that the spokesmodel of Open Robe Media, Atlas Shrugged, has a hilarious picture of Howard Dean up photoshopped as Hitler. But it's ok because it's totally funny:

Hey guys, its a joke. Helllllllllllllllllllllo, its F-U-N-N-Y (even if Dean's remarks were far from funny, futile maybe, treasonous maybe, stupid for sure, humorous - not). Actually, the pic is hysterical. I never said he was Hitler, never even called him a Nazi. A clown for sure. That's a clown pic - this is a clown pic too. Conversely, when the left calls Bush Hitler, they are dead serious. You can not compare the two. The above picture is hysterical. You clowns are as bad as the one in the picture. Sheesh.

Smart as a whip.




Update: For some real fun, read the comments. This one, I thought, was particularly insightful:

The country is driven by Cindy Sheehan. We republicans haven't got a chance....until election day. You dheminnocrats are sure simple minded. You make up the news and then believe it. Then, you take a phony poll and declare victory. The only thing missing is reality.

But don't worry, when the train of life is leaving you behind at the station of stupidity, I'll fart in your general direction.

.
digby 12/09/2005 01:50:00 PM |

 
Pandamonium

by digby

I can't stand this baby panda anymore. He is so cute it is almost painful to watch. He's so cute I want to kill him. It's just too much.


You can watch him live on the PandaCam at Animal Planet --- if you dare.

Oh man, the San Diego Zoo has a cub too.


.
digby 12/09/2005 12:58:00 PM |

 
Just Don't Call Them Special Interests

A Washington truism: Conservatives do meetings better than liberals. They get more done. They coordinate better. When it’s time to rally around John Roberts or Samuel Alito (or torpedo Harriet Miers), they know how to make it happen. Here’s a look at the conservative insider roundtables:

The Wednesday Meeting

HOST: Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform.

LOCATION: Americans for Tax Reform office, 20th and L streets, downtown DC.

TIME: Wednesdays, 10 am sharp.

SETUP: Norquist, flanked by invited guests, presides over a large conference table. Others sit in auditorium chairs.

FOOD: Delicious bagels, not-very-delicious coffee.

PHILOSOPHY: Leave-us-alone conservative crowd: Big government is bad; taxes are bad; liberal bureaucracy is bad.

PARTICIPANTS: 80 to 100 people, including elected officials looking for donations, Hill aides, state officeholders seeking tax-fighting help, even representatives of free-market think tanks in Europe and Asia.

KARL FACTOR: White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove has attended many meetings, including a “buck up the troops” visit before election 2004. Rove sends White House aide Tim Goeglein to take flak when he’s not there.

MEDIA: Conservative and some mainstream media attend with the proviso that the session is off the record.

CLAIM TO FAME: Seeded the 1994 Gingrich revolution. In time Newt’s informal policy shop became the connection between grasstops conservative activists and official Washington. The meeting helps the White House discern the mood of the movement.

NOTABLE GUESTS: Past speakers include Christopher Hitchens, Ralph Nader.

The Arlington Group

HOST: Donald Wildmon, American Family Association.

LOCATION: Family Research Council conference room in DC. Formerly based in the condo of Sandy Rios of Concerned Women for America.

TIME: Every-other-month sessions last up to several days.

SETUP: Conference tables arranged in a square allow participants to look each other in the eye.

FOOD: Sandwiches, chips, and drinks.

PHILOSOPHY: Savvy Christian political action.

PARTICIPANTS: 30 to 45 social-conservative leaders, ranging from Focus on the Family’s James Dobson to the National Association of Evangelicals’ Reverend Ted Haggard, ex-presidential candidate Gary Bauer, influential South Florida pastor D. James Kennedy.

KARL FACTOR: He has briefed the meeting—and listened to complaints—several times via telephone.

MEDIA: None, though details often leak to New York Times conservative-movement chronicler David Kirkpatrick.

CLAIM TO FAME: Conservatives frustrated at the pace of social-conservative legislation convened the group in 2003, and it was instrumental in garnering grassroots support for the Federal Marriage Amendment.

NOTABLE GUESTS: Reporters would love to know.

The Weyrich Meetings: Lunches, Family Forum, and Stanton Group

HOST: Paul Weyrich and staff, Free Congress Foundation; Bob Thompson, Coalitions for America.

LOCATION: Free Congress Foundation, 717 Second Street, Northeast.

TIME: Wednesday Weyrich lunches; biweekly Family Forum meetings; every other Friday for the Stanton Group.

SETUP: Varies.

FOOD: Family Forum serves doughnuts; Weyrich lunches are catered; the Stanton Group offers box lunches.

PHILOSOPHY: American conservatism, broadly construed.

PARTICIPANTS: 20 to 25 social-conservative activists, Hill staffers, and occasionally administration officials.

KARL FACTOR: Rove has attended several meetings.

MEDIA: None.

CLAIM TO FAME: First established in 1979, the Weyrich meetings helped bridge the gaps between the Washington GOP establishment and conservatives backing Ronald Reagan. Coalitions for America, a group linked to Weyrich, coordinates all three meetings.

NOTABLE GUESTS: George W. Bush attended during his father’s presidency.

The Monday Meeting

HOST: PR executive Mallory Factor and hedge-fund director James Higgins; affiliate of the Free Enterprise Fund.

LOCATION: Grand Hyatt, 42nd Street, New York.

TIME: One Monday a month.

SETUP: Chairs face a dais at the front of the room. Factor uses an egg timer to keep things moving.

FOOD: Water.

PHILOSOPHY: Free markets, free minds, but uncertain about cultural issues.

PARTICIPANTS: 200 guests, ten invited speakers.

KARL FACTOR: He hasn’t visited yet, but several allies have.

MEDIA: Conservative writers and a few others attend with the proviso that sessions are off the record.

CLAIM TO FAME: A participant says, “If you’re a conservative and you want to tap into New York money, you have to go there.” Potential 2008 Republican candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Sam Brownback have already stopped by.

NOTABLE GUESTS: Fernando Ferrer, onetime Democratic New York mayoral candidate, once spoke on taxes.

.
digby 12/09/2005 12:36:00 PM |

 
Campaign Troops

by digby

Via Dan Froomkin, I see that Fox News (of all places) is following this story of Bush making political speeches before military audiences:

... lately the president has been saying more than just "hello" to troops. Twice last month in speeches to military audiences, the president attacked Democrats and fired back at their accusations that pre-war intelligence was manipulated by his administration.

"It is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim we misled them and the American people," Bush said.

On Nov. 11 at the Army Depot in Tobyhanna, Pa., Bush told the audience of servicemen and women that some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq have attempted to rewrite the past.

"The national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges," he added.

The attacks against critics at military settings may have put troops in the awkward position of undermining their own regulations. A Department of Defense directive doesn't allow service members in uniform to attend "partisan political events."

Questions have been raised about the military's attendance at events where Bush says something like "they spoke the truth then, they're speaking politics now." Several members of the military told FOX News that Bush is inviting the troops to take sides in a partisan debate in his speeches.

"This is a very bad sign," said retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, who led Central Command in the early 1990s and is an administration critic. "This is the sort of thing that you find in other countries where the military and political, certain political parties are aligned."

Bush often appeared with troops in his 2004 campaign. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., endorsed him before hundreds of cheering soldiers.

"Where you have our uniformed members being put in a position where it looks like they're rooting for one side or another is very disconcerting," said Greg Noone, a former Navy lawyer.

Presidents have generally avoided such military settings due to the chance for attacks from opponents.

"They could be divisive," said Stephen Hess, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. "And as commander-in-chief, he represents all the people as does the military defend all the people."

I wrote about this a few days ago. It's not only the president, of course, who is doing this. The VP spoke before the troops this week as well. It's done for the specific purpose of giving the impression that the military backs the administration politically. It's inappropriate to give speech after speech before these captive audiences in the first place, but to take pot shots at the political opposition is really beyond the pale. There are Democrats among the troops, but they are not allowed to give their political opinion in this situation (by booing, for instance) the way a regular citizen could (theoretically, at least.)

And, as Stephen Hess points out, when Bush dons his Commander in Chief hat he's no longer supposed to be partisan. In that capacity, he's supposed to represent all the people. The military is always supposed to represent all the people.

Meanwhile, Dan Bartlet proves once again that the White House believes that they can speak gibberish and everyone will just let it slide:

"They're the ones who are defending our freedom," said White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett. "They should be able to listen to the debate, they should be able to hear both sides."

I'll be looking forward to seeing John Kerry and John Murtha addressing the troops every couple of days. After all, they should be able to hear both sides.



.
digby 12/09/2005 10:49:00 AM |

 
Thanks Bill

by digby

I'm not religious but I've always loved Christmas --- the food, the lights, the tree, the music, the whole thing. Now the right wing pricks have gone and made it a cause in their goddamned culture war and I can't enjoy it anymore. One sniff of fruitcake and a picture of Bill O'Reilly enters my mind. I'm instantly nauseated.

Everywhere I go, even here in the very heart of godless secular humanism, the People's Republic of Santa Monica, there are carolers on the sidewalk (singing songs like "Oh Holy Night" no less) "Merry Christmas" is written on store windows, decorated trees and twinkling lights are all over the place. And all I can think is "what in the hell are these wingnuts going on about? Christmas is everywhere! Are they nuts???" And then the pure, simple, childlike enjoyment I usually feel for the holiday just slips away.

I resent the hell out of these wingnut bastards turning Christmas into a political football. Is nothing sacred to these people?

Update: Oh, and please tell me again how secularists are declaring war on Christmas:

Many American "megachurches", huge Christian ministries with thousands-strong congregations, have horrified traditionalists by closing on Christmas Day.

Sunday services on Dec 25 are being cancelled because clergy fear attendance will be poor. Worshippers are instead being encouraged to spend the day with their families.

[...]

Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois, one of the six largest US churches with a weekend attendance of nearly 22,000, is among those closing its doors.

"At first glance it does sound contrarian," the Rev. Gene Appel, its senior pastor, said. "We don't see it as not having church on Christmas. We see it as decentralising the church on Christmas: hundreds of thousands of experiences going on around Christmas trees.

"The best way to honour Jesus's birth is for families to have a more personal experience on that day."

Christmas Sunday services were not the most effective use of staff and volunteers, a spokesman said.

Other megachurches closing on Christmas Day are in Kentucky, Texas, Georgia and Michigan.

"We feel that Christmas is definitely a time that should be spent with family,"said Kris McNeil of Michigan's Mars Hill Bible Church.

Cindy Willison, a spokesman for the evangelical Southland Christian Church, near Chicago, said at least 500 volunteers were needed, plus staff, to run Sunday services for the estimated 8,000 worshippers. Many volunteers appreciated the chance to spend Christmas with their families.

The closures contrast starkly with Roman Catholic parishes, which see some of their largest congregations at Christmas, and Protestant ministries, such as the Episcopal, Methodist and Lutheran churches, where Sunday services are hardly ever cancelled.

The number of megachurches in America, defined as non-Catholic congregations of at least 2,000 people, has soared from 10 in 1970 to an estimated 800 today.

Many function like corporations, running businesses such as publishing houses.

I didn't know that the Christmas tree actually functioned as an alter, but I'm not surprised. This is America and that's where the presents are.

I'm awfully impressed by the piety of the conservative evangelicals who attend these churches and lord their superior religiosity over the mainline churches.

Update II: I missed this Atrios post yesterday making essntially the same point.


.
digby 12/09/2005 08:19:00 AM |

Thursday, December 08, 2005

 
The System Worked

by digby

Kevin Drum is asking some questions about what happened on that flight in Miami yesterday. It all sounds a little "screwy" to me too, but not just because the witness accounts sound as if the marshalls may have overreacted. There's something else screwy about this.

The marshalls were obviously persuaded that it was quite possible that this man had a bomb in his carry on bag. And apparently, the marshalls went through the plane after the fact, looking for accomplices, pointing guns at the passengers and knocking cell phones out of their hands ostensibly because they thought they might contain guns.

Now I know that the marshalls are taught to shoot first and ask questions later and all that, so no lectures please. But I still find it amazing that after all this time, they automatically assume that a group of people could get a bomb and "cell phone guns" through the gate security in a US airport. Goes to show you how useful all that boarding gate crap really is, doesn't it?

My favorite comment on this matter is Monica Crowley this morning saying that the good thing about all this is that "the system worked."



.
digby 12/08/2005 05:25:00 PM |

 
Foxocities

by digby

In the latest installment of the "Democrats are in Disarray" show, Fred Barnes just did a reverse triple axel that would make Michelle Kwan weep. After going on and on about how the Democrats are all over the map, they don't know what they are doing, they are rudderless and lacking in ideas, he said that Nancy Pelosi has got the democrats voting in "lock-step" which is empowering the (apparently useless) GOP moderates. (Then he pouted and stomped his tiny foot in frustration.)

I assume that everyone can see the problem with Barnes' statement, even if he is so unaware of his own illogic that he makes both of these statements in the same breath.

The best moment today, however, was watching these rich, privileged, middle aged fucks sit around chuckling at the prospect of Stanley Williams asking for clemency. I don't know what it is these Republican assholes find so amusing about executions but they can't seem to contain their mirth when someone suggests the possibility of redemption.

These are the same people complaining about a war on Christianity.



.
digby 12/08/2005 03:46:00 PM |

 
SOS

by digby

Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory heard Howard Dean's shocking shocking comparison between Iraq and Vietnam and was led to do a rather unusual thing. He went back and read what our leaders were saying during Vietnam and compared it to what they are saying to today. What he found was quite interesting.

Howard Dean, unsurprisingly, is not full of shit after all.



.
digby 12/08/2005 03:35:00 PM |

 
Great Game

by digby

I had meant to review "Syriana" when I saw it over the Thanksgiving week-end, but with one thing and another, I let it slide. Now I see that the reviews are coming in fast and furious and I'm left in the dirt. Typical.

I'm not going to bore anyone with a synopsis, because anyone who is reading this can go to the web-site and see the trailer and read all about it right now. (God I love these internets.)

I happened to have loved "Traffic" (written by the same screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, who also directed "Syriana") so this frenetic, multi-tentacled, highly textured plot line was right up my alley. I like thrillers that I can't figure out until the end and which require me to go back and review the entire movie in my mind, seeing certain scenes through the prism of the climax and understanding them entirely differently than I did the first time. And I especially like it when a film's confusing plot is almost a character of the story, as this one is.

On a cinematic level it is not as polished or interesting as "Traffic" which had the brilliant Steven Soderberg at the helm. He used light and color to differentiate the varying threads of the plot to keep things straight in the audience's mind. This film is less dazzlingly directed, so the complicated plot becomes more challenging. Nonetheless, I found it gripping from start to finish mainly because it is about something that we here in the blogosphere have been talking about since the war began and it asks a question that everyone's asking (why are we in Iraq?) without ever bringing Iraq up at all.

The film observes various American and middle east actors running about with idealistic, nihilistic, greedy and personal agendas, bumping into each other sometimes at random and at others by design. But the single most important player is oil (which in real life, for reasons that are mystifying, is widely considered to be a tin-foil hat, loony-left explanation, even among liberals.) I don't normally consider myself a cynic, but on this topic, it's very hard not to be. In the final analysis, this really is a modern version of the Great Game. When we ask ourselves "why are we in Iraq?" it makes more sense to refine the question and ask whether we would be in Iraq if it weren't for oil. I think it's fairly obvious that we would not be. Terrorism, in the grand scheme of things, is not an existential threat no matter how hard the warbloggers wank. Invading Iraq was actually counter-productive to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and may end up creating another Islamic state. Even the Bush administration knew that this was not an adequate rationale for invading Iraq so they pimped the WMD threat.


Atrios has posted an interview with ex-CIA agent Robert Baer, on whom the George Clooney character was based, that is quite interesting. Here's another interview from Baer on Chris Matthews that I think speaks to my point:

MATTHEWS: What‘s the future look like?

BAER: I‘ll tell you what the Saudis are doing. They are building a fence to keep the chaos in Iraq from moving south, and so are the Jordanians. They‘ve put out contracts.

MATTHEWS: If you had to choose now between Americans forces staying in that country for two more years or getting out now, what is better?

BAER: Chris, the problem is oil. Muslims sit on 70 percent of oil. We cannot afford to see Saudi Arabia destabilized. We‘re going to have to keep troops in the area. I don‘t know where you are going to keep them, on the border, in the rear bases, but we cannot let the chaos in Iraq spread.

MATTHEWS: It would?

BAER: Absolutely. Look at the bombings in Jordan. That came directly from Iraq.

MATTHEWS: You say we have to stay, but when can we come home, ever?

The vice president today sounded like we‘re never really coming home.

That we have to fight for American influence in that part of the world.

BAER: We have to come home one day, it‘s $5 billion a day. We‘re going to run out of money. And we‘re going to run out of soldiers and run out of tolerance from the American people.

We have to find a way to remain the policemen of the Gulf and however you do that, leave that up to the military. But we cannot keep our troops as they are deployed now in Iraq forever.

I would suggest that what Baer says is worth considering as we contemplate what the meaning of "withdrawal" or "victory" or "bringing home the troops" really means. I think that we are going to be in the middle east for a long, long time, the only question is on what terms.

The powers that be in the US (and the United Kingdom of British Petroleum) believe they must control this region's valuable resource. Indeed, some of the big thinkers like Zbigniew Brzezinski (in "The Grand Chessboard") and the PNAC nuts believe that the US must control "Eurasia" or risk being shut out of the future. There is nothing new under the sun and the pursuit of precious necessary resources that belong to others has been going on forever.

