Month: August 2005

Establishment Claws

The Carpetbagger Report points to a case that shows the dangers this modern pluralistic country is facing as it begins to legally enshrine religion into public life:

In Pleasant Grove, Utah, for example, a Ten Commandments memorial, donated by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in 1971, sits in a secluded area of city property that is intended to honor the city’s heritage. Pleasant Grove is now facing litigation about the display, not from civil libertarians, but from another religious group that wants equal treatment.

People will pooh-pooh this case as they did an earlier one involving Wicca, in which a practitioner sued for the right to give the invocation for the legislature and was denied because her religion wasn’t part of the Judeo-Christian tradition:

The Fourth Circuit upheld the decision of a county legislature which sought to ban certain religions from giving an opening invocation:

The 4th Circuit ruled Chesterfield County’s Board of Supervisors did not show impermissible motive in refusing to permit a pantheistic invocation by a Wiccan because its list of clergy who registered to conduct invocations covers a wide spectrum of Judeo-Christian denominations. Simpson v. Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors, No. 04-1045 (April 14). Chesterfield County is in the Richmond suburbs.

“The Judeo-Christian tradition is, after all, not a single faith but an umbrella covering many faiths,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in the opinion.

Ok. So, as long as the Judeo-Christian tradition is fully represented then everything is ok, right? Not exactly. Guess what’s starting to happen:

A religious watchdog group went on the attack Monday against a Bible study course taught in hundreds of schools in Texas and across the country, saying it pushes students toward conservative Protestant viewpoints and violates religious freedom.

The Texas Freedom Network, which includes clergy of several faiths, said the course offered by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools is full of errors and dubious research that promote a fundamentalist Christian view.

The council dismissed the Texas Freedom Network as a “far left” extremist organization trying to stifle academic review of a historical text. Elizabeth Ridenour, president of the Bible class group, accused the network of censorship.

“They are actually quite fearful of academic freedom, and of local schools deciding for themselves what elective courses to offer their citizens,” Ms. Ridenour says in a statement on the council’s Web site.

Network President Kathy Miller said her group looked at the course after the Odessa school board voted in April to offer a Bible class. The network asked Mark A. Chancey, a professor and biblical scholar at Southern Methodist University, to review the council’s curriculum. He was not paid for his work, Ms. Miller said.

Dr. Chancey’s review found that the Bible is characterized as inspired by God, discussions of science are based on the claims of biblical creationists, Jesus is referred to as fulfilling Old Testament prophecy, and archaeological findings are erroneously used to support claims of the Bible’s historical accuracy. He said the course suggests that the Bible, instead of the Constitution, be considered the nation’s founding document.

All of those points may be acceptable to some religions, but not to others, Dr. Chancey said.

[…]

“No public school student should have to have a particular religious belief forced upon them,” said the Rev. Ragan Courtney, pastor of The Sanctuary, a Baptist congregation in Austin.

Surprise, surprise. There is disagreement even within the “Judeo-Christian” tradition — a fact which anyone who took 10th grade world history would already know. And some quite ugly problems promise to re-surface as more and more tax dollars are being funnelled to religious programs that are allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion:

A Christian adoption agency that receives money from Choose Life license plate fees said it does not place children with Roman Catholic couples because their religion conflicts with the agency’s “Statement of Faith.”

Bethany Christian Services stated the policy in a letter to a Jackson couple this month, and another Mississippi couple said they were rejected for the same reason last year.

“It has been our understanding that Catholicism does not agree with our Statement of Faith,” Bethany’s state director Karen Stewart wrote. “Our practice to not accept applications from Catholics was an effort to be good stewards of an adoptive applicant’s time, money and emotional energy.”

[…]

The agency’s Web site says all Bethany staff and adoptive applicants personally agree with the faith statement, which describes belief in the Christian Church and the Scripture. It does not refer to any specific branches of Christianity.

