Month: July 2006

March 7, 2003 Revisitedby poputonian
How could anyone have known back then that invading Iraq was going to be a mistake wrought with negative consequences?

The speech that follows was surely heard by the key planners in America, including everyone in the White House. It was delivered to the United Nations Security Council just days before the Iraq invasion. The speaker used the same reports and evidence available to the US. Note how accurate his comments were:

– He correctly ascertains the degree to which Iraq represented a threat to the world, and to its neighbors.- He identifies the convergence of international institutions as the reckoning force that was successfully disarming Iraq.- He debunks the Iraq / al Qaeda link.- He predicts that innocent families would suffer.- He forecasts the postwar carnage.- And, he zeroes in on the Bush administration’s disingenuous motives for war.

He did all this before the Iraq invasion; I’ll keep his identity hidden until the end of the post.[Excerpted]

I would like to thank Mr. Blix and Mr. ElBaradei for the presentation they have just given us.
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And what have the inspectors told us?
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Significant evidence of real disarmament has now been observed.
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Therefore, I would like solemnly to address a question to this body, and it’s the very same question being asked by people all over the world. Why should we now engage in war with Iraq? And I would also like to ask, why smash the instruments that have just proven their effectiveness? Why choose division when our unity and our resolve are leading Iraq to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction? Why should we wish to proceed by force at any price when we can succeed peacefully?
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War is always an acknowledgment of failure. Let us not resign ourselves to the irreparable. Before making our choice, let us weigh the consequences. Let us measure the effects of our decision. And it’s clear to all in Iraq, we are resolutely moving toward completely eliminating programs of weapons of mass destruction. The method that we have chosen worked.
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The information supply (inaudible) has been verified by the inspectors and is leading to the elimination of banned ballistic equipment. We must proceed the same way with all the other programs: with information, verification and destruction. We already have useful information in the biological and chemical domain.
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With regard to nuclear weapons, Mr. ElBaradei’s statement confirmed … the IAEA will be able to certify the dismantlement of Iraq’s program.
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What conclusions can we draw? That Iraq, according to the very terms used by the inspectors, represents less of a danger to the world than it did in 1991, that we can achieve our objective of effectively disarming that country. Let us keep the pressure on Baghdad.
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The adoption of Resolution 1441, the assumption of converging positions by the vast majority of the world’s nations, diplomatic action by the Organization of African Unity, the League of Arab States, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the non-aligned movement, all of these common efforts are bearing fruit.
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The American and British military presence in the region lends support to our collective resolve. We all recognize the effectiveness of this pressure on the part of the international community, and we must use it to go through with our objective of disarmament through inspections.
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As the European Union noted, these inspections cannot continue indefinitely. The pace must therefore be stepped up. That is why [we] wants to make three proposals today.
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First, let us ask the inspectors to establish a hierarchy of tasks for disarmament, and, on that basis, to present us, as quickly as possible, with the work program provided for by Resolution 1284. We need to know immediately which priority issues could constitute the key disarmament tasks to be carried out by Iraq.
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Secondly, we propose that the inspectors give us a progress report every three weeks. This will make the Iraqi authorities understand that in no case may they interrupt their efforts.
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And finally, let us establish a schedule for assessing the implementation of the work program. Resolution 1284 provides for a time frame of 120 days. We are willing to shorten it if the inspectors consider it feasible.
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The military agenda must not dictate the calendar of inspections. We agree to timetables and to an accelerated calendar, but we cannot accept an ultimatum as long as the inspectors are reporting cooperation. That would mean war. That would lead the Security Council to relinquish its responsibility.
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By imposing a deadline of only a few days, would we merely be seeking a pretext for war? As a permanent member of the Security Council, I will say it again: [We] will not allow a resolution to pass that authorizes the automatic use of force.
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Let us be clear-sighted. We are defining a method to resolve crisis. We are choosing how to define the world we want our children to live in.
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These crises have many roots. They are political, religious, economic. Their origins lie deep in the turmoil of history.
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There may be some who believe that these problems can be resolved by force, thereby creating a new order. But this is not what [we] believes. On the contrary, we believe that the use of force can arouse resentment and hatred, fuel a clash of identities and of cultures, something that our generation has a prime responsibility to avoid.
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To those who believe that war would be the quickest way of disarming Iraq, I can reply that it will drive wedges and create wounds that will be long in healing. And how many victims will it cause? How many families will grieve?
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We do not subscribe to what may be the other objectives of a war. Is it a matter of regime change in Baghdad? No one underestimates the cruelty of this dictatorship or the need to do everything possible to promote human rights. But this is not the objective of Resolution 1441. And force is certainly not the best way of bringing about democracy. Here and elsewhere it would encourage dangerous instability.
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Is it a matter of fighting terrorism? War would only increase it and we would then be faced with a new wave of violence.
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Is it finally a matter of recasting the political landscape of the Middle East? In that case, we run the risk of exacerbating tensions in a region already marked by great instability. Not to mention that in Iraq itself, the large number of communities and religions already represents a danger of a potential break-up.
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We all have the same demands. We want more security and more democracy. But there is another logic other than the logic of force. There is another path. There are other solutions. We understand the profound sense of insecurity with which the American people have been living since the tragedy of September 11, 2001. The entire world shared the sorrow of New York and of America struck in the heart. And I say this in the name of our friendship for the American people, in the name of our common values: freedom; justice; tolerance.
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But there is nothing today to indicate a link between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda. And will the world be a safer place after a military intervention in Iraq? I want to tell you what my country’s conviction is: It will not.
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Four months ago, we unanimously adopted a system of inspections to eliminate the threat of potential weapons of mass destruction and to guarantee our security. Today, we cannot accept, without contradicting ourselves, a conflict that might well weaken it. Yes, we also want more democracy in the world. But we can only achieve this objective within the framework of a true global democracy based on respect, sharing, the awareness of a true community of values and a common destiny, and its core is the United Nations. Let us make no mistake, in the face of multiple and complex threats, there is no single response, but there is a single necessity — we must remain united.
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Today we must together invent a new future for the Middle East. Let us not forget the immense hope created by the efforts of the Madrid conference and the Oslo agreement. Let us not forget that the Mideast crisis represents our greatest challenge in terms of security and justice. For us, the Middle East, like Iraq, represents a priority commitment, and this calls for even greater ambition and boldness. We should envision a region transformed through peace; civilizations that, through the courage of reaching out to each other, rediscover their self-confidence and an international prestige equal to their long history and their aspirations.
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Mr. President, in a few days, we must solemnly fulfill our responsibility through a vote. We will be facing an essential choice: disarming Iraq through war or through peace. And this crucial choice implies others; it implies the international community’s ability to resolve current or future crises; it implies a vision of the world, a concept of the role of the United Nations.
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[We], therefore, believes that to make this choice, to make it in good conscience in this forum of international democracy, before our peoples and before the world, the heads of state and government must meet again here in New York at the Security Council. This is in everyone’s interest. We must rediscover the fundamental vocation of the United Nations, which is to allow each of its members to assume its responsibilities in the face of the Iraqi crisis, but also to seize together the destiny of a world in crisis and thus to create the conditions for our future unity.
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Thank you, Mr. President.

