Month: March 2006

Poster Boy

by digby

Favorite Claude Allen Katrina Quote:

“Just the mere fact you have pictures of the president on TV embracing grieving mothers, embracing pastors of churches that have been destroyed,” Allen said. “That speaks about the personal character of our president, who is truly concerned about healing our nation.”

Favorite Claude Allen Bigoted Remark explanation:

During his confirmation hearing, Senate Democrats quizzed Allen about a comment he made in 1984 when he served as spokesman for the reelection campaign of then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). He told a reporter that then-Gov. James B. Hunt Jr., Helms’s Democratic opponent, was vulnerable because of his links to the “queers.”

Critics charged that Allen used the word to disparage gays. But during his judicial confirmation hearing, Allen told skeptical members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he intended the word to convey “odd, out of the ordinary, unusual,” not to denigrate gays.

Favorite Claude Allen Macabre Republican “Life” moment:

Robert G. Marshall, a Republican state delegate in Virginia, worked closely with Allen when the nominee served as Virginia’s health secretary. Together, they fought – and lost – a battle to prevent the family of Hugh Finn, a popular TV news anchorman from Kentucky, from removing his feeding tube when he was sick in a Virginia nursing home. Marshall and Allen insisted there was not enough evidence that Finn was in a permanent vegetative state, despite that conclusion from several doctors.

“The media made it look like we were pumping air into a corpse, but I knew my duty and Claude knew his,” recalled Marshall, who says Allen rightfully put a state’s duty to protect life above public pressure. “I want a federal judge who protects human rights, despite public opinion being whipped up.”

But Finn’s wife, Michele, wrote a scathing letter to the Judiciary Committee this summer, saying Allen was “unsuitable” for the bench and had tried to “impose his personal agenda and beliefs over the legal and moral rights to which my husband was entitled.”

He was Schiavo before Schiavo was cool.

Claude Allen is a Rove republican through and through — a cheap, opportunistic phony preying on people’s prejudices. He rose to the very top of the GOP heap by insulting the intelligence of all around him and daring them to call him on it. Very few people did.

You’ve gotta love this:

After his nomination was announced, some of Allen’s fraternity brothers from Chi Psi, a mostly white and liberal frat at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, called each other to talk about a man who they felt might have always inflated his conservative views.

“Some people have considered that, maybe, when he worked for Helms, he thought that by being an African-American male who holds these views, he could move up fast as a Republican,” said Donald Beeson, one of the fraternity brothers. “But I disagree. I don’t think he is someone who would do that.

Right.

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Happy Days

by digby

There must be great joy on the right tonight. One of Rush’s loathed leftist feel-good hand-wringers has been shown reality in a big way.

Only “Hillary’s face on a milk carton” could make them happier.

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*update below

Shoplifting Extremist

by digby

Bush’s Domestic Policy advisor, Claude Allen, inexplicably resigned a while back, and today it was revealed that the reason was that he had been arrested for shoplifting. Allen is not just some nobody. He was one of Bush’s closest advisors and was paid at the very highest salary level along with Rove and Bartlet and a very few others. He is an extreme social conservative who the Democrats were able to keep off the federal bench when Bush nominated him for a lifetime appointment. (Let’s give the Democrats some credit for doing something right on that one.) C. Boyden Gray, the shill in charge of putting far right radicals on the bench wrote this about Allen’s nomination in NRO in 2004:

Claude Allen promises not to advance a political agenda from the federal bench he has been nominated to, but to be the type of judge who buttresses the foundation of American government — by applying the rule of law however he finds it. President Bush, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, could do much worse than Allen. By the grace of democratic principles overriding a minority in the Senate, let us hope they do not have to.

I won’t say it.

But here’s the real kicker about Allen. From Josh Marshall, back in September 2005

(September 12, 2005 — 02:10 AM EDT)

Not sure what to make of this small tidbit. But while I was confirming some new entries in our Katrina timeline tonight, I noticed something I hadn’t heard before. According to Scott McClellan’s August 31st gaggle, in the early days of Katrina, the White House Katrina task force was being run by Claude Allen.

Allen’s title at the White House is Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy. But he’s basically the social policy czar, big into abstinence only education, stem-cell restrictions, stuff like that.

This may simply have been a matter of convening meetings — I have no idea. But still it seemed an odd choice.

Very odd. In the worst natural disaster in American history the Bush administration’s response was assigned to a shoplifting religious extremist and a crony from the arabian horseshow association while the head of homeland security flew off to give a speech. The president and John McCain laughed and ate cake. This is Republican governance.

The administration has known about this for over a month. They lied reflexively and said he had resigned to spend more time with his family. Did they think this wouldn’t come out?

Update: Apparently they are still laboring under the illusion that the country will swallow anything:

After the news of Allen’s arrest surfaced Friday, White House officials provided an account of their knowledge of the events that led up to it.

The night of Jan. 2, after the alleged incident at the Target in Gaithersburg, he called White House chief of staff Andy Card to inform him of what had happened. The next morning, he spoke again, this time in person, with Card and White House counsel Harriet Miers, assuring them it was all a misunderstanding, press secretary Scott McClellan said.

