As seen from Just Above Sunset

Thursday, 15 December 2005

Topic: Couldn't be so...

The Night of the Full Moon

Thursday, December 15, 2005 - a full moon rising over the Hollywood Hills and strange things in the news.

For example, mid-day out here, as the moon was still well below the horizon, word came for Washington that the Bush administration "reversed course" and accepted Senator John McCain's call for a law banning cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of foreign suspects in the war on terror. The bare bones Associated Press wire story is here - under "the deal," CIA interrogators would be given the same legal rights as currently guaranteed members of the military who are accused of breaking interrogation guidelines - they can defend themselves by arguing doing really nasty and degrading things to people was reasonable for them to do because they believed they were obeying a legal order.

The odd thing is this was no "deal" at all. McCain was going to attach his "we do not torture" amendment to every bill he could, and got a veto-proof vote in the senate on that (90-9), and the day before the house had voted to do the same - 308 to 122, with 107 of the Republicans voting against the president. Yipes. The White House had been saying the president would veto any bill to which such an amendment was attached, even if the bill was to pay for the war, or even for more tax cuts for those earning over a million a year or whatever. The vice president had been to the hill to urge that the CIA be exempted from this - but now no exemption for the spooks. Lots of the press called this a compromise. No.

But the word "capitulation" seems too strong. It's more like, well, getting the matter out of the way. When you've lost the game - there was no way this wasn't going happen, as any veto would be overridden - what's the point of fighting on and looking stupid? In chess you tip over your own king. You concede and move on, rather than watching your pieces leave the board, one at a time, until you're trapped in checkmate. Heck, that's just depressing. In poker you fold a losing hand so you don't throw away good money - unless you're sure you can bluff it out. But when you hold nothing?

And anyway, this made political sense. As you recall, the White House strongly opposed an independent commission investigating the events of September 11, 2001 - they wanted a congressional investigation, which makes a lot of sense when your supporters control congress. But that just wasn't going to fly so the White House "reversed course" and called for an independent investigation and a did a whole lot of talking that up, and most folks now think that independent commission was the administration's idea. Same thing here - on television you could see the senator and the president sitting together, announcing this agreement that we do not torture and will not, and the president saying this was great as all parties worked toward a "shared goal" and got there. Yes, of course that makes no sense given what had happened in the last month or two, but the American public is used to such disconnects, so when the president said this agreement will "make it clear to the world that this government does not torture and that we adhere to the international convention of torture, whether it be here at home or abroad" you get the idea the new spin will be this wasn't McCain's idea at all. McCain just help the president reach the president's goal.

That's how things work. Those who support the president will grudgingly concede McCain may have helped him straighten things out and do a good thing, but he was going to do the right thing anyway. Those who do not will claim McCain, a prisoner of war himself, slapped the president around and made him to the right thing. Take your choice.

The key person who worked to defeat the McCain amendment, the vice president, is no doubt fuming about all this, alone at his official Naval Observatory residence, grumbling. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld too was with Cheney on this. They've worked hand in hand since the Ford administration, so maybe he's dropped by and they're sipping scotch, watching the full moon rise, and wondering what's wrong with America.

A friend in Canada, on the night of the full moon, is wondering about the president -

Admitting mistakes were made, now this.

The body-snatchers must have dropped off their pods about a week ago, and this imposter has obviously just climbed out of his pod and assumed the place of the president!

And from our Wall Street attorney friend in lower Manhattan - "You mean kind of like the movie "Dave?"

From upstate New York -

In "Dave" I recall the good guy got out alive! The difference between Hollywood and DC, eh?

Or is the difference actually that in Hollywood we get to glimpse good guys - occasionally.

Maybe so. But our upstate friend also asked this

So does this begin to look like McCain might somehow become the West Wing type presidential candidate in '08 that the world has been awaiting? He'll never have the neo-con far right, but they've HAD their moment in the sun! Is there a patch quilt way he might somehow emerge - or even be willing to even?

Just wondering aloud -

Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, jumped in to add, "And maybe more to the point, could you vote for him? Could I? Could anyone here?"

Not me. Being right on one issue is not enough. To which Rick replied - "Ditto - although I guess it would depend on who the Democrats put up. I can't see them choosing anyone more conservative than McCain."

Dick in Rochester disagrees - "He is 'right' on a hell of a lot more than one issue. Unfortunately we pretty nearly never get to vote for the best, only the least bad."

From Hollywood -

I disagree on McCain. Later in a post I'll run down where he seems to stand on issue after issue, and where, each time, I think he's full of crap. He's a good man, and a decent one. He listens and he thinks. He just holds positions with which I disagree. Ah well, at least he's honest and honorable. That may be enough? Maybe so. That in itself would be refreshing.

But the matter is moot. Even if he spoke at Bob Jones University - and he did - the hard right is vehemently opposed to him, and the current neoconservatives see him as dangerous. And if he did somehow get the nomination, those Republicans who hate him would cancel out those in the middle who like him. He's dead in the water with his own party.

From upstate - "That only reinforces the point - we never get to vote for honest people - regardless of persuasion!"

Maybe so. We vote for pod people?

As an aside, on political matters, this full moon day was the day for the president to fold his hand on the torture business, as the voting in Iraq went rather well. As in this - "In a day remarkable for the absence of large-scale violence, millions of Iraqi voters, many of them dressed in their best and traveling with other family members, streamed to the polls today to cast ballots ..."

It worked. The president had a major success. One balances the other. Now let's see if they can form a government over there, and rewrite the constitution from the loose draft, and get along. As Fred Kaplan says here - " Watching these long-oppressed people exercising their franchise as citizens, hearing them express their hopes for a better, freer life - who could fail to be moved or to wish them well?" But then he covers what comes next, and it's not pretty. There's work to do - lots of it. An election is democratic, but not a democracy - not a working government.

What else happened on the full moon?

There was lots of coverage of what the president said in his exclusive interview with Brit Hume on Fox News. And the most interesting tidbit was this - "President Bush said yesterday he is confident that former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) is innocent of money-laundering charges, as he offered strong support for several top Republicans who have been battered by investigations ..."

He said DeLay was innocent. Were I Delay's defense attorney I'd argue to the jury that you couldn't possibly find my client guilty when the president of the whole damned United States says he isn't. Were I the prosecuting attorney I'd argue the president should be charged with jury tampering. How do you try a case when the man who runs the whole country has publicly said the accused in innocent? How can you even seat a jury?

The whole Fox News interview is here and it contains lots of goodies, like "The Brownie Kiss of Death" that everyone is talking about.

"The Brownie Kiss of Death" - if you don't remember - has to do with Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, and the Hurricane Katrina business. There's are lot of clips of the president saying, "You've doing a heck of a job, Brownie." A few days later Brown resigned in disgrace. You can buy t-shirts with "You've doing a heck of a job, Brownie" on the front. They're brown, of course. It's a running joke.

On Fox the president says this of Donald Rumsfeld - "He's done a heck of a job. He's conducted two wars, and at the same time is out to transfer my military from a military that was constructed for the post-Cold War to one that is going to be constructed to fight terrorism."

He's done a heck of a job? No, Rumsfeld is not on the way out. No one told the president about the running joke. It seems there's lots his people don't tell him.

For a full discussion of the Fox News interview see this from Tim Grieve. It's pretty amazing.

But Tim Grieve is best here -

Who, exactly, is allowed to be critical of the Bush administration these days?

We know it's not the Democrats. As Joe Lieberman said the other day, Democrats who distrust George W. Bush need to "acknowledge he'll be commander in chief for three more years" because "we undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril."

We know it's not senators who believe that the Bush administration manipulated prewar intelligence. As Dick Cheney explained last month, it's "irresponsible" for them to speak out about their "dishonest and reprehensible" views.

We know it's not the United Nations. As John Bolton said the other day in remarks intended for the U.N.'s high commissioner on human rights, "It is inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we're engaged in in the war on terror with nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers."

We know it's not peace activists or other antiwar groups. As NBC News reported this week, the Pentagon is monitoring even the smallest gatherings as "threats" and "suspicious incidents."

And now we know it's not our neighbors to the north, either. ... the U.S. ambassador to Canada told Canadians this week that they should tone down their anti-Bush rhetoric - or else. "It may be smart election-year politics to thump your chest and constantly criticize your friend and your No. 1 trading partner," David Wilkins said at the Canada Club in Ottawa. "But it is a slippery slope, and all of us should hope that it doesn't have a long-term impact on our relationship."