Oil is certainly not the only reason we are in this mess. It is, perhaps, the fundamental reason we are in this mess. And it's the reason that this mess isn't going to be solved by either bringing the boys home or creating a "democracy" in the middle east. We may leave Iraq as an occupying force due to a lack of domestic support, or we might be chased from the region by violent events. But if we have any illusions that the United States is not going to be deeply involved in the middle east for the forseeable future, we need to wake up. Sadly, whether we know it or not, by our blind and profligate actions the American people lend credence to the insane ramblings of that miniskirted harpy, Ann Coulter:

"Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil."

Why not, indeed? I wonder what would happen if the question was posed just that starkly? At this point, the Great Game players, the oil companies and the politicians who dance to their tune are unwilling to put it that way. They work to keep citizens in the dark about what is at stake, encouraging them to guzzle cheap gasoline at a fantastic pace while droning out messianic statements about good and evil and spreading freedom.

Syriana's "confusing" plot speaks to that. It's conveys the sense of drugged vagueness we all feel when we try to unravel the motivations behind these actions. There are a thousand different reasons why we could be doing what we are doing, but nobody knows for sure what is the real one.

There is only one character in the film who holds all the disparate threads in his hands --- the James Baker (Christopher Plummer) character who walks freely among the politicians, the oil companies, the ruling sheiks, the spooks and the regional puppets. He is the Grand Master of the Great Game. He ensures that none of the players know what the others are doing, each kept in the dark, flailing about with everything from torture to idealism to pragmatic everyday power politics without ever knowing that they are being manipulated by greater forces.

I suppose that we could prosaically assume that he represents a worldly reality like The Carlyle Group (or in an earlier time, The Trilateral Commission.) But I think he simply symbolises Power and Arrogance. He is fundamentally anti-democratic, amoral and relentless in his quest for more of what he is made of. He is America's id, perfectly represented as an elderly Texan with his steely talons dug deeply into every consequential player in the New Great Game.

The only character who sees through the subterfuge is the ex-CIA agent, abandoned by his country, whose life of dirty deeds on behalf of The Company prepares him alone to understand his role and dig his way out. That is the most out-of-sync Hollywood moment in an otherwise completely cynical film. (But then, it's George Clooney who can't help but be seen as a hero.) In reality, there can be no such neat denouement. The claws would turn deadly if he were to do what he does.

I've read a number of reviews in which the writer finds this movie a simple-minded portrayal of evil corporate masters holding the puppet strings of great nations and vast empires. It's the same complaint about the slogan "No blood for oil", as if those who see our presence in the mideast in such terms are silly dupes and fools. But I would submit that it is the jaded sophisticates who are missing the point. "Syriana", for all its "confusion" really does get to the heart of the matter and forces you to deal with the one simple fact that nobody wants to accept. This planet really is running out of oil --- and we are entering an era in which our nation is going to be asserting our power to get it.

Rather than finding "Syriana's" plot confounding, by the end I thought its multiple plotlines led to a bracing clarity: Oil. I don't know that it's all that important to understand anything else and if America sees this movie and comes away with that understanding then I think it succeeds as both a film and a political statement.



.
digby 12/08/2005 08:22:00 AM |

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

 
Desperate

Atrios has a post up this morning about Mel Gibson the holocaust denier. If the California Republican Party has its way, it could soon be Governor Mel Gibson, the holocaust denier:

With segments of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's political base rising in revolt, directors of the California Republican Party have demanded a private meeting with the governor to complain about the hiring of a Democratic operative as his chief of staff.

The request comes as Schwarzenegger faces a sustained wave of opposition from both moderate and conservative Republicans over the choice of Susan P. Kennedy. Before serving as a state public utility commissioner, Kennedy was Cabinet secretary to former Gov. Gray Davis. She also was an abortion-rights activist and former Democratic Party executive.

In appointing Kennedy last week, the governor praised her as an effective administrator who could "implement my vision" and work cooperatively with Democrats who control the Legislature.

But Republican operatives said grass-roots volunteers are so disturbed by the appointment that they are threatening to abandon Schwarzenegger during his re-election bid next year. Others said Schwarzenegger is risking a nasty fight that could cause the party to rescind its endorsement during February's convention in San Jose.

There is even a movement to draft Mel Gibson, the actor and director, to run against Schwarzenegger in the Republican primary next year -- in part because the success of Gibson's movie, "The Passion of the Christ," could help his chances among religious conservatives. Raised in Australia, Gibson was born in New York and is a U.S. citizen. He has not expressed an interest in elected politics.

"We need to have a good backup," said Mike Spence, president of the California Republican Assembly, a grass-roots organization that is separate from the state party. Spence's group has already set up a Web site, melgibsonforgovernor.com. "He seems to be more consistent with the Republican message than the governor does."

Gibson could not be reached, and his spokesman, who was traveling Tuesday, did not return an e-mail and call for comment.

Let's hope that the old saw "as California goes, so goes the nation" holds true. The Republican party in this state has become a sad, pathetic joke. And it was a power house not so long ago. After all, it sent two favorite sons to the white house in the last 35 years. (And, once again, I'd like to apologise for that. We'll try not to let it happen again.)



.
digby 12/07/2005 08:51:00 AM |

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

 
Moral Foundations

by digby

I see that Senator Lieberman is concerned about partisanship poisoning the atmosphere in Washington and he has some stern words for Democrats who insist on criticizing the president.

"It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he'll be commander-in-chief for three more years. We undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril."

For instance he really hates it when Democrats say things like this:

After much reflection, my feelings of disappointment and anger have not dissipated, except now these feelings have gone beyond my personal dismay to a larger, graver sense of loss for our country, a reckoning of the damage that the president's conduct has done to the proud legacy of his presidency and, ultimately, an accounting of the impact of his actions on our democracy and its moral foundations.

The implications for our country are so serious that I feel a responsibility to my constituents in Connecticut, as well as to my conscience, to voice my concerns forthrightly and publicly. And I can think of no more appropriate place to do that than on this great Senate floor.

[...]

The president's intentional and consistent statements, more deeply,may also undercut the trust that the American people have in his word. Under the Constitution, as presidential scholar Newsted (ph) has noted, the president's ultimate source of authority, particularly his moral authority, is the power to persuade, to mobilize public opinion, to build consensus behind a common agenda. And at this, the president has been extraordinarily effective.

But that power hinges on the president's support among the American people and their faith and confidence in his motivations and agenda, yes; but also in his word.

As Teddy Roosevelt once explained, "My power vanishes into thin air the instant that my fellow citizens, who are straight and honest, cease to believe that I represent them and fight for what is straight and honest. That is all the strength that I have," Roosevelt said.

Sadly, with his deception, the president may have weakened the great power and strength that he possesses, of which President Roosevelt spoke.

I know this is a concern that may of my colleagues share, which is to say that the president has hurt his credibility and therefore perhaps his chances of moving his policy agenda forward.

[...]



That's what I believe presidential scholar James David Barber (ph) in his book "The Presidential Character" was getting at when he wrote that the public demands quote, "a sense of legitimacy from and in the presidency. There is more to this than dignity -- more than propriety. The president is expected to personify our betterness in an inspiring way; to express in what he does and is, not just what he says, a moral idealism which in much of the public mind is the very opposite of politics."

Just as the American people are demanding of their leaders, though, they are also fundamentally fair and forgiving, which is why I was so hopeful the president could begin to repair the damage done with his address to the nation on the 17th. But like so many others, I came away feeling that for reasons that are thoroughly human, he missed a great opportunity that night. He failed to clearly articulate to the American people that he recognized how significant and consequential his wrongdoing was and how badly he felt about it.

Lieberman thinks that speeches like that are wrong --- that Democrats should not go before the senate and speak about how the president has failed the nation, been dishonest, misled the people and undermined the nation's moral authority. Unless, of course, there's a blow job involved in which case Lieberman himself would feel compelled to lead the stampede to condemn and chastise him publicly.

But then, that was an issue of prime importance, unlike lying the country into a useless war of faux masculine vanity in which we are becoming a pariah nation known for torture, kidnapping, and disappearance. As long as Bush keeps his codpiece zipped and doesn't let anybody see him playing Grand Theft Auto, he's got Joementum on his side.

Putz.



.
digby 12/06/2005 04:46:00 PM |

 
Vote For The Good Guys

by digby

I'm not sure what to make of this, but this blog seems to be nominated for a Weblog Award for "the best of the top 250 blogs" (I'm losing badly to that upstart whippersnapper, Jane Hamsher.) I had thought these were conservative awards, but apparently not. Anyway, there are a bunch of really good liberal bloggers nominated in various categories and you can vote once a day (!!?)

Check it out.

Update:

If you really love me, you'll want to stuff your little stocking with some postage stamps or ornaments and shirts with a Digby snowman on them. I'm not kidding. Apparently you can now design your own stamps and Bo Zartz has done up a "holiday blog homage" featuring various liberal bloggers. (And naturally Jane Hamsher gets to be the angel.)They're all fun, but I particularly like the one that says "Merry Fitzmas" which is guaranteed to piss off Bill O'Reilly six ways to Kwaanza.



.
digby 12/06/2005 03:20:00 PM |

 
Aggrieved Conservatives

by digby

I have hesitated to link to Rick Perlstein's Princeton speech, published here on Huffington Post, because he makes a very kind statement about me in it, and I sound like I'm tooting my own horn by posting about it. But, I decided to post about it anyway, because what he says is so important for people to understand: Republican intellectuals like to promote themselves as the party of Goldwater the principled conservative and Reagan the optimistic conservative, but they are actually the party of Richard Nixon, the aggrieved conservative. Their penchant for secrecy, their disdain for democratic processes, their lawless political tactics and their belief that might makes right are best understood by looking at them in that light.

The modern Republican party set about ruthlessly building a political machine while wearing the mantle of principle and morality after Nixon's fall. A machine is all they really are, but they persist in this fiction that they have a deep intellectual philosophy -- "the party of ideas" and all that. I assume that many of them believe this. But any person of ideas is only welcome as long as he or she is useful, after which he is thrown on the ever increasing pile of liberal traitors.

Here's one example of a conservative intellectual (one of the fathers of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol) making the Straussian argument that religion is necessary to keep the masses in line, but unnecessary for the highly educated mandarins who actually run things:

Because of Strauss' teachings, Kristol continued, "There are in Washington today dozens of people who are married with children and religiously observant. Do they have faith? Who knows? They just believe that it is good to go to church or synagogue. Whether you believe or not is not the issue -- that's between you and God -- whether you are a member of a community that holds certain truths sacred, that is the issue." Neoconservatives are "pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers."

This noble hypocrisy on the part of intellectuals is required in order to encourage religious belief in ordinary people who would otherwise succumb to nihilism without it. In other words, Kristol believes that religion, which may well be a fiction, is necessary to keep the little people in line. This line of thinking has led him and other neoconservative intellectuals to attack Darwinian evolution because they fear it undermines religious belief.

(The author of this companion article writes, "ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is "the opium of the people"; they add a heartfelt, 'Thank God!'")

I'm sure that the DC Neocon elites feel very secure that they are the ones running things. But as with so many other intellectual conceits of the conservative movement, it is awfully convenient that their "ideas" track with the needs of a Repubublican political machine. Here's how the man who identified the evangelical community as an untapped voting block, Paul Weyrich, saw it:

"We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country," he declared. Weyrich describes his views as "Maoist. I believe you have to control the countryside, and the capital will eventually fall." (David Brock, "Blinded by The Right" p.54)

I would submit that the Neos like Kristol and Podhoretz are just beltway pundit fodder for the Nixonian political machine. They think they are the mandarins but they are dupes too, of another sort, lending a phony intellectual heft to a movement that isn't intellectual at all. Nixon would have hated them. Weyrich is his man. (Until he isn't.)

I urge you to read Perlstein's speech and description of what it was like to go into the belly of the beast and talk about this among the faithful. He's got more guts than I do. Clearly he understands them better than they understand themselves:

The response to my address was, understandably, defensive. My co-panelist Stan Evans retorted that my invocation of Richard Nixon was inappropriate because Nixon had never been a genuine conservative. He added: "I didn't like Nixon until Watergate." I responded: "Thanks for making my point."

Everyone understands, I assume, that Bush, Delay, Norquist and Reed too, are morphing into liberals as we speak.


Update: I couldn't, for thel ife of me remember where I had recently seen this Kristol article, so I Googled it. thanks to a reader, I was reminded that it was in this great post by James Wolcot.



.
digby 12/06/2005 11:44:00 AM |

 
Nation Building

by digby

I was only half listening a minute ago as NBC's Jim Meceda in Bagdad was describing how a woman was stripped and tortured and then taken to Abu Ghraib and terribly abused. I turned quickly to see who this latest person was who had come forward to accuse the US of inhumane treatment --- only to find that it was a witness testifying at Saddam's trial. Wow.

Until the past two years I never would have made that assumption, never, even though I'm quite aware of all the nasty things we've done around the world over the years, including My Lai. But when you read things like this, it's natural to assume that any news of torture, Abu Ghraib etc. are reports of US behavior. These days, sadly, it usually is:

ABC News, citing unidentified current and former CIA agents, reported Monday night that 11 "high value" Al Qaeda terrorists had been held at a former Soviet air base in Eastern Europe and were spirited to a site in North Africa just before Ms. Rice's arrival in Europe.

Of the 12 high value targets housed by the CIA, only one did not require water boarding [what the CIA describes as "an enhanced interrogation technique"] before he talked. Ramzi bin al-Shibh broke down in tears after he was walked past the cell of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational planner for Sept. 11. Visibly shaken, he started to cry and became as cooperative as if he had been tied down to a water board, sources said.

The problem for the US has been that, along with the disclosure of the existence of the "secret prisons," there have been several high-profile cases that have highlighted US mistakes, such as US agents grabbing the wrong person, wrongly imprisoned subjects of rendition alleging they had been tortured in the countries where they had been taken, and allegations that the CIA lied to a European ally about a rendition.

The Washington Post reported Sunday on the case of Khaled Masri, a German citizen who had been the subject of a rendition and then wrongfully imprisoned for five months. When the US ambassador to Germany finally told the German interior minister about the mistake, the Post reports that he asked the German government not to disclose that it had been told about the US mistake, even if Mr. Masri went public with what happened to him. Apparently US officials feared exposure of the rendition program, and also possible legal action.

The Post reports that the Masri case shows how pressure on the CIA to apprehend Al Qaeda members after 9/11 led to an unknown number of detentions based on slim or faulty evidence, and just how hard it is to correct these mistakes in a system "built and operated in secret."

One [US] official said about three dozen names fall in that category [those mistakenly detained]; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by Al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the Al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

"They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association" with terrorism, one CIA officer said.

And there have been many other innocent people who have been rendered to countries and tortured, sent to Guantanamo or were wrongly imprisoned in Iraq since we began this practice. And the practice has led to more innocent people being imprisoned and tortured because those who are tortured tend to say anything they think you want to hear to make it stop. It builds on itself.

Saddam used this practice to terrorize the population to keep it in line. That is the only rational (if evil) purpose for such practices. I can't figure out why in the hell we are doing it.



.
digby 12/06/2005 10:04:00 AM |

 
Addressing The Legion

by digby

Watching these mini Nuremberg rallies with the president, and now the vice-president, using the troops to make political points I'm uncomfortably reminded that going back to Rome (and probably earlier) the point of having the troops assembled before the leadership was to make it clear that the military backed the leadership against all comers. Today this is slightly more subtly accomplished, but the motivation is the same. It is shamelessly done not just to convey the point that the military will follow the orders of the administration (which it is constitutionally required to do) but that it also politically backs the administration against its critics. These are political speeches done for the purpose of answering political critics.

If I didn't know better and were to watch the majority of speeches from afar for the last six months, I would assume that the United States is a military dictatorship, so many uniforms have been present. Even the speech that Bush gave the other day on the economy featured a bunch of people dressed in the same clothes in the standard tableau behind him.

This is becoming a bit disturbing. The administration is giving the appearance of having control of the military in an inappropriate political way and they are doing it more and more. My only consolation is that, if press reports are true, the military brass does not seem to be as enthralled by Republican leadership as they once were. A badly conceived and executed war by fanatics will do that to you.



.
digby 12/06/2005 08:51:00 AM |

Monday, December 05, 2005

 
Orwell's Dog

by digby

President Bush is disturbed by the U.S. military's practice of paying Iraqi papers to run articles emphasizing positive developments in the country and will end the program if it violates the principles of a free media, a senior aide said Sunday.

"He's very troubled by it" and has asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to look into the pay-to-print program, national security adviser Stephen Hadley said.

That's because he had ordered that all the unfriendly press operations in Iraq be bombed.

Christopher Hitchens is shocked, simply shocked to find out that we are doing this.

This time, someone really does have to be fired. The revelation that Defense Department money, not even authorized by Congress for the purpose, has been outsourced to private interests and then used to plant stories in the Iraqi press is much more of a disgrace and a scandal than anyone seems so far to have said.

[...]

... sometimes a whole new line is crossed and "propaganda" corrupts the whole process by becoming a covert operation against one's "own" side. The worst violation so far has been the spreading of a falsified story about the death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan. Not only was he slain by "friendly fire" instead of by the foe—which is a tragedy in far more ways than just as a setback for recruitment—but the family and friends of this all-American hero were purposely deceived about what had really happened. It would be trivial to add that they were also pointlessly deceived (how long do the geniuses at DoD imagine that such a thing can be kept quiet?) except that it greatly added to the callousness of the thing, and except that this same pointlessness and moral idiocy are now apparent in the "good news" scandal in Iraq.

[...]

[J]ust picture the scene for a moment. An Iraqi family living in, say, Anbar Province, picks its way down the stoop to collect the newly delivered newspaper. This everyday operation is hazardous, but less so than going down to the corner to pick it up, because there are mad people around who do not believe that anything should be in print, save the Quran, not to mention nasty local potentates who do not like to read criticism of themselves. Further, the streets are often dark and littered with risky debris. The lead story, however, reports that all is well in the Anbar region; indeed, things are going so well that there is even a slight chance that they will one day get better. Who is supposed to be fooled by this? The immediate target is, one supposes, the long-suffering people of Iraq. But over time, the printing and dissemination of cheery reportage must have been intended to be picked up and replayed back into the American electorate. If done from state coffers, that is probably not even legal.

