As seen from Just Above Sunset

Friday, 28 April 2006

A Friday Flurry: Could It Be That We're Now Living in the Only Banana Republic Armed with Nuclear Weapons?
Topic: Couldn't be so...

A Friday Flurry: Could It Be That We're Now Living in the Only Banana Republic Armed with Nuclear Weapons?

Are we living in the only banana republic armed with nuclear weapons? More on the specifics of that below.

But just what was the state of play as the week ended? At six in the evening on Friday, April 28th, out here on Los Angeles (three in the morning Saturday in Paris and early afternoon Saturday in Baghdad and Tehran) in the other room the television, on mute, was showing, for the fourth of fifth time this week, The Hunt for Red October. Harriet-the-Cat was watching. At one point in that film the Lithuanian-born soviet sub captain, played by Sean Connery in Scottish-accented English and Russian, peers through the periscope, sees the periscope of the American sub chasing him and barks out "mark this bearing."

So mark this bearing.

Note that the end of the week there was this, as the business with Iran came to a head -

The United Nations' atomic monitoring agency reported Friday that Iran continues to expand its uranium enrichment technology and to hold back information that would allow inspectors to determine whether a covert military nuclear program exists.

The report by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran is conducting an enrichment program in defiance of U.N. Security Council demands to halt it. Agency inspectors who visited Iranian sites observed construction of additional centrifuges for expanding uranium enrichment operations, the report said.

Agency inspectors found no "undeclared nuclear material in Iran," the report said. But it added that because of information gaps, "including the role of the military in Iran's nuclear program, the agency is unable to make progress in its efforts to provide assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran."

The report gives the United States and other Western countries ammunition to convene a debate in the U.N. Security Council next week on possible sanctions or other international pressures against Iran. Within minutes of the report becoming public late Friday afternoon Europe time, British officials urged such a debate.

... Members of the U.N. Security Council are divided on how best to persuade Tehran to back off from its nuclear program. The United States, France and Britain have been seeking international support for possible sanctions. But, China and Russia, which both have veto power on the council and strong trade ties to Iran, are advocating less provocative diplomatic channels.

This is not good. The IAEA reported back that they just cannot say if Iran is working on someday making nuclear weapons. Iran is holding back key information, just as they said they would, in reaction to all the not so subtle threats we made through third parties (we certainly won't talk with them). And it appears the UN will be useless here, as Russian and China, two members of the Permanent Security Council, don't much want severe action.

Earlier in the day, our UN ambassador, John Bolton, the man who made a career out of saying the UN was useless and should be abolished, and who the Senate would not confirm to this UN post, was on television saying this Iran was a grave danger, and hinting we might have to bomb the crap out of Iran to slow their nuclear program if the UN turned out to be as useless as he has always said it was. Yeah, yeah, the self-fulfilling prophecy and all that. Secretary of State Rice was saying the UN just had to do something about this, hinting that if the UN didn't we would. The president was making statements that now the diplomacy would really begin, by which he seemed to mean other people's diplomacy and certainly not ours - we're the nation that stands back while other nations try diplomacy, telling them it never works but they should probably try, while making comments on how hopeless diplomacy usually is, and when it doesn't work we say "told you so." Then we use our tool of choice, our military. It's very curious.

But Friday was the day things came to head. It'll eventually be the diplomacy of the "lesser nations" - the ones forced by their powerlessness to rely on diplomacy - that resolves this, or the military of the world's one remaining superpower, or hyper-power as the French would put it. That is unless everyone agrees that over there - what the heck - Israel, Pakistan, India and soon Saudi Arabia have the bomb. And to the north Russian has the bomb. Let Iran go for it. What difference does it make now?

And as for the hyper-power business, note this - al-Qaida Leader Sees 'Broken' U.S. in Iraq - "Hundreds of suicide bombings in Iraq have 'broken the back' of the U.S. military, al-Qaida's No. 2 said in a video posted Saturday - the latest in a series of messages from the terror network."

That's the third in a week. Last weekend it was Osama himself saying he didn't much like our "Zionist-crusader war on Islam" and urging militants to fight in Sudan too, and calling for attacks on civilians in the west, as they elected those waging "war on Islam." Tuesday it was the man who is "al Qaeda in Iraq" - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - dismissing Iraq's new government as an American "stooge" and calling it a "poisoned dagger" in the heart of the Muslim world. Now Osama bin Laden's Dick Cheney is saying this here hyper-power is basically broken.

Our Dick Cheney will no doubt say these three messages just prove how desperate al Qaeda is, and say they are proof we're winning "big time." Or maybe he already has said that. If he hasn't he will. He always does.

It hardy matters. It's just talk.

As for what else came to a head as the odd week ended, there was this, a story out of Chicago that hit the New York Times Friday but finally ended up where it should, in Saturday's International Herald Tribune (Paris) -

The City Council has voted to make Chicago the first city in the United States to outlaw the sale of foie gras, the fatty livers of geese and ducks that many consider a delicacy but that animal rights advocates describe as a product of inhumane treatment.

The ban, adopted Wednesday on a vote of 48 to 1, makes "food dispensing establishments" - restaurants and retail stores - subject to a fine of $500 for selling foie gras. The ordinance, which takes effect in 90 days, will be enforced by means of citizen complaints, said Joe Moore, the alderman who sponsored it.

Many in the restaurant industry said the ban would have little effect on business, but they condemned it as an unwarranted intrusion by city officials.

"Government shouldn't be dictating what we eat," said Rick Tramonto, executive chef at a French restaurant, Tru. "It's just not right."

... Mayor Richard Daley was not enthusiastic.

"We have children getting killed by gang leaders and dope dealers," Daley said in an interview with The Chicago Sun-Times. "We have real issues here in this city. And we're dealing with foie gras? Let's get some priorities."

Richard Daley has a point, and his frustration mirrors the national mixing of the minor with the major - at the end of the week the possibility of the United States launching a pre-emptive war on a nation that might one day be a threat and starting a major regional war in the Middle East was given less press coverage than the business with the lacrosse players at Duke (went there for graduate school so no comment) and the outrage that someone had recorded a version of the National Anthem in Spanish (the president said that was just wrong and Howard Dean said on MSNBC that he didn't care what language anyone sang it in, as it seemed actually kind of a patriotic thing.

The other big story that wasn't was this first reported in a Bradenton Florida newspaper -

Rush Limbaugh was arrested Friday on prescription drug charges, law enforcement officials said.

Limbaugh turned himself in to authorities on a warrant issued by the State Attorney's Office, said Teri Barbera, a spokeswoman for the State Attorney's Office.

The conservative radio commentator came into the jail at about 4 p.m. with his attorney Roy Black and bonded out an hour later on a $3,000 bail, Barbera said.

The warrant was for fraud to conceal information to obtain prescription, Barbera said.

But it wasn't what it seemed, as the Associated Press reported here -

In response to media and other inquiries, Roy Black, Rush Limbaugh's attorney, released the following statement today concerning a settlement agreement with the Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office to end the investigation of Mr. Limbaugh:

"I am pleased to announce that the State Attorney's Office and Mr. Limbaugh have reached an agreement whereby a single count charge of doctor shopping filed today by the State Attorney will be dismissed in 18 months. As a primary condition of the dismissal, Mr. Limbaugh must continue to seek treatment from the doctor he has seen for the past two and one half years. This is the same doctor under whose care Mr. Limbaugh has remained free of his addiction without relapse.

"Mr. Limbaugh and I have maintained from the start that there was no doctor shopping, and we continue to hold this position. Accordingly, we filed today with the Court a plea of 'Not Guilty' to the charge filed by the State.

"As part of this agreement, Mr. Limbaugh also has agreed to make a $30,000 payment to the State of Florida to defray the public cost of the investigation. The agreement also provides that he must refrain from violating the law during this 18 months, must pay $30 per month for the cost of "supervision" and comply with other similar provisions of the agreement.

There was no arrest. This was a plea deal in an old case that no one wanted to pursue. Charges will be dismissed in eighteen months. And it's much better than a deferred judgment which requires a guilty plea, as one attorney noted. The mug shot, all over the web, and the court appearance, were just administrative crap. False alarm. The voice of conservative talk radio was just tying up some loose ends.

The real arrests of interest as the week ended were reported here -

WASHINGTON, April 28 (Reuters) - Five members of the U.S. Congress were arrested on Friday at a demonstration held at the Sudan embassy to protest atrocities in that country's Darfur region, congressional aides said.

The lawmakers, all Democrats, were Reps. Tom Lantos of California, James McGovern and John Oliver of Massachusetts, James Moran of Virginia, and Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, aides to McGovern and Lantos said.

Now that's cool. It's not every day five members of congress are arrested for disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly. Actually, that may be a first. Want to see video footage of the arrests? That's here (QuickTime) or here (Windows Media).

But of course these congress folks aren't very photogenic. As someone once said, Washington is Hollywood for ugly people. The day before, as noted in the Los Angeles Times entertainment section here, the superstar George Clooney (and his elderly retired newsman father Nick), just back from Chad (as close as you can get Darfur in western Sudan these days) the day before held a press conference with the wildly conservative Oklahoma senator Sam Brownback and the rising progress-liberal star of the Senate, Barack Obama of Illinois. The basically said preventing genocide is not exactly a partisan issue - and this clearly is genocide as the Sudanese government bombs the folks they want out of the western Sudan and then the semi-official militias move in, kill all the men and children and rape the women. Those who escape to the west end up in Chad, without food and shelter, dying there. We're talking hundreds of thousand of people here, and, as above, Osama bin Laden is calling for all Muslims to drop by and help the Sudanese government get rid of the "wrong Muslims" there, and their non-Muslim friends.

There's not a lot of ambiguity here. Even our president has said this is genocide, and thinks maybe NATO or someone should do something about it, maybe even the totally useless UN.

The Times quotes Clooney suggesting maybe more people should know just what's going on, and do something, even if it's just sending blankets and food - "There's no right or left, there is no conservative or liberal point of view. There is only right or wrong." He was all over the airwaves at the end of the week, CNN, MSNBC, and even Fox News, where Sheppard Smith solemnly agreed with him.