Wilkins may not know much about Canada - before he got the ambassadorship, he'd visited the country only once, on a trip to Niagara Falls. But he certainly knows a thing or two about the value of long-term relationships. An old Bush family friend, Wilkins raised more than $200,000 for the president's 2004 reelection campaign. Which means, apparently, that he's pretty much free to say whatever he wants.

Of course he links to all the news stories supporting what he says.

It's all madness. It must be the full moon (here rising over the Hollywood Hills, Thursday, December 15, 2005, 6:15 pm - 18h15 - PST) -

Posted by Alan at 20:17 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Thursday, 15 December 2005 20:21 PST home

Wednesday, 14 December 2005

Topic: Chasing the Zeitgeist

The Passing Parade: Incremental Changes and More of the Same

From here above the Sunset Strip, and stretched out below, the Los Angeles basin, following the national dialog - who said what and who avoided saying this or that that might have been problematic - is fairly easy. In the far room the television burbles away with the "experts" on Fox News and CNN and MSNBC (and PBS) explaining the significance this or that event, and these or those words. And a drive anywhere has the same on talk radio, which is fairly mind numbing but a relief from Elvis singing about Christmas being blue without you and one more version of "Let It Snow." (We have snow here in Los Angeles County, up in the mountains - you can see that in the distance, forty miles away. But it's not really the same thing.) And, as for keeping up on the news, there's a massive amount of information on the net.

The problem is, of course, separating the wheat from the chaff - separating what seems significant about who we are and where we're going from just stuff that happens. Stuff that happens? Tuesday, December 13th, kicking off at four in the morning, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association did their annual announcements of their nominations for the Golden Globe Awards. Movie stuff. But at that pre-dawn hour no one in his or her right mind would be down the street at the Beverly Hilton. The place is depressing enough during the day and evening, what with the blue-haired matrons stumbling out of the last Trader Vic's around. But this is an industry town and that means people in their right minds are not really important.

People do follow such things. After twenty-five years in Los Angeles, and the last fifteen smack in the middle of Hollywood, it's just hard to get excited about such stuff. At the last Oscar Party I attended, back in the nineties, at the home of a VP of Sony Pictures, I came in second at guessing the winners in all the categories. I don't remember what I won. I do remember I hadn't seen any of the films, which defines guessing in its purist form.

Some folks think such things matter, a lot, and others of us don't - we're on the trail of "big events." The industry folks think we're nutty. We think they're silly. Fine.

But what are these here big events? By mid-week, Wednesday, December 14th, for news hounds, policy wonks, and others chasing the zeitgeist, there were a few. The president had given the country both the third and the fourth in his series of four speeches explaining his unified theory of everything, or everything about what the administration got us into with this war and "the plan" for making it all work out fine. That was a good thing because there was news bubbling up that come January there would be new requests for supplemental, off-budget bills to fund it all, driving the cost to over a half-trillion. That also was a good thing because congress med-week was in some turmoil about renewing the Patriot Act with even some of the guys in the president's own party getting worried about the implications of the thing - even a government run by a dry-drunk frat boy from Texas everyone loves and trusts can have a bit too much power and all that. And by mid-week we learned the military is keeping files on anti-war folks just like back in the sixties. And the speeches justifying everything were also useful because the administration's effort to allow our folks to torture who we want, under certain conditions, got a tad cleverer.

So here we go.

The Two Speeches

The first was Monday the twelfth at the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia, and the second in front of the Woodrow Wilson Institute in Washington on Wednesday. This was notable because these were speeches not given in front of military personnel. Only the first of the speeches, at the Naval Academy, was in front of our armed forces. Even Fox News was wondering about Bush and Cheney making overtly political speeches in front of the troops, as you see here -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The counterargument is, of course, these four speeches, timed to end the day before the Iraqi elections, were statements of policy and strategy and purely informative - they were not political. But insofar as they were a defense of policy and a rebuttal to criticism, at a time when the president and his party were under fire and worried about the effect of the war on the 2006 mid-term elections (coupled with the spreading scandals and low poll numbers), in a broad sense, they were political. In these times any presidential speech is. But there has been a hint of "don't mess with me because the military backs me" in previous speeches. You don't want that whiff of Juan Peron or Joseph Stalin.

So the audience for speeches two through four were civilians.

Monday's speech was odd. It was cheerleading mixed with a reality check. (Transcript here.) The president said that the week's Iraqi elections "won't be perfect" as the Associated Press was reporting this: "Four U.S. Army soldiers died in a roadside bombing, gunmen killed a Sunni Arab candidate for parliament, and militants tried to blow up a leading Shiite politician in separate attacks Tuesday, the last day of campaigning for Iraq's election."

Indeed, that is not perfect.

But the president was also saying "every milestone" toward democracy in Iraq "has been achieved."

True, as far as the predetermined milestones are concerned. We hit the targets, pretty much. The constitution there was approved, a week or two late - except it wasn't finished and whatever government created by the election of the new parliament will have as its first task finishing it up, or starting again. As it stands now, the new constitution is more like a collection of ideas, and likely to be more divisive than unifying. It's a grab-bag. Some things are not yet certain. Just who gets the oil revenue, are there autonomous or fully united states in this new Iraq, will the laws be Islamic or secular, will women have rights and, if so, what rights? There's a bit of work to do. But we met the deadline. It's kind of like a student saying, "My term paper was on time - you got it - but I'll finish writing it later." Well, you call it a success. Details come later. Film at eleven.

So how did the speech go over? A scan of the media for insightful analysis of the Monday speech would yield you little. It came down to saying things are fine, there are some problems, and so be patient. What was there to say about that?

And as for public reaction, here (USA Today/CNN/Gallup the next day), you see some of that made sense to people, as sixty three percent of those polled said they believe that Iraq has made real progress toward democracy over the last two years. Right. No problem. But fifty-eight percent decided the president still doesn't have a clear plan for Iraq - just about the same number who thought that when the "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" was finally unveiled to great fanfare in the first speech at Annapolis. Is that a way of saying things are getting better, but not because of anything the president or the administration has done? It was dumb luck? Maybe so, but the president's approval rating finally moved up a bit, from the thirties to forty-two percent.

Some of the jump in approval may be due to a change in tone.

As you recall, the venue for second of these four speeches - Wednesday, December 7th to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington - was where the Council broke its tradition and granted the White House's special request - no questions. The president speaks and the president leaves - a first for any speaker at the Council on Foreign Relations. But the following Monday, after the third speech, he took questions - five of them.

This was really big news in Washington, as he usually doesn't, or more precisely, doesn't take questions from audiences that haven't been screened, or questions that haven't been screened. Something is up.

His political advisors must have sensed that had made him look defensive and detached. So they took a chance, and it went something like this:

REPORTER: Since the inception of the Iraqi war, I'd like to know the approximate total of Iraqis who have been killed. And by Iraqis I include civilians, military, police, insurgents, translators.

GWB: How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis. We've lost about 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq. Yes.

SECOND REPORTER: Mr. President, thank you -

GWB: I'll repeat the question. If I don't like it, I'll make it up.

Oops. You could imagine his handlers cringing. They wanted him to project openness and honesty, and he said that? At least he didn't say, "Now watch this drive," and swing a golf club.

Another audience member asked why the White House persists in linking the war in Iraq to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon way back when. The answer? September 11, 2001 changed everything - "It said that oceans no longer protect us, that we can't take threats for granted, that if we see a threat we've got to deal with it, doesn't have to be military necessarily, but we've got to deal with it. We can't just hope for the best anymore."

Before that day he thought the oceans protected us? What? And because he now realizes that because the bad guys aren't afraid of water we need to do this preemptive war thing?

The problem for the handlers - how do we get this guy to seem to be connected to reality, to the serious stuff? That's the PR problem.

As mentioned previously, the day of this third speech Newsweek had hit the newsstands with its cover story Bush in the Bubble. There, the authors, Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe, lay out many, many details that suggest a level of indifference, if not denial, "that is dangerous for a president who seeks to transform the world." They do point out that all presidents face "a tension between sticking to their guns and dealing with changing reality." And yes, it can be a mistake "to listen too closely to the ever-present (and often self-aggrandizing) critics." But the general idea was that this fellow might be the most isolated president we've ever had - and alarmingly detached from what's really going on. (And alarmingly simple-minded, but they didn't say that.)

In an interview with NBC's Brian Williams, the president said it may be his own fault that so many Americans think he's uninformed about the world, but it's not really so - "Frankly, it is probably part of my own fault for needling people. But it's a myth to think I don't know what's going on. And it's a myth to think that I'm not aware that there is [sic] opinions that don't agree with mine. Because I'm fully aware of that."