[…]

Sandy Steadman said she was hurt and disappointed that Bethany received funds from the Choose Life car license plates. “I know of a lot of Catholics who get those tags,” she said.

She added: “If it’s OK to accept our money, it should be OK to open your home to us as a family.”

You do not have to be a genius to see that even though this country is majority Christian, there is always plenty of room for religious strife among the pious. The founders understood this very well being that they were the decendents of religious refugees from a country that had been fighting these sectrian battles for centuries.

They understood that democracy cannot properly operate when government establishes religion and that religion cannot freely operate when the government endorses one belief over another. Religion and government exist in their own equally important spheres. One of the ways the US came to deal with this ia a practical manner has been this: churches didn’t pay taxes and in return they didn’t expect the government to proselytise for them. All churches were on their own to promote their creeds however they wanted — except through the government. That way, we didn’t ask people to pay for religious belief they didn’t endorse and we didn’t create conditions whereby one religion could be seen to have preference over another.

The rules were always relaxed in terms of certain non-doctrinal traditions like holidays, which heavily favored the majority Christians (who could at least all agree that the big Christian holidays were shared among them all.) And we long practiced a sort of cultural protestant Deism that didn’t presume any specific political agenda. Socially, of course, we were horribly bigoted toward Catholics, Jews and anybody else who didn’t accept whatever the prevailing local sects decreed, but the federal government held to sort of phony distance that at least allowed the long progressive struggle to create a truly tolerant religious environment to endure. And it finally prevailed. Huzzah.

Sadly (or maybe inevitably) just at the moment when this country seemed to have found its way to a real tolerance of different religious beliefs, where there was more varied religion per square mile than virtually anywhere else in the western world, we’ve decided to force the government to get involved in pushing certain beliefs because they are majoritarian. I guess we’re overdue to take a little walk through the 17th century and experience some of that good old fashioned, traditional religious hatred.

People think “what’s the harm in putting up the 10 commandments on a courthouse?” Who cares? Truly, not a whole lot of people do. But as you can see by the the various legal challenges being mounted on behalf of minority religions and the stirrings of sectarian confrontation among Christian faiths, it would have been better if the government had just made it clear from the beginning that it can’t take sides. People would understand that, even most majority Christians.

The government should stay out of it, period. Let everybody believe what they will in perfect freedom. But it should be on private property funded by private money. The principle isn’t all that tough. Sadly, it appears that we are now going to have to painfully illustrate step by step, through court cases and endless fighting for who knows how long, why it is better for religion for the government to stay out of its sphere. (The battle for secularism for its own sake has been lost for the time being.) I guess we just have to relearn these lessons over and over again.

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What Will We Have Wrought?

Matt Yglesias makes a good case for withdrawal of US troops upon the inveiling of Iraq’s new constitution.

Far better to take advantage of the forthcoming promulgation of a new constitution for Iraq and then schedule a withdrawal on our own terms. Such a withdrawal would be pegged not to an “arbitrary timetable” but to the perfectly objective one governing Iraq’s political process.

This would not only provide us peace with honor but also with the best chance for securing a decent outcome in Iraq. Setting an end date would allay Iraqi fears of an indefinite occupation and allow us to secure more cooperation in the short term, give moderate Sunnis the opportunity they need to join the political process and separate themselves from the jihadists, and focus the minds of Iraq’s political elites on the urgent need to resolve the issues underlying sectarian tensions. Defeating every last insurgent in Iraq is not a realistic goal. But fortunately for us, neither is the insurgency’s goal of renewed Sunni hegemony a realistic one. A clear plan to bring the troops home would allow us to begin focusing on the kind of support for the new regime — political, diplomatic, financial, logistical, and intelligence — that can be provided over the long term, and that would allow a wise Iraqi government to eventually stabilize the entire country. Meanwhile, we can work on rebuilding our armed forces and reconfiguring them for the 21st-century security landscape.