Yeah, well, it's always more complicated, as noted here -

The reflexive new comment to make about Darfur is "what better way to tick off Osama bin Laden?" now that he has linked support for the Sudanese government to fighting the United States. The reality is sadder and more complex - while a moral person has no choice but to proactively engage the only declared genocide of the century, America is forced to consider what effect any action in the Middle East will have on the war on terror. The tragedy (upon Tragedy) is that Osama's latest tape should be a gift to us. What better propaganda opportunity for the United States than to show the wholesale slaughter of - Muslims - to the Muslim World (Arab and elsewhere) and ask who they stand with? Isn't that exactly what "the Enemy" does with images from the Palestinian occupation? If we had that Radio/TV Free Middle East we were promised, Darfur would make for a great campaign, but the Administration values intelligence ties with Sudan and relations with Sudan's protectors in the Arab league more than the thought of a direct appeal to the "Arab Street."

Thus we talk about how someone should do something. But it won't be us, no matter how many congressmen are arrested at demonstrations, or who shows up from Hollywood.

Besides, the president has other issues on his plate, specifically the record high price of gasoline. Yeah, so he started a war in Iraq that took a good chunk of the world's supply of oil off the market for more than three years, just when demand in China and India was exploding. Oops. Prices rose. It's a supply and demand thing. But he has a solution - Friday he announced he wants congress to give him the power to set mileage standards for American cars, bypassing any laws they pass and whatever the Transportation Administration says, or the Environmental Protection Agency, or anyone else at all. He said he alone should be "the decider" and said he'd use the power "wisely" - you could trust him. Congress may respond next week. It's a test. The response will weed out the traitors to him in his own party, and let him know, and the idea settles in with the resulting news stories, if the polls are all wrong and people still really do trust him.

That should be interesting.

You should trust him and his supporters? Maybe, but the same day there was this - Congresswoman Jean Schmidt of Ohio, down Cincinnati way, the woman who, on the House floor, called a decorated war veteran and military insider a coward for suggesting there might be better ways to get things done in Iraq, was reprimanded by the Ohio Elections Commission for padding her resume. Severely. She said she had two college degrees when she had only one, a violation of campaign law, and they mentioned a long series of other deceptions and distortions. They were one step away from suggesting she be sent to jail. Oops.

Ah well, the Vietnam War fighter pilot president would never mislead people like that. Schmidt was never a fighter pilot.

And the Schmidt story is a minor thing, and has at its core stuff about college degrees. Boring, boring, boring. What we need is a story about sex!

And glory be, we got one! And it was all over the web as the week ended.

Oddly, it first surfaced in the Wall Street Journal here, but then everyone knows the Wall Street Journal is a first rate and objective newspaper, with a whacky right-wing editorial page.

The item -

Federal prosecutors are investigating whether two contractors implicated in the bribery of former Rep. Randall "Duke" Cunningham supplied him with prostitutes and free use of a limousine and hotel suites, pursuing evidence that could broaden their long-running inquiry.

Besides scrutinizing the prostitution scheme for evidence that might implicate contractor Brent Wilkes, investigators are focusing on whether any other members of Congress, or their staffs, may also have used the same free services, though it isn't clear whether investigators have turned up anything to implicate others.

Cool. And that was followed a short item in Harpers here -

The two defense contractors who allegedly bribed Cunningham, said the Journal, were Brent Wilkes, the founder of ADCS Inc., and Mitchell Wade, the founder of MZM Inc.; both firms profited greatly from their connections with Cunningham. The Journal also suggested that other lawmakers might be implicated. I've learned from a well-connected source that those under intense scrutiny by the FBI are current and former lawmakers on Defense and Intelligence committees - including one person who now holds a powerful intelligence post. I've also been able to learn the name of the limousine service that was used to ferry the guests and other attendees to the parties: Shirlington Limousine and Transportation of Arlington, Virginia. Wilkes, I've learned, even hired Shirlington as his personal limousine service.

It gets even more interesting: the man who has been identified as the CEO of Shirlington has a 62-page rap sheet (I recently obtained a copy) that runs from at least 1979 through 1989 and lists charges of petit larceny, robbery, receiving stolen goods, assault, and more. Curiously - or perhaps not so curiously given the company's connections - Shirlington Limousine is also a Department of Homeland Security contractor; according to the Washington Post, last fall it won a $21.2 million contract for shuttle services and transportation support. (I tried to contact Shirlington but was unable to get past their answering service.)

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

Juicy stuff, and everyone thinks the person "who now holds a powerful intelligence post" is Poster Goss, the current CIA director, who was a Florida congressman back then, head of the house intelligence committee. Amd the kicker is all this took place at the Watergate complex. Watergate? Amusing.

But the San Diego Tribune owns the story, and note this -

Last night on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, Dean Calbreath of the San Diego Union Tribune - which recently won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Cunningham case - said that "as many as a half a dozen" members of Congress could ultimately be implicated in the prostitution scandal.

This is so much more fun than a strange, butter woman from southern Ohio lying on her résumé.

Then it gets positively Byzantine, as the San Diego paper adds this -

People who were present at the games said one of the regular players was Kyle Dustin "Dusty" Foggo, who has been Wilkes' best friend since the two attended junior high school in Chula Vista in the late 1960s. In October, Foggo was named the CIA's executive director - the agency's third-highest position.

Now this Foggo fellow has come up in these pages before - from March 5th see Getting the Details Wrong, and the Concept - and he certainly has a great name.

The key comment? Bill Montgomery here -

As long as it's only a contracting scandal (with the added fillips of sex and spies) this really isn't much more than a surreal variation on standard operating procedure in Jack Abramoff's Washington - even if the call girl angle does get the cable news juices flowing (so to speak.)

But it's at least possible that the intersection of sex, money and official secrecy will turn this story into something much more special. Who knows? Depending on how high the guest list goes for Wilkes's poker-and-prostitution soirées, this might even become the redneck equivalent of the Christine Keeler affair.

... It's only an educated guess - but also a reasonable one, given that Brent Wilkes and Mitchell Wade, the two contractors involved, were maneuvering to stick their dicks in the intelligence community's contracting honeypot as well as the Pentagon's. Goss's previous jobs as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and vice chairman of the low-key but powerful House Rules Committee (which controls the flow of legislation to the floor) obviously would have made him an extremely attractive piece of bowel material to a couple of intestinal parasites like Wilkes and Wade.

But Porter Goss, head of the CIA, involved in all this? Maybe. Maybe not. As in this -

On the other hand, Goss has a lot of enemies, including just about the entire career staff at the CIA, which he has been industriously purging of suspected Democrats at the behest of his White House masters. (If Porter ever turns up dead, the suspect list is going to include half of the McLean, Va. phone book and most of the world's professional assassins.) So who knows? Maybe it's just ex-spook disinformation - like the bit about the couple of dozen senior White House aides who were supposed to be indicted in the Plame case last October.

... OK, I know I'm getting carried away here. But this is really creepy stuff - and only contributes to the impression I sometimes have that we're now living in the only banana republic armed with nuclear weapons. (Or, as I've also been known to call it, North Argentina.)

I mean, we've got political purges underway in the organs of state security; a one-party legislature run by guys who write their names above the urinals at expensive K Street restaurants ("For a good time, call Duke") and - according to Harper's - limo services tied to call girl rings pulling down multi-million dollar contracts with the Department of Homeland Security, which itself sounds like a name dreamed up for the movie Brazil.

Forget Fellini, even Terry Gilliam couldn't do this justice.

Who knows what's going on? But note here - the reporter calls Goss' office at the CIA and gets a denial. He was not involved in any of this.

But what's this about this being the only banana republic armed with nuclear weapons?

Well, there's Glenn Greenwald here -

Over the last five years, our country has been gradually though incessantly changing in fundamental and radical ways. The things we see and hear our government doing are squarely at odds with how we perceive of ourselves as a nation and the values which Americans, by definition, universally embrace. We have watched while this administration imprisoned U.S. citizens on U.S. soil and claimed the right to keep them there indefinitely with no trial, no charges and no access to lawyers; routinely used torture as an interrogation tool; created secret gulags in former Soviet Eastern European prisons in order to detain people beyond the reach of the law or monitoring; and eavesdropped on American citizens, on U.S. soil, without warrants or oversight of any kind in patent violation of a 28-year-old law which makes warrantless eavesdropping on Americans a criminal offense.

Those scandals have received their fair share of attention, but this critical point has not: all of those scandals stem from the fact that we have a president who, expressly and out in the open, claims that he has the power to act in the broadly defined area of national security (which includes measures taken against American citizens on U.S. soil) without any "interference" from anyone - including Congress, the courts, and even the law. In sum, we are radically changing our system of government, and, in the process, have transformed ourselves from a country that, for decades, was widely respected as a restrained and principled superpower into an amoral, highly militaristic and aggressive state which is widely feared and despised.

... The president's approval rating didn't plummet from 60% to 33% because "liberals" changed their minds. That has happened because people who were open to standing behind the president -and who, for several years, did support him and his policies - have changed their minds about his competence, his likeability, his trustworthiness, and the overall wisdom of his world-view. That is an extraordinary shift. The group of people who believe that the Bush presidency is a failure extends far beyond "the Left" and includes virtually every group on every point on the political spectrum.

George Bush isn't just an unpopular president. He is close to reaching historic levels of disapproval. Richard Nixon's approval rating at the time he resigned his office after two years of the Watergate scandal was 25% - only 8 points below the lowly level to which Bush has tumbled. As is clear, the vast majority of Americans believe that the Bush presidency has taken us down a very ill-advised and destructive path and attempts to explore how and why that happened - and what can be done about it - are naturally going to find a receptive audience.

Well, Greenwald's new book was number one on the Amazon bestseller list, three weeks before its publication date, as the week ended. It seems a good number of people just don't want to live in a sort of banana republic with an insecure braggart tin-pot dictator in charge. Maybe it's nostalgia, for what we think we once were, and may actually have been.

And feeding the nostalgia is the old rocker from the late sixties and seventies, Neil Young, who started his career when he met the guys who formed Buffalo Springfield one block down the street at Sunset and Laurel Avenue, a block east of where the Garden of Allah complex once stood, the bungalows of the stars they tore down to build a strip mall and Joni Mitchell sang about in "they tore paradise down and put up a parking lot" (they really did). Joni Mitchell used to live just up the hill in Laurel Canyon. So did Neil Young, and he's back, with a new album and a hot single - "Let's Impeach the President." You can listen to the single here or the whole album, "Living With War" here. It's free. It's a sixties thing.