Allen told his bosses there was merely confusion with his credit card because he had moved several times. “He assured them that he had done nothing wrong and the matter would be cleared up,” McClellan said.

Allen told White House officials later that he wanted to resign because the job was too stressful on his family. His last day at the White House was Feb. 17, McClellan said.

The president first learned of Allen’s planned departure and the January incident in early February, but since Allen had passed the usual background checks and had no other prior issues that White House officials were aware of, “He was given the benefit of the doubt,” McClellan said.

“If it is true, no one would be more shocked and more outraged than the president,” McClellan said. Allen has had no contact with the White House since his arrest.

First male prostitutes in the white house press room and now shoplifters in the president’s inner circle. The vice president shoots an old man in the face. To say nothing of the indicted and soon to be indicted perjurers and corrupt GOP congressmen and Senators.

These are the people who are asking the nation to trust them with unfettered executive power because they are protecting the country. OK.

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**update below

Eunuch’s Panic

by digby

“While I don’t dispute the fact that we have challenges in the current environment politically, I also believe 2006 as a choice election offers Republicans an opportunity if we make sure the election is framed in a way that will keep our majorities in the House and the Senate,” said Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Stung by criticism, senior officials at the White House and the RNC are reminding GOP members of Congress that Bush’s approval ratings may be low, but theirs is lower and have declined at the same pace as Bush’s. The message to GOP lawmakers is that criticizing the president weakens him — and them — politically.

“When issue like the internal Republican debate over the ports dominates the news it puts us another day away from all of us figuring out what policies we need to win,” said Terry Nelson, a Republican consultant and political director for Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004.

What’s a rubber stamp congress to do? Should they run against their man and take the chance that weakening him weakens them as Kenny Boy Mehlman warns? Or should they go down with the ship? Tough choices.

The problem, of course, is that they can run but they can’t hide. They have gone along with every corrupt, inept, absurd and outrageous thing that the failed Bush administration has put out there. They have failed in their duty as a separate branch of government by pledging fealty to George W. Bush instead of the constitution. They are George W. Bush. There is no light between them.

This is the iconic image of the Republican Congress:

While New Orleans Drowned

Update: Tweety is down at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference (where they are selling those adorable bumper stickers that say “Happiness is Hillary’s face on a milk carton”) pretending like he’s not running and asking all those who are tempted to write his name on the ballot to write in “George W. Bush” instead. He’s tying Frist and the others up in knots.

The press loves the flyboy, never forget it. It’s going to take a long determined effort to degrade his favorability if the Democrats hope to win.

Update II: Roger Birnbaum and Howie Fineman are both saying that all the candidates should back putting the name George W. Bush on the ballot because this thing doesn’t really matter anyway and it’s a nice gesture. Frist has been working feverishly to line up the votes. He wanted to win. McCain just got first blood, and he did it with a smooth slide of the shiv. He’s good.

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Trash Talk Turkey

by digby

Atrios excerpts a few paragraphs from Paul Krugman’s delectable “I told you so” column from today and I thought I’d excerpt a few more paragraphs for those of you who don’t have Times select. I chose these in honor of tristero:

Never mind; better late than never. We should welcome the recent epiphanies by conservative commentators who have finally realized that the Bush administration isn’t trustworthy. But we should guard against a conventional wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says there’s something praiseworthy about having initially been taken in by Mr. Bush’s deceptions, even though the administration’s mendacity was obvious from the beginning.

According to this view, if you’re a former Bush supporter who now says, as Mr. Bartlett did at the Cato event, that “the administration lies about budget numbers,” you’re a brave truth-teller. But if you’ve been saying that since the early days of the Bush administration, you were unpleasantly shrill.

Similarly, if you’re a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who now says, as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that “the people in this administration have no principles,” you’re taking a courageous stand. If you said the same thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent approval rating, you were blinded by Bush-hatred.

And if you’re a former hawk who now concedes that the administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you’re to be applauded for your open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago that the administration was hyping the case for war, you were a conspiracy theorist.

The truth is that everything the new wave of Bush critics has to say was obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts

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No kidding.

It’s a good column, but it’s made shocking by the one that accompanies it on the page today by Thomas Friedman. Apparently, he didn’t get the memo that he was long ago proved to be an ass.

I used to think Friedman was an astute observer of world affairs and had insight into globalization and mid-east politics — until 9/11 when he showed himself to be an hysterical airhead. I’ve posted this column a couple of times, but it deserves another round as an illustration of how completely out of his mind he and the rest of the punditocrisy were in the days after the attacks:

… our enemies took us less and less seriously and became more and more emboldened. Indeed, they became so emboldened that a group of individuals – think about that for a second: not a state but a group of individuals – attacked America in its own backyard. Why not? The terrorists and the states that harbor them thought we were soft, and they were right. They thought that they could always “out-crazy” us, and they were right. They thought we would always listen to the Europeans and opt for “constructive engagement” with rogues, not a fist in the face, and they were right.

So our enemies took us less and less seriously and became more and more emboldened. Indeed, they became so emboldened that a group of individuals – think about that for a second: not a state but a group of individuals – attacked America in its own backyard. Why not? The terrorists and the states that harbor them thought we were soft, and they were right. They thought that they could always “out-crazy” us, and they were right. They thought we would always listen to the Europeans and opt for “constructive engagement” with rogues, not a fist in the face, and they were right.