I agree that withdrawal is probably the best solution at this point and it is logical to tag it to a milestone political moment. Our presence seems to be perpetuating the insurgency rather than quelling it. But, I really wonder whether the outcome will be as benign as Matt suggests.

It seems to me that even if we reject the cynical Realpolitik that says the country needed a strongman in order to survive, certainly we screwed things up so badly that we’ve allowed the conditions for protracted civil war to foment quite nicely. Perhaps there never would have been a better time, but I still cannot help but wonder at the logic that said we should use the moment of al Qaeda’s greatest PR victory to engage in a dicey game of chicken in the mid-east — at huge expense, without global support.

It still stuns me that the starry-eyed neocons thought we were so all powerful that we could simply flip a switch and the world would be changed. The timing was right for domestic political purposes but it couldn’t have been worse for strategic purposes. Keeping Saddam in place for a short while, until the smoke cleared at least, would have allowed us to get a much better lay of the land post 9/11 and perhaps make some realistic decisions.

But, all that is spilled milk now and we find ourselves at a point where we are thinking seriously of leaving Iraq in a chaos we have created and I would be interested in what are the realistic scenarios among the experts for a post withdrawal Iraq. It is unlikely that I would change my mind about the correctness of our doing so, but I would like to be prepared for what may follow. I have a feeling I know the answer and it makes me sick to my stomach.

In this regard I have been meaning to mention that shameful column by David Ignatius from last week called Iraq Can Survive This in which he makes the increasingly common rightist argument that someday things will probably work out in Iraq so everything we did will have been right in retrospect:

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

Similar logic would have one believe that because Czechoslovakia is now a thriving democracy, the invasion of Hitler in 1938 was all for the best. And hey what’s 30 years of human suffering? Eventually things will probably get better — as long as the “national identity” survives. Dear God.

This argument reveals something very fundamental about the way that the war hawks see this as a game of Risk rather than a catastrophic upheaval in which actual human beings are being killed and maimed and in which the everyday lives of those who live on that piece of land are affected in the most consequential ways possible. Who but the most arrogant, spoiled,pampered, elitist American could write such a thing? Perhaps David Ignatius should have a talk with Peter Daou, who actually lived in that lucky land of Lebanon during the civil war and occupation while “the country” was on ice. Unfortunately, the humans who lived there had some more immediate problems:

I spent my youth in Beirut during the height of Lebanon’s civil war, and I fought the Syrian presence in Lebanon long before the “Cedar Revolution.” I watched young boys give their lives and mothers cradle their dying children in blood-soaked arms. I’ve seen more bloodshed, war, and violence, and shot more guns than most of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists combined. I wouldn’t presume to question the strength or dignity of a stranger, and I pity those who blithely push the right=strong, left=weak rhetoric. It says far more about their inadequacies than it does about the target of their scorn.

Ignatius’s logic is becoming more prevalent among war supporters as we see that our lame attempt at neocon nation building (which was based, as are all their “plans” upon idealistic fantasies and crossing their fingers)has failed. Therefore, they are now going to take the “long view” in which victory will be prematurely hailed because as one Bush supporter puts it: “All that matters in the long run is the liberalization Bush and Blair have unleashed.”

Neat trick, isn’t it? Any progress in the future can be attributed to Bush and Blair’s foresight, no matter how long it takes or how much blood is spilled in the meantime. Indeed, George W. Bush, magical figure that he is, must, therefore, be responsible for the fact that:

…there was not a single liberal democracy with universal suffrage in the world in 1900, but … today 120 (62.5%) of the world’s 192 nations are such democracies.

Still, I wonder how a bloody civil war in a huge country in the mid-east, at a time of rising Islamic extremism and peak oil can be sold as being for the Iraqis’ own good — and ours? Assuming that we withdraw (because we really have no choice, as Matt Yglesias writes, and because we are actually exacerbating the problem with our presence) what are the realistic ramifications of Iraq descending into sectarian violence as seems to have already begun? What will we have wrought with this misbegotten invasion for the next decade or three — until everything comes out in the wash and we can permanently give George Bush credit for having invented human progress, that is?