Ah, someone told him. And someone told him a few interviews might help - he should get out more. We'll see more of this - it's time to "humanize" the product.

That effort came to fruition with the fourth and final speech, Wednesday, December 14th, with this - "On the eve of Iraq's historic election, President Bush took responsibility Wednesday for "wrong" intelligence that led to the war, but he said removing Saddam Hussein was still necessary."

Whoa, Nelly! Is this a mea culpa? "As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq." Was he wrong?

No. He was right, as he says. The intelligence was wrong - except, of course, much of it actually was right, and his crew ignored the part that was right and hyped the part that was wrong, that their own agencies and other governments and had told them was bogus crap.

But it's something. He says he knows something is wrong here. Too bad he doesn't see what the real problem is. The intelligence wasn't the problem. It was the notion Iraq was the problem, when the problem was larger and more diffused and not that simple.

The rest was boilerplate - "We cannot and will not leave Iraq until victory is achieved." Can't say what victory would look like, exactly, but we know all Americans love declarations like that so we'll say such things. There's a reasonable summary of the whole speech here, if you find that necessary. It isn't.

Who is buying this?

Andrew Sullivan here -

Something remarkable has been going on these past few weeks. The president has begun to be a real war-leader. He is conceding mistakes, he is preparing people for bad news, he is leveling with the American people, he is taking questions from audiences who aren't pre-selected or rehearsed. Some of us have been begging him to do this for, er, years. Now that he is, his ratings are nudging up. The truth is: most Americans want to win in Iraq. They will back a president who is honest with them and dedicated to victory. And those of us who have been deeply critical of the war's conduct thus far are fully prepared to back the only commander-in-chief we've got, if he's honest with us, corrects mistakes, and has a sane plan for progress. With Casey and Khalilzad and Rice, I think we have the best team we have yet deployed in the war. Let's pass the McCain Amendment and put the abuse and torture issues behind us, and fight this war the way Americans have always fought: humanely but relentlessly, for a better, freer world.

Yeah, onward and upward, except for the torture stuff.

Torture Tricks

The house overwhelming voted to support the efforts of Senator John McCain, symbolically echoing the senate vote on his amendment, to be posted to any bill possible, banning our side from using torture, anywhere, on anyone. Much has been written on this, here and elsewhere. The house vote, late Wednesday, December 14th, seems to be a slap at the White House, and the Republican house leadership did what the could to keep it from the floor, but that just didn't work. The vice president has been arguing there should be an exception for the CIA, and Rumsfeld that there should at least be some sort of retroactive release from liability for anything done or written in memos or policy about torture before there was this new rule that everyone had to follow the rules of the land, and in the military, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. No dice. No exceptions. No compromises.

But there is a way out, as reported here in the New York Times -

The Army has approved a new, classified set of interrogation methods that may complicate negotiations over legislation proposed by Senator John McCain to bar cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees in American custody, military officials said Tuesday.

The techniques are included in a 10-page classified addendum to a new Army field manual that was forwarded this week to Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence policy, for final approval, they said.

The addendum provides dozens of examples and goes into exacting detail on what procedures may or may not be used, and in what circumstances. Army interrogators have never had a set of such specific guidelines that would help teach them how to walk right up to the line between legal and illegal interrogations.

Call this the Rumsfeld gambit. You want to insist everyone follow the rules? We'll change them.

Very clever.

Big Bucks

That money issue mentioned up top?

Associated Press here -

The Pentagon is in the early stages of drafting a wartime request for up to $100 billion more for Iraq and Afghanistan, lawmakers say, a figure that would push spending related to the wars toward a staggering half-trillion dollars.

Reps. Bill Young, R-Fla., the chairman of the House appropriations defense panel, and John Murtha, D-Pa., the senior Democrat on that subcommittee, say the military has informally told them it wants $80 billion to $100 billion in a war-spending package that the White House is expected to send Congress next year.

That would be in addition to $50 billion Congress is about to give the Pentagon before lawmakers adjourn for the year for operations in Iraq for the beginning of 2006. Military commanders expect that pot to last through May.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress has approved more than $300 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan, including military operations, reconstruction, embassy security and foreign aid, as well as other costs related to the war on terrorism, according to the Congressional Research Service, which writes reports for Congress.

Asked about the upcoming spending package, Young offered the $80 billion to $100 billion range. "That's what I'm told," he said.

Murtha mentioned the $100 billion figure last week to reporters, saying "Twenty years it's going to take to settle this thing. The American people are not going to put up with it, can't afford it."

We have a choice?

New Orleans and the Gulf Coast will have to wait. But more tax cuts for the well off won't wait.

There's not much to say.

Patriot Games

As noted here, Wednesday, December 14th, the house voted 251 to 174 to renew the USA Patriot Act. This set up a confrontation over the revised version with a group of Democratic and Republican senators who say this new iteration would not go far enough to protect civil liberties.

You've got your FBI secret searches, monitored telephone calls and e-mails, and authority to obtain bank records and other personal documents in connection with terrorism investigations, without warrants or any show of cause, and those national security letters and other types of subpoenas that give the FBI "substantial latitude in deciding what records - including those from libraries - should be surrendered."

It seems a coalition of Democrats and moderates, and even conservative Republicans, in the Senate oppose the bill. They may filibuster.

How odd.

Enough is enough? The argument that it's a new world - everything changed on September 11, 2001 - seems to be failing. Should the administration say that louder and more often?

What do you do when the magic chant that worked so well doesn't produce magic any longer?

Stop Reading Here

Note this - the Pentagon is spying on anti-war protesters right here at home. They say they're just trying to protect military bases from damage.

But there's this -

The DOD database obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far from any military installation, post or recruitment center. One "incident" included in the database is a large anti-war protest at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles last March that included effigies of President Bush and anti-war protest banners. Another incident mentions a planned protest against military recruiters last December in Boston and a planned protest last April at McDonald's National Salute to America's Heroes - a military air and sea show in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The Fort Lauderdale protest was deemed not to be a credible threat and a column in the database concludes: "US group exercising constitutional rights." Two-hundred and forty-three other incidents in the database were discounted because they had no connection to the Department of Defense - yet they all remained in the database.

They're keeping a list? Hollywood and Vine? That's ten blocks east - and not near anything military.

Note this -

Everyone who reads this blog knows that I've consistently supported the Bush administration's Iraq policy. Tonight, however, I heard a profoundly disturbing report. NBC has obtained documents showing that the military has been collecting information on the identities and activities of anti-war protestors. While I strongly disagree with the protestors, it's their right as American citizens to express, in a non-violent fashion, their disagreement with the administration's policies. This is all-too reminiscent of the FBI's activities during the Vietnam era. Then, at least, there was concern about Communist infiltration of the anti-war movement. No such excuse exists today. The military's action is beyond the pale.

That's Marc Schulman. He and I have traded a few emails, and disagree on any number of things, but this is a worry.

Posted by Alan at 23:04 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 14 December 2005 23:14 PST home

Tuesday, 13 December 2005

Topic: The Law

Jurisprudence and Prudence: Justice in the State Governed by Former Movie Stars

Capital punishment has been discussed before in these pages.

There was the extended discussion of Scott Turow's book Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing With the Death Penalty (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) way back in mid-October of 2003, and, in late December of that year, The Culture of Death: Who We Should Kill and Why, a discussion of whether Saddam Hussein deserves the death penalty.

Posted on March 7, 2004 was the item Getting Even, a discussion of and commentary on Jeffrie G. Murphy's book, Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits (Oxford University Press).

That item pointed back to an item the previous year by Antonin Scalia, one of the nine on the Supreme Court, an essay titled God's Justice and Ours. Antonin Scalia was sort of saying this - since the death penalty was "clearly permitted when the Eighth Amendment [which prohibits 'cruel and unusual punishments'] was adopted," and at that time the death penalty was applied for all felonies -including, for example, the felony of horse-thieving, "so it is clearly permitted today." Justice Scalia it seems has no doubt that if the crime of horse stealing carried a death penalty today in the United States - he would find that law constitutional. Well, that really is his logic. So if we study history, we could extend the death penalty to those people who practice witchcraft, adultery, homosexuality and, say, heresy? All we need to do is find those particular death penalty laws existing as of November 3, 1791, and re-instate them. Scalia derives his ideas also, it seems, from Romans 13 - government authority is derived from God and not from the people; he asserts his view was the consensus of Western thought until recent times - "a democratic government, being nothing more than the composite will of its individual citizens, has no more moral power or authority than they do as individuals." Democracy, according to Scalia, creates problems, "It fosters civil disobedience." So screw it. Well, he's an odd duck.

