Month: October 2003

Who’s The Good Guy?

Atrios throws down the gauntlet:

… there’s also one more person who could end this – the senior administration official who pointed his finger at two White House officials in the WaPo article 8 days ago.

Oh yes, indeed. Let the games begin.

Many assume that it’s Tenet for a variety of reasons, many of which are very compelling.

But, I think it’s somebody else. Somebody who has voiced concerns in the past about the political operation of the White House. Somebody who expressed alarm in Ron Suskind’s seminal Esquire article that Karl Rove would have unfettered power with George W. Bush after the resignation of Karen Hughes:

“I’ll need designees, people trusted by the president that I can elevate for various needs to balance against Karl. . . . They are going to have to really step up, but it won’t be easy. Karl is a formidable adversary.”

That, of course, was Andy Card.

Someone else in the same article went on to say:

“But many of us feel it’s our duty—our obligation as Americans—to get the word out that, certainly in domestic policy, there has been almost no meaningful consideration of any real issues. It’s just kids on Big Wheels who talk politics and know nothing. It’s depressing. Domestic Policy Council meetings are a farce. This leaves shoot-from-the-hip political calculations—mostly from Karl’s shop—to triumph by default. No one balances Karl. Forget it. That was Andy’s cry for help.”

In fact, if you go back and read the entire article, you find that there were a number of White House officials who said things like:

“It’s an amazing moment. Karl just went from prime minister to king. Amazing . . . and a little scary. Now no one will speak candidly about him or take him on or contradict him. Pure power, no real accountability. It’s just ‘listen to Karl and everything will work out.’ . . . That may go for the president, too.”

In his amazing article Susskind said:

They [Rove’s friends] heard that I was writing about Karl Rove, seeking to contextualize his role as a senior adviser in the Bush White House, and they began calling, some anonymously, some not, saying that they wanted to help and leaving phone numbers. The calls from members of the White House staff were solemn, serious. Their concern was not only about politics, they said, not simply about Karl pulling the president further to the right. It went deeper; it was about this administration’s ability to focus on the substance of governing—issues like the economy and social security and education and health care—as opposed to its clear political acumen, its ability to win and enhance power. And so it seemed that each time I made an inquiry about Karl Rove, I received in return a top-to-bottom critique of the White House’s basic functions, so profound is Rove’s influence.

So, who knows? But, it does seem entirely possible that rather than this being a purely political turf war between the Neocons and the CIA (as is being promoted with the idea that Tenet was the one who blew the whistle on the Plame leak operation) that the “Senior Administration Official” does come from the White House and is one of those who have been sitting on their disgust at the total domination of politics over governance.

Leader of the Brats

Matt Yglesias says that voters shouldn’t let Arnold’s alleged piggish behavior affect their votes (not that he would vote for him):

Bill Clinton taught us that a person can have a strong record on women’s issues while treating women quite poorly in his personal life, just as LBJ showed us that a racist can end Jim Crow, while Truman and Nixon proved that anti-semites can be good friends of Israel. George W. Bush proves that a nice guy can screw the country up. This isn’t to condone Schwarzennegger’s misogyny (or anyone else’s racism or anti-semitism), simply to suggest that it’s not all that relevant to whether or not he should be governor.

Perhaps. But, if “character” is not relevant as to whether one should vote for Schwarzennegger, what is? He has no public record on which to base an assessment. The man is running on his movie star image and,

frankly, his association with the Kennedys. If he had a known record of strong support for women’s rights as Clinton did, or had demonstrated a shrewd knowledge of the winds of political change as Johnson did, or had years of foreign policy experience as Nixon had, perhaps his alleged character flaws could be put into the perspective of an entire career and would not loom as large when making a decision in the voting booth.

But, Arnold has no record of anything but being a very ambitious and pampered movie star.

One thing people may not realize about Arnold is that he is peculiarly unqualified for office even by Hollywood standards. He does not produce or direct films, he doesn’t run his own production company and he never risks his own money. Even Sandra Bullock and Demi Moore are more involved in the creative direction of their careers and have developed and produced their own vehicles.

Arnold is a hired gun. He comes on to a set without any responsibility for the actual nuts and bolts of raising money, adhering to the budget, maintaining the creative flow while massaging egos under strict time constraints and dealing with impossible logistics. In other words, he has been entirely removed from the day to day business and responsibility of the movie business. He shows up for work, sits in his trailer until he’s called, does his bit and goes home. When the film is finished he goes on a publicity tour to promote it. That’s it. It is not surprising that he would find plenty of time to be “playful” on the “rowdy” set. He isn’t involved in most of the work that goes on all around him. Indeed, he probably isn’t even aware of it.