America’s enemies smelled weakness all over us, and we paid a huge price for that. There is an old bedouin legend that goes like this: An elderly Bedouin leader thought that by eating turkey he could restore his virility. So he bought a turkey, kept it by his tent and stuffed it with food every day. One day someone stole his turkey. The Bedouin elder called his sons together and told them: “Boys, we are in great danger. Someone has stolen my turkey.” “Father,” the sons answered, “what do you need a turkey for?”

“Never mind,” he answered, “just get me back my turkey.” But the sons ignored him and a month later someone stole the old man’s camel. “What should we do?” the sons asked. “Find my turkey,” said the father. But the sons did nothing, and a few weeks later the man’s daughter was raped. The father said to his sons: “It is all because of the turkey. When they saw that they could take my turkey, we lost everything.”

America is that Bedouin elder, and for 20 years people have been taking our turkey. The Europeans don’t favor any military action against Iraq, Iran or North Korea. Neither do I. But what is their alternative? To wait until Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, who’s even a bigger psychopath than his father, has bio-weapons and missiles that can hit Paris?

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

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

This is the premiere, serious foreign policy op-ed columnist for the New York fucking Times. This is the level of sophistication we saw among the best and the brightest of famous public intellectuals, opinion makers and government officials as we raced to invade a country that hadn’t attacked us. Trash talk foreign policy and sophomoric dick measuring.

Since then Friedman has come to criticize the Bush administration’s execution of the Iraq war. But he certainly hasn’t changed his puerile desire for the United States to “flex its muscles” and force those recalcitrant arabs into line with a mighty American roar. After everything we know about the efficacy of a superpower “acting crazy,” Friedman comes out with this fatuous column today:

We need to bring together all the newly elected Iraqi leaders for a national reconciliation conference — outside Baghdad. We should lock them in a room and not let them out until they either produce a national unity government, so Americans will want to stay in Iraq, or fail to produce that government, which would signal that it’s time to warm up the bus.

Those choices need to be put to the Iraqis in the most frank, tough-minded way by the most nasty, brutish and short-tempered senior official we’ve got — and that is Dick “Darth Vader” Cheney. Mr. Veep, this Bud’s for you.

[…]

Mr. Cheney could open the meeting with his low growl by telling the Sunnis: “Look, you guys don’t want to compromise, fine. Then we’ll just leave you to the tender mercies of the Shiites, who vastly outnumber you.”

To the Shiites: “You want to rule Iraq and control the oil without real regard to the Sunnis? Well, you’re going to rule over nothing but a boiling pot, unless you compromise.”

And to the Kurds he could say: “You’ve behaved most responsibly. Stick with it. If Iraq falls apart, we will make sure you’re taken care of. We won’t ignore the fact that you’ve built an impressively decent, democratizing society in your region.”

After getting their attention, Mr. Cheney could start cracking heads on the key issues:

First, the Shiite alliance has to come up with a new candidate for prime minister, acceptable to all parties.

Second, the constitution has to be revised so the Sunnis do not feel that the Kurds and Shiites are breaking off their own chunks of Iraq, along with their oil resources.

Third, the Sunnis need to produce a credible plan for ending their insurgency.

Fourth, the parties have to agree on an inner cabinet, with ministers from each community, which will make all key decisions in coordination with the new prime minister.

Fifth, this inner cabinet has to draw up a plan for governing Iraq from the center — and not from any one faction.

Mr. Cheney could then conclude: “Read my lips — these are the minimum requirements for a decent government in Iraq. If Iraqis step up, Americans will want to stick it out. If Iraqis won’t step up, Americans will want to step out. The American people are ready to midwife your democracy, but not to baby-sit your civil war.”

Mr. Cheney, this is your Kodak moment. Iraqis are notoriously difficult and fractious. You’ve got the time and the mean streak to deal with them. They’ll get serious if you’re in the room. But just in case, bring along your shotgun. This is a good job for someone with bad aim.

Sixth: Go fuck youself, Dick.

I do not presume to understand the psychological disorder that leads so many highly placed gasbags to publicly yearn for a tough guy to step in and order everyone to do what he wants or else, but they need to deal with it rather than inflict their immature needs on the rest of the planet. I realize that Friedman thinks he was being funny by using Cheney as his villian, but apparently he truly believes the US can find a way to dictate these events around the world if we just show everyone that we have the biggest codpiece around. Please spare us any more of this juvenile trash talk. It’s what got us into this mess in the first place.

Update: Via Atrios, I see that Andrew Sullivan’s feelings are hurt that he’s being held responsible for his earlier words.

I defer to tristero to make this argument explicitly, but it’s important that people like Sullivan and Friedman don’t get a free pass. This isn’t going to be the last time the government makes devastating errors of judgment (although its going to be hard to beat the sheer scale of the Bush administration’s failures.)People who endorsed this folly, over the objections of others with cooler analytical heads, have been discredited. It’s that simple. They cannot be trusted the same way again, particularly if they fail to acknowledge that others were right and they refused to listen to them. It’s very unpleasant to be wrong but mature people try to figure out where their reasoning failed and admit their mistakes. Simply “discovering” after all this time that Bush does not fit their fantasy image of him is not good enough.