It is, anyway, not so much a matter of fooling people as of insulting them. The prostitute journalist is a familiar and well-understood figure in the Middle East, and Saddam Hussein's regime made lavish use of the buyability of the regional press. Now we, too, have hired that clapped-out old floozy, Miss Rosie Scenario, and sent her whoring through the streets. If there was one single thing that gave a certain grandeur to the change of regime in Baghdad, it was the reopening of the free press (with the Communist Party's paper the first one back on the streets just after the statue fell) and the profusion of satellite dishes, radio stations, and TV programs. There were some crass exceptions—Paul Bremer's decision to close Muqtada Sadr's paper being one of the stupidest and most calamitous decisions—but in general it was something to be proud of. Now any fool is entitled to say that a free Iraqi paper is a mouthpiece, and any killer is licensed to allege that a free Iraqi reporter is a mercenary. A fine day's work. Someone should be fired for it.

For a guy who models himself on George Orwell he sure is a naive little thing, isn't he? Where has he been?

The Bush administration doesn't just believe this will work in Iraq. They think they can bullshit the American people into believing they are better off economically than they really are, too. Their entire agenda boils down to convincing the American people that they can believe them or they can believe their lying eyes. They've been doing this from the beginning and it worked for a while after 9/11 when Bush was riding around like country on his white charger and the press was holding his codpiece. It doesn't seem to be working anymore.




.
digby 12/05/2005 02:06:00 PM |

 
The '05 Campaign

by digby

Atrios wonders why Bush is doing the happy talk thing about the economy when it won't make anyone change his or her mind about it:

There are things which make sense in the context of a first term, a presidential campaign, a major policy to sell, or if there is an heir apparent (like Gore in 2000). But basically either people are happy with the economy or not and no speechifying by Bush is going to change their minds

I thought the same thing and then realized that he was just repeating his stump speech, slightly updated. (He even had the usual applause lines --- tort reform! YEAHHHHHHHHH!) I should have known what was going on when he mentioned "his opponent" in a speech a couple of weeks ago.

Bush is running for president again. It's really the only thing he knows how to do successfully. (And even then, only 50% of the time.) This time he's running against himself --- Bush the 35% loser.

Talk about the lesser of two evils.



.
digby 12/05/2005 11:34:00 AM |

Sunday, December 04, 2005

 
She Initiated It

by digby

A lot of bloggers have written today about the rape case in Oregon in which a young woman was found guilty of falsely reporting the rape based upon a judge's impression that the "boys" were more credible and because the accuser allegedly didn't act properly traumatized according to a detective and two friends. (Kevin Hayden has more here.)

I'm quite sure that rape is falsely reported from time to time. It only stands to reason that it would happen. However, this judge was apparently not relying on the kind of evidence that could have supported the charge -- like testimony from a "co-conspirator" or a friend to whom she confessed to making it up, a blackmail attempt, stalking, a fight, nothing that concrete.

Despite what he describes as inconsistencies on both sides, he must have believed this in order to find her guilty:

The three men testified Thursday that the acts were consensual and at the girl's initiation.

How likely is that? Here in the real world, how often does it happen that a 17 year old girl initiates group sex with a bunch of her boyfriend's pals?

Again, I'm sure it happens. But this "porno star" defense is more common that you think and it works even in the face of documentary evidence. Here's a similar story that played out along similar lines, although it was tried as a rape case:

The jury announced Monday that it was "hopelessly deadlocked" on all 24 counts.

Defense attorneys and a middle-aged male juror told CNN that 11 jurors voted "not guilty" on the first four counts -- two counts of rape by intoxication and two counts of oral copulation by intoxication.

The alleged rape was videotaped by Haidl July 5, 2002, during a party at the home of his father, Don Haidl, a top-ranking sheriff's official in Corona del Mar.

Prosecutors relied on the tape as the most critical piece of evidence, telling jurors throughout the trial that all of the crimes can be seen on tape.

The prosecution doesn't feel it overestimated the impact the tape had with the jury, Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said Tuesday.

"It's very clear what's happening on the tape," Rackauckas said. The alleged victim is "unconscious, she's flopping around, out of control, being manipulated by these three individuals."

But, Haidl's attorney Peter Scalisi said "science and medicine backs" the defense's contention that Jane Doe was conscious during the incident.

A neurologist hired by the defense testified that in reviewing the tape, he found her to be alert and with the presence of mind to say "no," and yet she said "yes," Scalisi said in an appearance with Rackauckas on CNN.

During the trial, defense attorneys portrayed Doe as a promiscuous, aspiring porn star who agreed to be videotaped.

Scalisi called the depiction "very fair" because that's the way "she truly is."

I don't remember where I saw the footage, but I saw it, (with the body parts made hazy.) It was obvious that the poor girl was unconscious. She was like a rag doll, only making rare muffled sounds. And the criminals who were assaulting and humiliating her were laughing through the whole thing. I don't care if she'd made a thousand porno movies, in this one she was clearly not capable of consenting. It was one of the most disturbing videos I've ever seen.

But there were people on that jury who were able to look at that footage and be convinced that she was consenting--- evidently persuaded by her sexual history that even though she was clearly unconscious when the men inserted a lit cigarette, a pool cue and a Snapple bottle into her orifices, that somehow she wanted what was happening.(The case was retried and the punks were found guilty.)

I don't know all the particulars in this case in Oregon, but I think it's probably a good rule of thumb that when the defendant is a 17 year old girl accused of not only falsely reporting a rape but enticing her accused rapists into group sex, and there is no proof that she did all this other than the word of the boys and a vague observation that she didn't "act right" then the burden of proof has not been met.

The lesson here for young girls is, don't bother reporting a gang rape if you know the rapists. A good many people will believe that you are a sexually depraved black widow spider who lured the poor young fellas into your web and then tried to "kill" them with a false charge.



.
digby 12/04/2005 05:18:00 PM |

 
Kipmas Is Coming

by digby

Everyone needs to go and over to The Poorman and vote for the Soggy Biscuit award for the year's best circle jerk and the Purple Teardrop with Clutched Pearls cluster award for wounded feelings. The competition is very tough this year, vote early and vote often.

Also, seriously, throw some money to the gang at Wampum so that they can sponsor another great Koufax awards this year. It's great fun and helps build the liberal blog community by introducing us to new blogs and overlooked posts. I'm the incredibly lucky recipient of two of those babies and am ridiculously proud of the achievement.



.
digby 12/04/2005 02:35:00 PM |

 
Credibility Gap

by digby

A few people have e-mailed me today to tip me to this story in the NY Times about the NSC pollster who wrote the first draft of the president's "victory" speech last week.

I try not to do this too much because, well, it's stupid, but I can't help but point out that I've been harping on this for months, as my regular readers know. In fact, I wrote about it again the day before Bush's speech last week when I heard him say "We wanna WIN" at that press conference at the border. I am not in the least bit surprised that the speech originated with this fellow: they are desperate to believe that he's right and all they have to do is sell victory to get their poll numbers back up.

This advisor, Peter Feaver and a partner Christopher Gelpi produced a study that purports to prove that Vietnam wasn't "lost" because of mounting casualties; it was because the American people became convinced we were losing when the political leadership became irresolute. I'm not qualified to comment on the data which I haven't seen anyway, except to say as someone who was there at the time that this is bullshit. The problem was the "credibility gap." Ordinary citizens just didn't believe a word the government said about the war after a certain point because it had been pumping the country full of horseshit happy talk for years. Nobody knew what the truth was, except that the war just seemed to go on and on forever, kids were dying in great numbers with no real progress and no real purpose.

Mr Feaver seems to believe that the country still trusts George W. Bush. But they have to be delusionary to believe they could sell a war on a "grave and gathering danger" of "a smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud" and then think that they could maintain their credibility when it turns out that there was actually --- nothing. They shot the moon and lost.

In that respect, Iraq is quite different from Vietnam. Vietnam wasn't based on one big huge lie, but a succession of lies over a long period that only came into focus over time. Iraq was sold as a dramatic necessity in a big, brash marketing campaign with slogans and theme songs in a very short period of time for specific and memorable reasons that still echo loudly just two years later.

THE PRESIDENT: This is a guy who was asked to declare his weapons, said he didn't have any. This is a person who we have proven to the world is deceiving everybody -- I mean, he's a master at it. He's a master of deception. As I said yesterday, he'll probably try it again. He'll probably try to lie his way out of compliance or deceive or put out some false statement. You know, if he wanted to disarm, he would have disarmed. We know what a disarmed regime looks like.
I heard somebody say the other day, well, how about a beefed-up inspection regime. Well, the role of inspectors is to sit there and verify whether or not he's disarmed, not to play hide-and-seek in a country the size of California. If Saddam Hussein was interested in peace and interested in complying with the U.N. Security Council resolutions, he would have disarmed. And, yet, for 12 years, plus 90 days, he has tried to avoid disarmament by lying and deceiving.

Yes, John, last question, then we've got to go swear the man in.

Q Sir, if the Security Council doesn't go along with you, what happens then?

THE PRESIDENT: I have said that if Saddam Hussein does not disarm, we will lead a coalition to disarm him. And I mean it.

You can't convince the country that we are winning against all evidence to the contrary once you have been proven an ass on that scale. The game was up for Bush as soon as people fully realized that the WMD threat didn't exist. Either Bush was a liar or an idiot. Unfortunately, it didn't happen until after the last election.



.
digby 12/04/2005 01:08:00 PM |

 
Cakewalk

by digby

General Dempsey also said a key part of the training for the Iraqi forces involves how to operate in a democratic society. He said the troops and police need to develop loyalty to the government, rather than local tribes, militias or ethnic groups. They are also taught respect for human rights, and they are educated about the need to avoid corruption, which experts say is widespread in Iraqi society. In that regard, General Dempsey says the newly trained troops are doing better than the government ministries that are supposed to be supporting them. "They are taking an honest shot at corruption, and our intervention into these ministries in significant numbers I think is helping in that regard. But, you know, there are some bad habits that have to be overcome here," he said.

Oh sure, some people may carp that it's difficult to "train" the Iraqis in human rights when you legalize torture, cover up systemic prisoner abuse, contractor shootings and innumerable cases of innocent people being caught up in sweeps and imprisoned and harshly interrogated for months with no due process. And some bedwetters will complain that by buying off the press and installing friendly politicans and negotiating sweetheart deals for oil that we are actually embedding corruption in the new government before it's even formed.

But this is war, right? We can't pussy foot around. We have to win. We have to use these harsh wartime methods so we can stand down and the Iraqis can stand up. Which they will do just as soon as we train them to believe in loyalty to the government and human rights and honest politics.

Why is it that everyone keeps saying that Bush's strategy won't work?



.
digby 12/04/2005 11:57:00 AM |

Saturday, December 03, 2005

 
Alito Night Music

by digby

Samuel Alito is a real piece 'o work:

From TChris at Talk Left:

If a police officer doesn’t know why a suspect is fleeing, it’s reasonable for the officer to shoot the suspect to death and ask questions later. As you pause to consider the absurdity of that proposition, ask yourself why a government lawyer would consider it reasonable for an officer to shoot and kill an unarmed teenager who had just stolen $10 in a burglary. And then ask whether a lawyer who expressed that belief should serve on the Supreme Court.

As an assistant to the Solicitor General, Judge Alito weighed in on a case involving an officer who was investigating a possible burglary. The officer heard a door slam, then went to the backyard where he “shined his flashlight on a youth who appeared to be unarmed and who was trying to climb a six-foot-high chain link fence to escape.” The officer “seized” the kid by shooting him in the head.

"I think the shooting [in this case] can be justified as reasonable," Alito wrote in a 1984 memo to Justice Department officials. Because the officer could not know for sure why a suspect was fleeing, the courts should not set a rule forbidding the use of deadly force, he said. "I do not think the Constitution provides an answer to the officer's dilemma," Alito advised.

When in doubt, blow their brains out. That's the kind of thoughtful, deliberate analysis we need on the Supreme Court.

When the case was decided, we had a majority of non-psychos on the court:

The 4th Amendment forbids "unreasonable searches and seizures" by the government, and the high court said that killing an unarmed suspect who was subject to arrest amounted to an "unreasonable seizure."

"It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape," wrote Justice Byron White for a 6-3 majority in Tennessee vs. Garner. "Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so."

Said White: "A police officer may not seize an unarmed, nondangerous suspect by shooting him dead."

The burglar who stole $10.00 was only 15 years old.




.
digby 12/03/2005 02:32:00 PM |

 
Keep Up Your Campaigning Chops


One of my readers sent this in and I thought I'd pass it along so that anyone so inclined could do a little phone banking for a good Democrat here in California.

I'm looking for people who can use their free cellphone minutes for
an hour this weekend to help elect a Democrat to Congress from my
district. We're making phone calls to remind people to vote in the
special election this coming Tuesday, December 6. You can do the
whole thing from your home, using a cellphone and an Internet
connection. Here's what you do.

Write to ca48@easyco.com and say that you want to do "virtual
phonebanking for Steve Young." You'll be sent a user ID, password,
and a URL. Go to that URL and log in, and you'll see two scripts (one
for live people and one for messages) and a list of 50 Democrats to
call.

It takes very little time since some of the numbers are disconnected
and others are just voicemail. It's unlikely you'll get more than 1
or 2 live people.

The main points to get across are:

1) There's a special election this coming Tuesday and your vote is
crucial!
2) There's a terrific Democrat in the race and he can win if you
vote.
3) There are over 100,000 Democrats in our district and if just half
of them vote we can send a Democrat to Congress.
4) Please send Bush a message -- vote on Tuesday for Steve Young.

Check out his web-site, here. He's a good guy.



.
digby 12/03/2005 10:11:00 AM |

 
As The Army Stands Down, The Contractors Will Stand Up

Crooks and Liars is featuring a story today about yet more murdering contractors. Bookmark it for your burgeoning "why America is becoming a rogue nation" file.

Has anyone bothered to ask whether withdrawal of the military would mean withdrawal of contractors? Somehow, I doubt it. Our private army that answers to no one but its owners so it doesn't have to deal with all these messy old fashioned "laws" and "regulations" is going to be in Iraq for a long, long time.

I have little doubt that Rummy and Cheney have realized that it's a little more expensive since you have to pay the soldiers more than a hundred grand a year, but they're worth it. They're not hung up on all this honor and tradition crap. They know how to get the job done. But they aren't really mercenaries because they only torture, abuse and kill for America. They are patriots. Plus, we pay really well. So that's good.



.
digby 12/03/2005 08:45:00 AM |

 
Thinking Outside The Box

by digby

I was reading this incisive post on corruption at the Poorman and had a revolutionary idea. The Editors:

Imagine that. Elect gangsters, get gangsterism. Look, it’s a great thing that DeLay and Abramoff & Co. are getting in a bit of legal trouble now, but don’t pretend that this is some example of the system working and the balance being restored, because it isn’t. The worst case scenario for these guys is to spend a few years in a the nicest prison on Earth, followed by a career as an absurdly well-compensated and influential lobbyist, and kickbacks galore for you and yours. You can get a few years in prison for downloading mp3’s on the internets, and your chances of getting a trashbag full of cash and a cake job when you come out the other end are very, very, very slim. And a decade or so of federal legislation is arguably worth even more than kelis_milkshake.mp3. Justice for these people, and for us, would be massive jail sentences for everyone involved, a mass nullification of nearly every piece of legislation and every judicial appointment since 1994 (at least), and the guilty parties and their bagmen paying us restitution with interest. That would make things right. Lots of luck. Whatever slap on the wrist these guys get, we got taken.

This is another one of those un-unshittable beds, I’m afraid, so it makes a lot more sense to concentrate on not shitting it in the future. Step one, obviously, is to get rid of the crooks, or, as they are known in polite company, “the Republicans”. But as long as the system is what it is - as long as you can gainfully set up a blatantly corrupt political machine like DeLay’s, and make money hand-over-fist for years in exchange for a possible plea bargain down the road - this kind of behavior is going to continue. While it may be a little hard to imagine the Democrats (or the Greens, or the International Society of Con Men and Embezzling Liars) ever being able to top the standard set by these current Republicans, I’m sure they’d be willing to give it the old college try. Because if they won’t, someone else will.

Since I see little hope that the system is going to be reformed, it occurs to me that we liberals should just hire ourselves some lobbyists. Really. We spend many, many millions on political campaigns that get us zilch. Nada. We should just raise funds to buy congressmen yachts or send them to Australia on vacation or hire their wives at 5 grand a month to survey what congressmen like for dinner. These guys go cheap when you really think about it. They'll do pretty much anything you want for a golfing trip. We'd actually save money just by buying them all French commodes. In exchange we get them to vote for national health care and legal gay marriage and a $15.00 minimum wage.

I think we should consider it. At this rate, it's going to be 2100 before we ever get a chance to renact any true progressive legislation the old fashioned way, if then. It's time we in the reality based community faced the music. If you want something done in our government, you have to pay top dollar for it.



.
digby 12/03/2005 08:06:00 AM |

Friday, December 02, 2005

 
Heckuva Job

by digby


I can't believe what I'm seeing. CNN is reporting yet another propaganda boondoggle --- FEMA's "Recovery Channel" in New Orleans. One segment even features a military officer talking about all the good work that FEMA is doing rebuilding the schools. CNN investigated and found out the school in question was really two hours away from new orleans and that virtually all the schools in new orleans are in shambles.

My favorite part was the story about how "our Commander In Chief lent a hand" in the rebuilding.

Apparently, when FEMA realized that CNN was asking questions about this taxpayer funded propaganda operation, they issued a statement saying that they were going to revamp the whole thing and remove all editorial content.