We will, of course, have a new president in a few years, and maybe Hillary Clinton, but note what Eric Rauchway says here -

If the lineup of our Presidents were to read Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton, that in itself would suggest that our republic is broken. I know, only old Catonians like me find it troubling that we'd evidently like to hand the Constitution over to two feudin' clans. But it's flat not right.

Yep, it's banana republic stuff. But that's what we have. But you can also think of it as the Hatfield-McCoy model, and we get to choose which hillbilly dolt we dislike a bit less than the other at the moment.

And the banana republic stuff rolls on, as Matthew Yglesias notes here -

This article on revised Congressional Research Service estimates of spending on the Iraq War is pretty dull until the end, but then it starts to get interesting. The report apparently contains such phrases as "These factors, however, are not enough to explain a 50-percent increase of over $20 billion in operating costs" and "These reasons are not sufficient, however, to explain the level of increases." Relatedly, the Post reports that "Of the total war spending, the CRS analysis found $4 billion that could not be tracked. It did identify $2.5 billion diverted from other spending authorizations in 2001 and 2002 to prepare for the invasion." I'm fairly sure you're not allowed to "divert" money from other spending authorizations, and you're certainly not supposed to lose $4 billion in untrackable spending. Nor does it sound entirely appropriate for the Pentagon to be running its operation in such a way that the CRS can't discern the causes of 50 percent spending increases. All the sort of thing a real congress would hold some hearings on, and, once again, I won't be holding my breath.

I'm fairly sure you're not allowed to "divert" money from other spending authorizations? That doesn't take much research. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution: No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.

There's some secret stuff going on, or some good parties. Yglesias says "back in olden times when we still cared what the Constitution said, Bush could clearly be impeached for this." Those would be the Neil Young days. He's back, but maybe times have moved on. We'll see how the album does, and the single.

Things are different now, as in this from Texas -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That'd be a good guess. On the other hand, maybe they were just "blowing off steam" and this is no big deal, as that's what the man with the drug issues, Rush Limbaugh, said here about what happened at Abu Ghraib - just having a little fun.

The banana republic thing may be a bit of stretch, but things sure have changed.

Posted by Alan at 23:18 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 28 April 2006 23:34 PDT home

Thursday, 27 April 2006

Truth and Authenticity: More on the Power of Narrative
Topic: Reality-Based Woes

Truth and Authenticity: More on the Power of Narrative

As mentioned elsewhere in passing, will people, angry over the high price of gasoline these days, put two and two together and figure out that if you go to war with a major oil producing country you take maybe thirty percent of the world's oil out of production for a time, and in this case the time has stretched to over three years. That might make for tight supplies and, as a result, high prices. World demand is high and the insurgents keep blowing up the pipelines in Iraq, and making the rebuilding of the refineries and ports damned hard - and the contactor doing that work, the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg-Brown-Root, is charging the government a fortune and not much is getting done, given the security problems.

The Iraqis were supposed to greet us as liberators and we'd be out in six months, as Rumsfeld said, with Ahmed Chalabi running the place for us, as Cheney had arranged, with Chalabi's old University of Chicago buddies Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. But what should have happened just didn't happen.

So, if people start to think about the crude removed from the market, as the result of "the long war," as they're now calling it, and see the enormous profits from Exxon-Mobile and the rest, and think about the president and vice president coming from the oil industry... this could be trouble. Who to blame for paying a hundred dollars to fill up the SUV? The guys who started the war, or at least these same guys who gambled it would be six months and out, with our Chalabi in charge there.

Blame the war?

Well, the administration has another view. It's not the war. It's Bill Clinton's fault, or at the fault of the environmentalists he seemed to like, and Clinton's vice president, Gore, writing books on global warming, and now with that new film (see this discussion). These were the folks, Democrats and global warming chicken-little types, who opposed opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling a decade ago. That's what the president say here, without naming Clinton or Gore directly. But the implication is there.

It's another "it's not my fault" argument, of course. And the Clinton-Gore administration is still wonderfully useful - "How can you blame us when they did that?" That actually does seem to almost always work. It must be that Clinton fellow, or his oh-so-earnest sidekick, Al Gore. After Clinton got caught with his pants actually down, and fudged his response to the nation and the courts, it only seems fair to most people to think there may be something to what the Bush-Cheney administration claims. Clinton must be at the root of the problem, whatever the problem is. It's sort of ingrained in the national myth that explains everything.

Do you question conventional wisdom, what everyone understands to be so? As Josh Marshall finds here, someone was dumb enough to do that. It seems a reporter cornered Al Hubbard, the director of the president's National Economic Council, and Keith Hennessey, deputy assistant to the president for economic policy, and asked about the oil thing. What about it? Would the oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) have offset the oil we cannot seem to get from Iraq at the moment?

The transcript is here -

Reporter: The president made the point that had ANWR been approved ten years ago, you'd get about a million barrels a day. Had the Iraq production resumed to the level that had been projected before the war, how much would that contribute today?

Hubbard: I actually don't know the precise answer to that. What's really most important, though, is that we've become less reliable on overseas sources of crude oil and other sources of energy, and more reliant on energy from within our 50 states ...

Reporter: You have no estimate, though, about what Iraqi production could be?

Hubbard: I do not have it.

Hennessey: We can get back to you.

Hubbard: Yes, we can get back to you with that.

Reporter: That would be useful. I mean, just - obviously, since the president has chosen one interesting example in ANWR, the Iraq one would be an interesting one to compare it to, whether that would be more or less than a billion - a million a day.

Hubbard: Yes, we will have to get back to you on that.

They never expected anyone would put two and two together and ask. They just didn't expect the question.

Tim Grieve here helps out, but not in a nice way -

Iraq's prewar oil production has been estimated at somewhere between 2.6 million and 3 million barrels per day. In July 2003 - which is to say, two months after Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq - the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Iraqi Oil Ministry together set goals of getting production back up to 2.5 million barrels per day by the end of March 2004 and up to 3 million barrels per day by December 2004. But Iraq's oil production averaged just 2 million barrels a day in 2004, USA Today says, and by August 2005, it had dropped to 1.86 million barrels per day. By this February, the Times of London says, production had dropped further, to just 1.5 million barrels a day.

So to answer the question: If you assume that Iraq was producing 2.6 million barrels of oil per day before the war started, then it appears that production has dropped by 1.1 million barrels per day since then. If you assume that Iraq was producing 3 million barrels per day before the war, then it appears production has dropped by 1.5 million barrels per day. In either case, the daily oil production lost to the war exceeds that which the president says would have been gained from drilling in the ANWR.

Oh. Facts. They're awful things.

Luckily for the administration, the American public doesn't much like facts. We like a good narrative and what feels right - that "gut feeling," our instincts. That's why we elected a "I go with my gut" president who doesn't much care for detail. He's one of us.

So the facts don't matter much. Of course Grieve lays out some others. Our death toll in Iraq is approaching two thousand four hundred, and a new report from the Congressional Research Service estimates that if Congress approves the supplemental spending bill now before it, a total of three hundred twenty billion dollars will have been appropriated for the war, so far. And the Congressional Research Service looks at the Pentagon's "burn rate" of about six and half billion a month, so you see where this is going. And of there's the other study suggesting that the total cost of the war, including the long-term care that will be required for its veterans, could reach around two trillion dollars.

But that's beside the point. People don't think about such things when you're talking about the grand narrative of the noble good guys (us) fighting pure evil (them). They're just facts.

But some facts do intrude. And that messes things up. Thursday, April 27, filling the twenty-gallon of your Ford here in Los Angeles would cost you about sixty-five dollars, and next week will be higher, and every week after that. When you have to drive a lot of miles a week, as you do in Los Angeles and so many other places, sixty-five dollars means a lot more to you than this two trillion dollars, or the forty grand every man woman and child will carry as their share of the national debt for the next three or four generations. The sixty-five dollars is kind of immediate. The other figures are for policy wonks and eggheads.

But the senate Republicans have the answer, with this - "Most American taxpayers would get $100 rebate checks to offset the pain of higher pump prices for gasoline, under an amendment Senate Republicans hope to bring to a vote Thursday... 'Our plan would give taxpayers a hundred dollar gas tax holiday rebate check to help ease the pain that they're feeling at the pump,' Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist announced Thursday."

Right. In another two weeks that's about one tank of gas.

Note this from Kevin Drum in the Washington Monthly -

It's bad economics, bad policy, bad optics, and the palpable stink of election-year desperation all rolled into one fetid package. But at least it's means tested!

Frist said the rebates would go to single taxpayers making less than $125,000 per year, and couples making less than $150,000.

Whew. For a minute there I thought they were just being frivolous about this. But as long as Bill Gates doesn't get a rebate check, sign me up.

Yeah, right. Drum can be sarcastic if he wishes, but it is an attempt to recapture the narrative, and a pretty good one. A check in the mail is something you can cash, It's real, not this two trillion dollars for the war, or the forty grand every man woman and child will carry as their share of the national debt for the next three or four generations. You can take it to the bank. It's not abstract. And it "feels" good.

Just don't think about the more than three years of war taking all that Iraqi crude off the market, creating scarcity in a time of high demand here and new demand from China and India, driving prices up. Economists think about those kinds of things, as do Democrats. Ordinary folks think of the check in the mail buying one more tank of gas.

And Thursday, April 27, brought another tussle for control of the national narrative with this -

Hurricane Katrina turned FEMA into a "symbol of a bumbling bureaucracy" so far beyond repair that it should be scrapped, senators said Thursday. They called for creation of a new disaster relief agency as the next storm season looms on the horizon.

The push to replace the beleaguered agency was the top recommendation of a hefty Senate inquiry that concluded that top officials from New Orleans to Washington failed to adequately prepare for and respond to the deadly storm, despite weather forecasts predicting its path through the Gulf Coast.

Well, symbols matter, and no one likes a "symbol of a bumbling bureaucracy."

Drum again here - "This is truly remarkable. FEMA was a fine organization for eight years under Bill Clinton, widely recognized as one of the best run agencies in the federal government. But after a mere five years of George Bush's stewardship there's now a bipartisan consensus that it's so rundown that the only choice is to get rid of it and build a completely new agency in its place. Astonishing."

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

It is part of the Reagan narrative - government is bad, and there should be less of it, and private for-profit enterprise is good, and there should be more of that. Carol's long rant, from which that one snippet is quoted, notes the same thing happened with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and so many other government functions. Wreck them and then point to the wreckage as proof that government is not the answer to anything. It's a pretty neat trick. And it advances the Reagan narrative. Very clever.