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Of Course

by digby

Avedon Carol snares a great quote that finally cleared something up for me: why does Bush always sound like he’s talking to five year olds?

“He speaks to the audience as if they’re idiots. I think the reason he does that is because that’s the way these issues were explained to him.” – Graydon Carter

The funny thing is that he sounds irritated too. It has always puzzled me why he seems so inappropriately impatient in his town meetings, as if his rapt audience needs some sort of time-wasting remedial education before he can get to the subject, which he never does. (“See — social security is program for older people. Older people like ta retire. When you retire you don’t work. When you don’t work you don’t earn money. That’s the problem.”)

Again, he’s just parroting his own tutorial.

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They Mean It

by digby

It’s pretty clear that the assault on women’s reproductive rights is in full swing. I suspect that many Republicans know that their legislative majority days may be numbered and they are trying to deliver for their constituents before they lose their perch.

This one’s a twofer.

Today the United States Senate is considering a bill that would have a serious and damaging impact on health coverage for women across the United States. The Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act (HIMMAA), introduced by Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) would allow insurance companies to ignore nearly all state laws that require insurance coverage for certain treatments or conditions, such as laws that require them to include contraceptives in their prescription plans.

[…]

For years, many insurance plans covered prescription drugs, but refused to cover birth control pills and other prescription contraceptives for women. In the past decade lawmakers in 23 states have remedied this inequity and enacted contraceptive coverage laws. Under HIMMAA women will lose contraceptive-equity protections currently guaranteed by state law.

They deliver for their primary masters, the insurance companies by “streamlining” the state laws that require the companies to cover certain health needs. This mandated coverage is often aimed at women’s reproductive health. Insurance companies prefer not to be required to cover anything they can get away with not covering — and the theocrats in the republican party want to make birth control more difficult to obtain if not against the law all together. This is one of those times when the interests of the big money boys and the bedroom police can work comfortably together.

This development is very interesting in light of the new emphasis on birth control among strategists in the Democratic party. The next battle is already being fought out on the edges of the abortion debate. If this goes the way of Democrats’ previous brilliant strategies in the culture wars, within five years we’ll have jettisoned our argument about Roe altogether and will be fighting with all our might to preserve Griswold, which the other side will be arguing is a matter of states’ rights just like Roe. (No “streamlining” necessary.)

You’d think that common sense would preclude this, but it won’t. Common sense says that regulating guns in a country of almost 300 million people is the smart thing to do. But we can’t do it in the case of terrorism even now:

Historically, terrorist watch list checks were not part of the firearms background checkprocess implemented pursuant to the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. Such watch lists were not checked, because being a known or suspected terrorist is not a disqualifying factor for firearm transfer/possession eligibility under current federal or state law.

[…]

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has directed the DOJ Office of Legal Policy to form a working group to review federal gun laws — particularly in regard to Brady background checks — to determine whether additional authority should be sought to prevent firearms transfers to known and suspected terrorists.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, you’ll recall, John Ashcroft refused to extend the very short period that firearm backround checks were kept so that authorities could compare the lists with terrorist watch lists. (At the same time he and the rest of the administration ripped up the constitution because Dick Cheney believed the paperwork involved was too onerous.)

As of right now, it is perfectly legal for a terrorist suspect to buy guns. The right to bear arms is inviolate with these people. Not even a national security argument can be brought to bear — even while habeas corpus is selectively suspended and the president has asserted a right to do anything it deems necessary to fight terrorism. Democrats can say nothing about this because we completely capitulated on the issue. It no longer even exists.

The Republicans and the NRA wore their opposition down over the course of many, many years and they are doing the same thing with abortion. So far, it’s working pretty much the same way. And the icing on the cake from the perspective of the Republicans is that every time they wear the Democrats down on these contentious issues, it makes their “Democratic weakness” argument more believable. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Michael Bérubé discusses this today by reflecting on the wide-spread belief among certain liberals that the anti-abortion people don’t really mean it:

My point is that Nader, like all too many men on the left, doesn’t believe that the right-wing culture warriors really mean it. They think it’s all shadow-boxing, a distraction, a sop thrown to the radical fringe. That same attitude can be found, as I’ve noted before, in Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, where Frank writes, “Values may ‘matter most’ to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won. This is a basic earmark of the phenomenon, absolutely consistent in across its decades-long history. Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act.”

The idea is that an actual abortion ban would go too far: the first back alley death, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble. Well, maybe and maybe not, folks. You might think, along similar lines, “the first hideous death by torture in the War on Terror, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first unconstitutional power grab by the executive branch, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first data-mining program of domestic spying, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first systemic corruption scandal involving Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham and Tom DeLay, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” and you’d be, ah, wrong, you know. Besides, there’s a nasty time lag between that first back-alley death and the repeal (if any) of a state’s draconian abortion law, and in that time-lag, that state’s Republican Party might or might not be in deep trouble. It’s hard to unseat incumbents in this jerry-built and gerrymandered system, after all. So there’s no guarantee that popular outrage against back-alley deaths would jeopardize a state’s elected GOP officials en masse. But we can be pretty sure that women with unwanted pregnancies would be . . . how shall we say? in deep trouble.