The question now is what department of the Bush administration isn't using tax dollars to promote the President and the Republican party's political agenda?


Update: Here's the transcript

PHILLIPS: Chances are you've never heard of it, but Recovery TV is spreading the word about this year's devastating hurricanes and the federal government's response. And whether you think it warrants cheers or jeers, you're paying the bills.

Here's CNN's Tom Foreman.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Far from the cleanup, the debris and the angry public meetings.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I need some answers.

FOREMAN: Seventy miles from Washington in the Maryland countryside, it's show time for FEMA.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In times of crisis, the best help is often just a source of reliable information.

FOREMAN: This is the "Recovery Channel," produced by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and airing around the clock via satellite and the Internet.

DIANNA GEE, RECOVERY CHANNEL ANCHOR: It could be the best day and the worst day. The day you finally get to go back to your storm- damaged home.

FOREMAN: FEMA conceived the channel years ago to spread important information after disasters. Following Katrina, it was on in shelters, a plain display about rebuilding, financial aid, help and more. But now, with FEMA accusing the mainstream media of failing to provide enough of that info, the "Recovery Channel" has undergone a makeover.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Stay with us. Together, we can build a bright future.

FOREMAN: And at the Annenberg School of Communication, Professor Joe Turow says it's turned into propaganda.

JOE TUROW, ANNENBERG SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION: Most of the information was really not the specific kind of factual information one might think, but rather feature and fluff pieces that seemed designed to aggrandize FEMA, and actually the Bush administration, too.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I just want to thank FEMA for all they've done for us.

FOREMAN: Certainly, the channel conveys no public frustration with FEMA. When the channel was airing this,

JAMILAH FRASER, RECOVERY CHANNEL ANCHOR: The massive effort to clean up Louisiana is still topping our coverage. And to speed up this process, our commander in chief steps in with some additional assistance.

FOREMAN: CNN was airing this: UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What's wrong with you, Uncle Sam? You drunk? Huh? What you doing with our tax money? Come on, you need to go to rehab, brother.

FOREMAN: Consider this "Focus On Education" report.

FRASER: But one New Orleans school refused to let the doors of education close on them. They just rolled in the wheels of knowledge.

FOREMAN: This segment, this week was about FEMA bringing trailers to a school where a tree destroyed several classrooms.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And all of us without FEMA would not be able to be standing here today.

FOREMAN: But this school is not in New Orleans. It's two hours north and there was no information about more than 100 devastated schools actually in the city, where by the way, almost 8,000 school employees have just been told they've officially lost their jobs.

FRASER: Good information for good decisions.

FOREMAN: Another concern. The FEMA logo appears often, but much of the language on the channel suggests it is independent of the very government agency that is running it.

FRASER: Today our lead story is FEMA's top priority: Housing. A two-week extension for those evacuees in hotels. That's what FEMA is saying today.

FOREMAN: Critics on Capitol Hill have repeatedly suggested the administration is misusing public funds for domestic propaganda. Senator Frank Lautenberg is one of them and he watched the channel at our request.

SEN. FRANK LAUTENBERG (D), NEW JERSEY: The way this is being done, it's a fakery. And it shouldn't -- it should be identified as a government product.

FOREMAN: When we contacted FEMA, a spokesperson defended the channel, but after reviewing the questions CNN raised, sent this statement: The agency, it says, is taking immediate measures to ensure that all programming is unmistakably labeled as an official FEMA resource. And it's eliminating any editorial content.

They just can't help themselves.



.
digby 12/02/2005 12:39:00 PM |

 
Political Grease Monkeys

by digby

If a partisan impeachment, unprecedented recall elections, bogus voter roll purges, uncheckable voting machines and Supreme Court chosen presidents didn't convince you that the Republicans are trying to undermine the fundamental electoral processes of our Democratic system, this one should lay any questions you have to rest:

Justice Department lawyers concluded that the landmark Texas congressional redistricting plan spearheaded by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) violated the Voting Rights Act, according to a previously undisclosed memo obtained by The Washington Post. But senior officials overruled them and approved the plan.

[...]

The 73-page memo, dated Dec. 12, 2003, has been kept under tight wraps for two years. Lawyers who worked on the case were subjected to an unusual gag rule. The memo was provided to The Post by a person connected to the case who is critical of the adopted redistricting map. Such recommendation memos, while not binding, historically carry great weight within the Justice Department.

[...]

The Texas case provides another example of conflict between political appointees and many of the division's career employees. In a separate case, The Post reported last month that a team was overruled when it recommended rejecting a controversial Georgia voter-identification program that was later struck down as unconstitutional by a court.

Mark Posner, a longtime Justice Department lawyer who now teaches law at American University, said it was "highly unusual" for political appointees to overrule a unanimous finding such as the one in the Texas case.

"In this kind of situation, where everybody agrees at least on the staff level . . . that is a very, very strong case," Posner said. "The fact that everybody agreed that there were reductions in minority voting strength, and that they were significant, raises a lot of questions as to why it was" approved, he said.

There have been many reports of career civil service employees leaving the government because of this behavior. If the Republicans' corruption and greed manages to lose them the congress, (and hopefully the presidency) there is going to have to be a massive investigation into who has replaced these employees to make sure that a permanent patronage machine hasn't been put in place in the Federal Government. That is, of course, what they wanted to do, but it's likely that they haven't had enough time to fully implement it.


If, on the other hand, they are not brought low by their corruption and ineptitude in the very near future, we may not get another chance to fix this. The best news I've heard all week is this NY Times article in which it's shown that the Justice Department is finally taking a close look at the crooked K Street Project:

Investigators are said to be especially interested in how Tony C. Rudy, a former deputy chief of staff to Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, and Neil G. Volz, a former chief of staff to Representative Bob Ney of Ohio, obtained lobbying positions with big firms on K Street.

The hiring pattern is "very much a part of" what prosecutors are focusing on, a person involved in the case said. Another participant confirmed that investigators were trying to determine whether aides conducted "job negotiations with Jack Abramoff" while they were in a position to help him on Capitol Hill.

Prosecutors are trying to establish that "it's not just a ticket to a ballgame, it's major jobs" that exchanged hands, the participant in the case said. Also under examination are payments to lobbyists and lawmakers' wives, including Mr. Rudy's wife, Lisa Rudy, whose firm, Liberty Consulting, worked in consultation with Mr. Abramoff, people involved in case said.

What began as an inquiry into Mr. Scanlon and Mr. Abramoff's lobbying has widened to a corruption investigation centering mainly on Republican lawmakers who came to power as part of the conservative revolution of the 1990's. At least six members of Congress are in the scope of the inquiry, with an additional 12 or so former aides being examined to determine whether they gave Mr. Abramoff legislative help in exchange for campaign donations, lavish trips and gifts.

It may be difficult for prosecutors to translate certain elements of the case into indictments. Bribery, corruption and conspiracy cases are notoriously difficult to prove. But the potential dimensions are enormous, and the investigation, at a time of turmoil for the Bush administration, threatens to add a new knot of problems for the party heading into the elections next year.

Let's hope so. The K Street project is the heart of the big money and ihnfluence machine that built the party since the 1990's.


Update:

Here's Steny Hoyer's statement on the redistricting issue.



.
digby 12/02/2005 10:49:00 AM |

 
"Land-grabbing Yids"

by digby

I've written before about the possibility of an impending implosion in the Christian Right. You don't put behind thousands of years of sectarian competition just because Paul Weyrich needs a voting block. One of the oddest marriages of convenience in this block has always been the fundamentalist armagedonists and the right wing Jews, seeing as the gleeful worldenders view the destruction of the Jews as a requirement for the rapture. But it's been a convenient political alliance among certain Republicans so that's been overlooked.

But guess what. When the "yids" don't behave, here's what you get on Tim LaHaye's web site. From Max Blumenthal:

The Christian right sure gets its panties in a bunch when Jews act without their permission. Recently, a speech by the ADL's Abe Foxman denouncing the Christian right's theocratic agenda provoked a Gangland-style threat from James Dobson minion Tom Minnery -- "If you keep bullying your friends, pretty soon you won't have any." Then, in response to Ariel Sharon's Gaza pullout and subsequent formation of a new, centrist party, Tim LaHaye's Left Behind Prophecy Group leapt into the fracas with some good, old-fashioned anti-Semitic slurs.

In an article entitled "Will the Goyim Win?" published on the official site of best-selling author Tim LaHaye (who also operates an annual Holy Land tour for evangelicals), "Christian journalist" Stan Goodenough takes Israel and the Sharon government to task for trading land for peace. In breathless prose, Goodenough bemoans the Israelis' supposed surrender of "the cradle of their nationhood, the burial places of their national patriarchs and heroes."

Then, he proceeds to pile it on:

But do you know what, Jews of Israel - and those Jews still in exile who so fervently support this way? You may think that in so acquiescing, you are setting a glowing example to the nations of the world.

But as far as these nations are concerned, the last thing they will want to do is emulate you. All you are doing is proving them right in their long-held belief that you are illegitimate, land grabbing, not-to-be-trusted Yids. And, as far as the Muslim world is concerned, your actions only confirm their view of you as a dhimmi nation, fit only to be ruled over by, and subdued under, Islam.

Ah yes, more of that sophisticated right wing geopolitical strategy. Chest thump and bellow your way to "victory." (I don't know what happened to them in the schoolyard, but it stunted their intellectual growth.)

And apparently if the Israelis don't follow their edict to blow themselves up for Jesus, they will be seen as "land-grabbing yids" and lily livered cowards too. That was a short trip from A to B wasn't it?


Get ready for more of this as various Christian sects come in to conflict as well. It's only a matter of time before they start fighting among themselves.



.
digby 12/02/2005 10:16:00 AM |

 
Leftist Scandalmongers

by digby

A fascinating Ron Reagan and Monica Crowley show today in which the topic is how the Democrats are failing everyone on Iraq because they are spineless and unfocused and in disarray and can't speak with one voice and have no leadership. I can't get enough of blaming Democrats for the mess the Republicans have made.

But, this is a doozy. I just heard David Limbaugh say the following in response to Arianna Huffington saying that there needs to be a bi-partisan Truman Commission to sort out how much of the 200 billion we've spent has been lost to graft and corruption:

"I just wish the left would stop focusing on all these scandals."

They. Are. The. Most. Shameless. Unself-aware. Obtuse. People. On. The. Planet.



.
digby 12/02/2005 09:24:00 AM |

 
Babes In Arms

by digby

I can't remember who it was, but somebody involved with the Open Robe Media project (thanks TBOGG) said that the reason they went with them is because Republicans know how to run a business. Heh. Kevin at Catch has all the latest on their troubles and links (via Juan Cole) to an impressive professional liberal news portal run by Robert Sheer. They must have kept their expensive launch party under wraps.



.
digby 12/02/2005 08:01:00 AM |

Thursday, December 01, 2005

 
Friends With Benefits

by digby

This Lincoln Group story is amazing. I have nothing to add to the substance that Laura Rozen and Billmon haven't already covered with great insight. Psyops is one of Rummy's favorite little hobbies. It's no surprise that he's been using it in every way he can get away with.

But I am interested in the fact that General Pace is on the record being against it saying "I would be concerned about anything that would be detrimental to the proper growth of democracy." This is the second time in two days that Pace is playing the straight arrow to Rummy's sleaze. Bob Fertik sent me an e-mail pointing out something interesting that I overlooked in that Pace-Rummy public disagreement the other day.


Here's the whole passage (and the video at C&L):

QUESTION: Sir, taking on his question a bit -- and I can give you actual examples from coalition forces who talked to me when I was over there about excesses of the Interior Ministry, the Ministry of Defense; and that is in dealing with prisoners or in arresting people and how they're treated after they're arrested -- what are the obligations and what are the rights of U.S. military over there in dealing with that?

Obviously, Iraq is a sovereign country now, but the United States is responsible for training and expects to turn over the security mission to them.

So, what is the U.S. obligation in addressing that, preventing that, and what can we do? And what are we doing?

RUMSFELD: That's a fair question. I'll start and, Pete, you may want to finish. But we are working very hard to train and equip the Iraqi security forces. So is NATO. So are some neighboring countries.

There are a lot of people involved in this, dozens of countries trying to help train these Iraqi forces. Any instance of inhumane behavior is obviously worrisome and harmful to them when that occurs. Iraq knows, of certain knowledge, that they need the support of the international community. And a good way to lose it is to make a practice of something that is inconsistent with the values of the international community.

RUMSFELD: And I think they know that.

He doesn't even know what he's saying, does he?

Now, you know, I can't go any farther in talking about it. Obviously, the United States does not have a responsibility when a sovereign country engages in something that they disapprove of. However, we do have a responsibility to say so and to make sure that the training is proper and to work with the sovereign officials so that they understand the damage that can be done to them in the event some of these allegations prove to be true.

QUESTION: And, General Pace, what guidance do you have for your military commanders over there as to what to do if -- like when General Horst found this Interior Ministry jail?

PACE: It is absolutely responsibility of every U.S. service member if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it. As an example of how to do it if you don't see it happening, but you're told about it, is exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago. There was a report from an Iraqi to a U.S. commander that there was a possibility of inhumane treatment in a particular facility. That U.S. commander got together with his Iraqi counterparts. They went together to the facility, found what they found, reported it to the Iraqi government, and the Iraqi government has taken ownership of that problem and is investigating it.

So they did exactly what they should have done.

RUMSFELD: I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it, it's to report it.

PACE: If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it.

QUESTION: Let me follow up. To what extent do you think these allegations of abuses by the Iraqi security forces, particularly some of the complaints and allegations from Sunni Iraqis that the largely Shia security forces are engaged in abuses, to what extent do you think that's an indicator that the Iraqi military, Iraqi security forces are not yet ready to assume control of the country?

RUMSFELD: Oh, I don't think it is. I mean, you're going to have allegations back and forth.

We were deeply concerned that there could be conflict among the various elements in that country after the end of major combat operations, and there hasn't been, and that's a good thing.

RUMSFELD: First of all, what we're doing is we're prejudging these remarks and allegations and reports. And I just can't do that. And what's going to happen is the Iraqi government is going to be formed after the December 15th election -- two weeks, whatever -- and it will be seated by the 31st of December...

QUESTION: So your sense is that these abuses are not a widespread problem that threaten the...

RUMSFELD: My sense is I don't know. And it's obviously something that one has to be attentive to. It's obviously something that General Casey and his troops are attentive to and have to be concerned about.

I am not going to be judging it from 4,000 miles away -- how many miles away?

Rummy quite clearly wants to deal with "reports" of "allegations back and forth" that can be "investigated" and then "more reports" can be issued saying that it was a bunch of "bad apples." Why mess with success?

He doesn't want American forces doing anything to stop abuses --- because he wants the Iraqis to do this dirty work. Why, if we play our cards right, we will have another friendly country willing to accept our illegal renditions and torture them for us! Maybe they'll even house a secret CIA prison or two. This nation building makes friends with benefits.

But, unlike that drooling sycophant Richard Myers, who slobbered all over Rummy like he was Elvis, Pace doesn't seem to be following the script. What's up with that?


Update: One other thing about the "blowback" aspect of the planted stories business. It's quite obvious that it's a Republican PR job because it's the same M.O. they used in the Clinton scandals. They planted lies or rumors in the much looser foreign tabloid press, who would then print it so that Drudge could link it and Cokie would report it because "it's out there." This "blowback" is just standard GOP psyops.



.
digby 12/01/2005 06:31:00 PM |

 
Tear Down That Wall

by digby

Here's a provocative post on immigration by Brad Plumer: The Case for Open Borders. Click through to all the links and you will find some very informative data. (I especially recommend this article by Daniel Drezner.) It's not a plan I'm necessarily endorsing, but it's a different way of looking at things. With problems this complicated and politically treacherous we need to be open to fresh thinking if only to question whether some of our assumptions are still valid.



.
digby 12/01/2005 06:28:00 PM |

 
Memory Hole

by digby

Jane is reporting that Rove's lawyer Luskin told Fitzgerald that "inveterate gossip" Viveca Novak told him that Rove was Matt Cooper's source, which sent him and Karl rummaging frantically through the e-mails to refresh Karl's sketchy memory. Apparently, it took them five months to find it, but whatever.

If Novak confesses that she did this, it certainly gives the lie to all this high minded posturing we've heard from all the journalists about their do or die committment to their promises of confidentiality. This little scenario requires that Cooper or his editor blabbed to Novak who then blabbed to Rove's lawyer! Oh Lord, bless the majesty of the First Amendment that guarantees Freedom of the Press and Anonymous Juicy Gossip.

I actually find it hard to believe that she really told Luskin this. I'm going to withhold judgment until she writes her story. (Check out Jeralyn for the explanation of the legal ramifications of Novak telling Luskin.)

I think that the NIH should be looking into something else right away, however. There seems to be some sort of terrible medical condition that's taking over Washington. Libby didn't remember Cheney telling him that Plame was CIA. Rove didn't remember telling Cooper. Woodward's source is reported to have forgotten that he told Woodward. Miller forgot that Libby told her and couldn't remember why she wrote down the name Plame. Pincus couldn't remember Woodward telling him about Plame. Woodward can't remember if he mentioned Plame to Libby. Mitchell doesn't remember what she had for lunch.

And of the people who could have looked through their notes or checked their phone logs or even rattled their memory once the shit hit the fan --- and it hit the fan within days or a week of hearing about all this --- none of them did. Here we had this huge brouhaha, with Joe Wilson talking about frog-marching and claiming that the administration had outed his wife to punish him, and none of these officials and journalists remembered that they had spoken to one another about the very subject that was under discussion. It was only years later when confronted with documentary proof, jail time or someone coming forward that they decided to search their records or think back, and in most cases it was just too late.

These are elite journalists and the highest government officials. And they all seem to have some sort of serious memory defect. This explains a lot about what has gone wrong in our political system.