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Pushing Keller

Talk Left points out that all this talk of a waiver for Lil Miz Judy is bunk. Lil’ Miz Judy is refusing to talk for reasons of her own.

However, I maintain that calling on Libby to produce this waiver puts pressure on the one place that may have some influence with Miller — the NY Times. The weak point for her is if her employers get really antsy. We’ve already seen some indication that they are. Divide ‘n conquor.

Jane Hamsher reports something I hadn’t heard before which was James Carville’s appearance on Imus last week in which he posited that Fitzgerald was going to call Keller et al before the grand jury. I don’t know how he’d know that, but whether he does or not, it’s quite clear there are rumblings down at the Kewl Kidz soda shoppe. Carville is very well connected if nothing else.

(In fact, as with so many others in the beltway circle jerk, he has a conflict of interest a mile wide — his wife, who is up to her ears in this thing. She was, after all, hired back specifically to handle the post Novak damage control.)

Still, I assume that he’s not working for Rove:

Carville said there was “heavy, heavy speculation out there” that Miller was being used by the White House to “disseminate this” – an apparent reference to CIA employee Valerie Plame’s name.

“There are all sorts of rumors and I hear second hand that [Miller] was screaming out in the news room about this.”

The Times, said Carville, “to some extent is going to have to come clean. Because they’re going to have to tell us what Judy Miller knew, when she knew it and who she told.”

“And there’s a lot of people at the Times – and I know this to be a fact – who believe that,” he insisted.

“It’s going to be very interesting to see,” Carville mused, “whether [Miller’s] problem is a First Amendment [problem] – i.e., I want to protect a source – or a Fifth Amendment [problem] – I was out spreading this stuff too.”

None of this is particularly new to those of us who’ve been following the punchin’ Judy show. But it does seem to be bubbling up. As more and more strategic leaks are sprung, it becomes clear that some major media players have not been forthcoming.

Certainly Tim Russert owes everybody a little explanation about that NBC psuedo-statement that leaves wide open the fact that he may have shared a delicious little bit of back-biting gossip with his friend Scooter. If he didn’t then he should come clean and take his medicine as he so santimoniously advises all his politician friends to do.

Bob Novak should be… oh forget it. The man’s having a public nervous breakdown. It’s absurd to think that he would behave like a journalist anyway. He should be retired. (His sources are already making a fool of him — remember the Rehnquist is resigning today at 4:50pm story?)

And finally, we have the vaunted New York Times executive staff who’ve been parading Judy around like she was Jesus himself being crucified for standing up for the first amendment. It’s been awfully convenient for them to do so, but their loyalty to Judith Miller is misplaced and it’s hurting their reputations. They are going to have to start making some tough choices about what is really important to them.

If Lewis Libby says publicly that he released Judith Miller from all her obligations, the public is really going to wonder what in the hell is going on. See, this excuse that sources shouldn’t be coerced only works when the source is a powerless lone citizen standing up against the full force of the government. Lewis Libby is chief of staff to the Vice President of the United States. If he makes it clear that he releases her from her waiver, nobody is going to believe that he’s weakly acquiesing to the big bad government. He is the big bad government.

I realize that Miller will likely not capitulate even then. But it will put a tremendous pressure on the NY Times — and they may put pressure on her. We’ll see whether Miller cares more about her neocon buddies or her own career and reputation.

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A La Carte

Michael at Americablog brings up a point I think is worth a little passing mention. People talk a lot about pushing for “a la carte” cable as a way to appeal to social conservatives who say they want to limit what their children see on television. But these social conservatives are not being honest. John points out that you can block any channel just by calling your cable company. After all, they have the ability to block out HBO if you don’t pay for it, they can certainly block out MTV if you request it.