They really mean it. This is no bullshit. There is no downside to overturning Roe for them — and if there is, they don’t care. If they want to overturn Griswald, they’ll do that too. They fought the gun control fight when people were freaking out over crime in the streets and political assassinations. Conservative absolutists don’t give up just because liberals get up-in-arms. They certainly don’t care if we think they are shrill.

I believe that this fight is going to have to be fought on a number of fronts. We must make some decent people who have not fully explored the ramifications of their stand take a good hard look at it from a moral and logical standpoint. They need to be shown that their leaders (in the mode of Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed) are very cynical and deceitful. What they say to their flock is very different from what they believe. From this review of the book “Absolute Convictions” in today’s Salon magazine:

“Somebody’s intimidating them, somebody’s bullying them,” Rev. Rob Shenck, a founder of the Christian lobbying group Faith and Action, says of women who seek abortions. Press counters: “None of the women interviewed claimed her decision was anyone’s but her own.” (He also cites this comment made to a reporter by antiabortion leader Joe Scheidler: “the gals usually know what they’re doing and want to do it … But if we started saying that women who have abortions should be sent to jail for life, we’d get into a real beehive.”…)

A real beehive all right. An awful lot of people don’t understand that this is where this argument inexorably leads. That means we have to engage at the dinner table and the water cooler as well as among ourselves. We must make some people look more closely at their own self-interest in this issue, particularly men.

But more than anything else we must accept the fact that these people are serious. They want to outlaw abortion and they want to curtail people’s access to birth control. They aren’t lying. And as they’ve shown with gun rights, they are in it for the long haul. We must be just a stubborn as they are and seek to wear them down rather than let them wear us down.

This is not an issue for tweaking. Let’s tweak on the Ten Commandments or public funds for parochial schools or something else if it is necessary to adjust for this family values crap in order to win elections. State mandated forced childbirth and denial of access to birth control cannot be negotiated or finessed. This one’s going to have to be fought out head to head, day to day to a final reckoning. That’s what they are going to do and if we don’t recognise that and act accordingly, we will lose.

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You And What Army?

by digby

I might be crazy but I think that Charles Krauthamer and Fred Barnes just implied that if we suffer another terrorist attack it will be because Bush was not allowed to reward our good friends the UAE with the port deal. Apparently if we don’t play ball with our “allies” they’ll be forced to do something nasty. It looks like the Bush Doctrine has undergone a little tweaking. The US is now paying off middle eastern countries so they won’t help terrorists attack us. It’s probably a better approach that “yer either with us or agin’ us” thing. Paying off blackmailers directly is a lot cheaper than a war. In fact, it’s a lot like the K Street project.

I wonder how the Republican base feels about that?

Meanwhile, Charles, Fred and Mort Kondrake agree that the UN is even more useless than it was before we went into Iraq and we won’t be able to move into Iran for at least a year. We must once again unleash our mighty sword and remind some people of the military might of the United States (and Israel.) To hell with the Chinese and the Russians!

Looks like the Beltway Boys are getting ready to hitch up their codpieces and yippie yie yo kie yay, mothafuckahs. Just as soon as they remove their make-up.

Update:

Nice little country you’ve got there. Be a shame is something happened to it:

TODD (voice over): A warning of possible fallout from the port fight.

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: I think we’ve missed a opportunity.

TODD: CNN national security adviser John McLaughlin, a former deputy CIA director, says American politicians focused too much on the UAE’s pre-9/11 terrorist ties and undervalued the Emirates’ role since September 11 in catching terrorists, cracking down on weapons trafficking and money laundering.

Now…

MCLAUGHLIN: I think the UAE will continue to be a good intelligence partner, but there’s a risk here, a chance that they will lose a lot of their enthusiasm for cooperating as closely with us as they have in the past.

TODD: Militarily, U.S. officials consistently hit home one point: the Emirates, specifically their port facilities in Dubai, are critical to U.S. operations in Iraq an Afghanistan. CAPT. THOMAS GOODWIN, U.S. NAVY: On a daily basis there is at least one U.S. ship in a port in the UAE, and oftentimes more than that.

GEN. PETER PACE, JOINT CHIEFS CHAIRMAN: And as you look to potential problems in the future in that region, the United Arab Emirates’ location and capacity will be critical to our ability to succeed.

TODD: Now one former U.S. defense secretary tells CNN the ruling family may not kick American ships out of port, but may, in his words, “rethink their level of participation.”

In business, the UAE is a huge American partner. Emirates Airline has placed a multibillion-dollar order for Boeing jets, but also buys planes from European-based Airbus.

Now…

RICHARD ABOULAFIA, TEAL GROUP: It’s easy to see a scenario where this poisons commercial relations between the Emirates and the U.S., and that could directly impact Boeing’s prospects to sell aircraft to the Emirates.

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Shell Game

by digby

John Warner says that DP World has agreed to transfer the operation of their US ports to a US “entity.” They are guaranteed, apparently, not to suffer any financial loss in the deal. One must wonder exactly how that will be accomplished — and who will be paying for it.

It appears on the surface that they are going to set up a shell company in the US in which the US taxpayer will guarantee DP World that it won’t lose money. Nice deal. It will be interesting to see if that passes muster with the public.