What do you think? Lead? Mercury? Huffing Glue?




.
digby 12/01/2005 02:30:00 PM |

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

 
"Cultural Discomfort"

by digby


The New Republic and The LA Times this week both feature articles about the Minutemen of Herndon, Virginia. The TNR piece is framed as a cautionary tale for liberals who think that the Minutemen are out of the mainstream:

Bill explains that he "slid into the Minutemen" because he was disturbed by the way his neighborhood was changing, and the other Minutemen standing with him nod in agreement. "Dormitory-style homes" have popped up on their streets, Bill says, and the residents come and go at strange hours. Their neighbors' children are intimidated and no longer like to play outside, in part because "we've got about 17 cars coming and going from our neighbors' houses." Matt, another Minuteman who lives in nearby Manassas, claims that the police have busted prostitution rings operating out of nearby properties. Bill doesn't want his name printed, he tells me, because he worries about retaliation from the local Hispanic gang, MS-13. Pointing to the cluster of day-laborers across the street, he explains to me that the Herndon 7-11 is "a social gathering place, too." Taplin has publicly objected to a regulated day-laborer site set to open in Herndon on December 19--proposed in order to combat the trespassing, litter, and nuisance complaints that have arisen in conjunction with the informal 7-11 site--because he worries that even a regulated locale wouldn't change "their behaviors." Even on the coldest mornings, more than 50 workers often convene at the 7-11, and Bill judges that sometimes only 10 or 20 get hired. "When," he asks me, "is it ever a good thing for 40 men to hang out together?"

These anxieties may be overblown, in some cases borderline racist; but they are not, unfortunately, outside the mainstream. In Mount Pleasant, the predominantly Hispanic, rapidly gentrifying Washington neighborhood where I live, complaints have begun to surface about the groups of men that congregate on stoops or outside of convenience stores at night. Those who have complained call it loitering, but one Hispanic resident told the Post that when the men gather outdoors, "[t]hey're having coffee; they talk about issues. ... It's part of our community." For the neighborhood's Hispanic population, this practice is a cultural tradition; for its newer batch of hip, ostensibly liberal urbanites, it is disturbing, and too closely resembles something American law designates a crime.

These are people who would never admit they share anything in common with the Herndon Minutemen. But like it or not, the Minutemen are acting on anxieties many Americans share--anxieties about the challenge of enforcing the law in towns that are swelling in size due to immigration; anxieties about the challenge of integrating and accommodating an immigrant culture. Border states like California have been grappling with these issues for years, in court battles about day-laborer sites and debates over concepts like bilingual education. Often in these conflicts those who have presented cultural, as opposed to legal, objections to uncontrolled immigration are condemned as xenophobic or racist. But as my Mount Pleasant neighbors have shown, it can be tricky to disentangle legal from cultural discomfort.

Not really. People legally assembling in public is not criminal and this "cultural discomfort" is simple xenophobia. And just as xenophobes (and their close cousins, racists) did in the past, they couch their "cultural discomfort" in narrow interpretations of the law and property rights.

Notice that the neighborhood in question is a Hispanic neighborhood being gentrified. These complaints are coming from yuppies moving into neighborhoods where their "culture" isn't dominant. Who's the immigrant, anyway?

Rick Perlstein reminded me of this passage from Thomas Geoghegan's wonderful book "The Secret Lives of Citizens:"

It was Massey, again, who pointed it out to me. "Why in Chicago," he asked, "is there no anti-immigrant movement as there is in California?"

Because the white ethnics here have their own, uh, "mexicans," to protect. White European immigrants. The Romanians, Russians ... but above all, Poles. From Poland. Many Poles. Tens of thousands. So how can the whites here complain about the latinos? We've got our own illegals to hide.

That kind of clarifies things a little, doesn't it? The eastern Europeans are often highly skilled tradesmen, not day laborers like the Mexicans, who really do take high paying jobs away from citizens. It's a major issue in Europe and would be here too except for the fact that in the cities where large numbers of Poles and Russians overstay their visas and live here illegally, they are in the bosom of their well assimilated ethnic group. "Illegal immigration" is a much more complicated issue than it seems in our multi-ethnic culture.

The LA Times tells a similar story of Herndon and the Minutemen but had the added feature of the residents complaining about their property values being lowered while George Bush and the Republicans are catering to the Hispanic vote at their expense.

The retired social studies teacher said she got involved because houses in her neighborhood had become packed immigrant dormitories. She suspects that most tenants in the rooming houses, including the one next door, are illegal. She deals with roosters crowing and men urinating in the yard, loud parties and empty beer cans dumped outside. She fears it's driving down the value of her house.

"I'm angry," said the 60-year-old widow. She said the fight against illegal immigration was deeply personal and broadly political.

"George Bush is in it for the Hispanic vote, and we're on the receiving end," she said. "That's not fair. Before, everybody looked out for everybody else; no one locked doors," she said of her neighborhood. "Now we all have security systems."

Jeff Talley, 45, an airplane maintenance worker who lives across the street from Bonieskie, also joined the Minuteman chapter. "When you start messing with the value of people's houses, people get really upset," he said.

As Talley sees it, illegal immigrants take jobs from Americans  whom it would cost companies more to employ and that will have long-term effects on American society.

"There's a disappearing middle class," said Talley, a Republican. "George Bush is a huge disappointment to this country. The Republican Party used to be for ordinary people, but no more."

This is an old, old populist rant. The Republican moneyed elites are against the little guy --- and it's because of the immigrants.

The TNR article goes on to explain:

Our national debate on immigration tends to focus on economic issues, namely job loss, and scrupulously to avoid the kind of cultural anxieties that the Herndon Minutemen, the residents of Mount Pleasant, and Bill O'Reilly are bringing to the fore. After all, anxieties about how immigration will affect national culture seem like more of a European thing, springing from a deep-seated and distinctly un-American nativism and yielding byproducts like the headscarf dispute and Jean-Marie Le Pen. But on this side of the Atlantic, little Le Pens are beginning to flourish.

[...]

Only a few years ago, the European political establishment largely ignored concerns about an immigration wave overwhelmingly originating from one region--only to be stunned as fanatics rose to prominence by championing an issue that mainstream politicians had refused to touch. To prevent the same thing from happening here, liberals will have to recognize that immigration, often considered a "conservative" topic, is now a potent political issue. Concern is no longer confined to California, Arizona, and Texas; nor is it confined to Republicans. Liberals will need to make an affirmative case for immigration as a concept--but also concede that our current system is deeply flawed. They will have to acknowledge that many Americans have legitimate worries about immigration--but that there are better ways to approach the issue than skulking around day laborer sites with a camera. Wherever they come down on the issue, and whatever they propose, liberals will have to acknowledge that immigration is not a fringe concern. And telling the Minutemen to "go home" isn't going to make it go away.

Ok. But let's not bullshit ourselves while we are making our political argument about how to deal with this issue. This is not a uniquely European problem, for crying out loud. It's as American as McDonald's apple pie. We've been doing this shit for centuries --- and we do it to Mexicans pretty regularly because we share a border and there are always handy illegals to kick around when necessary. This is not new. It's a symptom of economic insecurity.

And the problem for these Minutemen and those liberal hipsters is not "cultural discomfort." There's are other, older, better words. Xenophobia. Nativism. Racism. The dark underbelly of populism.

I agree that this is a potent issue right now for reasons I set forth earlier. But please, no soft-peddling the reasons, at least in our own minds. No creating nice little code words for confused working class whites who are looking for easy scapegoats or narrow-minded urbanites to excuse their "discomfort" with law abiding people who are doing nothing more than legally assembling in public. Let's call a Mexican a Mexican and go from there.

I wrote a post some time back called Populism Tango, wherein I discussed the dangers in jumping into populism. It's a perfectly good, and often correct, political philosophy. But it does have this ugly tendency to scapegoat immigrants, blacks and ethnic minorities. In that post I quoted Democratic strategist Mudcat Saunders who has a lot of advice about how to attract those elusive white males:

"Bubba doesn'?t call them illegal immigrants. He calls them illegal aliens. If the Democrats put illegal aliens in their bait can, we're going to come home with a bunch of white males in the boat."

Why would that work?

[W]hat he is suggesting is a tried and true method to get rural white males to sign on to a political party. Bashing immigrants and elites at the same time has a long pedigree and it is the most efficient way to bag some of those pick-up truck guys who are voting against their economic self-interest....And that's because what you are really doing is playing to their prejudices and validating their tribal instinct that the reason for their economic problems is really the same reason for the cultural problems they already believe they have --- Aliens taking over Real America --- whether liberals, immigrants, blacks, commies, whoever.

That's a problem for us because no matter how tempting it might be to go and grab those Virginians who are so disenchanted with George Bush and promise to close the borders and solve their problems: nobody has yet figured out how (short of an economic catastrophe so huge that people will disregard everything else) we can keep a coalition of liberals, workers, urbanites, racial minorities and nativist immigrant bashers in the same tent.

Blaming the "culturally discomfitting" Mexicans during one of these periods of economic insecurity is a temptation for political strategists, I have no doubt. But today, it's playing with fire. There is a reason why Karl Rove has been handling this issue with kid gloves. It's not just the agriculture lobby, which could be persuaded to keep its powder dry for a period of time until the frenzy dies down (as it always does.) No, this time, there is a huge voter block at stake. They saw what happened in California when Pete Wilson let his id run free in an earlier period of economic insecurity and he ran ads saying "they just keep coming." He destroyed the Republican party in this state.

Demographics show that the Hispanic vote is essential for future majorities. Ruy Teixiera reported last August:

As two recent reports document, the Hispanic population of the United States continues to increase rapidly, especially in areas that we now think of as "solid red." The Pew Hispanic Center report describes and analyzes the extraordinary growth of the Hispanic population in six southern states, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, down to the county level. The Census report shows that Texas has now become a majority-minority state (joining New Mexico, California and Hawaii), primarily due to its burgeoning Hispanic population.

[...]

In this survey just completed, Hispanics had swung back to the Democrats with a vengeance, giving them a 32-point margin in a generic race for Congress (61 to 29 percent). The Republican vote today is 10 points below what Bush achieved just six months earlier. These voters are deeply dissatisfied with the Bush economy and Iraq war; they are socially tolerant and internationalist; they align with a Democratic Party that respects Hispanics and diversity, that uses government to help families, reduce poverty and create opportunity, and that will bring major change in education and health care. This is even truer for the growing younger population under 30, including Gen Y voters, who support the Democrats by a remarkable 46 points (70 to 24 percent).

The country is experiencing economic and social insecurity and as has always happened in the past at such times, the focus turns to immigration (illegal and legal) as a cause. But this time that same immigrant group (that has always been here, by the way) is a huge, growing voting block and a big prize for the political party that recognizes and respects it. People like Mudcat Saunders think that you can scapegoat the "illegal aliens" without any spillover into the large legal Hispanic community. But as we saw in that gentrifying neighborhood in Virginia, it isn't really about illegals per se. And California proved that if you go too far with the "illegal alien" business you lose the Hispanic population altogether.

Democrats can look to the future and find a populist message that doesn't cater to white fear and tendencies to scapegoat minorities. And we can add the Hispanic community permanently into our coalition, denying Karl Rove his most coveted goal. Or we can take the easy way out and catch a few Bubbas until the economy turns around, at which point they'll go right back home to the party that really knows how to feed their worst instincts on regular basis --- the Republicans.

And then of course, there's this: if we succumb to the temptation to re-marry the twin pillars of populism for the umpteenth time, economic resentment and nativism, we will not only continue to lose elections we will lose our souls as well.


Update: Alice in the comments points out that Herndon, the home of the militiamen in the two articles quoted above, voted decisively for Tim Kaine in the last election. It's not a mainstream as the authors would have people believe.


Update II: Greg at The Talent Show offers up some thoughtful advice on how to handle this.


.
digby 11/30/2005 02:38:00 PM |

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

 
Nice Tries

by digby



Josh Marshall is collecting "nice tries," which are the brownnosing, he said/she said statements by the media implying that all this nasty corruption business is a bi-partisan matter.

It's obvious that the "culture of corruption" charge is scaring the GOP because they've clearly put the hammer down on the media to portray the looming scandal tsunami as something "everybody does." This, of course, is utter bullshit. As Marshall says, it comes from the proximity to power and the Democrats are way out of that game.

All DC reporters know about the K Street Project:

[B]eginning with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and accelerating in 2001, when George W. Bush became president, the GOP has made a determined effort to undermine the bipartisan complexion of K Street. And Santorum's Tuesday meetings are a crucial part of that effort. Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican--a senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors. "The underlying theme was [to] place Republicans in key positions on K Street. Everybody taking part was a Republican and understood that was the purpose of what we were doing," says Rod Chandler, a retired congressman and lobbyist who has participated in the Santorum meetings. "It's been a very successful effort."

If today's GOP leaders put as much energy into shaping K Street as their predecessors did into selecting judges and executive-branch nominees, it's because lobbying jobs have become the foundation of a powerful new force in Washington politics: a Republican political machine. Like the urban Democratic machines of yore, this one is built upon patronage, contracts, and one-party rule. But unlike legendary Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, who rewarded party functionaries with jobs in the municipal bureaucracy, the GOP is building its machine outside government, among Washington's thousands of trade associations and corporate offices, their tens of thousands of employees, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in political money at their disposal.

Political machines are not unprecedented. Patrick Fitzgerald is dismantling both a Republican and Democratic one in Chicago as we speak. We've seen "heckuva-job-Brownies" before. We've seen politicians and business work together to rip off the taxpayers and cheat the little guy many times. We've seen greedy politicians before. But this current national GOP machine is unique in its blatant, in-your-face arrogance and the swiftness with which it descended into utter, all-out corruption such that even a Republican run Justice department cannnot ignore it.

As the Abramoff scandal unfolds, it's important to remember that Jack Abramoff is not just another lobbyist or even just another Republican. He and Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed all ran the college Republicans during the Reagan years. He is a "movement conservative" of the innermost circle of movement conservatives. This is not a fluke. It's endemic to the modern Republican party.

As for Marshall's collection, I would suggest that he check out the first 15 minutes of Hardball today. Tweety could hardly stop talking about how corruption is totally non-partisan in any way. Tony Blankley at least had the good graces to say that if he were a Democratic operative he'd be wearing a bib --- to catch the drool.

However, my winner of the day is from Wolf Blitzer's 'The Situation Room" today in which Bruce Morton went all the way back to the 70's Wilbur Wayne Hays and his mistress-on -the-payroll-who-couldn't-take-dictation, Elizabeth Ray, to demonstrate how corrupt the Democrats were. (The only corrupt Republicans mentioned in the piece were Cunningham and ... Gingrich, who it was claimed had to leave office in part because of his crooked book deal, which isn't actually true.)

The kicker was a poll showing that 63 percent of the public consider most Democratic representatives are honest compared to 57 percent who think that most Republican representatives are honest. Morton said that means it's a tie.



.
digby 11/29/2005 03:27:00 PM |

 
Dancing With The Mediawhores

by digby

In case anyone missed this funny, revealing piece on Mike Isikoff by John Amato of Crooks and Liars, check it out.

Woodward called Isikoff a Junkyard Dog reporter. But I don't think that's right. He's more of an Upskirt Dog. You know the kind.



.
digby 11/29/2005 03:08:00 PM |

 
Victory Strategy

by digby



Here's Bush today:

I'm giving a speech tomorrow that outlines the progress we're making in training Iraqis to provide security for their country. And we will make decisions about troop levels based upon the capacity of the Iraqis to take the fight to the enemy.

And I will make decisions on the level of troops, based upon the recommendations by the commanders on the ground. If they tell me we need more troops, we'll provide more troops. If they tell me we've got a sufficient level of troop, that'll be the level of troops. If they tell me that the Iraqis are ready to take more and more responsibility and that we'll be able to bring some Americans home, I will do that. It's their recommendation.

Secondly, we want to win. The whole objective is to achieve a victory against the terrorists. The terrorists have made it very clear that Iraq is the central front on the war on terror. See, they want us to leave before we've achieved our mission. You know why? Because they want a safe haven. They want to be able to plot and plan attacks.

This country must never forget the lessons of September the 11th, 2001. And a victory in Iraq will deny the terrorists their stated goal.

Finally, a democracy in Iraq, which is now emerging, will serve as a fantastic example for reformers and others. And as democracy takes hold in the broader Middle East, we can say we have done our duty and laid the foundation of peace for generations to come.

We should listen to what Bush is actually saying here because he lays it all out. Notice that he has to predicate everything on the idea that we are winning. (In the press conference he said it very emphatically: "secondly .... we wanna WIN) He deeply believes, for both political and ideological reasons, that winning is the only thing that matters.

Last night I heard Newt Gingrich throwing around the phrase "surrender to the terrorists" on O'Reilly. His successor as Speaker of the house, Dennis Hastert wrote earlier:

Murtha and the Democrats ''want us to retreat. They want us to wave the white flag of surrender to the terrorists of the world." And he said, ''We must not cower like European nations who are now fighting terrorists on their soil."

This is significant because Rove long ago convinced Bush that he can continue in Iraq as long as the American people think we are "winning." It tracks with his own belief in the bandwagon effect and it's backed up by some academics who have advised the White House that "staying the course" is possible as long as they handle the PR effectively.

In shaping their message, White House officials have drawn on the work of Duke University political scientists Peter D. Feaver and Christopher F. Gelpi, who have examined public opinion on Iraq and previous conflicts. Feaver, who served on the staff of the National Security Council in the early years of the Clinton administration, joined the Bush NSC staff about a month ago as special adviser for strategic planning and institutional reform.