I think that most people would like the idea of paying only for the channels they watch. I pay an exhorbitant amount of money to basically watch a handful of channels in order to feed my addiction to CNN and HBO. But I think that people have to recognise that the whole 500 channel universe is built on the idea that you pay big bucks for these channels we all like in order to subsidize the ones that fit the niche markets. In the early days, they really did support new stuff this way, although it’s now become a much different game with advertisers and big media conglomerates buying up cable channels.

I think it is highly unlikely that they will create an a la carte system that will allow you to actually save money. They’ll just price CNN at 50 bucks a month and you won’t get any of the quirky channels you might watch once in a while.

And I would bet that there would still be no respite from the religious right’s screeching about decency on cable. They can have all that dirty, dirty turned off right now if they want to. It’s not that they don’t want their families to see “Deadwood.” They don’t want me to see “Deadwood.”

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Who Was Neville Chamberlain’s Priest?

Can somebody please explain to me why the Democrats should be blamed for every stupid utterance that emantes from some junior college instructor, while the Republicans dance free of any association with a preacher who says “God Hates Fags?” Is it just the fag word that allows them to escape? It must be because the sentiment is certainly mainstream GOP cant.

I think Pastor Fred Phelps should be tied around the necks of the right wing Christianists with a bowline knot. Julia fills us in on his latest cause:

WBC rejoices every time the Lord God in His vengeance kills or maims an American soldier with an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked” (Ps. 58:10).

To most effectively cause America to know her abominations (Ez. 16:2), WBC will picket the funerals of these Godless, fag army American soldiers when their pieces return home. WBC will also picket their landing spot, in Dover, Delaware early and often.

Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that Phelps was saying that US soldiers are all “little Eichmans.”

I recall that during a supremely insane period in our recent history we were told ad nausaeum that the president receiving fellatio sent a message of loose morals to the culture. (Fellatio hadn’t been popular until then.) If that were true, I would think that messages like this should be seen as incitement for the likes of Fred Phelps:

Tony Perkins:

“If we do not immediately pass a Constitutional amendment protecting marriage, we will not only lose the institution of marriage in our nation, but eventually all critics of the homosexual lifestyle will be silenced. Churches will be muted, schools will be forced to promote homosexuality as a consequence-free alternative lifestyle, and our nation will find itself embroiled in a cultural, legal and moral quagmire.”

Chuck Colson:

“Radical Islamists were surely watching in July when the Senate voted on procedural grounds to do away with the Federal Marriage Amendment. This is like handing moral weapons of mass destruction to those who use America’s decadence to recruit more snipers and hijackers and suicide bombers…. when radical Islamists see American women abusing Muslim men, as they did in the Abu Ghraib prison, and when they see news coverage of same-sex couples being ‘married’ in U.S. towns, we make our kind of freedom abhorrent–the kind they see as a blot on Allah’s creation. Preserving traditional marriage in order to protect children is a crucially important goal by itself. But it’s also about protecting the United States from those who would use our depravity to destroy us.”

Alan Keyes

“It’s about time we all faced up to the truth. If we accept the radical homosexual agenda, be it in the military or in marriage or in other areas of our lives, we are utterly destroying the concept of family. We must oppose it in the military. We must oppose it in marriage. We must oppose it if the fundamental institution of our civilization is to survive. Those unwilling to face that fact and playing games with this issue are doing so irresponsibly at the price of America’s moral foundations.”

Gary Bauer

“An instinctive revulsion against evil isn’t bigotry, it’s our best defense.”

Gosh, it sure looks to me as if old Fred’s only using some salty language to say the same thing the rest of these guys are saying. In fact, he’s right in the mainstream of religious right thought. Apparently, God does hate fags.