There aren’t a lot of big stars like this anymore. Most of them , like Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks, are producers at the least and the smart ones like Eastwood and Redford have run their careers like a business with themselves at the producing helm most of the time and often behind the camera as well. They have experience running a production, hustling for money, dealing with executives on a business level, handling other stars’ egos etc. They have shown throughout their careers that they are, within their field … leaders.

Arnold is not one of those guys. He has come a long way from his beginnings as a body builder and created a niche for himself in high priced action films that make lots of money (particularly overseas.) But, he has not shown any kind of leadership in his own life beyond touting physical fitness and making a lot of easy money.

So, how does a person evaluate someone whose life and career show no obvious qualifications for the office he is seeking? Isn’t he, in fact, running solely on the idea that his character — as personified in his movie roles — is what qualifies him for office? Isn’t he presenting himself as a real life Action Hero?

In truth, his real life (at least for the last 20 years) has been one of incredibly spoiled and princely pampering, to the point that he has absolutely no clue about what is acceptable behavior because he’s been indulged beyond any normal everyday person’s ability to even imagine. This is why he says things like, “No one ever came to me in my life and said to me that I did anything, that said ‘I don’t want you to do that, you went over the line Arnold.'”

I imagine that this is quite true. Nobody tells Arnold Schwarzenegger, “I don’t want you to do that.” In his world, he is completely free to act with impunity because in his world he is the pasha, the prince, the coddled “product” who is beyond the realm of normal human behavior. His power is the power of a cossetted and overindulged brat.

These accusations may or may not be true. But, they certainly do fit the profile of this man who has never done anything but seek fame and power for their own sakes. If there were anything in his life that mitigated these alleged character flaws — intellectual development, a record of accomplishment, demonstrated leadership or even a campaign that featured a detailed and serious program and a well articulated vision — perhaps it wouldn’t be wise to take easily made and difficult to prove accusations in the last days of a campaign as a deciding factor.

But with Arnold, it’s pretty much all we’ve got to go on.

Sore Losermen

They’ve already looked for the weapons and couldn’t find ‘em. They sent in more people and looked again. Now they want 600 million dollars to look one more time.

They just want to keep looking until it comes out the way they want it to!

They’re trying to divine the location of the weapons of mass destruction!

Racist Meme

Via CNNSI:

“I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well,” Limbaugh said on Sunday NFL Countdown. “There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve. The defense carried this team,” he said.

[…]

Limbaugh on Wednesday reiterated that he doesn’t think McNabb is a bad player, just that he isn’t as good as some media members think he is. “This is such a mountain out of a molehill,” he said. “There’s no racism here, there’s no racist intent whatsoever.”

This is so typical of cowardly bigots. They act as if they are completely clueless that what they are saying is racist. “Who me? I’d never do that.”

Limbaugh was basically saying that the NFL is practicing affirmative action and giving this guy McNabb a job he doesn’t deserve because he’s black. This is because the media are politically correct and demand it.

Can there be anything more absurd than this? This is professional athletics, not some junior college in Northern California. The National Football League, for gawd’s sake. Is there no corner of society in which Rush can allow that African-Americans may be making it on their own merit?

This really gets to the essence of modern racist rhetoric. The belief has been subtly reframed from an overt belief that racial minorities are inferior and must be kept in their place to a subliminal meme that they are inferior so they must be getting an unfair advantage when they are treated equally with whites.

To say that this applies in professional sports, one of the most meritocratic institutions in our society (and one which nonetheless still has vestiges of racist barriers to full participation) is a perfect example of how the modern racist mind works.

A Traitor’s Best Friend

Via Atrios:

Robert Novak is completely immoral and intellectually bankrupt. I had heard him make a statement on CNN regarding the issue but never actually read his column about his relationship with convicted spy Robert Hanssen

His apparent confusion as to the integrity of the man whom he reluctantly revealed as a souce after he had pled guilty to spying and blowing the covers of dozens of CIA assets (resulting in many deaths) is downright astounding.