And there's the other narrative that's getting a lot of play these days. That would be the "man of the people" narrative - some public figures are just "straight shooters" and flat-out authentic.

This had been built up around George Bush, the plain-spoken uncomplicated cowboy-type who likes to clear brush on his Texas ranch, even if he was born in Connecticut, went to Yale, got his Harvard MBA, and the ranch dates from 1999 when he bought the spread from a pig farmer just before the first election. Yeah, he did spend lots of years in Texas in his twenties and thirties, so he must really be an authentic Texan.

John McCain is another riding the same wave, the narrative that has him as a "straight shooter" war hero, even if what he shoots is often inconsistent and muddled. He was a hero, no question about that, given all those years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, so when he says something pandering or befuddling, it must be us. It's the power of the narrative. The narrative trumps logic and facts.

The third example of a rider on the same wave came up in the New Republic profile of Senator George Allen of Virginia, who may very well be the Republican candidate for president in the 2008 elections. This profile, released Thursday, April 27, but from the May 8 issue of the magazine, by Ryan Lizza, is here, but you have to be a paying subscriber to read beyond the first paragraph that opens with this - "Senator George Allen is the only person in Virginia who wears cowboy boots."

Ah, another Texan, except he grew up out here in Palos Verdes Estates while his father was with the Los Angeles Rams, and his mother is French -

In Palos Verdes, an exclusive cliffside community, he lived in a palatial home with sweeping views of downtown Los Angeles and the Santa Monica basin. It had handmade Italian tiles and staircases that his eccentric mother, Etty, designed to match those in the Louvre. "It looks like a French château," says Linda Hurt Germany, a high school classmate.

... While there, [Allen] became obsessed with the supposed authenticity of rural life - or at least what he imagined it to be from episodes of "Hee Haw," his favorite TV show, or family vacations in Mexico, where he rode horses. Perhaps because of his peripatetic childhood, the South's deeply rooted culture attracted him.

... Whatever it was, Allen got his first pair of those now-iconic cowboy boots from one of his father's players on the Rams who received them as a promotional freebie. He also learned to dip from his dad's players. At school, he started to wear an Australian bush hat, complete with a dangling chin strap and the left brim snapped up. He wore the hat for a yearbook photo of the falconry club. His favorite record was Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison.

And we learn about lots of things - his red mustang he drove to the local high school with its confederate license plate on the front, the white-supremacist racial pranks, the senior photo where he wear a confederate flag pin, the confederate flags in his office now, and the little noose hanging in a potted plant there, reminding everyone he was one of the ones who voted against the senate statement apologizing for all the blacks who had been lynched in the south form the end of the Civil War to the late forties. Charming. He's a good ol' boy, from Palos Verdes. His friends and classmates found him creepy, and not very bright.

And now, in Virginia? Try this, from a recent political rally -

As the scrum breaks up, Allen turns away and spits a long brown streak of saliva into the dirt, just missing one of his constituents, a carefully put-together, blonde, ponytailed woman approaching the senator for an autograph. She stops in her tracks and stares with disgust at the bubbly tobacco juice that almost landed on her feet. Without missing a beat, Allen's communications director, John Reid, reassures her: "That's just authenticity!" It's a word they use a lot it the Allen world - "authenticity."

And there you have it. The rich red-neck wannabe from one of the most exclusive communities in La-La Land struts his stuff.

What does an actual Southerner say? Ed Kilgore here -

As a native southerner, I find this weird and a bit troubling. Personally, I have all sorts of issues with the Confederate Flag and the whole self-destructive cult of the Lost Cause. But I do understand its appeal to people who have grown up saturated in southern culture; I may sometimes consider them SOBs, but they are my SOBs. The idea of young, incredibly privileged, golden-boy-quarterback George Allen of California choosing to embrace southern shibboleths at the precise moment, in the late 1960s, when they were most associated with atavistic racial attitudes, bothers me a lot.

No Texans say that of Bush.

Other views? Ezra Klein here -

Potentially worse, Allen comes off as a garden variety of sadist, a high school bully and vandal who hurled his brother through a glass door when he wanted to stay up past his bedtime, cracked another brother's collarbone for the same offense, and so tormented his youngest sister that she wrote a memoir packed with instances of his cruelty and thuggishness. It's grotesque stuff, and considering the perpetrator is being seriously considered as the chief executive and primary symbol of our country, Lizza's article is a definite must-read.

But to read it you need a subscription, until May when you can read the hard copy. On the other hand there are big chucks of excerpts here, where Digby at Hullabaloo fills in the details.

And he adds this -

George W. Bush has proven that being a phony southerner is better than not being a southerner at all. Indeed, a phony southerner can be better than a real one as long as they put their whole heart and soul into it as George W. Bush and George Allen do. It shows respect.

Presumably a guy like Allen (who during his teen-age years in Southern California had a confederate flag on his mustang and wore a rebel flag pin in his graduation picture) is a man who has lived his bona fides even better than the Yale fratboy, Junior Bush. Nobody can assail his good ole boy pretensions. Allen truly loves southern culture even if he has no blood ties to the south and his mother is (gasp!) French.

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

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

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

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

Well, actually, the problem may be the press, as Kevin Drum notes here -

The press corps is a sucker for "authenticity," and it's something that both George Bush and John McCain have cleverly exploited - because for most reporters, speaking in complete sentences or having smart ideas about policy are way less important than being a "straight talker" or "comfortable in your own skin." But just as McCain's embrace of Jerry Falwell has shown him to be a wee bit less of a straight talker than his handlers claim, Allen's "authenticity" also turns out to be barely skin-deep.

... Allen may reasonably claim that what he did as a teenager four decades ago shouldn't be held against him now. But the consistent evidence in Lizza's piece that his red state good 'ol boy shtick is little more than a personal invention, carefully cultivated and maintained through the years, should at least give the press corps pause as they cover his campaign. They've gotten suckered by this act before, and both McCain and Allen are currently gearing up to sucker them again with the same song in a different key. Caveat emptor should be their watch phrase this time around.

But it won't be. It's the power of the narrative. The narrative trumps logic and facts, and boosts circulation and market share, and that's your advertising revenue.

The Democrats who wish to stop this madness really don't need any more facts. They don't need them. No one cares. They need a counter-narrative.

Posted by Alan at 22:18 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 28 April 2006 07:07 PDT home

Wednesday, 26 April 2006

The conceptual flaw in the
Topic: Political Theory

The conceptual flaw in the 'intimidation model' for getting what you want...

In these pages last November, around the time the president gave his Veterans Day speech and John Murtha, the previously hawkish congressman from Pennsylvania, caused a firestorm by suggesting we ought to get at least our troops out of Iraq and do this Iraq thing a different way, in Things Coming to a Head there was a reference to the third volume of the C. S. Lewis "Perelandra" trilogy, That Hideous Strength (1945), where one of the characters says this -

If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family - anything you like - at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder.

Back then, Thursday, November 17, 2005, seemed like a day full of "the possibilities of even apparent neutrality" diminishing really fast. (Oh yes, as before, you can learn about the CS Lewis book here, if you're into theological science fiction.)

But Lewis was right - elbow room disappearing is a continuous process as things get "sharper and harder" day by day, month after month, and in America today too, as if the current administration wants it to be so, in some kind of "final showdown" way. Call it governing by confrontation, and in foreign policy, replacing diplomacy with carefully stage-managed public conflict.

Maybe it's a Texas thing. You get done what you need to get done with your squinty-eyed look and threats, and sometimes you shoot.

The problem is, as we see with Iran - Iran Threatens To Strike At US Targets If Attacked. If you want to bring something to a head the other side sometimes doesn't back down like they're supposed to.

And now we have a domestic example. The president's opponents have a large bill of particulars, from telling us we had to war because of the nuclear and chemical and biological weapons we could prove Iraq had in stock, which turned out not to exist, and now we know all the warnings that they didn't exist were dismissed, to the various scandals, almost too many to mention, to the claims the president has the right to ignore this law or that, to the far less than half-hearted response to Hurricane Katrina, to the Dubai ports deal, and so on and so forth. The president's opponents - rather than caving in to all the claims that being bothered by any of this means that they just "hate America" and are, in effect, "on the side of the terrorists" - are not rolling over and seem to be willing to say "not so fast." Two can play that game.

There seems to be a basic, conceptual flaw in the "intimidation model" for getting what you want. Projecting power and refusing to compromise were, we were told, what would win the day in Iraq and cow North Korea into dropping their push to build nuclear weapons, and what, we are being told now, will force Iran to back down from their efforts to do that too. It doesn't work, and there's no evidence it ever has. But we are told it always works, and that it's the only solution to get what we want.

Anyone can see it has the opposite effect, but we are told that's just because we just haven't been intimidating enough, so far, and the bad guys sense some of us want to compromise, so that dilutes the effect. So we must show more resolve, and the thoughtful and questioning should just shut up, as they're ruining everything. Well, maybe so. There's always a first time for everything. In the history of the world this "intimidation model" has never worked even once. But it sounds good, if you're from Texas.

As a grand experiment in redefining who we are and how the world works, it is interesting in a theoretical way. It's something new, and captured in the core doctrine of "preemptive war" - we reserve the right to wage war on any nation on earth that sometime in the future might act in a way that threatens us, and we'll use our own secret evidence of what they might do one day and no one else's. The neoconservatives and their easily manipulated and somewhat clueless president really do have bold ideas. Confusing "bold" with "sound" seems to be at issue, of course. It's an easy mistake to make.

As for the purely domestic example of "push-back" that really isn't supposed to happen, there's new talk of impeachment. It seems someone looked in the user manual, the constitution, and found that the framers, in assigning rights to the states to balance the powers of the federal government, added a curious provision - if both houses of any state legislature vote that the president should be impeached, congress must take it up and hold hearings. And there's a move in both Illinois and Vermont to do just that, as noted here in the Boston Globe. The modern conservative movement made its bones on "states rights" - fighting integration and fluoridation and nationally-mandated Daylight Savings Time and all the rest - and the irony here is delicious. Not that anything will come of it. Vermont may be able to pull it off, maybe, but in Washington the Republican-controlled House will schedule the required hearings for sometime in 2025, or later. Still, it's push-back, Texas-style, from Vermont.