So now pastor Fred is picketing outside military funerals, celebrating their deaths because they are part of a system that allows gay people to exist. He’s making the same sort of logical leap that Ward Churchill made when he condemned the dead capitalist workers at the WTC for being part of a global economic system that exploited the downtrodden masses — a point of view that is held by no more than .05% of Americans, who dwell at the far left fringe of American thought and have no influence on politics whatsoever.

Fred Phelps, however, dwells quite close to the mainstream of the religious right, which has huge influence in the Republican party. If instead of using a slur, he were picketing various events with his homemade signs and they said “God Hates The Homosexual Agenda” would he be any different than hundreds of other groups who say the same without any sense of shame or regret? It’s just one little word.

I don’t imagine that a spiritual advisor like Chuck Colson celebrates the killing of American servicemen, but his statement above sure sounds like he’s sympathising with the Islamic fundamentalists’ complaints about decadent western culture. One can see how Fred might extrapolate from that that the bad guys in this war of civilizations are Americans. In Fred’s mind he’s picketing fallen soldiers’ funerals in order to protest his country’s immorality.

I really don’t want to hear any more lectures about Ward Churchill or any other obscure little left wing gadfly. The mainstream of the Republican party is out there promoting an agenda that the Ayatollah would be proud to sign on to — and they admit it. Who are the appeasers now? And who is responsible for Fred Phelps celebrating the deaths of American servicemen? It sure isn’t me.

Julia links through to some military wives’ novel way of dealing with James Dobsons’ blood brother’s little stunt. They are turning the Phelps circus into a fundraiser.

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Dear Leader

Kevin points to this Ron Brownstein column in which Brownstein compares the Republican Party’s governing style to North Korea. It’s quite true. They believe bipartisanship is date rape. They know that they needn’t fear they will be seen in a bad light by the public for this because the public gives fuck-all about legislative process — and the media allows them to present themselves as having mandates or representing the mainstream despite having only the thinnest majority. They’ve taken the “winner take all” concept to new heights.

From Brownstein:

The essence of the modern Republican governing strategy is self-reliance. The goal is to resolve all issues in a manner that solidifies their political coalition. The means is to pass legislation primarily by unifying Republicans, thus shrinking opportunities for Democrats to exert influence. This approach represents the political equivalent to what the North Korean government calls Juche: a strategy of maximizing independence by minimizing dependence on outside forces.

I keep hearing that until Democrats start “winning elections” they should just step aside and if they refuse, they will be shoved aside. It makes me wonder if the founders knew what they were doing with this representation thing. Surely, it would have been more efficient to just have the ruling party come to Washington and legislate without interference from the minority. Think of how much money it saves.

One thing I think that both Brownstein and Drum neglect with their North Korea comparison is that in order to succeed it must also feature a godlike infallible cult leader. (After all, before Kim Jong Il was revealed as the successor to his father, he was mysteriously referred to as “party center“):

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

In North Korea they have the same kind of leader — but they have the good graces to notice:

Reflecting his apparent encyclopedic knowledge and superhuman abilities, the Dear Leader is also considered by North Koreans as a “great figure of the arts and architecture,” “genius of music,” and “world famous writer,” the report said.

The KCBS added that the Dear Leader is a “computer genius who surprises computer experts”, and the “ideal leader of the world” because he is so erudite.

The North’s media also have described the North Korean leader as an “incarnation of power” who exerts “unlimited creative power” and is the “hero of the heaven.”

Perhaps when we are done renaming every street in American after Great leader Ronald Reagan, we can begin the movement to officially recognise our Dear Leader too.

He, at least, knows his own value

Q — at politically? I mean, you’ve still got Iraq holding over your head and Social Security. You’ve got a lot of tough things that are going —

THE PRESIDENT: Well, it took — it took the — I don’t know how many times I have to tell people that polls go up and polls go down. If you made decisions based upon polls, you would be a miserable leader.

Q But power is perception.

THE PRESIDENT: Power is being the President.