According to Novak, (whom it seems is every treasonous Republican’s favorite reporter) the fact that Hanssen had spied for more than 30 years, had collected more than a million dollars in “fees” from the KGB and had been personally responsible for many deaths and compromises of national security, was not enough to fully convince him

that he wasn’t acting out of patriotism when he leaked to Novak that Janet Reno was endangering spies in China.

Unanswerable questions are pondered. During the lengthy interim when he was not betraying his country, could Hanssen have felt some genuine concern about the security of U.S. assets in China if they fell into the hands of the attorney general? Could he have experienced a sudden change of heart after disclosing the identity of U.S. assets in Russia?

Or, was he merely using me to undermine Reno — and his boss, FBI Director Louis Freeh, as well? …

Robert Hanssen is an enigma and will remain so at least until he reveals himself. The speculation that he is purely the embodiment of evil tends to be undermined by the validity of his report about Ray Wickman. He really may have been living a double-life, one as a patriotic, religious American and the other as spy of the century. That sounds fanciful, but any other explanation fails.

No, there actually is another explanation. The explanation is that Robert Hanssen, traitor and scumbag, was a sexually repressed, greedy, mentally unbalanced right wing Republican who would sell out his fellows, his family and his country for money and ego gratification. Anyone who believes that this is not the embodiment of evil has no business being on the receiving end of ANY sensitive information.

It is monumentally insulting that Novak would even ponder the possibility that a man like Hanssen remained a good patriotic American when he accused Janet Reno of being a traitor. It’s simply unbelievable.

Establishment Washington needs to start taking a good hard look at Novak’s work over the last 40 years. It seems he has often been a willing tool of those who like to commit treason. Perhaps the “pattern” required to establish a journalist’s culpability under the law is more obvious than we think.

Nasty Boys

So, Limbaugh is under investigation for a serious narcotics addiction and Arnold is being accused of some seriously creepy sexual harrassment.

I’m not a big fan of tabloid journalism and I don’t have any idea if this stuff is credible. It’s awfully easy to make accusations.

But even it it’s true, I’m sure this won’t hurt them with their base —- hypocrites.

Ya think?

As the White House hunkered down, it got the first taste of criticism from within Bush’s own party. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said that Bush “needs to get this behind him” by taking a more active role. “He has that main responsibility to see this through and see it through quickly, and that would include, if I was president, sitting down with my vice president and asking what he knows about it,” the outspoken Hagel said last night on CNBC’s “Capital Report.”

Just try to picture the scene in which Junior sits Cheney down and demands that he tell him what he knows about it.

I didn’t think so….

Neocon Hash

NY Times

An Extreme Plan for Iraq

By JEFF MADRICK

IRAQ’S new finance minister, Kamel al-Gailani, announced a sweeping liberalization of his country’s economy at the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Dubai early last week. Amid the controversy over President Bush’s request for $87 billion to finance the American presence in Iraq, the new laws hardly attracted attention in the United States.

But by almost any mainstream economist’s standard, the plan, already approved by L. Paul Bremer III, the American in charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority, is extreme — in fact, stunning. It would immediately make Iraq’s economy one of the most open to trade and capital flows in the world, and put it among the lowest taxed in the world, rich or poor. Is this Middle Eastern nation, racked by war, ready for such severe experimentation? Moreover, the radical laws have been adopted without a democratic Iraqi government to discuss or approve them.

One would have thought that the failures of swift and sudden free market changes in Russia in the 1990’s would have made even extremist economists cautious. In Russia and other nations, spontaneously freeing markets from price controls, reducing taxes and suddenly privatizing business was supposed, almost overnight, to create a thriving economy.

In a recent book, “Income and Influence: Social Policy in Emerging Market Economies” (W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research; $14), two economists, Ethan B. Kapstein and Branko Milanovic, remind us how the assumptions behind such “shock therapy” were not borne out. To the contrary, the gross domestic product continued to fall for years in most of the “reformed” nations, and eventually unemployment rose rapidly. The failure to grow immediately after the transition became, in the words of the M.I.T. economist Olivier Blanchard, “the major theoretical challenge facing economists.”

And supply side economics, which argues that low taxes are the main ingredient in motivating people to save, invest and innovate, did not even work in the United States. The economist Arthur Laffer, a member of President Ronald Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board, claimed that reduced taxes in the 1980’s would actually raise tax revenue. President Bush’s current chief economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, wrote in his widely read textbook that “subsequent history failed to confirm Laffer’s conjecture.”