Excerpted remarks as delivered by France’s Foreign Minister to Security Council and recorded by the Federal News Service. March 7, 2003. New York. Note: all the bracketed [we]’s above replaced “France” in the text.
This speech shows the remarkably accurate observations made by someone able to detach from the emotional context of a tense situation, which is what a skilled Chief Excutive is able to do. Our friend, Mr. De Villepin, was calm and reserved, and able to think with disciplined restraint. The American Chief Executive, on the other hand, was, for whatever reason, unable to grasp the same evidence seen by others. The results speak for themselves. The point now is not to ask how anyone could have missed the evidence that others could see, nor is it to insist that America should have known. The point is, how can anyone today, with the advantage of retrospection, still deny what was evident on March 7, 2003?

Déjà Vecu

We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time – of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances – of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remember it. Charles Dickens, “David Copperfield”

I’m honored to offer my readers another exclusive sneak preview of Rick Perlstein’s forthcoming book, Nixonland:

The President was glad for a politically useful distraction. On March 29,[1971] after the longest court-martial trial in history, Lieut. William “Rusty” Calley was convicted of murder by a jury of his military peers.

When Calley had first been called to Washington in June of 1969, he thought it was to receive a medal. He was shocked to learn it was for a court martial: “It seemed like the silliest thing I had ever heard of. Murder.” It betokened a national confusion. At the trial his defense lawyer said, “This boy’s a product of a system, a system that dug him up by the roots, took him out of his home community, put him in the Army, taught him to kill, sent him overseas to kill, gave him mechanical weapons to kill, got him over there and ordered him to kill.” He argued that the decision to scapegoat Calley went all the way up the chain of command–better to indict a lieutenant, shut down this whole embarrassment incident as neatly as possible, than the entire system of “pacification” and “free fire zones” and “search and destroy missions” itself. He tried to call Defense Secretary Laird as a witness. The judge overruled him.