[…]

Q Did the Bolton decision, you think, have any affect on your relations with the Senate, or will they understand?

THE PRESIDENT: …Bolton’s standing in the world depends upon my confidence in Bolton, and I’ve got a lot of confidence in Bolton.

One would think it would be much more efficient if we let Dear Leader make all the decisions. After all, power is the president. However, it would be much more difficult for the revolving door of lobbying and the military indusrtrial complex to make multi-millionaires of generals and politicans. So we need to at least have a congressional pageant now and then. The Democrats can play the fools.

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Punchin’ Judy

Arianna has more insider dirt on the Judy Miller file:

A well-connected media source e-mailed to say that the most interesting development on the Miller story is coming from inside the Times: “I gather that Doug Jehl, who is a dogged and respected reporter, has been assigned to do an in-house investigative report for the Times and that he is already cutting pretty close to the bone. Several editors he has spoken to are now asking themselves why there wasn’t more questioning of whether Miller’s silence reflects a fear of incriminating herself rather than betraying a source. I predict this will start to unravel in the next couple of weeks — if only because the Times is afraid of getting scooped again by outside rivals.”

If they just now began to question this then there is a lot more wrong with the NY Times than we’ve known. Considering Miller’s recent history any cub reporter would have at least wondered whether Miller was colluding with the administration on this.

As Xeno reminds me in the comments, the NY Times recently published quite a scathing editorial about Karl Rove “using” the press for his own ends and demanded that he hold a press conference and admit what he knows.

Far be it for us to denounce leaks. Newspapers have relied on countless government officials to divulge vital information that their bosses want to be kept secret. There is even value in the sanctioned leak, such as when the White House, say, lets out information that it wants known but does not want to announce.

But it is something else entirely when officials peddle disinformation for propaganda purposes or to harm a political adversary. And Karl Rove seems to have been playing that unsavory game with the C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, Joseph Wilson IV, a career diplomat who ran afoul of President Bush’s efforts to justify the invasion of Iraq.

[…]

The White House has painted itself into a corner. More than a year ago, Mr. Bush vowed to fire the leaker. Then Scott McClellan, the president’s spokesman, repeatedly assured everyone that the leaker was not Mr. Rove, on whom the president is so dependent intellectually that he calls Mr. Rove “the architect.”

Until this week, the administration had deflected attention onto journalists by producing documents that officials had been compelled to sign to supposedly waive any promise of confidentiality. Our colleague Judith Miller, unjustly jailed for protecting the identity of confidential sources, was right to view these so-called waivers as meaningless.

Mr. Rove could clear all this up quickly. All he has to do is call a press conference and tell everyone what conversations he had and with whom. While we like government officials who are willing to whisper vital information, we like even more government officials who tell the truth in public.

I assume that the NY Times will issue another such scathing indictment of Scooter Libby now that we know he was the person who Judy Miller is protecting. After all, he has the power to release Judy tomorrow if he will just hold a press conference and tell everyone what conversation he had and with whom. Then Judy would be released from her obligations and could testify in good faith. Right?

Libby On The Label

According to Murray Waas, Scooter told Fitzgerald that he met with Miller on July 8th. But he has not given Judith Miller the specific waiver she seeks to talk to the prosecutors.

It’s time for the press to go to the mattresses and demand an explanation from the white house.

The new disclosure that Miller and Libby met on July 8, 2003, raises questions regarding claims by President Bush that he and everyone in his administration have done everything possible to assist Fitzgerald’s grand-jury probe. Sources close to the investigation, and private attorneys representing clients embroiled in the federal probe, said that Libby’s failure to produce a personal waiver may have played a significant role in Miller’s decision not to testify about her conversations with Libby, including the one on July 8, 2003.

Libby signed a more generalized waiver during the early course of the investigation granting journalists the right to testify about their conversations with him if they wished to do so. At least two reporters — Walter Pincus of The Washington Post and Tim Russert of NBC — have testified about their conversations with Libby.