And then there's this, a discussion of a short speech that Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia gave on the floor when everyone came back from their two-week Easter break -

"Despite more than two centuries of pressures to change and 'modernize,' the Senate, as an institution, remains remarkably similar to the body created at the Constitutional Convention in 1787," Byrd said. "It retains all of its original powers, including providing advice and consent - yes. You said it. You better read that again in the Constitution. It retains all of its original powers, including providing advice and consent to presidents on nominations and on treaties, serving as a court of impeachment. You better believe it, Mr. President. The Senate can send you home. You better believe that. If the House impeaches you, the Senate will try you."

So the old coot from West Virginia talks Texan too. The president a few years back, when asked what he thought about all the folks fighting us in Iraq long after we had "won" and whether we could handle that without increasing the number of troops we had there, famously said there was no problem - "Bring it on." Two can play that game.

But the other side is supposed to back down, isn't it? You can almost hear the befuddled anger at the White House. What's wrong with these people? Don't they know how things work?

What could this mean?

It could mean that the days of "shock and awe" as both a military tactic, and a political one, seem to be passing. Yeah, we captured Baghdad brilliantly and the regime of Saddam Hussein fell quite nicely, but "shock and awe" are not very effective long-term tools. There's resentment, and blow-back. The neoconservative might claim it's just not fair, as the tactic is so impressive. Maybe we should do more of it and see if it still works. But it just doesn't. That's life. And on the political side, the bold and audacious radical remake of who we are and how things work, with its own "shock and awe," turns out to be only useful in the short term. Either way you create insurgents - a nasty army of the resentful. And they fight back.

So C. S. Lewis was onto something - things come to a point, "getting sharper and harder." The process continues.

How does the president respond now?

For that you might go read Sidney Blumenthal on how he sees the White House.

The passion of George W. Bush
"The president doesn't care that he is reviled. He is a martyr, and someday all will see his glory. Meanwhile, he's got Karl doing his dirty work."
April 27, 2006, SALON.COM

That opens with this -

The urgent dispatch of Karl Rove to the business of maintaining one-party rule in the midterm elections is the Bush White House's belated startle reflex to its endangerment. Besieged by crises of his own making, plummeting to ever lower depths in the polls week after week, Bush has assigned his political general to muster dwindling forces for a heroic offensive to break out of the closing ring. If the Democrats gain control of the House or Senate they will launch a thousand subpoenas to establish the oversight that has been abdicated by the Republican Congress.

In his acceptance speech before the Republican National Convention in 2004, the "war president" spoke of "greatness" and "resolve" and repeatedly promised "a safer world" and "security," and compared himself "to a resolute president named Truman." Afterward, Bush declared he had had his "accountability moment"; further debate was unnecessary; the future was settled.

But Rove's elaborate design for Republican rule during the second term has collapsed under the strain of his grandiosity. In 2004, Rove galvanized "the base" (ironically, "al-Qaida" in Arabic) through ruthless divide-and-conquer and slash-and-burn tactics.

This is followed by a great deal of discussion of Rove, but gets interesting when it gets beyond that one man -

For Rumsfeld and Cheney the final days of the Bush administration are the endgame. They cannot expect positions in any future White House. Since the Nixon White House, when counselor Rumsfeld and his deputy Cheney watched the self-destruction of the president, they have plotted to reach the point where they would impose the imperial presidency that Nixon was thwarted from doing. Both men held ambitions to become president themselves. The Bush years have been their opportunity, their last one, to run a presidency. Through the agency of the son of one of their colleagues from the Ford White House, George H.W. Bush (whom President Ford considered but passed over for his vice president and chief of staff, giving the latter job to Cheney), they have enabled their notion of executive power. But the fulfillment of their idea of presidential power is steadily draining the president of strength. Their 30-year-long project on behalf of autocracy has merely produced monumental incompetence.

Yet Rumsfeld and Cheney do not really care. Bad public opinion polls do not concern them. Their ambition is near its end. They want to use their remaining time accumulating as much power in an unaccountable executive as possible.

And as for the president -

The more beleaguered Bush becomes, the more he is flattered by his advisors with comparisons to great men of history whose foresight and courage were not always appreciated in their own times. Abraham Lincoln is one favorite. Another is Harry Truman, who established the framework of Cold War policy but left office during the Korean War deeply unpopular with poll ratings sunk in the 20s. Lately, Bush sees himself in the reflected light of Winston Churchill, bravely standing against appeasers. "Never give in - never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in," Churchill said in 1941 as Britain stood alone against the Nazis. "Bush tells his out-of-town visitors to think of how history will judge his administration twenty years hence and not to worry about setbacks in Iraq," conservative columnist Arnaud de Borchgrave writes.

... The greater the stress the more Bush denies its cause. In his end time he has risen above his policy and is transcending politics. In his life as president he has decided his scourging is his sanctification. Bush will be a martyr resurrected. The future will unfold properly for all the wisdom of his decisions, based on fervent faith, upheld by his holy devotion. Criticism and unpopularity only confirm to him his bravery and his critics' weakness. Being reviled is proof of his righteousness. Inevitably, decades hence, people will grasp his radiant truth and glory. Such is the passion of George W. Bush.

Could this be so? Is this where ruthless divide-and-conquer and slash-and-burn tactics end up, with an apparent failure muttering to himself that nothing in the polls matter, that most of the world's nations now at best don't trust America but more generally see America as both foolish and dangerous doesn't matter, that the enormous federal deficit and massive trade deficits don't matter, that the scandals don't matter - history will prove him right? "The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder." Cold comfort. One wonders if uses the "history will prove me right" line on his father, the president who decided against taking Baghdad.

And the hits just keep coming.

Wednesday, April 26, was the surprise testimony of Karl Rove, this for the for the fifth time before the grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame case. It seems the "intimidation model" may not have worked so well there, having the team go after her husband, who revealed embarrassing things, by leaking to the press that his wife was a CIA agent and set the whole thing up to get him out of the house. Now that gets sticky.

The Washington Post has details of what it was all about here, but it's very complicated. Kevin Drum untangles it all nicely here, or you might go to a famous defense attorney here. It comes down to Rove probably bargaining for lesser charges, but being charged none the less, and Fitzgerald works his way up through Stephen Hadley to Vice President Cheney. This wasn't supposed to happen. When you're indicted for a crime you sort of have to leave office. Who will be left?

Then there's this - "Investigators for the European Parliament said Wednesday that data gathered from air safety regulators showed that the CIA had flown 1,000 undeclared flights over Europe since 2001, sometimes stopping on the Continent to transport terrorism suspects kidnapped inside the European Union to countries using torture."

From Reuters, this -

A senior EU lawmaker on Wednesday backed accusations the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had kidnapped and illegally detained terrorism suspects on EU territory and flown them to countries that used torture.

"The CIA has, on several occasions, clearly been responsible for kidnapping and illegally detaining alleged terrorists on the territory of (EU) member states, as well as for extraordinary renditions," Claudio Fava said in his first interim report of the European Parliament's probe into the suspected CIA abuses.

No one was supposed to know, and the cooperating people within certain governments were supposed to keep quiet. Too many things are coming out.

Luckily a good number of Americans think kidnapping and torture are just fine, as these people aren't like us but merely depraved evil devils. We are the people who did the Salem witch trails in the seventeenth century. We get it. Who cares what the Europeans think? And whatever it was we did it was only to keep us safe, and that's our right, and we're the good guys. Right.

But there are other things.

Will people, angry over the high price of gasoline these days, put two and two together and figure out that if you go to war with a major oil producing country you take maybe thirty percent of the world's oil out of production for a time, and in this case the time has stretched to over three years. That might make for tight supplies and, as a result, high prices. World demand is high and the insurgents keep blowing up the pipelines in Iraq, and making the rebuilding of the refineries and ports damned hard. They were supposed to greet us as liberators and we'd be out in six months, as Rumsfeld said, with Ahmed Chalabi running the place for us. Should have happened, but didn't. If people think about the crude removed from the market, as the result of the long war, as they're now calling it, and see the enormous profits from Exxon-Mobile and the rest, and think about the president and vice president coming from the oil industry... this could be trouble.

Well, at least there's a new White House press spokesman, that fellow from Fox News, Tony Snow. A well-spoken and well-liked new press secretary, energetic and photogenic, can explain it all.

What's to say about that? He has a hard job, of course. Yes, he comes straight from pro-Bush Fox News, which is more of a political movement than a news network, but that hardly matters. The White House would hardly pick Dan Rather or Bill Moyers, and Snow has been blunt at times in the past. He'll do. He's rather pleasant. He has a nice smile and a good sense of humor. And he will tell us what?

Walter Shapiro imagines that here -

Question: Karl Rove is making his fifth appearance in front of the grand jury today. And I'm wondering how you would characterize its effect on the administration? Is it a disruption, a distraction?

Press Secretary: Actually, it's a great tension release mechanism around here. We all have a great laugh imagining Karl sharing a cell with Tom DeLay and Kenny Lay. Of course, we try not to make those jokes when Karl's around. But then we don't see much of him, since he's constantly with his lawyers or sitting in a darkened office muttering about running off to Tahiti to write a McKinley biography.

Question: What do you think the impact is going to be at the gas pump of relaxing environmental rules, and how soon do you think that will show up?

Press Secretary: Is the Twelfth of Never soon enough for you? If the inky-dinky spider fell down the water spout, we'd use that as an excuse to relax environmental rules. But seriously, no president - Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative - can do much about gas prices in the short run. It's like King Canute trying to command the tides.

Question: Has the president been briefed at all on the CIA's firing of Mary McCarthy for allegedly leaking classified information? Does he have any reaction to this?

Press Secretary: Look, it's not coincidental that the most leak-obsessed president in history has named the most leak-obsessed CIA director. It's also not coincidental that the first victim of this internal investigation happens to be somebody who donated $2,000 to John Kerry in 2004. As far as the president is concerned personally, he's totally in favor of finding out the truth. As long as it doesn't come too close to the Oval Office.

Question: How would the president assess his final 1,000 days in office?

Press Secretary: Like a prison sentence.

Question: Does the president support Senator Clinton's move to have the generals who are calling for Secretary Rumsfeld's ouster testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee?