Other discussions?

There was The Company We Keep (July 25, 2004), a discussion of which countries, like us, employ the death penalty. And A Minor Matter (March 6, 2005), opinion on the then recent Supreme Court decision that we really ought not execute minors.

Then there was An Idea Whose Time Has Come (March 20, 2005), a discussion of the idea proposed by a professor of constitutional law at UCLA that not only should we have a death penalty, we should have extended public executions involving torture and pain, and the family of the victim should be the ones inflicting that pain and death - but he doesn't think we will go for amending the constitution to allow that. And then he changes his mind. Maybe the whole idea wasn't that good an idea. In fact, in An Oklahoman Turns European (April 24, 2005) we see the father of one of the victims of the famous Oklahoma City bombing of the Federal Building there is a vocal opponent of the death penalty - Timmy didn't have to die, as he reasons it out.

So it's not as if this issue hasn't come up before.

Anyway, the nub of the matter, as Turow puts it in his book, is that, on the one hand, some crimes, like murder, are so extreme that they require the most extreme retribution. On the other hand, state-sanctioned killing reduces our society to its lowest common denominator, making all of us complicit in the taking of a life.

The basic question? "Should a democratic state ever be permitted to kill its citizens? If the people are the ultimate source of authority in a democracy, should the government be allowed to eliminate its citizens"

Who knows?

Those enthusiastic about the death penalty see it as "a statement of moral value" to be applied widely and often, to say who we are - to clearly show what we just won't tolerate. And there may be some merit in that. But some of us won't tolerate the concept that the state can decide to take anyone's life - as the decision is so often flawed, and even when it isn't flawed, shows something else about us all. We don't like what it shows.

And round and around it goes. But the position here has been consistent.

"It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners." - Albert Camus (1913-1960)

But we just did it again, out here in California.

Tookie Williams Is Executed
The killer of four and Crips co-founder is given a lethal injection after Schwarzenegger denies clemency. He never admitted his guilt.
Jenifer Warren and Maura Dolan, Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, December 13, 2005, 2:18 AM PST

The bare bones -

Stanley Tookie Williams, whose self-described evolution from gang thug to antiviolence crusader won him an international following and nominations for a Nobel Peace Prize, was executed by lethal injection early today, hours after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to spare his life.

His death was announced at 12:35 a.m.

During the execution, the inmate's friend Barbara Becnel and other supporters mouthed "God bless you" and "We love you" and blew kisses to Williams. Williams also seemed to mouth statements to Becnel.

The entire procedure took longer than usual. The execution team took about 12 minutes to find a vein in Williams' muscular left arm. While the personnel were probing, Williams repeatedly lifted his head off the gurney, winced visibly, and at one point appeared to say: "Still can't find it?"

So read Warren and Dolan if you want more detail of who said what.

And too, there's background like this -

Despite persistent pleas for mercy from around the globe, the governor earlier in the day had said Williams was unworthy of clemency because he had not admitted his brutal shotgun murders of four people during two robberies 26 years ago.

After the U.S. Supreme Court denied a request for a last-minute stay Monday evening, the co-founder of the infamous Crips street gang - who insisted he was innocent of the murders - became the 12th man executed by the state of California since voters reinstated capital punishment in 1978.

This was high drama out here. The racial implications were hanging heavy in the air - the dreaded black gangs had to be stopped, and for some whites, the lawless, hyper-masculine and testosterone-pumped virile (if not feral) sexually-threatening savage black man had to be put down, as you put down an animal. But that bubbled under the surface.

And would there be riots all over Los Angeles as we had when the police who beat the crap out of Rodney King were found guilty of nothing at all? No, this fellow was hardly a goofy innocent. Some screamed he was innocent. Not many were buying that line. He had not been a nice man. He was tried for murder, convicted and sentenced, in 1981, down in Torrance, a bedroom community of aerospace folks (Hughes, TRW, Northrop and all that) just south of the airport and, at the time, a white-bread place if there ever was one. But he would have been convicted in Compton or Watts. The angry in black community did not seem to want to burn down the city over the officially authorized execution of this particular guy. The Times quotes "African American activist" Eric Wattree - "We have to understand, this is our failure taking place here." The day was quiet.

As the Times points out, and as many can see, the theme here was really something else - what they call "society's dueling goals of redemption and retribution."

The argument came down to whether he should pay with his life for what he had done - or had all the writing, the series of books warning ghetto kids away from violence, the brokering of gang truces in Los Angeles and New Jersey, and all the rest, "redeemed him," and earned him life in prison without the possibility of parole, until he died of something other than the state's injections. Last year, after all, this guy's life had been made into a television movie - "Redemption," starring Jamie Foxx. Heck, Desmond Tutu and Snoop Dogg said the man's life should be spared. Joan Baez sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" outside the prison walls hours before the execution, for - excuse the pun - goodness sake. This was high drama out here.

Arnold Schwarzenegger knows drama, or at least melodrama, and, as reported, said he saw no need to rehash or second-guess the many court decisions already rendered in the case. His thumb shot down, just like in the movies. Of course he was on solid ground. Sunday before the execution the state Supreme Court heard the argument that the 1981 trial was "fundamentally unfair" because the prosecutors had failed to disclose that a key witness, Alfred Coward, was a violent ex-felon. They said it didn't matter. The Ninth Circuit agreed the next day, as did the US Supreme Court. Alfred Coward may have been a violent ex-felon, and that should have been revealed, but it would not have made a difference.

So Stanley Tookie Williams is gone.

And the lead editorial in the Los Angeles Times, on newsstands an hour or two after the execution, said, well, It's not about Tookie.

It isn't?

The argument here is that Schwarzenegger should have granted clemency to the guy before, one Donald Beardslee, a convicted murderer executed in January with no big fanfare of any kind. The Times thinks Schwarzenegger should have made it clear that "no one would be put to death on his watch" - as they contend "a civilized society doesn't kill for retribution and should certainly not continue doing so when it's become clear that the judicial system's margin of error is unacceptably high."

Short form: Exacting retribution is uncivilized, and doing it incompetently is even worse.

What they don't mention is every film Schwarzenegger ever made is about retribution - the bad guys get what's coming to them, and no matter how they plead and whimper, they die, spectacularly, and noisily, with music. And there may be collateral damage (the title of one of his recent films, oddly enough), but stuff happens. This is what he knows. This is what made him who he is. He never said he was a policy expert or knew much about governance - he sold himself to the voters as the outsider who wouldn't be encumbered by all that, and what we really needed. What did the Times expect?

The Times says Schwarzenegger turned Williams down "because he does not consider capital punishment to be about our values as a society, but about the merits of the convicted supplicant." The man didn't seem sincere enough? He didn't grovel enough for the Terminator to spare him? Like this is a movie?

The Times position, that that capital punishment is always wrong because it is incompatible with our values, isn't in the script. They say that those who opposed Williams' plea argue that he deserved his fate, "but the people of California don't deserve to play the role of executioner." But that is role we have the script, and Arnold is our man.

We see also there are now 647 folks on Death Row out here, and next up is Clarence Ray Allen, scheduled for 17 January. He's seventy-five, blind and confined to a wheelchair. Can the state keep him alive until the 17th? This should be interesting. Didn't see that one in any of the Schwarzenegger movies.

James Wolcott here voices what may of us in the tiny minority who oppose the death penalty feel at the moment -

I held out the fugitive hope that the moderate side of Schwarzenegger might prevail as his wife tugged him in the direction of leniency and mercy. What a fool I am. Whatever Maria Shriver said or didn't say was of no consequence, nor were the pleas for clemency from citizens, famous and obscure alike, who felt Williams had done enough good over the last twenty years to deserve having his life spared.

The death penalty must be abolished. No former movie action hero - or Yale cheerleader with enough psychological baggage to sink the African Queen - should be entrusted with the power of life and death over his fellow citizens. These are essentially frivolous, uninformed men playacting blue-suited roles of grave responsibility. And, no, I don't think Bill Clinton should have executed Ricky Ray Rector either. Capital punishment must be de-politicized, and as long as politicians make the final decision, depoliticization is impossible. So abolish it.

Well, that is the bottom line, isn't it? No politician should be entrusted with the power of life and death over his fellow citizens. Yeah, think about those who aspire to politics, with their mixture of idealism and raw hunger for power over others, with their soaring egos and odd insecurities, and with their almost pathological narcissism.