Feaver and Gelpi categorized people on the basis of two questions: "Was the decision to go to war in Iraq right or wrong?" and "Can the United States ultimately win?" In their analysis, the key issue now is how people feel about the prospect of winning. They concluded that many of the questions asked in public opinion polls -- such as whether going to war was worth it and whether casualties are at an unacceptable level -- are far less relevant now in gauging public tolerance or patience for the road ahead than the question of whether people believe the war is winnable.

"The most important single factor in determining public support for a war is the perception that the mission will succeed," Gelpi said in an interview yesterday.

I suspect that Gingrich and Hastert's "surrender" talk is aimed at Bush as much as the Democrats, to keep him from going soft, but it's also setting the stage for the inevitable "who lost Iraq" argument down the line. Guys like Gingrich want to clearly be on the "never give up, never give in" team after the smoke has cleared so they can pretend they are brave warriors worthy of leadership. I think Bush actually believes this crapola, however. It fits his schoolboy vision of the way the world works.

Here's Bush in 2003:

The terrorists have a strategic goal. They want us to leave Iraq before our work is done. They want to shake the will of the civilized world. In the past, the terrorists have cited the examples of Beirut and Somalia, claiming that if you inflict harm on Americans, we will run from a challenge. In this, they are mistaken.

It's one of their more ridiculous beliefs and yet it is the foundation of neocon thinking about how to deal with terrorism. They honestly think that if we stay in Iraq that we will prove to the terrorists that we are tough ... and then they will not be able to attack us anymore. As unbelievable as it is, this simple-minded psychological diagnosis of the problem is one of the main reasons why we are stuck in this quagmire.

But Bush doesn't stop with that simple delusion. He also believes that he has been called to this battle by something much more important than the mere will of the American people. As Seymour Hersh writes in this week's New Yorker:

Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.

Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.

“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”

According to this report in the NY Daily News, Bush doesn't trust his advisors anymore. (Not even his wife, after all she failed him on the Miers debacle.) He's going to stick with the simple script that has him being chosen by God to lead this battle against evil. Hardliners are going to manipulate him with that by doing what Gingrich did last night --- characterizing a withdrawal as "surrendering to the terrorists."

What he is going to do is what many in the military have long wanted to do, which is revert to a greater reliance on air power. If anyone is succumbing to political pressure it's the wild-eyed Rummy whose management of the war has turned out to be a cock-up of epic proportions. We're going back to our tried and true: Bombing the shit out of anything that moves. From Hersh:

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

Now that's the nice, clean, surgical kind of war the American people like. No American casualties and fun pictures of buildings going "kaboom!" And it takes the pressure off of our near-broken Army. The Air Force may have problems with Iraqis using their air power to play out old grudges against non-combatants, but the American people can be successfully snowed on that one. The Iraqis will be standing up and we'll just be enforcing the conditions of our glorious victory.

“We’re not planning to diminish the war,” Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. Clawson’s views often mirror the thinking of the men and women around Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting—Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of airpower. The rule now is to commit Iraqi forces into combat only in places where they are sure to win. The pace of commitment, and withdrawal, depends on their success in the battlefield.”

That is what we call "winning." And we will keep plenty of troops on the ground and planes in the air for years to come to ensure that the war stays "won."



.
digby 11/29/2005 02:00:00 PM |

 
Call 911

by digby

PACE: It is absolutely responsibility of every U.S. service member if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it. As an example of how to do it if you don't see it happening, but you're told about it, is exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago. There was a report from an Iraqi to a U.S. commander that there was a possibility of inhumane treatment in a particular facility. That U.S. commander got together with his Iraqi counterparts. They went together to the facility, found what they found, reported it to the Iraqi government, and the Iraqi government has taken ownership of that problem and is investigating it.

So they did exactly what they should have done.

RUMSFELD: I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it, it's to report it.

PACE: If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it.

Does anyone have any further doubts about how out torture regime happened?



.
digby 11/29/2005 01:08:00 PM |

 
Luskin's Friendly Chat

by digby

Since Luskin supposedly unveiled some sort of exciting eleventh hour evidence that gave Fitzgerald so much pause I wondered if maybe Viveca Novak had been called to provide exculpatory evidence for Rove. (I would have thought that Fitzgerald would have moved a little quicker with that thrilling new angle, however, if it could have closed this investigation.)

The Washington Post article today says Novak and Luskin are personal friends and:

Unlike Cooper, Viveca Novak is not seeking to protect a confidential source and was not subpoenaed to testify.

Jane thinks that this is total crap and that Viveca Novak is being called for reasons other than Luskin's 11th hour pause giving "evidence":

If Luskin is dragging in Viveca Novak to substantiate something he said, then it seems likely Fitzgerald has some piece of evidence her testimony is intended to counter. Something within the timeframe must indicate that Rover wasn't being completely honest with either the FBI or the grand jury, and they hope to prove that if Luskin was out there selling his own client's special brand of bs then Fitzgerald should buy it, too.

Luskin has a history of playing reporters. He may very well be playing VandeHei here too (although VandeHei does report that another source says this Novak testimony has nothing to do with all this Luskin fluffing.)

The article says Novak will write a piece about her deposition, so we will soon find out what this is all about.

But this brings up a question I've long wondered about. Why in the hell did Rove hire Luskin in the first place? The article Jane references in the link above (from The New Republic) describes Luskin this way:

[S]coring Rove was a coup. Luskin is an unlikely choice for a Republican, let alone Rove. In fact, during the 1990s, a wide swath of the conservative movement spent a good chunk of its time trying to destroy his reputation. For the last ten years, Luskin has served as the in-house prosecutor for the Laborers' International Union, where he has been charged with fighting corruption. The right was miffed that the Clinton administration let the Laborers clean house on their own rather than under the tutelage of the Justice Department, as was done with the Teamsters. One gadfly conservative organization, the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), turned discrediting Luskin into its own personal crusade. They produced a highly unflattering 13-page report that set off a cascade of critical stories and editorials in the conservative press. Under the headline "Luskin's Ties to the New England/Patriarca Crime Family," the report documented a fishy episode wherein Luskin was forced to return $245,000 in legal fees that he received from a client named Stephen A. Saccoccia, who was sentenced to 660 years in prison for laundering South American drug-cartel and mob money. A U.S. attorney, accusing Luskin of "willful blindness," reasoned that, when Luskin started getting paid with solid gold bars (he ultimately received 45 of them, worth $505,125) and wire transfers from Swiss bank accounts, he should have known the payments were from illicit sources, especially since his client's crimes involved gold bars and wire transfers from Swiss bank accounts.

Many of the other anti-Luskin criticisms concerned alleged conflicts of interest stemming from his defense of several clients wrapped up in Clinton-related scandals. Luskin soon became a target of The Washington Times, Investor's Business Daily, The Weekly Standard, National Review, and The American Spectator, each arguing a version of the NLPC line that he was ethically unsuited for his job at the Laborers' Union.

But, by the end of the '90s, Luskin had established himself as a top-tier defense attorney. He abandoned his boutique law firm for the gilded hallways of Patton Boggs. Still, big-name Washington lawyers say he's not really part of the small clique of attorneys that seem to pop up during every investigation--people like Jacob Stein, Abbe Lowell, Plato Cacheris, Robert Bennett, and Reid Weingarten. "Let's just say that I haven't been in a case where he represented anyone," sniffs a member of Washington's legal royalty.

These political cases require very specialized legal experience. That's why clients usually hire from the small pool of attoprneys who know how to feed the beast, protect their client's reputation to the degree possible) and deal with special prosecutors who operate under different rules and restraints than the usual US Attorney. I've never understood why Rove, the man who said he wanted to "get" Wilson purely because he was a Democrat, hired this guy.

Any thoughts?



.
digby 11/29/2005 07:56:00 AM |

 
Better Stop Sobbin' Now

by digby


The Duke-stir has been a prick for years. He said that the liberal leaders of congress should be lined up and shot. He calls for the death penalty for drug dealers and then cries at his son's sentencing hearing for possession of 400 lbs of marijuana and asks for mercy because his son has a good heart. Here's how the conservative San Diego Tribune editorial board described him back in 1998:

Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Escondido, responded to a heckler at a San Diego forum on prostate cancer by gesturing toward him with his finger and declaring, “(expletive) you.” During his remarks at the weekend event, the congressman also described a rectal procedure he had received as “just not natural, unless maybe you’re Barney Frank,” a reference to the openly gay lawmaker from Massachusetts.

Cunningham later apologized, saying his actions were inappropriate for a member of Congress. He certainly got that right.

But this was not the first time Cunningham let his temper get the better of him.

In 1995, Capitol Hill police had to break up a scuffle between the San Diego County lawmaker and Rep. James Moran, D-Va. A year earlier, Cunningham challenged Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., to a physical confrontation on the House floor. On another occasion, he used the degrading term “homos” to describe gays in the armed forces.

As a four-term veteran of the House, Cunningham has exerted constructive leadership on important military and education issues. But his reputation for vulgar conduct — a reputation he seems intent on reinforcing at regular intervals, despite his own repeated apologies — is an embarrassment to San Diego.

And it turns out he was a thief, too. What a big surprise, what with him being such a great guy and all.

Cunningham is a typical loud mouthed bully who fairly represents the (large) angry white male faction of the Republican party. Like Limbaugh the criminal drug addict and DeLay the thieving crook, they think they are immune from laws they seek to inflict on the rest of the American people.

Good riddance.



.
digby 11/29/2005 07:31:00 AM |

Sunday, November 27, 2005

 
Clean Break

by digby


Mickey Kaus has been flogging his "scoop" about Libby calling up Russert to complain about Chris Matthews using the allegedly anti-semitic term "neocon." We would only know this for sure if Russert would reveal his conversation with Libby and he won't because he isn't a journalist, he's a talk show host. Just as Jay Leno wouldn't want to upset Jessica Simpson, Russert doesn't want to upset the White House.

Kaus brings up something interesting, however, to explain Libby's bone deep hatred for Wilson. (We know what Rove's reason was --- "he's a Democrat.") He writes:

What Wilson quote is most likely to have angered Libby? I'd nominate the following excerpt (again, via Maguire) from a discussion by Wilson at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center on June 14, 2003, about a month before Libby's call to Russert:

I think there are a number of issues at play; there's a number of competing agendas. One is the remaking of the map of the Middle East for Israeli security, and my fear is that when it becomes increasingly apparent that this was all done to make Sharon's life easier and that American soldiers are dying in order to make Sharon's life--enable Sharon to impose his terms upon the Palestinians that people will wonder why it is American boys and girls are dying for Israel and that will undercut a strategic relationship and a moral obligation that we've had towards Israel for 55 years. I think it's a terribly flawed strategy. [Emphasis added. Audio here at 13:33]

Kaus notes that there is no way of knowing if Libby had heard about this talk when he went over the edge on Wilson, but it's possible.

It reminds me that Wilson has long held that the administration's Iraq policy could most simply be explained by the "Clean Break" document which was written for the Netanyahu government in 1997. It's interesting to note how many of the current players were involved in that document:

Following is a report prepared by The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000." The main substantive ideas in this paper emerge from a discussion in which prominent opinion makers, including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser participated. The report, entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," is the framework for a series of follow-up reports on strategy.

If you haven't read that document, you should. It's amazing.



.
digby 11/27/2005 05:49:00 PM |

 
Mexamerica

It's clear that Bush is going to try to change the subject with a big push on the immigration issue. This article in TIME discusses the various pressures on both parties.

Having spent a good part of my almost 50 years in California, I have observed that the immigration issue is usually a sign of a weak economy or some other form of discontent. It's been around forever and rears its head every once in a while as people perceive a "crisis" and then it goes underground again.

It is not a partisan issue; many Democrats are very exercised about Mexican immigrants overrunning the borders and allegedly taking away jobs from Americans or at least holding wages below what they would otherwise be. On the other side are liberals who see a subtle and no so subtle racism in the border debate and feel that all this talk of cultural dissonence is a false construct. There are conflicting values of economics and human rights involved and it's confusing.

The Republican have a different set of divisive issues. TIME characterizes Bush's dilemma this way:

So far, he has not been able to bridge his party's business leaders, who need a steady supply of workers willing to do hard labor, and its cultural conservatives, who fear that something essential about the American character is vanishing under the crosscurrents of multilingualism and demographic change and ethnic pluralism.

This is clearly going to be an issue. Even up in Ohio, which I didn't know until recently has been a mexican migrant crop picking destination forever, is having a fit about illegal immigration and all the alleged problems associated with it.

My feeling is that this time we are dealing with displaced fear and frustrating impotence. The terrorist boogeyman has been fully internalized and people are afraid. But it is an ephemeral and distant enemy. Another brown hoarde is conveniently available. I think my theory is borne out by the right's increasing emphasis on the Mexican border being a national security threat and the sudden seriousness of Pat Buchanan's "fence" concept:

This latest fence proposal comes from an organization called Let Freedom Ring, and its WeNeedaFence.com project. It's funded by Dr. John Templeton, a generous supporter of a range of conservative causes.

Colin Hanna, the group's president, says we shouldn't be messing around with the flimsy and partial fences we've built so far. What's needed is a serious border fence, one modeled after what the Israelis are building on the West Bank.

What Hanna has in mind is a barrier consisting of a "pyramid" of rolls of barbed wire piled 6 to 8 feet high. Alongside it would run a deep ditch, followed by a fence, a security road, another fence, another ditch, and then another wire pyramid. Cameras and motion detectors would monitor the fence to create a formidable barrier 40 to 50 yards wide. The cost: $2 million to $4 million a mile, or $4 billion to $8 billion in total.

Hanna says his proposal is entirely consistent with President Bush's emerging proposal to legalize some illegal immigrants through a temporary guest-worker program. In fact, he says, it will complement it. Unless more illegal migrants can be kept out after Bush's guest-worker program is established, more will keep coming in. ''The fence is the sine qua non of immigration reform," Hanna argues. "If you don't have a secure border, all the rest is whistling in the wind.''

To promote his ideas, his group has lobbied on Capitol Hill and aired two television spots in the Washington area. One cites statistics of North Koreans and Iraqis crossing the Mexican border, and includes a clip of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center.

I'm also hearing a lot about rapes, animal mutilation and kidnapping along the border.

I understand the strong negative feelings that many Democratic populists have about illegal immigration. Disdaining the cheap immigrant labor the wealthy thrive on is an understandable populist impulse. I do hope, however, that Democrats give some long and serious thought to the underlying racist implications of some of this on the right ---- and understand the dangers of getting into bed with people whose real agenda has nothing to do with economics:

...the great migration north continues. Some 1.5 million are apprehended every year on our southern border breaking into the United States. Of the perhaps 500,000 who make it, one-third head for Mexifornia, where their claims on Medicaid, schools, courts, prisons, and welfare have tipped the Golden State toward bankruptcy and induced millions of native-born Americans to flee in the great exodus to Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Colorado. Ten years after NAFTA, Mexico's leading export to America is still--Mexicans. America is becoming Mexamerica.

Source: Where The Right Went Wrong, by Pat Buchanan, p.166 Sep 1, 2004

Mexifornia? How silly. The word "California" is spanish. So are "Los Angeles" and "San Francisco" and "Las Vegas" and "Santa Fe" and "San Antonio." This country has always been Mexamerica. Perhaps Pat doesn't know this being from Washington DC, but those of us from the border states don't find this "alien culture" alien at all. It's always been here. And, yes, there are plenty of people who have always hated it --- the same way that some white southerners are intimately familiar with black culture and hate it at the same time. But contrary to what Pat and some of the other "American culture" hysterics are trying to promote, this isn't new. It's been literally going on for centuries. And we've been having these panics about it every so often for centuries too.

We can argue about the degree of the immigration problem and about solutions. But we should remember that populism isn't only a leftwing ideology. It swings both ways as Pat Buchanan's racist right wing populism shows. Sadly, it's been most successful when it combined both elements. I hope that liberals don't find it "useful" to subtly play to some of these sentiments no matter how tempting it might be. We should be very thoughtful about this.

Update: Kevin Drum discusses the policy implications of the immigration debate. Sadly, I don't think this debate is really about policy. It's about the boogeyman.



.
digby 11/27/2005 12:39:00 PM |

 
It Ain't Over Rover

by digby

How odd. A new reporter is being subpoenaed in the Fitzgerald investigation and the press is actually reporting details about it. Shocking breach of DC etiquette, what what?

A second Time magazine reporter has been asked to testify in the
CIA leak case, this time about her discussions with Karl Rove's attorney, a sign that prosecutors are still exploring charges against the White House aide.

Viveca Novak, a reporter in Time's Washington bureau, is cooperating with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who is investigating the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity in 2003, the magazine reported in its Dec. 5 issue.

Novak specifically has been asked to testify under oath about conversations she had with Rove attorney Robert Luskin starting in May 2004, the magazine reported.

Novak, part of a team tracking the CIA case for Time, has written or contributed to articles quoting Luskin that characterized the nature of what was said between Rove and Matthew Cooper, the first Time reporter who testified in the case in July.

Luskin has talked a lot of trash from the get. It will be very interesting if his big mouth gets his client in trouble.

There is nothing about this on the TIME web-site but if the AP got it, I expect there will be. And I expect that Viveca Novak will write a story after her testimony. They seem to be catching on to the fact that while they may be inhibited from divulging the names of their anonymous sources, they have an obligation to find a way to report the substance of what they tell them. TIME's Matt Cooper set the standard for how a responsible journalist deals with this sticky wicket (even if his publisher was very mealy mouthed.) It can be done.



.
digby 11/27/2005 11:48:00 AM |

 
Clean Up The Mess

by digby


I've always thought that in order to really put a monkeywrench into the modern GOP's political machine it was important to take out prime movers Rove, Delay, Reed and Norquist. The CIA leak scandal has wounded (perhaps mortally) Karl Rove. Ronnie Earle has weakened Delay in preparation for the coup de grace Abramoff scandal that may just take down him, Reed, Norquist and a bunch of others in short shrift.