Press Secretary: This administration rarely supports Hillary Clinton on anything, of course. But we would even let Laura and Barbara Bush testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee if it would convince Don Rumsfeld to quit. In case you haven't noticed, we are at an impasse here. One of President Bush's most admirable human qualities is his reluctance to fire anyone. One of Secretary Rumsfeld's least admirable qualities is his refusal to take a hint. I'll let all of you in the press room connect the dots.

Question: What does the president plan to do differently between now and November to get Republicans elected or reelected?

Press Secretary: Raise money in private for any Republican who asks and avoid appearing in public with any Republican who has serious opposition. If you've got another strategic idea for us, please call Karl. That is, if you can find him.

Question: The president made a phone call to Canadian Prime Minister Harper on the weekend? Can you tell us the contents of that call?

Press Secretary: About all I know is that the conversation was short. Very short. With all the problems facing President Bush, do you think he cares about the mood of Moose Jaw?

Question: Just a personal question, just wondering how you're feeling today with this transition, what your plans are for the future? What do you want to do when you grow up?

Press Secretary: I feel envious of my predecessor Ari Fleischer for so wisely getting out in time. I feel pity for my successor who doesn't fully understand how hard it is in this White House to be allowed to say anything publicly. I feel a trifle bitter that the president I have so loyally served set me up to fail in this job. I feel hopeful that I will be rewarded in the private sector for all the abuse I have taken in this room. And, most of all, I feel sorry for all of you in the press corps who somehow cling to the illusion that asking a White House press secretary - any press secretary - a snarky question at a televised briefing is an exercise in uncovering the truth.

Well, it will be an interesting charade.

But the fact remains, there was a time "when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp" and "there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous." Of course "the whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder."

That may be the grand experiment in governing by intimidation. And it's too bad it just doesn't work.

Posted by Alan at 22:29 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Thursday, 27 April 2006 07:43 PDT home

Tuesday, 25 April 2006

What Adults Do
Topic: Chasing the Zeitgeist

What Adults Do

Glenn Greenwald is that constitutional law attorney in New York, the one who writes the political blog, "Unclaimed Territory," often cited in these pages. Oddly enough, he's also written for the magazine American Conservative, and you see him on television now and then, or hear him on the radio. He's been on C-Span's "Washington Journal" and Air America's "Majority Report" - and on Public Radio International's "To the Point." You find him doing his blend of reporting and analysis in print and online here and there. He was on fire when the NSA warrantless story broke, or he covered that like white on rice - choose your own cliché. Greenwald didn't much care for the president saying that, yes, he knew there was a law requiring that if any president was going to have his NSA folks secretly spy on American citizens - listening to their phone calls and reading their email and such - that president had to run that past a special court for approval in the form of a warrant, but the White House legal staff had assured him that the correct way of looking at the constitution showed he could ignore that law, and the congress and the courts did not have any authority to make him follow that law, or any other that he decided, without review by anyone, just didn't apply to him.

Of course, the implications of this new and special way of seeing the constitution were enormous. And the president's "spying on anyone he chooses" business was matched by the signing statements, the most widely discussed one being when the president attached a signing statement to the McCain legislation the definitively outlawed any agency of our government doing anything like torture. The president attached a statement that said as he read the legislation it was fine, but he reserved the right, under his plenary powers as commander-in-chief, to ignore the law when he decided it would be better to ignore it, and that wasn't open to review, as he saw it, and the White House attorneys assured him.

The idea was you just had to trust the president that any secret spying on American citizens, that no one would ever know about, would only be for the purest of motives, to get terrorists, and never to find out things about political opponents and their plan, or anything like that. The president seemed more than a little surprised and a bit miffed that anyone would even think otherwise. And as for torture, the president time and time again said, in spite of all the obvious evidence, we never do that. But then, he reserved the right to order just that if he alone decided it might be useful, and no one had the authority to stop him from ordering torture when he so decided.

You see where all that leads. Yes, when confronted with the many calls from recently retired top generals for the Secretary of Defense to be replaced, the president simply said "I'm the decider." Case closed. He stays. No real substance, no reasons he's the right man. Not open to discussion. This is a distinct new view of presidential powers. There are no limits on them, except for an election every four years. Congress has no authority at all, with their "laws." And the courts have no jurisdiction.

All this is the sort of thing that drives constitutional law attorneys up the wall, although, considering the results of the last presidential election, it was just fine with slightly more than half of all Americans. When you're convinced the world is a scary place full of very odd people, many of whom want to kill us all, and no one anywhere likes us much anyway, you elect a strong daddy who will fix things without tedious explanations. You may suspect some very nasty things are going on, but you don't ask, and daddy doesn't tell. It's a mutual bargain.

The problem is that the more you inadvertently discover about what is actually going on, and what it can lead to, the more you may want out of the bargain. You can be told, again and again, this is just what you agreed to, and there's no backing out, and, if you have a problem with any little or large bit of it, go do something about it in the voting booth in 2008, but just shut up now.

That worked fine for the administration after the events of September 11, 2001, when almost ninety percent of the angry, frightened and confused public bought into the bargain. Now that's down to thirty-two percent. That would be the thirty-two percent who would still like to be treated as children, and who just trust daddy, because not to trust daddy is just too scary.

And that brings us back to Glenn Greenwald, who has just written a book for the growing majority of people who think that bargains you made when you were a child, to keep the monsters under the bed from attacking you in the night, can be discarded, along with GI Joe and Barbie.

The odd thing about the book is that, as of six in the evening, Pacific Time, Tuesday, April 25, 2006, it was sixth on the Amazon bestseller list, and hadn't been published yet. The ranking was based solely on pre-orders. Times have changed quite a bit.

If you don't want to be left out - if you're tired of sitting at the children's table while the adults are across the room with the good food and interesting talk - here's the book.

How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok
Glenn Greenwald
Paperback: 146 pages
Publisher: Working Assets Publishing (May 15, 2006)
ISBN: 097794400X

What Greenwald says about it over at his blog is this -

What I hope will be the book's principal impact is to cast a very bright light on the fact that all of these Bush administration scandals which are always discussed in isolation - lawless detentions, secret prisons, the use of torture, illegal eavesdropping, etc. - are merely symptoms of a profound political crisis which our country faces, brought about by the fact that this administration has adopted radical theories of power whereby the President literally and expressly claims the right to act without restraint, including those imposed by law. The powers seized by this president are exactly those powers about which the founders most urgently and explicitly warned, and which they sought, first and foremost, to prevent.

A substantial portion of the book is devoted to highlighting the ways in which the administration has used rank fear-mongering and an endless exploitation of the terrorist threat to attempt to obscure and justify these abuses. Those manipulative tactics have not only enabled them to embrace these most un-American powers right out in the open, but they are also threatening to alter, perhaps irreversibly, our national character.

Perhaps most importantly, the book documents the fact that even when all other intended checks on government excesses fail - when the media, the Congress and the courts are co-opted or are otherwise neutralized - Americans always have the ability, inherent in our system of government, to put a stop to abuses and excesses, provided they choose to exercise that power. But to do so, it is necessary that it first be understood just how radical and dangerous our government has become under this administration, and making the case that we have arrived at exactly that point is the primary purpose of the book.

So it's time to walk away from the bargain we made four years ago, and this is the precise time to do it. Part of it is walking away from childish things - the need for a strong daddy and a fear of thinking about what to do and then the responsibility that goes along with actually making decisions about what to do. Part of it has to do with all the things that used to be associated with being an American doing the right thing - not cheating or lying or hiding information to get what you want, a system of laws everyone follows and some kind of "justice for all," a governmental structure that keeps any one person or party from having all the power. It's all that stuff from civics classes, about how things run here, and the constitution that provides the basic user manual.

Note this from Digby at Hullabaloo, from his comments on the new Greenwald book -

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

... Unless we insist upon accountability for what these people have done, I fear that the country will not be able to recover. People need to see that our system of government can not only survive such assaults on its integrity, but that justice and the rule of law will reassert themselves under responsible leadership. It must be publicly demonstrated that this doctrine of unlimited presidential authority is unacceptable and un-American.

A distorted, authoritarian undemocratic view of American government has persisted now for more than a generation among certain conservatives. This philosophy has taken us from Watergate to Iran-Contra to Impeachment to the Supreme Court deciding a presidential election and the last five years of unprecedented assaults on the constitution in the name of a war that has no end. We need to drive a stake through the heart of this philosophy once and for all before it kills us.

Well, we may not be fighting the undead, even if the image fits in an odd sort of way (Nixon rising from the grave and all that). But it may be time for a bit of a new American Revolution, to get us back to where we were after the first one, unless you think what happened four years ago "changed everything" as the president and his supporters so often say. Time to choose.

Who will you have for company if you leave the children's table? There is Bruce Springsteen of all people -

"I guess my take on some of the last experiences we've had," Springsteen says, "is that a small group of men with a very particular ideology found their way into power and pressed themselves on an immature president. They were able to literally get what they wanted: They got their tax cuts, they got their war, they got their money going to the places they wanted it to go to. I don't think that's being cynical."

No, that's just realistic. Time to do something.

After all, things like these below can't go on forever. Someone has to deal with them, preferably an adult, who knows how to work with others and together figure out what to do.

This is just a sample from Tuesday, April 25th.

A few days after the audio tape from Osama bin Laden - he doesn't much like our "Zionist-crusader war on Islam" and is urging militants to fight in Sudan, and calls for attacks on civilians in the west, as they elected those waging war on Islam - we get this - "Terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi revealed his face for the first time Tuesday in a dramatic video in which he dismissed Iraq's new government as an American 'stooge' and called it a 'poisoned dagger' in the heart of the Muslim world."

And this wasn't a tape delivered to al Jazeera by a series of couriers with lots of clever cut-outs. This was a video web broadcast, and he showed his face - no hood or anything. So we know just what he looks like at the moment. He doesn't care.

This war is not going well, and it could use a "rethink." Admit it's a mess, get a lot of adults together, the thoughtful and maybe the irritating contrarians, and let's figure out a new way to deal with this. Why not? Maybe daddy doesn't know best and all the adults could come up with something. That seems unlikely. But it's an idea.

And the same day there was this - "Iran ratcheted up its defiance ahead of a U.N. Security Council deadline to suspend uranium enrichment, threatening Tuesday to hide its program if the West takes 'harsh measures' and to transfer nuclear technology to chaos-ridden Sudan."