But Wolcott is angry with these fools who are politicians. These are the people who get to say who lives and dies?

But how about this? No government should be entrusted with the power of life and death over its fellow citizens. We, as citizens, are entitled to life - a basic premise. If we do horrible things we can be punished. Grant the government that. But set aside what is called the "ultimate punishment." The government has no right to kill its citizens, as governments are notoriously mistaken again and again, and change their calculation of legal and illegal, right and wrong, as they correct themselves over the long years - and they're artificial constructs of convenience. Don't give them the power to kill their citizens.

Funny, you'd think most conservatives on the right - the less government is better folks - would see this. Ah well.

An aside - France abolished the death penalty in 1981 and you see here, Julien Dray, spokesman for the Socialist Party in France, saying, "Schwarzenegger has a lot of muscles, but apparently not much heart." That's not the point, but it's amusing.

Jeralyn Merritt, defense attorney of note, adds the basic facts here about governments being notoriously mistaken. Since 1973, 122 people in 25 states have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence. She says it's time for a moratorium. And she quotes Supreme Court Justice Brennan from 1994 - "Perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent."

Also noted there, Sean Paul - "What requires more courage: revenge or forgiveness?"

What plays better politically?

And Susan Hu -

What matters for me is that murdering Tookie solves nothing, makes the United States look barbaric to the rest of the world, and destroys Tookie's future chances to influence more young people against entering the gang life. ...

And from Jeralyn Merritt's own memorandum to Schwarzenegger -

Clemency is about mercy. It is an act of grace. You have the opportunity to stop a needless killing. Tookie's execution will not bring the victims back. It will not heal. The welfare of the people of California is best served by the message clemency would send - one of hope to the tens of thousands of disadvantaged young people your administration has professed to care so deeply about. A denial of clemency will send a message of despair.

Note these last two items presume one of the jobs of government is to provide hope that things will be better. That's a "progressive" view, not a conservative one. It is well beyond obvious the conservative national government of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld operates on a far different premise - we're in deep danger and could all die and you should be very afraid and keep us in power to protect you. Mercy? Healing? We may have to torture people to keep you safe, and you really don't want to know about that. It's a cruel world and there is pure evil and there is no way you can think what is pure evil can ever change, or think those who perpetrate evil deserve anything less than horrible pain or death, as it's us or them.

Hell, Arnold Schwarzenegger is just a minor George Bush, with a different accent, but just about the same language skills, the same analytical skills, and the same distain for complexity. The political strategy is the same - keep up the level of fear and show you are eliminating, in one way or another, the evildoers you have made into cartoon bogeymen.

But that really does work.

By the way, Amnesty International here takes a completely different approach to the issue, pointing out the logic problem -

By refusing to stay Williams' execution, Gov. Schwarzenegger has failed to demonstrate genuine leadership on this issue. In his prepared statement, he said that he was placing his trust in California's criminal justice system, which the Senate Commission is currently investigating. Last year, the legislative body recognized the pervasive flaws plaguing the system and tasked the Commission with discovering and exposing the potentially lethal errors and bias that have metastasized throughout the state's administration of the death penalty.

As California's highest-ranking public official, Gov. Schwarzenegger has an obligation to guarantee that all of the state's laws are applied equally to everyone - even people on death row. But today, he abandoned that responsibility and left the more than 640 death row inmates to fend for themselves in the state's broken system. According to the Santa Clara Law Review, California's death penalty system is incapable of providing equal protection because it lacks "... the basic safeguards to avoid capricious, erroneous, and discriminatory application of the death penalty."

Hey, Arnold, you say you trust the courts got it right and your own commission says they often just don't get it right. What up with that?

Finally a good read is Jeanne over at Body and Soul telling us here how she tried to explain this all to her young daughter. The kid is confused about how it makes sense that when someone kills someone else we show that is really bad by killing them. Yeah, kids are a pain sometimes. She suggests there are leaned behaviors at play here -

We think there's some instinctive desire for vengeance that law and civilization help us overcome, but I wonder if there is not also an instinctive recoiling from vengeance, like the one I saw on my daughter's face last night. A deep-seated understanding that if killing is wrong, killing a killer is also wrong. I don't know, but I wonder if we have it all turned around. People don't have to learn not to be vengeful; they have to bury their natural compassion.

Maybe so. But we seem to have done that.

As Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times, who actually witnessed the execution, suggests here, this was a "macabre spectacle in a nation that preaches godly virtue to the world while resisting a global march away from the Medieval practice of capital punishment." But he was okay with it - as were most people.

__

It should be noted the next controversial death penalty case where there is a question of whether clemency should be granted is not the one out here with the seventy-five-year-old blind man in the wheelchair. This one concerns one Cory Maye of Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi.

Here's a quick summary -

In the process of executing a warranted no-knock search on Maye's neighbor in the middle of the night, cops burst into Maye's home, unannounced. Maye woke up and, fearing for his life (that of his 18-month-old child), fired on one of the police, who later died from the wound. The cop's death is a horrible tragedy, but the cause was the cops' mistake - breaking down the door of the wrong home - not Cory Maye's. If Maye reasonably believed his life was in danger, the shooting was self-defense.

Well, he was convicted of first-degree murder, given the death penalty, and scheduled for execution.

Read all about it here - all the details and lots of links. The local police mistakenly break down the door of a sleeping man, late at night, as part of drug raid. But the man wasn't named in the warrant, and wasn't a suspect. The man, frightened for himself and his infant daughter, fires at an intruder who had just rushed into his bedroom after the door had been kicked in.

The problem?

The man, who is black, has just killed the white son of the town's police chief. Oops. The police apparently beat Maye pretty comprehensively after he was arrested. And he's summarily convicted and sentenced to death by a mostly white jury. The man has no criminal record, and police changed their story about finding traces of drugs in his possession at the time of the raid. They turn up the next day, oddly enough.

Yeah, right.

This should be interesting.

Posted by Alan at 21:30 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 14 December 2005 07:08 PST home

Monday, 12 December 2005

Topic: God and US

The Culture Wars: The Jewish Problem

As mentioned in these pages in late November, in Mondays With Murrow, we are divided. Bill O'Reilly and the whole Fox News network have mounted a campaign to end the oppression of beleaguered and minority Christians in this country and save Christmas itself from the secular bullies who now run this country.

See Media Matters here for a review of what Bill O'Reilly, the most popular cable news commentator in America, had been saying up to that point, or check out the new book by another Fox News anchor - John Gibson's The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought (Sentinel, October 2005).

Bill says we need to get back to what the Founding Fathers intended (but ignores that they worked on Christmas Day 1779 and Christmas wasn't a national holiday before 1870 - the Puritans banned the holiday and 25 December is mentioned nowhere in the New Testament).

So what is the war about? John Gibson argues this war must be fought every time someone uses the greeting Happy Holidays rather than Merry Christmas. And who does that? Costco, Target, Wal-Mart, K-Mart and Sears have "Happy Holidays" in their promotional material - not "Merry Christmas." So we need to fight them. If we don't fight them? That would be a victory for the secular left and a defeat for all Christians.

It's hard to avoid this issue. It's all over the press, and some on the Christian right have even turned on the president, when a few of the more easy-going and sardonic of those who follow such things pointed out to them that the more than a million cards sent out by the White House this December wished recipients "Happy Holidays." The First Lady's press secretary, Susan Whitson, had to scramble - "Certainly President and Mrs. Bush celebrate Christmas." It's just that their "friends" include "people of all faiths."

This may not mollify some. Bush has, for the last four years, tried to make up for initially calling our current effort in Iraq a "crusade." Some trembling staffer had to explain to him that might be a word that would upset more than a few of our allies in the Middle East. The president's life-long contempt for history and detail had him at a temporary disadvantage here. To many in the Middle East, the historic Crusades, by Christians to win back the Holy Land from the Muslims, are just something everyone knows happened, and they'd rather not they happen again. So the president would, now and then, here and there, assure those in that part of the world that this wasn't a Christian holy war on Islam. He had used the "crusade" word in a general sense, of course, and then stopped using at all. And how many times did he say, "Islam is a religion of peace?" Quite a few times - attempting to diffuse all this. Of course, worse yet, if you're a proud Christian, last week you might have seen the president lighting a Menorah at the White House.

The mainstream, or near mainstream like Fox News, gives him a pass on all this. But the Christian right is wary. How they see that secular bullies are running the country is difficult to understand, given that the party they support, and depends on them to stay in power, controls the White House, both houses of congress and most of the courts. But the wariness is there. Someone is out to get them.