But Miller has said she would not consider providing any information to investigators about conversations with Libby or anyone else without a more specific, or personal, waiver. Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, has previously said Miller had not been granted “any kind of a waiver … that she finds persuasive or believes was freely given.”

Libby has never offered to provide such a personalized waiver for Miller, according to three legal sources with first-hand knowledge of the matter. Joseph A. Tate, an attorney for Libby, declined to comment for this story.

[…]

At least two attorneys representing private clients who are embroiled in the Plame probe also privately questioned whether or not President Bush had encouraged Libby to provide a personalized waiver for Miller in an effort to obtain her cooperation.

In a memorandum distributed to White House staff members shortly after the investigation became known, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, who at the time was White House counsel, wrote, “The president has directed full cooperation with this investigation.” Bush himself said: “[I]f there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of.”

Congressman Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, while sidestepping the specifics as to whether Bush should order Libby to provide a personalized waiver for Miller, said in an interview Friday evening: “I would say the president has the power to help us get to the bottom of this matter. And we in Congress want to do this not so much for what has happened but to prevent such a thing from happening again.”

This is bullshit. The white house cannot get away with saying they are cooperating with the prosecutor by not talking — and then not require the staff to fully cooperate with the prosecutor.

“I want to know the truth,” Bush told reporters in September 2003 after news of the investigation had burst into headlines. “If anybody has got any information, inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business.”

Here’s Scotty from July 11th:

Q: Does the president stand by his pledge to fire anyone involved in a leak of the name of a CIA operative?

MCCLELLAN: I appreciate your question. I think your question is being asked related to some reports that are in reference to an ongoing criminal investigation. The criminal investigation that you reference is something that continues at this point.

And as I’ve previously stated, while that investigation is ongoing, the White House is not going to comment on it.

The president directed the White House to cooperate fully with the investigation. And as part of cooperating fully with the investigation, we made a decision that we weren’t going to comment on it while it is ongoing.

Now that it’s been reported that Libby is the source Miller is protecting the media should demand that Libby free their sister from jail.

“Scott, Judy Miller is languishing in a DC jail because the vice president’s chief of staff refuses to grant her a specific waiver. The prosecutor has told federal judges that he needs to talk to her. Is this what the president calls cooperating with the investigation?”

There really is no good reason why Libby hasn’t provided a specific waiver for Judy if he told Fitzgerald he talked to her.

Unless he lied to the prosecutor about what was said, that is.

And if Judy gets a specific waiver she has no more excuse to play Jeanne d’Arc. If she still won’t squawk, the NY Times will have to finally admit that they have employed a neocon operative as a reporter.

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Sit Tight

A thought to ponder as we debate whether we should be moving toward more social conservatism. The number one Republican in the US Senate just endorsed stem cell research and the number three Republican in the Senate just backed off his previous support for intelligent design.

This would indicate to me that these two politicians, one of whom is running for president and the other who is trying to keep his seat in a swing state, have seen numbers that indicate the religious right is hurting their chances. They are sistah sojah-ing like madmen pretty damn early in the game.

I suspect that some democratic strategists think this is a good reason for us to “meet them in the middle” by running as social conservatives — just without James Dobson. But anyone who thinks this is someone who hasn’t been watching politics for the last 20 years.

We should sit tight. We’re already in the middle, right where most of the public is. It’s just that the public didn’t realize it until recently. When the wingnuts start devouring each other we should tie them together and run against the whole lot. I know this because I watched it happen in the 80’s. To us.

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Good For Thee But Not For Me

The United States’ envoy in Iraq delivered a warning on Saturday to Shi’ite Islamist leaders, propelled to power by U.S. forces, not to use a new constitution to impose discriminatory laws by majority rule.

Hmmmmm.

JOINT RESOLUTION Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relating to marriage .

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of its submission for ratification:

“Article —

“SECTION 1. Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.”

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