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GUEST POST

Our Two Bobbies

By Lucian Truscott IV

The steno-pads in the Washington press corps have covered the Dubai Port deal the way they cover everything else, like a herd of hamsters scurrying for space on the airless, cramped exercise wheel that serves as our national capital. The conventional wisdom has focused exclusively on only one aspect of the story, national security, conveniently overlooking the fact that the Bush White House owns the goddamned national security issue. It’s the one thing they can spin freely at Rovian whim, because they happen to have noticed that the inhabitants of Redneck Nation responded so warmly to Ronnie “working” at his “ranch” in his cowboy boots and western shirt and rolled up sleeves that Redneck Nation has collectively seized on the idea that anybody who spends lots of time “clearing brush” on his “ranch” in cowboy boots and western shirts with rolled up sleeves can be trusted not only with the Office of the President, but with our “security.”

As a sergeant from Tennessee of my acquaintance in the Army used to say every time the Captain would pass down some wisdom from on-high about what was necessary to become a combat-ready rootin’ tootin’ blood-thirsty warrior: whhuuuut th’ fuuuuuuk?

Here is a glimpse of what the Washington press corps steno-pads are failing to copy down:

Ask yourself why Bush suddenly found his Veto Stick and brandished it wildly at any legislation intended to stop the Dubai port deal. Ask yourself why he’s out there on the plank facing growing opposition within his own party to the deal. Was it because he believes canceling the deal would send the wrong message to all of our “friends” in the world– all three of them? Or maybe because he really believes it would be “unfair” to all those sheiks and emirs swathed in gold-embroidered robes having their toes sucked by Imported Blonde Virgins while they tap at their Blackberries, checking their stock portfolios for teeny little hundred-million dollar variances in their multi-billion dollar balances. I’ve got it! Bush is all upset with Republican Party congressional “leaders” because he’s absolutely convinced that Dubai Ports World Inc. — a national company wholly owned by the Emirate of Dubai — has been thoroughly and expertly vetted by some “interagency committee” neither he, Rumsfeld, Snow, Chertoff or anyone else ever heard of before last week.

There are a few problems with this interagency committee vetting thing, beginning with the fact that the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury who chaired the interagency committee that vetted Dubai Ports World is the same guy who vetted Dan Quayle as well qualified to be Vice President for Bush’s daddy when he was running for President in 1988. You read that right. His name is Robert M. Kimmitt, and believe-you-me, this man has a history of doing a hell of a job when it comes to being Bush Family Deputy-Expert Vetter. This is no doubt because he studied the fine art of vetting at the feet of Bush Family Master Fixer, Expert Vetter and Chief Water Carrier: James A. Baker III.

The Dubai Ports deal stinks to high heaven of tall Texan and master-fixer Baker. Robert M. Kimmitt, chair of the interagency committee that took something like 20 minutes to certify Dubai Ports as a worthy partner in running our ports — without even taking a vote — is a familiar name to me. He and I graduated in the same West Point class in June of 1969. Kimmitt, after serving in Vietnam, during which he was awarded three Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart, and an Air Medal, Kimmitt went to Georgetown Law School on the Army’s dime and after graduating in 1977, plunged himself immediately into finding his way along Washington’s corridors of power. As it happens, Kimmitt had some help reading the Power Map. His father was the man chosen by then Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson to replace Bobby Baker as the quietly powerful Secretary to Senate after Bobby Baker was discovered inflagrante in the bathroom of a gay porno theater. If anyone had the Power Map to the maze of corridors in our nation’s capital, it was Kimmitt’s daddy.

Kimmitt had also benefited from the careful guidance and ministrations of a powerful mentor with a big-time DC Power Job while he was still a cadet at West Point — loooong story…WAY too long for this brief screed — and now that he had in hand his Vietnam medals and Georgetown diploma and letters of recommendation from his DC Circuit Court of Appeals judge, whatdayaknow, but our boy Bobby immediately landed a job across town on the National Security Council at the White House. No stopping off to spend a couple of years rooting as an associate, around in a dusty law firm library for this boy! Nosiree! Robert M. Kimmitt knew there was one hell of a lot of vetting in his future, and where better to learn the fine art of vetting, but in the offices of the National Security Advisor to the President of the United States? There just wasn’t any better place, that’s what! So Kimmitt sets up shop on the staff of the NSC in 1978 and holds his breath and guts it out until that commie pinko peacenik Naval Academy grad and former nuclear submariner Jimmie Carter was ousted by cowboy boot and western shirt wearin’, brush clearin’ President Ronald Reagan, and he rolled up his sleeves and got busy. Busy doing what, you may ask? Easy! Bob Kimmitt got busy studying at the feet of his new mentor on the NSC — James A. Baker III, who was installed on the NSC as the Bush Family Master Fixer, Expert Vetter and Chief Water Carrier!