Note this, a bit of an editorial by Chris Satullo in the Philadelphia Inquirer -

"Happy holidays" and "Seasons greetings" are neither new nor hostile to Christmas. They are fine, old inventions that exemplify civility and recognize that one of the nation's glories is its diversity. In much of America, you never know whether the stranger with whom you exchange pleasantries in the line at Starbucks might be Jewish, Buddhist, agnostic, Muslim or Hindu. The "War on Christmas" riff smacks of a panicky grievance against an America of many hues.

Retailers such as Wal-Mart appeal to the broadest, most diverse market. That's why "Happy holidays" or "Season's greetings" makes perfect sense for them. It's not an insult to Christians. It's marketing to those who are not. (Don't conservatives believe in capitalism?)

Now, if a store wants to shout "Merry Christmas" to the world, the First Amendment is certainly OK with that. Retailers may do it, churches may, individuals, as well. A newspaper may, without apology, publish an annual Christmas story. (Hint: See this space next Sunday.)

The First Amendment limits only what government, with its myriad powers, may do. Government must not grant adherents of one faith greater (or lesser) rights and benefits.

That's why creches at City Hall and pious carols on the school stage are always problematic (though not always wrong). People who don't get the First Amendment, who yearn for their faith to be top dog, can't see that. Instead, they seek to poison a national holiday of good will with trumped-up grievances.

Well, you can be sure these folks are not out to "poison a national holiday of good will." But there is some panic here.

And everyone agrees civility is fine. It's a good thing. But here one assumes civility is something that, while nice, is something that one cannot afford when one is "at war." In fact, the argument might be roughly parallel to the idea that we cannot afford to forego state-sponsored torture - we wouldn't normally codify and do that, but September 11 changed everything and we're in a new kind of war. Civility is something we can no longer afford? Well, when the very core of your being, your faith, is under attack, you might argue that.

So the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, proclaims the "Holiday Tree" on the lawn there is now a "Christmas Tree" - and the same happens in Boston and all over, in a show of solidarity, even if the relation of such trees to the birth of Jesus is well beyond tenuous. The dead tree made pretty in December is a winter solstice thing, isn't it? Is it pagan? There's no such thing in the New Testament, but then there was no parade a balloons in the shape of cartoon characters in Jerusalem that night more than two thousand years ago.

Whatever. It's a show of defiance - standing up to the bullies. And there are a few votes there too, of course.

Now as a goy, and a life-long atheist, the dark side of this should not bother me. But there is a dark side. Bill O'Reilly is all over George Soros, as here he warns America about the vast conspiracy to get rid of Christmas -

There's a very secret plan. And it's a plan that nobody's going to tell you, "Well, we want to diminish Christian philosophy in the U.S.A. because we want X, Y, and Z." They'll never ever say that. But I'm kind of surprised they went after Christmas because it's such an emotional issue.

It's the ACLU and the secular Jews like George Soros, of course. Damn those Jews! They hate Christmas.

And lately O'Reilly has been all over the satirist Jon Stewart for kidding around about this on The Daily Show on Comedy Central. Stewart's mocking relies in part on Stewart noting he himself is Jewish.

It's all silliness. But there is this dark side, as many have seen but M. J. Rosenberg points out here in Israel Policy Forum -

The fact that the Christmas warriors are talking in code should not fool anybody. When a political candidate denounces his opponent for receiving campaign contributions from New York and Beverly Hills, we all know who he is talking about. Similarly, denunciations of secular liberals, especially when coupled with references to, say, George Soros and John Stewart, are pretty unambiguous.

Yeah, it seems anti-Semitic, doesn't it?

Yes, and both CNN and MSNBC have reported on the "controversy." And Fox News, which invented the whole thing, from November 28th to December 2nd devoted fifty-eight segments to the subject, and, last Wednesday, the conservative Heritage Foundation held a symposium on "the liberal plot" to ban Christmas.

Rosenberg is not pleased -

Of course, the "war on Christmas" it is totally manufactured. There is no Jewish, or other non-Christian group, that campaigns to ban the term "Merry Christmas."

I suppose there are individual Jews (or Muslims, or others) who prefer to be wished "happy holidays," but that is simply neither here nor there. As for the secular liberal groups making war on the term, they don't exist either. The whole issue was invented by the far right to divide Americans from one another, at Christmastime no less. As the Christmas warriors probably know, the reason businesses have adopted the term "the holidays" in place of Christmas is that Christmas is one day, December 25th. "The holidays" suggests a period that runs from Thanksgiving through New Year's, more time for shopping and exchanging. Anti-Christmas animus is a myth.

But that does not mean that the "war on Christmas" brouhaha is not threatening to Jews.

Why would that be? Because Bill O'Reilly in response to a Jewish caller last December who said that he found O'Reilly's views on Christmas objectionable told the fellow to "move to Israel?"

Would it be because O'Reilly said this?

Now the reason this is happening is because of the ACLU and George Soros, Peter Lewis. Just a reminder: George Soros and Peter Lewis are the far-left, secular progressive billionaires who have funded - they pour money into the ACLU, they pour money into the smear websites, you know, they buy up a lot of the media time. And they basically want to change the country from a Christian-based philosophical country to a secular progressive country like they have in Western Europe.

Rosenberg notes Soros is a Holocaust survivor and a billionaire who backs liberal causes, and Lewis is also a billionaire and a major donor to progressive and Jewish causes.

Would it be because O'Reilly said this when The Daily Show made fun of him and his war on those who say Happy Holidays and use those words in store promotions?

There you go, Jon Stewart. We know what he's doing over there [on Comedy Central]. And it's not just Stewart. You know, ninety percent of quote unquote entertainers are secular progressives. And a Merry Christmas to you, John Stewart. As I said in my newspaper column this week, three wise men showed up to honor the baby Jesus way back when. And if corporate executives are not wise enough to emulate that, well, those of us who respect Christmas might look elsewhere.

Ah, that's how you handle uppity Jews - get in their face, poke them in the chest and sneer, "Merry Christmas." The message is there are more of us than are of you people, so shut up, if you know what's good for you.

Jews have seen this before. What more is there to say?

Eric Alterman here points out another detail, but a small victory -

Rosenberg reserves special scorn for O'Reilly's new ally, comedian Jackie Mason, who has gone on Fox to take O'Reilly's side against those liberal Jews who are out there assaulting Santa Claus. He calls Mason "the Stepin Fetchit of Jewish comedians." The O'Reilly-Mason alliance is no big surprise. Mason, who famously called Mayor Dinkins "a fancy schwartze with a moustache" has always trafficked in racial stereotypes. In his dotage, he has now turned on the Jews. Bye bye, Jackie. It says something when the crazy right has Jackie Mason and we have Jon Stewart. This is a cultural war we have won!

Maybe so, but why is it being fought at all?

And what's with O'Reilly? Some had him pegged as this generation's Joe McCarthy, with all this talk about secret plots, and with his blacklist of enemies of American (and of him) he is going to expose and drive into oblivion. It seemed a retro fifties thing. Now it seems like a late-thirties-in-Germany thing.

That O'Reilly has the largest number of viewers - of those who watch opinion shows on television - just as Rush Limbaugh has the same on radio - is interesting. These are odd times. Schoenberg and Thomas Mann and all the rest bailed out of Germany and Austria in the middle thirties and ended up here in Hollywood. Will things reverse? Steven Spielberg to Munich? You never know.

But there is an explanation for all this, from the mysterious Umberto Eco - God Isn't Big Enough For Some People.

Eco digs deeper -

We are now approaching the critical time of the year for shops and supermarkets: the month before Christmas is the four weeks when stores of all kinds sell their products fastest. Father Christmas means one thing to children: presents. He has no connection with the original St Nicholas, who performed a miracle in providing dowries for three poor sisters, thereby enabling them to marry and escape a life of prostitution.

Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.

They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms - yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious - to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest.

And we need to justify our lives to ourselves and to other people. Money is an instrument. It is not a value - but we need values as well as instruments, ends as well as means. The great problem faced by human beings is finding a way to accept the fact that each of us will die.

That's curious. What makes O'Reilly and John Gibson so defensive, what makes them go on attack, is their sense that someone, somehow, is taking away their justification for simply being, and their hope. The first depends on their Christianity, and the second depends on the belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Eco here simply points out that the role of religion to provide that justification - religions are systems of belief that enable human beings to justify their existence and which "reconcile us to death." Thus O'Reilly and Gibson and the rest see the abyss, know they will die, as we all do, and attack the Jews and other who question their justification for being. As Eco says, we're all still looking for something that will reconcile each of us to the inevitability of our own death. Of course, the attacks help in the ratings too.