It doesn't mean that the machine will be irreparably broken, but it won't work as smoothly as it did with the original parts. Those men have unique gifts that they honed over a long period of time to create a very efficient political mechanism. It may not be that any one of them going down would make the difference, but all of them going down at virtually the same time certainly does.

They do not look good. Here's the latest on Grover:

The knives are falling all around him, but Grover Norquist -- antitax crusader, Republican lobbyist, and Weston native -- insists they won't fall on him.

A Norquist friend and former colleague, Jack Abramoff, is under criminal investigation for his lobbying activities, some of which involved the same Native American tribe on Norquist's client roster. The noose on Abramoff appeared to have tightened Monday when his former business partner, Michael Scanlon, agreed to cooperate with prosecutors after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to bribe public officials and to defraud Indian tribes.

At a breakfast meeting with reporters the next morning, Norquist behaved as if this was all nuisance background noise, as he mostly held forth on the state of the ongoing war between the political left and right.

Finally, when pressed on the investigations, he was curt and unapologetic. ''We worked with the Choctaw Indians. We did a book, and I was hoping to do more outreach with Native Americans," said Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform. ''Jack, I'm sure he advised the Choctaws. But the Choctaws worked with ATR and they're happy with ATR."

Last year, a Senate committee investigating allegations that Abramoff defrauded Indian tribes obtained e-mail traffic from ATR, but Norquist says he had not been contacted by government prosecutors in the Abramoff case. Now the conservative activist is on the warpath against Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who is leading the Senate investigation.

After ATR turned over its e-mails, Norquist charged, McCain tried to ''steal our donor list."

''He subpoenaed our donor records and we said no," Norquist said. ''He took a shot at me and it didn't work and it embarrassed him."

Norquist then accused McCain and Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, of discrimination by targeting lobbyists who worked for Native American tribes. Abramoff and his partners collected $82 million in fees from Indian tribes and their casinos over four years.

''The implication is that it's money laundering to raise money from Native Americans, and spend it," Norquist said.

. . . And senator's camp fires back

An early favorite in the 2008 presidential race, McCain is in a delicate position with political conservatives, who have held a grudge against him since he ran in 2000 against George W. Bush.

While McCain has been trying to smooth ruffled feathers on the right, his investigation into the Abramoff scandal, which he has called ''a complex and tangled web . . . a story alarming in its depth and breadth of potential wrongdoing," reinforces the bad blood with Norquist and his political allies. Apparently, McCain could not care less.

When we asked the senator's staff for a comment on Norquist's fusillade against McCain, his chief of staff, Mark Salter, had a lot to say. ''In Norquist's world, the truth is for suckers. And it's as pointless to respond to him as it would be to respond to some street-corner schizophrenic," Salter responded.

''There is nothing remotely accurate about his recollection of the committee's dealings with him," he added. ''Nor, obviously, is his charge of discrimination credible, considering that it is made against someone who has a long and well-known record of respect for the tribes by someone who excuses ripping them off."

Grover's natural instinct is to viciously counter-attack. It's what he does. McCain is having none of it and with a weakened political machine, McCain has much less to fear by ignoring them.

I do not want John McCain to be the next president. But I think that he might be if he keeps this up. His greatest appeal to crossover Dems and independents is that he isn't afraid of these assholes like Grover Norquist and Tom DeLay. When you hear George Will sniffing about the "criminalization of politics" over bribery scandals and leaking of classified information, when you see a guy like John Warner embarrasingly attempt to dance on the head of a pin as he did this morning on Press The Meat, defending the indefensible, McCain looks damned good. Even to regular Democrats whose fondest wish is to see these arrogant scumbags have to eat their words.

These scandals are dealing a major blow to the corrupt GOP political machine, which is an unalloyed good thing. But it would be a shame if John McCain were the one who benefitted from it. He's long cast himself as a crusading reformer and the time is ripe for one of those. The Dems ought not let themselves be left in the lurch on that message. Instead of the smarmy "together, we can do better," we ought to be shouting "once again, the Democratic party is called on to do the patriotic thing and clean up the mess the corrupt Republican party has made with its free lunch policies and taxpayer rip-offs."

If we don't say it, McCain will win on personality alone.



Update: I do agree that McCain will have a hard time getting past the Christian Right in the primaries, but I fear that a whole lot of independents (and some Democrats) will make up for it. If the machine is weakened, it will be more difficult for it to shut him down in states with open primaries and even those that aren't. I personally know Democrats who will register as Republicans to vote for him in the primary. Hardcore Dems like me will never vote for such a conservative politician, but to many people in this country, he is a very attractive candidate. I think he is, by far, our biggest political threat.

Update II: Laura Rozen discusses this NY Times article taking the temperature of the country on the Bush administration (decidely cold, frigid even) and the malaise among her Republican relatives. So far they can't think of a single soul to vote for, McCain being seen a disloyal to the party.

My relatives, on the other hand, are warming to the flyboy. It's a military thing. He served. He understands. He will beat the terrorists. Suddenly, Junior and Unka Dick's lack of military service is meaningful.

Oh, and John Kerry is still a lying, lily livered coward, just like all the Democrats who want to offer therapy to the French terrorists.


.
digby 11/27/2005 10:35:00 AM |

 
VI Day!!!!

by digby


Yea! President Bush has finally achieved consensus for his Iraq pull-out plan. It wasn't easy. Joseph Biden has tacitly admitted that the Bush administration has been right all along in its insistence that we pull out large numbers of troops in 2006.

As you know, Democrats have long been insisting that the US stay in Iraq indefinitely. It was only through the wise counsel and patient persuasion of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush that they were convinced that a timed withdrawal was the best way to go.

While it's great news that the Iraq war is over and done with (and the liberals can finally stop obsessing over it) it's going to take some work to get them to stop lobbying for more tax cuts and destroying social security. When are they going to get some responsibility and recognize that there is no free lunch?

At least the Bush administration finally got the liberals to let the poor Katrina victims keep a roof over their heads until after Christmas. Jeez, what Scrooges.




Update: The really neat thing about this is that Rove has decided that Joe Biden should be the 2008 Democratic nominee. Feel the magic.



.
digby 11/27/2005 07:37:00 AM |

Saturday, November 26, 2005

 
Taking On Woodward

by digby

I have taken a rather strong stand in this Plame case that the elite beltway reporters involved lost sight of their primary mission, which is to inform the public. I've even (unpopularly) criticised Tim Russert for not adequately explaining his involvement, even if Patrick Fitzgerald asked him not to. I don't think that reporters should not report things just because authorities ask them not to unless there is an immediate danger involved --- even if our friend the straight-shootin', Rove-killin' prosecutor requests it.

I'm glad to read a real, live credible investigative journalist make these points clearly and unambiguously. Sydney Schanberg writes:

He openly says that protecting his sources is his highest priority. Here's a response he gave to Howard Kurtz, media reporter for The Washington Post: "I apologized [to the executive editor, Leonard Downie] because I should have told him about this much sooner. I explained in detail that I was trying to protect my sources. That's Job No. 1 in a case like this. . . . I hunkered down. I'm in the habit of keeping secrets. I didn't want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed."

Again, something is missing. Reporters have lots of different thoughts and emotions when they come across an important story. In my life, and the lives of most reporters, "Job No. 1" is getting the story confirmed and into the paper quickly. Get it to the readers now, not two years from now, so they can assess it and act on it, if they choose. A second emotion: Get it to them before the competition gets wind of it.

I believe it's fair for a reasonable person, without being inside Woodward's head, to listen to his explanations and arrive at the notion that his main priorities are protecting his sources and protecting the exclusivity (and therefore marketability) of his next book. That wasn't true when he and Bernstein were prying open the Watergate story. He didn't have any book contracts then to muddle and infect the issue. In this instance, his explanations include no thoughts about writing an early story for his paper, no reservations about holding back information from the public.

No one is questioning Woodward's reporting skills or his intelligence. And I don't want to know the names of his sources. I believe in granting confidentiality when it's the only way to get a story out—and in going to jail if that's the consequence of refusing to identify a source or turn over notes. But when your modus operandi is to hold on to information instead of publishing it right away, then, in my opinion, you are not serving the public.

Yep. it wasn't just Woodward, it was all these guys, except for Cooper and Royce and Phelps who wrote in real time what they knew. Pincus and Kessler wrote some of what they knew, but at least they wrote something. Woodward, Miller, Russert, Mitchell and who knows how many others offered opinions, grilled others or sat on relevant information for years. I just don't see how that can be journalism.

Schanberg says something that I think is relevant to the Plame case, for you plamaniacs who are jonesing:

And also, in my experience, important conversations about important stories do not fade quite the way Woodward intimates they do when he says he doesn't recall whether Libby or Card brought up Wilson's wife. Reporters almost always remember such things.

This has bugged me from the first. Woodward doesn't remember if Libby or Card brought up Wilson's wife or if he brought it up with them. But that's not the problem. He does remember having "Joe Wilson's wife" written on a series of questions when he spoke to them. This is a huge gift to Libby's defense.

The indictment shows that Libby learned of and discussed Plame's identity from a bunch of people other than Woodward, so it doesn't change the fundamentals of the case. But they can put Woodward on the stand and grill him about whether he might have told Libby about Plame's wife and muddy the waters. If it can be believed that Woodward ever brought up Plame to Libby, it bolsters his "dazed and confused" defense.

I continue to wonder if Woodward didn't bring up his involvement just for that purpose.



.
digby 11/26/2005 03:25:00 PM |

 
An Observation From Highpockets

by digby

For reasons I don't fully understand, there is something about "leaders," especially self-appointed leaders, and most especially those who are drawn to intensive participation in organizations, that tends toward liberalism. We see this in politics all the time, of course: it is one thing to vote for conservatism, something else entirely to get it from our elected leaders.

All of which makes me especially thankful, this year, for democracy, limited government and free enterprise: the best measures yet devised to protect us from our leaders.

I'm seeing a lot of this lately. Movement conservatives are getting ready to write the history of this era as liberalism once again failing the people. Typically, the conservatives were screwed, as they always are. They must regroup and fight for conservatism, real conservatism, once again. Viva la revolucion!

There is no such thing as a bad conservative. "Conservative" is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces. Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals.

Get used to the hearing about how the Republicans failed because they weren't true conservatives. Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed by weak-minded souls who refuse to properly follow its tenets. It's a lot like communism that way.



.
digby 11/26/2005 02:43:00 PM |

 
Burning Witches

by digby

As regular readers know, I have been exercised about the fact that some people believe that torture is no longer taboo --- that we are normalizing the concept in our minds in anticipation of the government legalizing it. Some have called me shockingly naive for not knowing that we have always tortured and abused and that this is nothing new, but I think this misses my point. It is true that our nation has always engaged in bad acts, I am well aware of that. But this is something new. We have high level people in our government attempting to create a legal torture regime on the basis of a new constitutional finding that the executive branch is unfettered by the rule of law in a time of war --- our current "war" conveniently having no obvious end. For a long, long time now, if our government tortured and abused, it at least had the decency to hide it.

If you want proof that torture is still not publicly acceptable in our culture, you need look no farther than the 90-7 vote in the senate. A whole lot of big shots, including tough guy red-state Republicans, don't want to be associated with supporting torture. They know damned well that it is beyond the pale. (For now.)

If we allow this to become normalized, I don't think it will stop at suspected terrorists --- eventually people will ask why we should have all these laws and prohibitions in the case of non-terrorist, but equally heinous, crimes. How do you tell the family of a victim of a suspected gang killing that the suspected perpetrators have a right to lawyers and a right not to incriminate themselves? Is their pain less than the pain of terrorism victims? Why shouldn't these "worst of the worst" be tortured by the police or the FBI to find out what they know? After all, more people could die if they aren't forced to give up their home boys.

The reason that people do not demand this now is because we have long required a public adherence to the rule of law --- and we have instinctively understood that authorities sometimes make mistakes, are corrupt or inept. Due process is required to mitigate those human failings. Yet, innocent people are still caught up in the system even with all these processes. Imagine what would happen if we didn't have them?

Once you introduce torture into the equation, justified by the fact that these are people alleged to be "the worst of the worst" you are letting go of the idea that innocent people are sometimes incarcerated, and that it matters that we don't treat innocent people barbarously, even if we are inclined by primitive notions of revenge to treat guilty people that way. We know that non-terrorists have been caught up in the net and have been tortured and abused. Even more horrifyingly, we know that even innocent, mentally ill people have been tortured and abused. (I don't think you can go any lower than that --- maybe children, but they did that too.)

There are important moral and human rights arguments to be made against torture of anyone, guilty or innocent. I believe that it makes an entire society, an entire culture, immoral. But the most immoral act of all immoral acts is to torture an innocent person. And since nobody is omniscient, to torture a person with no due process, no right to confront accusers, no way of proving their innocence, it is guaranteed that we are doing this under our torture regime. As I said, we know that we are.

One might assume that there is no one on the planet who thinks that torturing innocent people is right. Certainly, it's going to be hard to find intelligent educated people who believe that it is a moral good to do so. But not impossible. As it turns out there is a moral argument for torturing innocent people:

From Orrin Judd:

You might want to go back and brush up on your history, witchcraft was quite popular, even within the Church, for an awfully long time. In fact, it's back today in the form of Wicca. In its denial of the basis of Western Civilization it is so transgressive that it deserved to be and was persecuted. People who deny there were witches because they don't like how the religious treated them are akin to the Left denying there were Communists because they don't like that Americans reviled them. Jews too were justifiably, though unnecessarily, persecuted for their beliefs and inability to conform to social norms. The great injustice was the persecution of the conversos in Spain, who were sincere converts to Christianity.

Of course, anti-Semitism only became exterminationist once you mixed in Darwinism and racial theory, by which it is necessary to kill any group outside your own discrete gene pool.

There are of course variations within any group, but folks conform to type more than less.

Posted by: oj at November 25, 2005 01:49 PM

I think he understands something I failed to understand about this argument. This isn't about terrorism. It isn't about national security. It isn't about the rule of law or enlightenment values. It's about conforming to social norms. That puts the whole thing in perspective, doesn't it? What I call "innocent" isn't innocent at all. Just being a practicing Muslim makes one guilty.

It's nice to know that we shouldn't be persecuting those who have converted to Christianity (or properly protestantised Islam, which translates into an embrace of Western Civilization.) The good news is that "protestantising" (forcing Western conformity on) the billion Muslims out there will be a cakewalk:

You can have a number of voices so long as everyone has just one hymnal. That's the essence of the protestantism that the End of History requires. It'll be easy enough to Reform Islam, just as we did Catholicism, Judaism, and the rest.

Posted by: oj at November 25, 2005 10:56 AM

And here I thought the whole "End of History" thing had been laughed out of town by the events of 9/11. Apparently History has only been postponed. Protestantism is still on the march, "reforming" witches and Muslims alike. And if it takes a little waterboarding or burning at the stake to get the job done, so be it. These people have to understand that we're going to end History one bloody non-conformist bastard at a time if we have to.

I have to hand it to Orin Judd. Like Ann Coulter, who's rhetoric is not nearly as elegant, he is at least willing to put his beliefs on the table and take responsibility for them. So was Ann, when she wrote:

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.

Like the Spanish inquisitors and Salem witch burners before us, we owe it to the world to continue to End History by torturing and persecuting those trangressive non-conformists who deny "the basis of Western Civilization" as necessary. Indeed, we can't help ourselves. It's our destiny.




But I have to say that Orrin is very mistaken to think that exterminationism only came into existence once Darwinism and racial theory emerged. As good Protestants, 'reformed" and unreformed Catholics and Jews know, that is something that has been going on for a very, very long time. Dig it:

1 Samuel 15

15:1 Samuel also said unto Saul, The LORD sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the LORD.

15:2 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt.

15:3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

15:4 And Saul gathered the people together, and numbered them in Telaim, two hundred thousand footmen, and ten thousand men of Judah.

15:5 And Saul came to a city of Amalek, and laid wait in the valley.

15:6 And Saul said unto the Kenites, Go, depart, get you down from among the Amalekites, lest I destroy you with them: for ye shewed kindness to all the children of Israel, when they came up out of Egypt. So the Kenites departed from among the Amalekites.

15:7 And Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt.

There's more. Saul spared the Amakalite king and some good sheep and oxen, sorely disappointing God. Samuel promptly kills them himself, on God's orders. Ain't nothin' new 'bout genocide. Sometimes it's God's work.


.
digby 11/26/2005 09:59:00 AM |

Friday, November 25, 2005

 
Priming The Pump For The Masters

by digby

Can we please put a merciful end to he "black friday" kabuki, in which retailers put out rediculous promotions to entice customers to stand in line for hours to "buy" things at below profit so they can report that sales are very brisk this year (only to find out that sales and profits were flat or down some time later?) All day long the news stations were interviewing shoppers in the malls and Wal-Marts as if they had made a trek to Lourdes for the cure and all the anchors dutifully reported that everyone was reporting huge crowds. They were even shilling for specific items, trying to "find" the next Tickle Me Elmo. It is mildly entertaining to watch idiots trample each other for a piece of useless junk, but I only need to see it once. 22 times was overkill.

Reporting that people are shopping is a blatant attempt to prime the pump for retailers. It's not a news story, it's advertising. The story is whether the sales were any greater than last year, or greater than expected or whatever. And they can't know that for at least a little while. This is a made up news story with even less substance than the Runaway Bride, who did, after all actually run away.



.
digby 11/25/2005 06:40:00 PM |

 
Mr Silver Lining

by digby

Hey everybody, welcome David Ignatius to planet earth:

The United States must begin to replenish this stock of support for America in the world. I would love to see the Bush administration take the lead, but its officials seem not to understand the problem. Even if they turned course, much of the world wouldn't believe them. Sadly, when President Bush eloquently evokes our values, the world seems to tune out.