Now you may be thinking, what a lucky guy, this Bob Kimmitt. It’s 1978, he’s not even 30 years old, and he’s held only one real job in his life — junior officer in the Army — and there he is with his nose pressed not against the glass trying to get a glimpse of the Asshole of Power in Washington D.C., but on the other side of the glass, inside, really, really, really close to the Asshole of Power in Washington D.C., the one place where those words which ring in such dulcet political tones….national security…are not merely an aspect of policy, or a sideshow to the Real Deal, but the Real Deal Itself! Wow! National Security is right there in the title of the office where Bobby had his desk! And his phone! And his White House Pass! And his parking spot! Say it out loud! Listen!

National Security Council!

Double wow! Triple wow! No…whoopee! He’s made it! Across town, mentors and daddies are celebrating! They’re pouring tall tumblers of the Good Stuff out there on their patios! A Republican in the White House wearing cowboy boots and western shirts and clearin’ brush during those loooooong weekends out there at the Western White House — don’t ya love the sound of it? Western White House! And our boy Bob right in there with him, watching out for our security! Whew! Isn’t it great that we can relax out there on the back nine…swing that club a little looser…get that ball a little closer to the pin, maybe…now that Bob is in the White House making sure we’re safe?

It was a great time for golfers, those years when Bob Kimmitt was looking out for the safety and security of their country clubs and the skies through which they passed in their Lears and Gulfstreams. Kimmitt spent the years 1978 to 1983 as an NSC staffer, and then he was promoted, and the golf courses turned greener and the Gulfstreams flew faster! Yep! Jim Baker promoted Bob to be his Executive Secretary, and then he made Bob the General Counsel to the NSC! Quadruple wow! But…wait. There was a problem. Some guys down there in the bowels of the NSC, guys flew so close to the Asshole of Power that their noses got singed, guys like North and Poindexter and McFarlane, guys who were messing around with arms for hostages and Contras and so forth. Not only did their noses get singed, some of ’em even got convicted of some crimes! But not our Bobby. No sir. That whole Iran-Contra thing…that was a Reagan deal all the way. Well…sort of. There was one little hiccup, something about Bob and a license that was needed to ship some missiles or rockets or something or another, and Bob was interviewed by the Tower Commission, but he sailed through safely, and in 1985, our Bobby followed the Bush Family Master Fixer, Expert Vetter and Chief Water Carrier over to the Department of Treasury, where he was installed as General Counsel to the Department under Secretary Baker. Now that the golf courses were safe and the Gulfstreams were up there flying through our secure skies, it was time to Watch the Money, and where better to watch it than the place where it was printed and distributed.

Kimmitt remained at Treasury under Secretary of Money Watching Baker until 1988 when he followed Baker into Bush Campaign I, where he distinguished himself by being deputized by Expert Vetter Baker to check out the qualifications of Dan Quayle. But hell. Anybody can make a mistake when it comes to one of those loons from Capitol Hill, and besides, Quayle didn’t work out so badly. He turned into a kind of Agnew The Lesser, and baited the Dems and did what he was told, and down the road, he sure as hell wasn’t a threat to any of the Bush Boys when one of them decided to run for President!

With Bush I elected in ’88, Kimmitt followed the Master Fixer over to the Department of State, where he was made Under Secretary of State for Political and Military Affairs! Our boy Bob, who had toiled so long as a little-known player in the back rooms and basements of various government departments, was now up there on a High Floor at Foggy Bottom! And those golf courses and Gulfstreams and all that Republican money? Why, having Insured Security and Watched the Money for years, now Bob would move off-shore and do the same thing all over the world — making the International Skies safe for the Gulfstreams and Watching the Money as it moved back and forth between friendly companies and banks in the States to foreign countries and friends who could be trusted, because if they stepped out of line, Bob was there to see to it that their Gulfstreams wouldn’t be welcome in our skies, and their tacky golf shoes would not sully the groomed greens of our golf courses until they straightened-up and did the Right Thing with Our Money, which of course was to turn the Small Piles into Large Piles, and the Large Piles into Huge, Monciferous Piles of Crinkly-Smacking-Green Cash!

In 1991, Secretary of International Money Watching and Security Insuring Baker put in the fix so Bob was appointed Ambassador to Germany. He stayed in this post until Baker’s boss lost in ’92, and the Clinton people removed him in ’93.

Sigh. Bob was on the street…in a Republican sort of way, you understand. He held a series of big-time, big-bucks corporate jobs during the politically Lean Years of the Clinton Administration, and took a long-awaited and well-deserved vacation in a top job at Time Warner AOL during Bush II’s first administration. But recently jaws dropped on the E-ring of the Pentagon when word got around that Kimmitt was offered Secretary of the Navy, and to everyone’s surprise, turned down that plum for Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. Now, why would a Power Guy like Kimmitt turn down a job where you could hop in your own personal Navy Lear Jet and take off to “visit the fleet” in Honolulu for the weekend, and instead take a slot as a deputy to a Bush lapdog who’s still wandering the halls of the big building on 14th Street looking for his water bowl? There are probably some cynics who would call Kimmitt a footman riding the back bumper of the Bush Family Power Carriage, but I think of him simply as a wholly-owned subsidiary of James A. Baker III, Inc. Subsidiaries do what they’re told to do, and when a former Treasury Secretary drops a hint that there are Things to Do and Money To Be Watched over in a Deputy Secretary’s office at Treasury, why, what would you expect a good little Bobby to do, but listen to Duh Man.