Okay, same thing, get a lot of adults together, the thoughtful and maybe the irritating contrarians, and let's figure out a new way to deal with this. Making threats seems to be making matters worse, so why bother? And the United States refuses face-to-face talks with Iran, preferring "proxy diplomacy" - the UN or NATO or somebody better fix this or we really will bomb the crap out of Iran. Of course, adults do the adult and responsible thing - when you have a problem with someone you sit down with them and figure out what's going on. They talk, you listen, and you talk and hope they listen. It's unpleasant, but that's what adults do. Children hide behind others and make threats.

But what do we get? Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Europe with this - she's asking NATO to do something harsh to show Iran they're being very, very bad. She says the NATO nations really need to support us on this. The item doesn't mention any NATO ambassador asking her why, if this is such an urgent problem, doesn't Bush send her to Tehran to sit down and talk with them and explain the concerns and see if something can be worked out, or just go himself if he's so hot and bothered.

That no one asked the question indicates what people know of us now - we don't do that sort of thing. We ask the grownups to do that talking stuff, while we pout and hide. Why even bother to pose the question? This was in Athens, and there were anti-American riots in the streets - tear gas and everything - with the crowds telling her to go home. Who needs a brat, or more precisely a princess, whining that no one will do what she won't do?

As for the big story of the day, it was the president delivering a major speech saying the government really was going to do something about the record high gasoline prices.

CNN - "Calling the oil issue a matter of national security, President Bush outlined a plan Tuesday to cut gasoline costs and temporarily stopped deposits to the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve."

The New York Times - "President Bush today announced a series of short-term steps that he said might slightly ease energy prices, including a suspension of government purchases to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and investigations into possible price gouging and price fixing. The moves reflect growing concern among Republicans that the price hikes would become another election-year liability for them."

Buried in each story was also dropping all the environmental regulations for now, so you will be able to get anything at all at the pump, and anyone who wants to build a refinery can build anything they'd like, no matter what it does to the air or ground water.

And they admit it really won't fix anything. The price of gasoline will only go higher. But they care.

Bill Montgomery here and what else they could try -

They could even try telling the truth: That sky-high gas prices are the product of many forces, including the economic rise of China, our national allergic reaction to conservation, the security nightmare of trying to protect a far-flung global energy infrastructure, and, most of all, the inevitable fact that the supply of light sweet crude is finite, and production is probably nearing its peak.

They could explain to the American people that there is no quick fix, no miracle fuels on the horizon, no package of tax incentives or industry subsidies that is going to make the problem go away.

They could warn them that even if there was such a solution, current fossil fuel consumption trends still wouldn't be sustainable, not unless we're willing to turn most of coastal cities into salt water swimming pools.

And they could try to make our pampered upper and middle classes understand that the sooner they adjust their bloated lifestyles to reflect these unpleasant facts, the better off we will all be in the long run.

But it looks like they want to keep their jobs.

On the other hand, given Greenwald's not-yet-published bestseller, it would seem that the idea that you keep your job by concealing the unpleasant truth may be an idea that's just outmoded. What Montgomery proposes is treating people like adults, rational participants in events that effect them, and able to handle the facts.

Some of us would like to be treated that way. In fact, there are more and more of us everyday. Someone should tell the White House, but maybe that comes in November.

Posted by Alan at 22:27 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 26 April 2006 07:36 PDT home

Monday, 24 April 2006

The Great Unraveling, or Something
Topic: In these times...

The Great Unraveling, or Something

Looking back on Monday, April 24, 2006, it might be possible to see the political system in place disintegrating. The administration has about a thousand more days in office, and no one knows quite how those days will play out. Maybe this happens in the middle of every second term. Decisions were made in the first six years and the implications of those decisions cannot be glossed over or spun as "not as bad as they seem" forever. The mood of the country is sour, and those who have run the joint for the last six years are increasing seen as somewhere between incompetent and bat-shit crazy by increasing numbers of people.

The clock ran out on any number of things, and long before the mid-term elections, when angry voters may change the House and Senate from majority Republican to majority Democratic, and with those bodies no longer controlled by the party of the administration things could get really ugly. There'll be some explaining to do, after six years of a free ride where the administration "got the benefit of the doubt" or just unquestioning approval born of loyalty, and the puzzled and alarmed were told they were the usual - that they were unhinged by irrational personal hatred of a great man they just didn't understand because of their elitist, intellectual way of looking at things, or that they wee unpatriotic, if not treasonous, for raising issues in dangerous times. The puzzled and alarmed could say, all they wanted, that, no, it wasn't "the man" really, it was the decisions, the policies and the responses to events that were dangerous. It didn't matter. Such talk was dismissed with a patronizing shrug, or attacked as something like treason, as any questioning of any of all that, even minor tax policy, was letting "the enemy" know we weren't united behind our leaders.

But you can only ride that pony so far. As the war in Iraq seemed to be worse than pointless as it entered its fourth year, and although the stock market was healthy, and corporations, for the most part, making fine profits, real income for most had declined for four years straight, costs had risen, particularly for healthcare and health insurance (now forty-five million don't have any at all), and then, with all the talk that maybe we should launch a preventive war with Iran, maybe using nuclear weapons, to keep them from developing their own nuclear weapons in eight or ten years, the price of crude oil jumped to record levels, and thus the price of gasoline, as that neared four dollars a gallon, the simmering resentment rose too.

There is some explaining to do. And if the Republicans lose the House or Senate, or both, then the current implicit administration position - "we don't have to explain anything to anyone, and you have no right to ask questions" - becomes impossible. Subpoena power is nasty. When confronted with the many calls from recently retired top generals for the Secretary of Defense to be replaced, the president simply said, "I'm the decider." Case closed. He stays. No real substance, no reasons he's the right man. Not open to discussion. Since the start of the administration six years ago, with Vice President Cheney formulating energy policy, and perhaps foreign policy too, with the heads of the oil industry in secret meetings, it's always been this way. Heck, the Supreme Court decided Americans had no right to know what went on in those meetings, in a decision where the key vote was that of Antonin Scalia, who went duck hunting with Cheney the weekend before the oral arguments. Now Scalia says "his proudest" moment on the court was refusing to recuse himself on that matter (you could look it up). Maybe those "we don't explain, we do" days will be gone.

November is, of course, a political lifetime away. Many things could happen to reverse the mood of the country. Would a war with Iran rally everyone behind the administration, if they make a convincing case we just had to drop some nukes on them, given what they might do sometime in the next decade? After Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction that weren't there? It's a long shot that that would work, but it may be the only thing to do to recover from the current mess. Nothing to lose, after all.

And things keep happening that shouldn't have happened before Election Day in November.

The political week started Sunday evening, not Monday morning, with the former head of covert CIA operations in Europe telling "60 Minutes" that the Bush administration had "politicized and cherry-picked" intelligence on Iraq (see CBS's excerpts here for details). Tyler Drumheller has turned Naji Sabri, Iraq's Foreign Minister, and got him working as a CIA asset. Drumheller informed George Tenet, the head of the CIA. Tenet told Bush, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice. They were thrilled. They wanted to know what this Sabri fellow had to say. But they were told Sabri said that Iraq did not, in fact, have any active WMD programs. None. Nothing there. But it was too late. The administration had already decided Saddam Hussein had to go, and, one assumes, decided that no one would ever find out that what they were saying was the reason we had to go was just not so, or wouldn't find out until it was too late. Well, three years later it is too late.

This is an historical footnote. It doesn't much matter now. They fooled us all but good, and there's something to say for that, although just what that is depends on your political leanings. As for the "benefit of the doubt" element, see Josh Marshall here - he interviews Tyler Drumheller after the "60 Minutes" show and asks about the big post-war effort to blame the whole thing on the intelligence community, the commissions and all. They interviewed Drumheller. He told them just what he told "60 Minutes" - more than three hours of testimony in front of them all. They seem to have decided this was not worth a mention, and one assumes the Republicans on the committee in question felt revealing this would embarrass their side, and the Democrats knew that harping on this would make them look unpatriotic or something or other. Interesting, but ancient history.

But it does leave the general public feeling a bit like the rube at the carnival tricked in front of everybody, bitter and embarrassed for getting suckered. And unfortunately Tyler Drumheller didn't have the decency, or feel it was his patriotic duty, to keep quiet until November - or alternatively, CBS didn't sit on this story until after the November election because they have it out for Bush and the Republicans. There they go, those lefties, subtly trying to influence the upcoming election with such things.

But it's history. What's done is done.

But it must be irritating for the White House. And making things worse was Osama bin Laden. Yeah, we were going to get him "dead or alive." We didn't. So what? So much else is going on everyday that at one point the president even said he didn't matter - "I really don't think about him much." We weren't supposed to think about him much, either. But the week opened with a new tape from him - he doesn't much like our "Zionist-crusader war on Islam" and is urging militants to fight in Sudan, and calls for attacks on civilians in the west, as they elected those waging war on Islam. Odd, it hardly seems that the Islamic government in Sudan needs much help in driving out the whole population of Darfur from the western edge of Sudan and starving the hundreds of thousands they haven't yet killed (see this).

But these calls for new attacks? There was a general shrug - there he goes again. Then there was this -

Three nearly simultaneous bombings hit an Egyptian beach resort popular with foreigners Monday, killing at least 23 people on streets filled with vacationers and Egyptians marking the beginning of spring.

The bombers struck the Sinai seaside city of Dahab in the early evening along a crowded promenade of shops, restaurants and bars. Interior Minister Habib el-Adly said those killed included 20 Egyptians and three foreigners. Sixty-two people were wounded.

The explosions came a day after Osama bin Laden issued a call to arms to Muslims to support al-Qaida in fighting what he calls a war against Islam.

Osama bin Laden couldn't wait until November?

This is not helpful, politically. And the same day another retired general says Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, has to go (see who here). That makes eight. And he says it on Fox News, of all places.

That was the day after the first major newspaper in America calls for the president to dump Vice President Cheney. That would be the Los Angeles Times here, as they see it is one way to save things, after dumping Rumsfeld, "not because he has been criticized by a group of retired generals but because he embodies the smugness and inability to acknowledge error that has characterized both the Iraq war and the wider war on terrorism."

Yeah, that. But they say it's time to be even more "bold" and "audacious" - and of course "throwing Cheney overboard would be an implicit repudiation of the excessively hawkish foreign policy with which the vice president, even more than Rumsfeld, has been associated."