No kidding. But that because the Cheney administration "understands" the problem to be that we aren't feared and loathed enough, not that we are feared and loathed too much. This is fundamental to understanding what they are doing. Bush is trotted out to spread Messianic platitudes about freedom to the red state rubes to make them feel all warm and toasty about our splendid little GWOT. But Cheney and Rummy and the rest of the cold war time warpers have no illusions or interest in being "understood" by anyone. They believe in the Friedman Doctrine:

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

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

It's awfully nice that the elite liberal pundits in this country are finally regaining their equilibrium after basking in the glow of that mighty bullhorn for the last four years but it's pretty useless now, as even Ignatius seems to realize when he prescribes this:

So this task falls instead to the American public. It's a job that involves traveling, sharing, living our values, encouraging our children to learn foreign languages and work and study abroad. In short, it means giving something back to the world.

Have you ever read a more irrelevant, starry-eyed piece of gooey treacle in your life? Oh yes you have, here:

Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn't so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn't be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn't provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.

Turn that frown upside down, sunshine. Civil war is a drag and all, but it isn't all bad! If Iraq can just learn to have patience over the next generation or two and Americans can learn a foreign language and give something back to the world, we can all come together and love one another ---- eventually. Probably. Oh sure, there will be a great deal of death and destruction in the meantime because our president "doesn't understand" the problem and turns everything he touches into chaos. But there's no need to be pessimistic. Go on a trip and buy some souvenirs.(Snowglobes really send a strong message of cultural understanding. Collectible spoons scream of shared sacrifice.) Oh yeah, and be sure to love yer neighbor like you'd like to be loved yerself. It's the key to persuading the world that we really aren't the loathesome, cruel, imperialistic freakshow they now think we are. Eventually.



.
digby 11/25/2005 05:32:00 PM |

 
Too Much W-ne

by digby

From Atlas Shrugs, centerfold of the Bathrobe Media Empire

G-d bless President Bush, holding himself out there for ridicule and vile hate so that we might be stay free. History will be kind to President Bush and hold him in the highest regard. He sees the future, he sees the realites, he sees the truth s we take so for granted.

Am-n



.
digby 11/25/2005 05:07:00 PM |

 
Getting The M.R.S.

by digby

What Kevin says. I don't know what to say about the LA Times op-ed page nowdays except, don't bother. Yesterday, we had Jonah's typically puerile blog post he calls it a column. (Some pouty mess about Dinos and Rinos running to the center. Maureen Dowd he ain't.)

Today, David Gelertner reveals that the reason why kids today are so career obsessed instead of learning for learning's sake is because rich, highly educated women used to get married and stay home with thier kids instead of working outside the home. (It's true. They did. They also drank. A lot. Usually because thier only choices in life were to marry some thick-headed moron like Gelertner or work for him as his low paid "office wife." )

There is one sense in which society has suffered by women having more opportunities, however. In the past, many of the smartest women in the country became teachers because they were not afforded opportunities to use their minds and skills in other fields. (Some very smart women also became nuns and ran big hospitals and schools, as well.) The public school system was probably the lucky recipient of some extraordinarily good teachers in greater numbers than we have today. After all, the schools could get some of the best minds in the country to work for low pay and no respect or chance of advancement. It was quite a good deal.
digby 11/25/2005 12:36:00 PM |

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

 
In Our Dreams

Yesterday on Matthews there was this little exchange between Tweety, Chuck Todd and Deborah Orrin:

ORIN: ... I think we are close to starting to pull troops out. Talk to people at the White House and the Pentagon, they feel the Iraqis really are stepping up. And some of them, if you want to be conspiracy theorists, think this was all a Democratic game so that when we announce after the elections in December, that they are a success and when we start pulling troops out, Democrats can say see, we are responsible. We did it.

MATTHEWS: You think they are that smart?

TODD: You're giving them a lot of credit.

In our dreams.

I think this withdrawal plan is the same phony drawdown that they've been talking about for the last year. They will do it to show "progress" before the 2006 election. but I'm with Atrios on this --- I don't think there's a chance in hell that George W. Cheney is going to allow himself to be portrayed "cutting and running" by anyone, and if bombs are still going off in Iraq that's exactly how it will look. The military is hurting and so it must lessen its presence and regroup. But we are not leaving there before 2008. From what I'm hearing today, they think the magic number is 100,000. troops. That means that we will have 99,999 troops there indefinitely. And they are going to keep getting blown up indefinitely.

I've written before about historian Bernard Lewis and his outsized influence on the thinking inside the Bush administration. He's the guy who persuaded the erstwhile hardliners that they were correct to be tough, macho and manly --- but they also needed to "democratize" the middle east. The arabs, you see, need our guidance, just as they've always needed somebody's guidance:

Bernard Lewis often tells audiences about an encounter he once had in Jordan. The Princeton University historian, author of more than 20 books on Islam and the Middle East, says he was chatting with Arab friends in Amman when one of them trotted out an argument familiar in that part of the world.

"We have time, we can wait," he quotes the Jordanian as saying. "We got rid of the Crusaders. We got rid of the Turks. We'll get rid of the Jews."

Hearing this claim "one too many times," Mr. Lewis says, he politely shot back, "Excuse me, but you've got your history wrong. The Turks got rid of the Crusaders. The British got rid of the Turks. The Jews got rid of the British. I wonder who is coming here next."

The vignette, recounted in the 87-year-old scholar's native British accent, always garners laughs. Yet he tells it to underscore a serious point. Most Islamic countries have failed miserably at modernizing their societies, he contends, beckoning outsiders -- this time, Americans -- to intervene.

Call it the Lewis Doctrine. Though never debated in Congress or sanctified by presidential decree, Mr. Lewis's diagnosis of the Muslim world's malaise, and his call for a U.S. military invasion to seed democracy in the Mideast, have helped define the boldest shift in U.S. foreign policy in 50 years. The occupation of Iraq is putting the doctrine to the test.

For much of the second half of the last century, America viewed the Mideast and the rest of the world through a prism shaped by George Kennan, author of the doctrine of "containment." In a celebrated 1947 article in Foreign Affairs focused on the Soviet Union, Mr. Kennan gave structure to U.S. policy in the Cold War. It placed the need to contain Soviet ambitions above all else.

Terrorism has replaced Moscow as the global foe. And now America, having outlasted the Soviets to become the sole superpower, no longer seeks to contain but to confront, defeat and transform. How successful it is at remolding Iraq and the rest of the Mideast could have a huge impact on what sort of superpower America will be for decades to come: bold and assertive -- or inward, defensive and cut off.

As mentor and informal adviser to some top U.S. officials, Mr. Lewis has helped coax the White House to shed decades of thinking about Arab regimes and the use of military power. Gone is the notion that U.S. policy in the oil-rich region should promote stability above all, even if it means taking tyrants as friends. Also gone is the corollary notion that fostering democratic values in these lands risks destabilizing them. Instead, the Lewis Doctrine says fostering Mideast democracy is not only wise but imperative.

After Sept. 11, 2001, as policy makers fretted urgently about how to understand and deal with the new enemy, Mr. Lewis helped provide an answer. If his prescription is right, the U.S. may be able to blunt terrorism and stabilize a region that, as the chief exporter of oil, powers the industrial world and underpins the U.S.-led economic order. If it's wrong, as his critics contend, America risks provoking sharper conflicts that spark more terrorism and undermine energy security.

After the terror attacks, White House staffers disagreed about how to frame the enemy, says David Frum, who was a speechwriter for President Bush. One group believed Muslim anger was all a misunderstanding -- that Muslims misperceived America as decadent and godless. Their solution: Launch a vast campaign to educate Muslims about America's true virtue. Much of that effort, widely belittled in the press and overseas, was quietly abandoned.

A faction led by political strategist Karl Rove believed soul-searching over "why Muslims hate us" was misplaced, Mr. Frum says. Mr. Rove summoned Mr. Lewis to address some White House staffers, military aides and staff members of the National Security Council. The historian recited the modern failures of Arab and Muslim societies and argued that anti-Americanism stemmed from their own inadequacies, not America's. Mr. Lewis also met privately with Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Mr. Frum says he soon noticed Mr. Bush carrying a marked-up article by Mr. Lewis among his briefing papers. A White House spokesman declined to comment.

Says Mr. Frum: "Bernard comes with a very powerful explanation for why 9/11 happened. Once you understand it, the policy presents itself afterward."

[...]

"The question people are asking is why they hate us. That's the wrong question," said Mr. Lewis on C-SPAN shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. "In a sense, they've been hating us for centuries, and it's very natural that they should. You have this millennial rivalry between two world religions, and now, from their point of view, the wrong one seems to be winning."

He continued: "More generally ... you can't be rich, strong, successful and loved, particularly by those who are not rich, not strong and not successful. So the hatred is something almost axiomatic. The question which we should be asking is why do they neither fear nor respect us?"

For Mr. Lewis and officials influenced by his thinking, instilling respect or at least fear through force is essential for America's security. In this formulation, the current era of American dominance, sometimes called "Pax Americana," echoes elements of Pax Britannica, imposed by the British Empire Mr. Lewis served as a young intelligence officer after graduate school.

[...]


Eight days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with the Pentagon still smoldering, Mr. Lewis addressed the U.S. Defense Policy Board. Mr. Lewis and a friend, Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi -- now a member of the interim Iraqi Governing Council -- argued for a military takeover of Iraq to avert still-worse terrorism in the future, says Mr. Perle, who then headed the policy board.

A few months later, in a private dinner with Dick Cheney at the vice president's residence, Mr. Lewis explained why he was cautiously optimistic the U.S. could gradually build democracy in Iraq, say others who attended. Mr. Lewis also held forth on the dangers of appearing weak in the Muslim world, a lesson Mr. Cheney apparently took to heart. Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press" just before the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Cheney said: "I firmly believe, along with men like Bernard Lewis, who is one of the great students of that part of the world, that strong, firm U.S. response to terror and to threats to the United States would go a long way, frankly, toward calming things in that part of the world."

The Lewis Doctrine, in effect, had become U.S. policy.

Do we have any reason on earth to believe that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsefeld and George W. Bush are prepared to abandon this thinking?

Let's give them at least some credit for sincerity on one thing. They honestly believe that we have been perceived as weak by the rest of the world. They've always thought this. This isn't a political calculation, they really believe it. They went into iraq with the idea that they had to show those hinky arabs that we are not going to be pushed around. When they say that everyone from Nixon on down behaved like cowards, they really mean it. This is their world view.

Norman Podhoretz even characterizes their god Reagan this way:

Having cut and run in Lebanon in October, Reagan again remained passive in December, when the American embassy in Kuwait was bombed. Nor did he hit back when, hard upon the withdrawal of the American Marines from Beirut, the CIA station chief there, William Buckley, was kidnapped by Hizbullah and then murdered. Buckley was the fourth American to be kidnapped in Beirut, and many more suffered the same fate between 1982 and 1992 (though not all died or were killed in captivity.

It is a deep article of faith that the reason we were hit on 9/11 is because we failed to respond to the terrorists and others . Therefore, we must make them respect and fear us by being violent and dominating.

I am of the opinion that alienating our allies, exposing ourselves as having an intelligence community that can't find water if they fall out of a boat and then screwing up Iraq in spectacular fashion, we have destroyed our mystique and have made this country less safe. We were much better off speaking softly and carrying the big stick than flailing around like a wounded, impotent Giant.

I see no reason to believe that these people see that. They believe that to "cut and run" is the equivalent of emasculating this country and that is what puts us at risk. George W. Bush is not bugging out.



Up on the podium, Mr. Lewis lambasted the belief of some Mideast experts at the State Department and elsewhere that Arabs weren't ready for democracy -- that a "friendly tyrant" was the best the U.S. could hope for in Iraq. "That policy," he quipped, "is called 'pro-Arab.' "

Others, like himself, believe Iraqis are heirs to a great civilization, one fully capable, "with some guidance," of democratic rule, he said. "That policy," he added with a rueful smile, "is called 'imperialism.' "



.
digby 11/23/2005 04:48:00 PM |

 
I See Marty's Underpants

by digby


I get these neat little e-mails from Marty Peretz at the New Republic telling me that I should read this or that article in the magazine (and subscribe, of course.) It's always amusing how "he" chooses to frame certain arguments. Here's one that cracks me up:

The first of these is a long piece (with a dejected Napoleon on the cover) by Paul Berman, the author of Terror and Liberalism, the prize-winning book of two years ago, relating France's xenophobia towards America to its historic arrogance about France as the perfect model for everyone, including its Arab and African immigrants.

And here I thought all this talk about Freedom Fries and "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" showed America's xenophobia toward France. And then there is our vaunted "exceptionalism" in which we are forcibly exporting our perfect model for everyone as if we are high priests anointed by the God of Democracy. (And also, of course, because we are so good and they're so evil.) And call me crazy, but it seems to me that I've heard an awful lot, my whole life, about the damn immigrants (legal and illegal) who refuse to learn English. Damn that liberal multiculturalism all to hell.

I guess I just have never understood why conservatives hate France so much. It's the most American country in Europe. Only with really good food, good wine and liberal attitudes toward sex. It's a lot like San Francisco.

Ahhhhh.



.
digby 11/23/2005 10:45:00 AM |

 
Of Course It's True

by digby

I was busy yesterday so I didn't get to comment on the amazing story that Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera headquarters. I think what surprised me the most is that anyone thinks that it might not true. Of course, it's true.

Juan Cole leads us through the evidence, the most compelling being that he blew the shit out of two other Al Jazeera offices!:

The US military bombed the Kabul offices of Aljazeera in mid-November, 2001.

The US military hit the Aljazeerah offices in Baghdad on the 9th of April, 2004, not so long before Bush's conversation with Blair. That attack killed journalist Tarek Ayoub, who had a 3 year old daughter. He had said earlier, "We've told the Pentagon where all our offices are in Iraq and hung giant banners outside them saying `TV.''' Given what we now know about Bush's intentions, that may have been a mistake.

When the US and the UN shoe-horned old-time CIA asset Iyad Allawi into power as transitional prime minister, he promptly banned Aljazeera in Iraq. The channel still did fair reporting on Iraq, finding ways of buying video film and doing enlightening telephone interviews.

Having blown up two Al Jazeera offices and having his puppet shutting down remaining operations in Iraq, I have to say that I think the onus is on Bush to prove that he didn't want to blow up the Al Jazeera headquarters in Qater. Fool me once, won't get fooled again and all that.

One of these days, journalists are going to have to face the fact that they are considered by the Cheney admnistration to be "fair game" in the GWOT. And it isn't just the hostile Arab press. The Republicans have made it quite clear that anyone who implies that the Americans are on the wrong track or are behaving in less than gallant ways, are traitors.


This little t-shirt pitch encapsulates the beliefs of many on the right, I'm afraid:

The Marine who killed the wounded insurgent in Fallujah deserves our praise and admiration. In a split second decision, he acted valiantly.

On the otherhand, Kevin Sites of NBC is a traitor. Beheading civilians, booby-trapped bodies, suicide bombers?? Sorry hippie, American lives come first. Terrorists don't deserve the benefit of the doubt. This Marine deserves a medal and Kevin Sites, you deserve a punch in the mouth.

Via Atrios and Steve Clemons, I see that Frank Cakewalk actually uses the phrase "fair game" in reference to al Jazeera:

Gaffney: We're talking about a news organization, so called, that is promoting bin Laden, that is promoting Zawahiri, that is promoting Zarqawi, that is promoting beheadings, that is promoting suicide bombers, that is other ways enabling the propaganda aspects of this war to be fought by our enemies, and I think that puts it squarely in the target category.

Whether the best way to do it is with bombs or through other means is something we could discuss, but I think it's fair game, under these circumstances, given the way it conducts itself.

These "moral clarity" guys really take my breath away.


.
digby 11/23/2005 09:21:00 AM |

 
Walking In Each Other's Shoes

by digby

I hear that Jean Schmidt is unrepentant this morning, saying, "There's no way that I remotely tried to impugn his character" speaking of her remarks about John Murtha.

This is a very important principle for her. After all, just a couple of months ago, Schmidt said this in her first remarks before the House:

(Mrs. SCHMIDT asked and was given permission to address the House for 1
minute.)


Mrs. SCHMIDT. Mr. Speaker, I stand here today in the same shoes, though with a slightly higher heel, as thousands of Members who have taken the same oath before me. I am mindful of what is expected of me both by this hallowed institution and the hundreds of thousands of Americans I am blessed to represent. I am the lowest-ranking Member of this body, the very bottom rung of the ladder; and I am privileged to hold that title.

This House has much work to do. On that we can all agree. We will not always agree on the details of that work. Honorable people can certainly agree to disagree. However, here today I accept a second oath. I pledge to walk in the shoes of my colleagues and refrain from name-calling or the questioning of character. It is easy to quickly sink to the lowest form of political debate. Harsh words often lead to headlines, but walking this path is not a victimless crime. This great House pays the price.

So at this moment, I begin my tenure in this Chamber, uncertain of what history will say of my tenure here. I come here green with only a desire to make our great country even greater. We have much work to do. In that spirit, I pledge to each of you that any disagreements we may have are just that and no more. Walking in each other's shoes takes effort and pause; however, it is my sincere hope that I never lose the patience to view each of you as human beings first, God's creatures, and foremost. I deeply appreciate this opportunity to serve with each of you. I very much look forward to getting to know you better, and I humbly thank you, Mr. Speaker, for allowing me to address this humble body.

She still feels that way, which is why she's willing to endure all "the
hateful words" being said about her for her innocent remarks about cowards cutting and running.

Does anyone know of any studies done on the effects of long term self-bullshitting victimization? Do their minds fracture at some point? Does that explain Dick Cheney?



.
digby 11/23/2005 08:24:00 AM |

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?



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.




.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.


.
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.



.
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.)


.
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?



.
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.



.
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.






.
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.


.
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



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.


.
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.''

.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.


.
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.




.
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.


.
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.



.
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 pa