When it comes to the Middle East — specifically, to the Oil Business in the Middle East — Baker is most assuredly Duh Man. Baker’s powerful Houston law firm, Baker & Botts, represents the oil interests of the Saudi Royal family and has a big satellite office in Dubai which does business, among other things, in pipelines, energy and trade. You will recall that in 2003, Bush Family Master Fixer Baker was appointed by Bush as the Special Envoy who “negotiated” Iraq’s huge debt, largely held by other Middle East oil-producing nations, including the UAE. Iraqi debt was reduced across the board. Does anyone think that the UAE just wrote off Iraq’s debt? Not on your life. They are getting paid off in other ways…such as having the US approve a deal to have the UAE’s Dubai company run six US ports, which will doubtlessly turn out to be hugely profitable to them, or else why would they be in the port business in a time when maritime trade is growing by leaps and bounds, and shipyards around the world can’t turn out container ships and tankers fast enough. And that doesn’t even get into Baker’s connections to the Carlyle Group, or Bechtel, which built the port of Dubai, or any of that boring stuff.

Even leaving the Carlyle and Bechtel Boys aside, it gets better. Another “protege” of Baker’s appears on the scene: Robert Zoellick, currently Deputy Secretary of State, but from 2001 to 2005, this country’s Trade Representative in charge, largely, of setting up free trade agreements such as CAFTA around the world. I guess it was little noticed in 2004 when Zoellick signed a TIFA — Trade and Investment Framework Agreement — with the UAE, a first step in the negotiations with the Sheiks of Dubai toward a FTA, a Free Trade Agreement, negotiations for which are ongoing. In a speech in Jordan that year, Zoellick described the UAE as a “very positive partner for free trade in the region. The impending FTA with the UAE follows on the heels of FTA’s already negotiated with Jordan, Egypt and Morocco. Trade ministers in the Middle East have described the free trade march of the US across the Middle East as picking off suckers one by one and an attempt to mollify Arab and Muslim nations with the carrot of trade while the stick of war is pounding Iraq. In fact, the several FTA’s already signed are the beginnings of a plan for an overall MEFTA — Middle East Free Trade Agreement — intended to cover up to 20 nations in the region which is planned for completion by 2013.

And who is Zoellick to James A. Baker III? Why, he was the guy walking behind Baker carrying the briefcase containing Baker’s Roman numerals, that’s who! His technical job title was Counselor to Treasury Secretary Baker in 1985, and then Deputy Treasury Secretary under Baker until 1988. Then he took a cab down the Mall to Foggy Bottom where he was stood guard as Counselor to the State Department, and then moved into a tidy office down the hall where he went about the business of American Business as Undersecretary of State for Economic and Agricultural Affairs.

You think our two Bobbys ran into each other in the Corridors of Power when they were working for Duh Man? Does “duh” work for you as an answer? You think that the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and the U.S. Trade Representative might have, uh, talked about stuff over a couple of lunches or sixteen or thirty-three? You think they might have played a round of golf or anything like that? You think that the interests of Bobby The Kimmitt and Bobby The Zoellick might not only coincide, but resemble each other so much they would appear as twins?

Consider their mutual interests in the UAE: The UAE is our 3rd largest trading partner in the Middle East, behind only Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Port of Dubai is the 3rd busiest in the world and is Home Away From Home for US warships, not to mention airfields in the UAE serving the same function for US Air Force warplanes. Consider that the Bush Administration’s plans for a Free Trade Agreement with UAE are not just a foot but an entire leg in the door of an overall Middle East FTA slated for only 7 years down the road. You think there might be far more at stake with the Dubai Ports deal than our reputation with our “friends” in the world, or maybe even our “national security?” You think with two Money Watchers running things when it comes to Big Business and the UAE, that Bush might consider puttin’ on his boots and western shirt and rollin’ up his sleeves and brandishin’ his Veto Stick if those goofballs on Capitol Hill mess around with his deal? Huh? Ya think?

As usual with the Bush Family — with this Bush administration and the administration of Bush I — if you turn over a rock, you won’t find Weapons of Mass Destruction or Terrorist Connections or Osama bin Laden, but you will find a gigantic pile of Crinkly Greenbacks being overseen by our two Bobbies, dutifully carrying out their duties as Money Watchers, and buried in there amongst the grass-cuttings from the fresh-mown greens and a faint odor of kerosene dripped from topped-off wing tanks of the Gulfstreams…right down there next to the Veritable Bunghole of Power you will find evidence of fresh spittle from Bush Family Master Fixer, Expert Vetter and Chief Water Carrier James A. Baker III.

Most of you probably already know the name Lucian Truscott IV from the op-ed pages of the New York Times, stories in the Village Voice, novels like Dress Gray and Dress Blue or perhaps even the Sally Hemmings controversy in which Truscott, a Jefferson heir, insisted that Hemmings’ family be included in the yearly family reunions. Now he has reached the pinnacle of his career by appearing on Hullabaloo.

By the way, even though he has been publishing op-eds in the New York Times since they started the page, for some reason they weren’t interested in (the sedate NY Times version) of this essay. So he blogged it. Hah. —- digby

Correction: Bobby Baker was discovered running a call girl ring, not in a gay porno theatre. That was Walter Jenkins.

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