Eco, of course is making a far different point. He's writing, in amazement, at the growth of belief in some mighty odd things - "from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code." -

It is amazing how many people take that book literally, and think it is true. Admittedly, Dan Brown, its author, has created a legion of zealous followers who believe that Jesus wasn't crucified: he married Mary Magdalene, became the King of France, and started his own version of the order of Freemasons. Many of the people who now go to the Louvre are there only to look at the Mona Lisa, solely and simply because it is at the centre of Dan Brown's book.

The pianist Arthur Rubinstein was once asked if he believed in God. He said: "No. I don't believe in God. I believe in something greater." Our culture suffers from the same inflationary tendency.

The existing religions just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret "container" with his or her own fears and hopes.

As a child of the Enlightenment, and a believer in the Enlightenment values of truth, open inquiry, and freedom, I am depressed by that tendency.

Well, there's a lot of that specific kind of depression going around these days. And he notes Himmler and many of Hitler's henchmen were "devotees of the most infantile occult fantasies." And in bookstores he sees all these books explaining "Templars, Rosicrucians, pseudo-Kabbalists, and of course The Da Vinci Code, but also anti-semitic tracts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

Yes, there's something in the air. It smells like middle Europe in the late thirties, like dank metallic streets and fear, not like fresh-cut pine and cookies baking in the kitchen.

O'Reilly and Gibson and their legions, of course, aren't into the infantile occult - unless your count their defense of the Jesus Tree with blinking lights and tinsel.

And Christmas will be over soon. And these guys will forget the Jewish Problem until next year.

__

Note:

These are available for your Jesus Tree -

Posted by Alan at 20:31 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Monday, 12 December 2005 20:41 PST home

Sunday, 11 December 2005

Topic: Breaking News

Teeing Up the Week - Which of these news stories will you be talking about tomorrow?

Keith Olbermann has this daily news show on MSNBC, Countdown, that always opens with the question, "Which of these news stories will you be talking about tomorrow?" The show, the most popular of anything MSNBC runs and fast gaining a following, doesn't run on the weekend, but the producers really should think about a Sunday afternoon edition, because that's when the news organizations tee up the week with a scoop or two, or something sure to cause a buzz.

Sunday, December 11, was no different. Dana Priest over at the Washington Post seems to have had this Sunday off - no insider CIA stories confirming our chain of secret prisons, or how we get the wrong people, do nasty things with them, and when we realize they're nobodies, drop them in the Macedonian forest with no papers and no cash, and tell their home governments not to say anything. Dana had done enough.

So, "Which of these news stories will you be talking about tomorrow?"

Time Magazine Reporter Sacrifices Her Career to Save Karl Rove's Career

Time appears on the newsstands Monday mornings, but the content is available on the net a day ahead of the hard copy. And the headline here may or may not be unfair. What Vivica Novak (no relation to Bob Novak) has to say is here - in the matter of the CIA leak investigation she seems to have provided Karl Rove's attorney, a source who became a good friend, clear warning, early on, that Karl Rove actually did speak to Time's Matt Cooper about the CIA spy whose career the White House had to dismember in the process of trying to make the spy's husband appear opportunistic and wrong. That husband had said, nope, Saddam was not trying to buy uranium and build a nuclear bomb or three - he went and looked, and nothing of the sort was so.

The vice president's chief of staff, Libby, had been indicted for obstructing any look into the matter (five felony counts). You're really not supposed to blow the cover of CIA agents. There are laws. And you're really not supposed to lie and cheat to make sure no one can find out what actually happened. Scooter, in the latter case, had been a bad boy, or so the indictments charge.

Anyway, it seems this Novak woman unwittingly worked with Rove's attorney to make sure Rove didn't get caught the same way. She implies she was used, but basically, she let on that her colleague Cooper had talked with Rove about the woman spy, on some very specific dates, and that led the attorney - no dummy - to get Rove to go back and change his testimony to the grand jury investigating this. Otherwise, they'd have nailed him for perjury. This was a useful heads-up.

This Novak woman from Time seems real sorry about all this. She says she really didn't want to be part of the story. She just hates when that happens.

Of course she betrayed Cooper, her friend and colleague, who was trying to keep all this Rove business secret to "protect his source." Heck, he was willing to go to jail over the matter - and she was speaking "out of school" to Rove's attorney the whole time.

And of course she never told her employer, the magazine, what was going on, even after she hired her own attorney, and even after she gave testimony to the grand jury. Well, specifically, she didn't tell here editors what she had done until after she had hired her own lawyer and debriefed with the investigator, Patrick Fitzgerald. She didn't tell them until she got a formal subpoena.

And of course she kept reporting on "the CIA leak story" as if she knew nothing and wasn't involved with any of this at all. Time didn't know. Cooper didn't know. No one knew.

She's now on a "mutually agreed upon" leave of absence from the magazine. One assumes the editors are drinking heavily.

Jeralyn Merritt, the famous criminal defense attorney in Denver, has much more here. Basically, this woman saved Karl's bacon. The president keeps his key advisor.

What to make of all this?

"Insider Journalism" is tricky.

Judy Miller, late of the New York Times, gave us all those pre-war scoops about aluminum tubes for making bombs and mobile chemical weapons labs and anything else Chalabi and his team in the vice president's office could think of. She carried their water for them and overrode everyone else at the Times to plant the stories. She had the inside scoop. She knew people - important people. She got the "real" story. But none of it was so.

What does that tell you?

In a rather sarcastic manner Jack Shafer here argues outsiders know more than insiders. The Knight-Ridder reporters, he shows, were pretty much right on all matters, using what was available to everyone, tapping a few low-level confidential sources, and actually thinking about it all. They may be third-string and out of the loop, but they were even better than the CIA on most things. Looking in from the outside keeps you from being spun. In the run up to the war, they "were able to piece together a more accurate picture of Iraq's capabilities based on public information and interviews with midlevel and career sources than all the president's men, who drew on testimonials from administration stars, political appointees, and the intelligence establishment." In short, instead of swooning, they were reporting.

That sort of thing isn't very sexy. You don't get to appear on all the political shows on television. You don't socialize with the big boys - you don't chat with the key players. You just get the story right.

Perhaps Fox News will pick up this Novak woman.

First the Germans, Now the French - We TOLD You All This Was Bogus

Ah, the local paper out here, the Los Angeles Times, broke this one Sunday, December 11, with French Told CIA of Bogus Intelligence - and the subhead is "The foreign spy service warned the U.S. various times before the war that there was no proof Iraq sought uranium from Niger, ex-officials say."

The opening four paragraphs -

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

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

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

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

You get the idea. And the scoop here is last week big guns on both sides of the Atlantic said that just as the CIA asked Joe Wilson to look into the matter, the CIA pulsed the French, and came up empty there too.

Think about that. The line from the administration and all the supporters of the war is that we may have been mistaken, but everyone in the world thought Iraq had nasty weapons and was going nuclear. Except last week the Germans said the source on the existence of those mobile weapons labs was a drunk and totally unreliable, and they told us, and we knew it. Now the French say the whole Niger yellowcake business was bogus, and they told us, and we knew it. France's Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure told us, again and again. The CIA officer notes that, well, they did. Alain Chouet, France's former chief of counterintelligence, backed up by a former CIA official, is clear on this.

The Italians tried to sell the famous forged documents proving Saddam's agents were buying up yellowcake. They didn't buy them. These were their operations in Niger. Duh.

And the CIA had rejected the documents.

So the documents got to the White House through the back door - Cheney and Rumsfeld had set up alternative intelligence operations to bypass the old bureaucracy and get the real story. In good faith, perhaps, they wanted to protect America - and thought the CIA and all the rest were pretty useless.

They could do better than the professionals? Something like that.

It didn't work out.

"When Bush gave his State of the Union address in January 2003, citing a report from the British that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium in Africa, other French officials were flabbergasted." No kidding. Would they have been sidéré? Whatever.

Of course it is hard to see where this story goes from here.

No matter how many times the administration is "busted" on such matters we are where we are - the president is in office for three more years and the Democrats are in such disarray there is no chance anyone will see a majority of Democrats in either the house or senate, or any Democrat (or even anyone whose last name isn't Bush) in the White House, in the next fifty to sixty years. Voters are defensive. Rather than admit they elected some real dangerous goofballs, they'll not admit that and keep voting for such folks.