But never mind such historical lessons. The Iraqi planners, apparently including the Bush administration, seem to assume they can simply wipe the slate clean.

Those poor bastards.

C’mon. We aren’t going to do this, are we?

Waddya think, Tom Friedman? Is this what you had in mind when you pounded the war drum so we could empower the moderates in the mid-east by setting such a fine example of political freedom and democratic capitalism? Did you realize that what we were really doing was buying Ahmed and his little friends a brand new country to play with?

What a good idea. It just get’s better and better every single day.

Slime And Defend

The White House encouraged Republicans to portray the former diplomat at the center of the case, Joseph C. Wilson IV, as a partisan Democrat with an agenda and the Democratic Party as scandalmongering. At the same time, the administration and the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill worked to ensure that no Republicans in Congress break ranks and call for an independent inquiry outside the direct control of the Justice Department.

“It’s slime and defend,” said one Republican aide on Capitol Hill, describing the White House’s effort to raise questions about Mr. Wilson’s motivations and its simultaneous effort to shore up support in the Republican ranks.

“So far so good,” the aide said. “There’s nervousness on the part of the party leadership, but no defections in the sense of calling for an independent counsel.”

[…]

With initial polling suggesting that voters are concerned about the accusations and the Democratic presidential candidates trying to make the matter an issue, the White House and its allies worked to shape public perceptions. In particular, they raised questions about the motivations of Mr. Wilson.

In a memorandum distributed Wednesday to Republicans on Capitol Hill, the Republican National Committee suggested that the party strike back at Democrats.

“Lacking a positive issue agenda to offer the American people, the Democratic Party now returns to what they have long seen as their best opportunity to defeat President Bush and Republicans — scandalmongering,” the memo said.

House Republicans distributed white paper bags with the label “Leak hyperventilation bag,” saying they might come in handy for Democrats who were having trouble catching their breath over the subject.

Well, you can’t exactly say they are being devious or Machiavellian, can you? After all, they are openly telling the NY Times about their stonewall and smear strategy and they don’t seem to feel the slightest need to pay lip service to the old fashioned concepts of adhering to the rule of law or statesmanlike conduct. They used to at least pretend to give a damn about having an image of sobriety and responsibility. This stuff is something you’d expect from a College Republican Freshman strategy seminar.

It is actually quite a dizzying admission of the corruption and impending mass mental breakdown of the Republican Party.

This line of defense is so lame that it tells me that Rove must be involved in the scandal and has completely lost his touch because of it. And, it points out that Republicans don’t know how to play defense (which is not surprising since they haven’t had to in many years.)

They can’t put this genie back in the bottle by pretending that the Democrats have morphed into Newt Gingrich and they are now the beleagered and victimized Clinton administration. (What are these people smoking?) And Joe Wilson could be Teddy Kennedy’s long lost twin and it wouldn’t make it any more ethical or legal to blow his wife’s CIA cover. It’s absurd on it’s face.

But it’s also completely misreading what’s driving the story. Don’t they get that the media itself is one of the stars of this little narrative and therefore they have an unusually clear view of the facts in this case? Obviously, they are all dying to know not just who leaked, but who got leaked to.

This is one time the media starlets are not going to be baby birds and sit in their nests waiting for the masticated RNC faxfacts to be dropped into their willing little beaks. In their minds this one is about something very, very important.

It’s about them.

Fasten Your Seatbelts, Folks

Here we go….

Via (future radio star) Atrios:

“They may try and recover deleted email files for certain dates…”

“The White house asked for and got permission earlier this week to wait a day before issuing a directive to preserve all documents and logs which led one seasoned federal prosecutor to wonder why they wanted to wait a day, and who at the justice department told them they could do that, and why?”

Nina Totenberg, on NPR this evening.

One would have thought that the Commander in Chief would have personally ordered his staff to preserve all e-mails and documents relating to a possible felony and breach of national security during wartime on the morning after the leak was revealed in Robert Novak’s column.

That’s what a leader does. He doesn’t depend upon legal technicalities and partisan firestorms to make him do the right thing. He takes the bull by the horns and demands that anyone under his watch who commits such an act, or knows who committed such an act, comes forward or he’ll know the reason why. He would make it crystal clear that there will be zero tolerance for political games with national security. He would immediately put in place safeguards to ensure that it never happens again. He would fire the perpetrator and send all evidence to the proper authorities.

Of course, strutting around in a fighter pilot costume is good, too.