The president knows he should -

The truth is that the president, however grudgingly, has recognized that he and the administration made mistakes in the run-up to the war in Iraq and in its aftermath. He has not confessed that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, but he has acknowledged with increasing explicitness that he was wrong to believe that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction.

No longer proclaiming "mission accomplished," Bush has been pursuing a sadder-but-wiser policy in Iraq that many Democrats also endorse. It involves ramping up the training of Iraqi troops to take over from U.S. forces while leaning on Iraq's feuding sects to join, however unenthusiastically, in a government of national unity.

Having changed his tune, the president should also think about changing the company he keeps - big time, as Dick Cheney would say.

Of course, Cheney will never allow the president to do this, but it is odd to have a major paper call for the resignation or dismissal of a duly elected official. You don't see that very often. And irritating for the White House.

But it seems we're going to have a government in Iraq, and that should shut up some of the critics, except the new man finally selected to lead Iraq seems to think would be a good idea to take all the roaming militias and death squads and incorporate them into the armed forces (see this) - as if we'd fix the gang problems out here in Los Angeles by having all the Bloods and Crips and such join the Los Angeles Police Department.

As for how the war is going otherwise, along with the daily deaths of our guys, two or three a day, and the usual Baghdad bombings and thirty or so locals dead each day from those, or just showing up shot in the head and dumped in an alley, there was this - joint US-Iraqi inspections of detention centers continue to reveal "signs of torture," particularly at the Ministry of Interior. It seems the Shiites now in power, or in the majority in government for the first time in many decades, tend to get a little carried away in their political discourse. And that's not a good sign. On the other hand, this is - our top commander in Iraq changes the rules governing privatized military support operations after confirming cases of "human trafficking." Subcontracting services can be such a bother, and kidnapping to build a workforce and keeping them in what amounts to slavery reflects badly upon your skills in vendor management.

But do people really care what's happening in Iraq? Yes and no. There was that Gallup poll the week before showing that Americans' biggest concerns are Iraq, immigration and the price of gas. So if things are going to get better for the administration, and there will be this wonderful "reenergizing" of the Bush presidency and the American people will come around, there will be a serious rethinking of the war, and real leadership on immigration and on the gas prices.

Maybe. Maybe not. There's not much more the administration can with Iraq, as events on the ground are "not in the control" of the White House, and all the levers have been pulled. And gasoline prices cannot be controlled by much of anything the administration does, although blustering about bombing Iran if they continue being pesky does tend to drive prices up, and that could be toned down, even if it's politically useful not to tone it down. The best that can be done is this - "President George W. Bush, alarmed by a spike in gas prices at the pump, has asked the Departments of Energy and Justice to look into possible cheating or manipulation of gasoline markets, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said on Monday." The Democrats had been urging this, so the Senate and House majority leaders, Frist and Hastert, said it was their idea and sent a letter to the White House, and the president says it was his idea. Whatever. Nothing will come of it. But it's a nice gesture.

As for immigration, the president was out here Monday the 24th, speaking down in Irvine (see this) - pleasing no one. His party in the House wants to build a big wall at the Mexican border and make being here without papers an aggravated felony. His party in the Senate wants to allow those without papers to pay a fine and jump though some hoops to "earn" citizenship. No one is compromising and he's stuck, and favoring the latter, but his "base" is furious.

The result, a major poll released after he spoke, from polling the previous week, ending Friday - "President Bush's approval ratings have sunk to a personal low, with only a third of Americans saying they approve of the way he is handling his job, a national poll released Monday said." Thirty-two percent approval, sixty percent disapproval - the worst ever. And that was before gas hit four dollars a gallon at some places out here. We're talking trouble.

But he has a new chief of staff, Josh Bolten, replacing Andrew Card, shaking things up, and according to Time Magazine, Bolten has a recovery plan.

The best summary of that is from Tim Grieve here -

The plan: Seek more money for immigration enforcement, then pose for lots of pictures with new agents in uniforms. Put smiles on the faces of Wall Street pundits by pushing through extensions of tax cuts for stock dividends and capital gains. Talk more about the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the stock market and the economy generally. Talk more with the press. Talk tough with Iran.

If you didn't see anything about Iraq or the price of gas in there, well, you didn't. The administration apparently hopes that happy talk from happy talking heads who are happy about tax cuts will make Americans forget that they're paying three bucks a gallon at the pump. As for Iraq? It's there only by implication. In a sign that the bubble may be a whole lot thicker than we thought, Time says Bush's advisors think Bush can recapture the national security credibility he lost in Iraq by turning up the pressure on Iran.

Out here in the reality-based world, we think that the opposite is true: Every time we hear the Bush administration warn about the threat Iran poses, we remember the similar threats the Bush administration made about Iraq. But the Bolten plan isn't about us; it's about the base, the third of the country that still approves of the way the president is handling Iraq, the people who still believe - every new revelation notwithstanding - that Bush told the truth then and can be trusted to tell it again now.

And there's another good summary here, but it's all the same - change next to nothing, but talk more about how you're right about everything. It's not the product, it's the PR. Right. Maybe they'll send out Karen Hughes to visit gas stations to tell folks, as the pump up, that things are fine. Or she could bring cookie to people reading the eviction notice or waiting, uninsured in the emergency room, or visit the families of dead soldiers and say pleasant things about the weather.

Bah. This really is unraveling.

__

Bonus items:

Via CURSOR.ORG -

"What are the fed smoking?" asks a Scientific American blog post about the FDA's statement reaffirming its opposition to medical marijuana, which reportedly "directly contradicts" a 1999 review by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine.

These guys don't do science. They remember Reefer Madness.

Last week, Tommy Chong at a convention in San Francisco, with this -

"I know Dick Cheney's Secret Service guys smoke pot," Chong said. "The reason I know that is I sold them bongs."

Ha. The whole speech is here (an audio mp3 file). It's amusing.

Also this -

That woman who was fired by the CIA because she leaked classified information to a reporter about our secret overseas prisons and our rendition practices? That was discussed in these pages here - Dana Priest of the Washington Post wins a Pulitzer for investigative reporting, digging in and letting the American public know what is secretly being done in our name with our tax dollars, disappearing people forever in a chain of secret foreign prisons - no charges or chance to dispute the reason for removing them from life for life, with "enhanced interrogation" or whatever you choose to call waterboarding, beatings and carefully planned humiliation - and often people we find out did nothing and know nothing and were grabbed by mistake or misplaced enthusiasm, like the useless German fellow we later dumped in the woods in the Balkans who wants to sue us. It seems some think it was good reporting to uncover this, as it violates any number of treaties we recognize and thus have the force of law, and contradicts what the administrations has said publicly. Some think it was not good reporting, but rather something like treason. And the leaker got fired.

Since then, someone who worked for her, Larry Johnson thinks the firing of his former boss Mary McCarthy "smells a little fishy."

Then it gets real odd. The woman "categorically" denies she was the source of the leak about the secret CIA detention and torture camps in Eastern Europe. She says she passed the lie detector test for that part. They fired her for having social contact with the press, or because she was a Democrat, and the new head of the CIA, Porter Goss, is a former Republican congressman and he's been purging the CIA of anyone who isn't a conservative Bush supporter, no matter what their skills or accomplishments.

See Newsday, November 2004, with this -

The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources. "The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

Just following orders.

Newsweek breaks the currnet story, and adds -

A counter-terrorism official acknowledged to NEWSWEEK today that in firing McCarthy, the CIA was not necessarily accusing her of being the principal, original, or sole leaker of any particular story. Intelligence officials privately acknowledge that key news stories about secret agency prison and "rendition" operations have been based, at least in part, upon information available from unclassified sources.

Oh. And CNN adds this - "A U.S. official told CNN on Monday that the CIA officer fired for leaking classified information was accused of a 'pattern of behavior,' including multiple contacts with more than one reporter."

The woman had tendered her resignation and was fired one week before her final day. This is very odd.

Of course it's not as odd as what one UCLA professor, for the fun of it, collects here - all the right-wing blogs and radio shows saying there were no secret prisons, none at all. It was just a ruse to trap CIA folks who like to leak information to make Bush and his administration look bad. They made it all up to trap people like this woman.

Yep.

Not this from conservative Andrew Sullivan -

It is against the law for CIA officials to be leaking extremely classified information - especially information as sensitive as secret detention facilities. But all these comments seem to me to have ignored the critical and unmissable context. Yes, leaking is against the law. But what if the leaker is exposing something as grave as illegal torture? Isn't that when a leak becomes the blowing of a whistle? Wouldn't you want law-abiding officials within the CIA to do something if their own government is breaking American law, violating treaty obligations, breaking the law of other countries - and using the secrecy of the executive branch to conceal it?

Recall the story McCarthy is accused of leaking. ... It just won the Pulitzer Prize, and it richly deserved to. What Dana Priest reported was that the Bush administration had taken over former Soviet camps in Eastern Europe and adapted them to abuse and torture terror suspects. The detainees' innocence or guilt was never verified by anything approaching due process. For me, it represented the quintessence of Bush's betrayal of Reagan. Ronald Reagan helped liberate Eastern Europe from Communist tyranny. He wielded the moral authority of freedom and tore down the walls of Communism, a system where people could be detained without trial, "disappeared", and tortured. In an inversion as hideous as at Abu Ghraib, Bush's CIA was twisted into a reflection of our former enemy.

Many, many people in the military and CIA are in close-to-open revolt against these policies; many, many more have been placed in morally excruciating positions: they have been forced to choose between loyalty to their country and their conscience. They hate what this president has made them do: every fiber of their being as Americans and as moral individuals rebels against it. This doesn't necessarily excuse McCarthy legally. If she is guilty as charged, she probably should have quit first, disclosed all she knew and faced the legal consequences. But when the government itself breaks the law, when it violates ancient moral standards that Americans have fought and died for, sometimes people within the government have to stand up and be counted.

McCarthy may well be one of those people. And, if that's true, I have a feeling that history will be much kinder to her than to her hyper-ventilating critics.

Of these many, many people in the military and CIA are in close-to-open revolt against these policies, and the generals, much is going around. The change may not come in November in the elections. There may be a revolt, a revolution led by the decent, sensible people. Who needs a left-leaning opposition bloc when you have people of common sense? Thomas Paine was onto something.

Posted by Alan at 23:29 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Tuesday, 25 April 2006 14:13 PDT home

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