So it doesn't matter very much.

Israel to the Rescue

The real scoop of Sunday, December 11, concerns the middle member of the Axis of Evil, Iran. In the Times of London (UK, not Canada), Uzi Mahnaimi reporting from Tel Aviv, and Sarah Baxter from Washington, give us this: Israel Readies Forces For Strike On Nuclear Iran.

Oh yeah? The opening line - "Israel's armed forces have been ordered by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, to be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran, military sources have revealed."

Well, they did the job in Iraq way back when.

Find details here from Marc Schulman in American Future, but note this -

If a military operation is approved, Israel will use air and ground forces against several nuclear targets in the hope of stalling Tehran's nuclear programme for years, according to Israeli military sources. It is believed Israel would call on its top special forces brigade, Unit 262 - the equivalent of the SAS - and the F-15I strategic 69 Squadron, which can strike Iran and return to Israel without refuelling.

"If we opt for the military strike," said a source, "it must be not less than 100% successful. It will resemble the destruction of the Egyptian air force in three hours in June 1967."

Aharon Zeevi Farkash, the Israeli military intelligence chief, stepped up the pressure on Iran this month when he warned Israel's parliament, the Knesset, that "if by the end of March the international community is unable to refer the Iranian issue to the United Nations security council, then we can say the international effort has run its course".

The March deadline set for military readiness also stems from fears that Iran is improving its own intelligence-gathering capability. In October it launched its first satellite, the Sinah-1, which was carried by a Russian space launcher. "The Iranians' space programme is a matter of deep concern to us," said an Israeli defence source. "If and when we launch an attack on several Iranian targets, the last thing we need is Iranian early warning received by satellite."

Russia last week signed an estimated $1 billion contract - its largest since 2000 - to sell Iran advanced Tor-M1 systems capable of destroying guided missiles and laser-guided bombs from aircraft. "Once the Iranians get the Tor-M1, it will make our life much more difficult," said an Israeli air force source. "The installation of this system can be relatively quick and we can't waste time on this one."

The date set for possible Israeli strikes on Iran also coincides with Israel's general election on March 28, prompting speculation that Sharon may be sabre-rattling for votes. Benjamin Netanyahu, the frontrunner to lead Likud into the elections, said that if Sharon did not act against Iran, "then when I form the new Israeli government, we'll do what we did in the past against Saddam's reactor, which gave us 20 years of tranquillity".

Well, that's cheery. Who doesn't like tranquility? But this may not get us that.

Note This Will be Ugly -

I'll be the first to admit that Israel is stuck between a rock and a hard place on this. If she does not act, and no one else (read; The United States) does either, she faces nuclear annihilation. On the other hand, an attack on Iran by Israel would bring down the wrath of world on her head. That is, the wrath that she doesn't already constantly receive in such an undeserved and unfair manner. What to do, what to do?

That's a tough one. It would appear to me that Israel's best hope is that the ever-improving situation in Iraq will drive up George Bush's poll numbers giving him the political punch to carry out the attacks without Israeli participation. And even then this would be no easy call for Bush.

We would be attacking and destroying Russian built facilities, filled with Russian technology and staffed by no small number of Russian scientists and technicians, some of whom would no doubt perish in any attack. The fallout with Russia would be of earthquake proportions.

The fallout with the Iranian government? Well, who cares? However, the Iranian people, the majority of whom seem to support efforts by The United States to help them in their cause for freedom from the Mullahs, might well react negatively towards overt American military action against their country. Man, what a mess this is going to be. "Ugly" comes to mind.

Wait a second! Israel's best hope is that the "ever-improving situation in Iraq" will drive up George Bush's poll numbers giving him the political punch to carry out the attacks "without Israeli participation." That's thin hope.

Let's assume this is all idle speculation, or a contingency plan that gets put on the shelf. We probably have a contingency plan for invading Portugal under certain circumstances, like a sudden uptick in their production and export of "fado" albums.

For idle speculation on this Israeli planning see Steve Bainbridge of UCLA here - "Can Israel Stop Iran from Going Nuclear? Can Anyone?" Also see Hugh Hewitt here - "It is a terrible task that cannot be postponed much longer."

Here's the denial -

The senior Defense Ministry official for diplomatic policy refrained Sunday from ruling out a future Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites, saying that "at the moment" the emphasis was on international diplomatic pressure, and that the details in a British newspaper report saying plans were being prepared for such an operation appeared "more imaginary than real."

That's not very comforting, but it's something.

The Russians are in Iran, helping with this and that, selling them this and that. And this will be a news story when the United States or Israel suggests any Russians in Tehran and some other parts of Iran take a vacation - go home and see mom and the wife and kids for a week or two. Until then, this item is a semi-scoop - interesting but not news, yet.

Bubble Boy Returns

As with Time, the other big weekly, Newsweek, appears on the newsstands Monday mornings, but their content is available on the net a day ahead of the hard copy. The cover story is amusing, but won't have traction. It's been done before, and this is just filling in detail - Bush in the Bubble.

The idea here is this: "He has a tight circle of trust, and he likes it that way. But members of both parties are urging Bush to reach beyond the White House walls. How he governs - and how his M.O. stacks up historically."

So we're talking historical perspective here, not news per se. Bush may be the most isolated president in modern history? It's been said before, but actually, never in such detail and in such an organized manner. It's long, but fascinating.

What's immediately fascinating is who is quoted -

- A White House aide, who like virtually all White House officials (in this story and in general) refused to be identified for fear of antagonizing the president...

- According to senior Pentagon officials who did not want to be identified discussing private meetings...

- One House Republican, who asked not to be identified for fear of offending the White House...

- ... this official, who did not want to be identified discussing high-level meetings ...

- A foreign diplomat who declined to be identified...

- ... a senior aide who wouldn't be identified talking about his boss ...

- ...a GOP staffer who did not want to be identified criticizing the president ...

These folks are scared. Why?

Two nuggets. This -

Bush may be the most isolated president in modern history, at least since the late-stage Richard Nixon. It's not that he is a socially awkward loner or a paranoid. He can charm and joke like the frat president he was. Still, beneath a hail-fellow manner, Bush has a defensive edge, a don't-tread-on-me prickliness. It shows in Bush's humor. When Reagan told a joke, it almost never was about someone in the room. Reagan's jokes may have been scatological or politically incorrect, but they were inclusive, intended to make everyone join in the laughter. Often, Bush's joking is personal - it is aimed at you. The teasing can be flattering (the president gave me a nickname!), but it is intended, however so subtly, to put the listener on the defensive. It is a towel-snap that invites a retort. How many people dare to snap back at a president?

And this -

Bush generally prefers short conversations - long on conclusion, short on reasoning. He likes popular history and presidential biography (Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington), but by all accounts, he is not intellectually curious. Occasional outsiders brought into the Bush Bubble have observed that faith, not evidence, is the basis for decision making. Psychobabblers have long had a field day with the fact that Bush quit drinking cold turkey and turned around his life by accepting God. His close friends agree that Bush likes comfort and serenity; he does not like dissonance. He has long been mothered by strong women, including his mother and wife. A foreign diplomat who declined to be identified was startled when Secretary of State Rice warned him not to lay bad news on the president. "Don't upset him," she said.

But isn't that what we pay him for - to deal with what is upsetting and do what he, and the government, can about it? Surely we do not employ this man as our chief public servant to avoid unpleasantness, exercise four hours a day, get to bed by ten (both these apparently true), and watch ESPN for hours a day?

The authors, Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe, lay out many, many details that suggest a level of indifference, if not denial, "that is dangerous for a president who seeks to transform the world." They do point out that all presidents face "a tension between sticking to their guns and dealing with changing reality." And yes, it can be a mistake "to listen too closely to the ever-present (and often self-aggrandizing) critics." They are just pointing out that the idea that any president can go it alone "is, to say the least, problematic."

Others are more alarmed, if not worried sick that we're in real trouble. Between this purposeful intolerance of anything upsetting, and the idea Karl Rove and Dick Cheney will take care of what the president proudly chooses to miss in details and concepts, when the state is not rudderless it's heading in some mighty strange directions.

Okay, this is not a news story you will be talking about tomorrow, as Keith Olbermann would say. It's a backgrounder.

But it's one hell of a backgrounder. And it already has generated a wide array of comment.

"Which of these news stories will you be talking about tomorrow?" That depends on what happens on any given tomorrow.

Posted by Alan at 20:38 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Monday, 12 December 2005 07:17 PST home

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