The argument was lent support by the fate of Calley’s commander, Major General Samuel Koster. Koster had witnessed the massacre from his observation helicopter and complained only that they weren’t recovering enough enemy weapons. He signed off on an Army report that noncombatants had been “inadvertently killed…in the cross fires of U.S. and V.C. forces.” After the Army’s investigation into the My Lai massacre, he suffered a mere reduction of a grade in rank. Everyone else involved ended up acquitted or with their charges dropped.

Calley stood ramrod straight at his sentencing and mewled in a breaking voice about his victimhood: “Yesterday, you stripped me of all my honor. Please, by your actions that you take here today, don’t strip future soldiers of their honor.” He was sentenced to life at hard labor. You didn’t have to construe Calley a put-upon innocent to conclude that something stunk. “Calley Verdict: Who Else Is Guilty?” read Newsweek‘s cover line. “Who Shares the Guilt?” asked Time.

John Kerry, the VVAW spokesman, had an answer: “We are all of us in this country guilty for having allowed the war to go on. We only want this country to realize that it cannot try a Calley for something which generals and Presidents and our way of life encouraged him to do. And if you try him, then at the same time you must try all those generals and Presidents and soldiers who have part of the responsibility. You must in fact try this country.” It was a common conclusion of liberals: Senators Ribicoff and Hatfield, the New Yorker, Telford Taylor, a prosecutor of Nazis at Nuremberg and the author of Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy.

But that was what the Communists were saying, too, conservatives observed. And if Calley was their villain, he must be our hero.

The VFW’s national commander Herbert Rainwater led the way: “There have been My Lais in every war. Now for the first time we have tried a soldier for performing his duty.” A little Mormon boy in Utah, Timmy Poppleton, wrote his senator begging him to intervene: “I’m only eight years old, but I know that Lieut. Calley was defending our freedoms against Communism.” His mother–many mothers–had explained that the villagers of My Lai must have done something to deserve it. Joseph Alsolp agreed. The hawkish one of the columnizing brothers complained in his second column after the verdict about what his editors did to his first one: “by no fault of this reporter, the persons Lt. Calley was convicted of killing were miscalled ‘civilians.’…. These victims from My Lai in fact came from a ‘combat hamlet’ of a ‘combat village.’ From about the age of four on up, all persons in a ‘combat village,’ of both sexes, are trained to kill. by the iron rules of the Viet Cong, if they do not follow their training, they are killed themselves after one of the VC kangaroo-trials.”

The American Legion post at Columbus, Georgia, home of Fort Benning, pitched in a promise they would raise $100,000 to help fund Calley’s appeal “or die trying”: “The real murderers are the demonstrators in Washington who disrupt traffic, tear up public property, who deface the American flag. Lieut. Calley is a hero. He’s an all-American. He fought for us in a country where Communism is still trying to take over. We should be proud of him. We should elevate him to saint rather than jail him like a common criminal.” Calley was now Columbus’s favorite son. At a revival at the football stadium, the Rev. Michael Lord pronounced, “There was a crucifixion 2,000 years ago of a man named Jesus Christ. I don’t think we need another crucifixion of man named Rusty Calley.”

Entrepreneurs stood at attention. “Free Calley” stickers managed to blossom on car bumpers within 24 hours, like toadstools after a spring rain. A Nashville record producer slapped a solemn recitation as if in William Calley’s voice over a backing track of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and moved 200,000 45-rpm records in a day and a million in a week:

While we were fighting in the jungles they were marching in the street
While we’re dying in the rice fields they were helping our defeat
While we’re facing V.C. bullets they were sounding a retreat
As we go marching on…

When I reach my final campground in that land beyond the sun
And the great commander asks me, ‘Did you fight or did you run?’
I’ll stand both straight and tall stripped of medals, rank and gun
And this is what I’ll say:

Sir, I followed all my orders and I did the best I could
It’s hard to judge the enemy and hard to tell the good
Yet there’s not a man among us would not have understood

We took the jungle village exactly like they said
We responded to their rifle fire with everything we had
And when the smoke had cleared away a hundred souls lay dead…
There’s no other way to wage a war when the only one in sight
That you’re sure is not a VC is your buddy on the right…

Glory, glory hallelujah, glory, glory hallelujah…

And radio stations played the silent majority’s “Four Dead in Ohio” over and over again, only pausing in between to call for donations to Rusty Calley’s defense fund, as respectable editorialists stood aghast. “We responded to their rifle fire”? A jury of six decorated combat veterans had ruled there had been none. “For the first time we have tried a soldier for performing his duty”? The stockades were full of soldiers and Marines tried for killing Vietnamese captives in combat. “The only difference,” wrote William Greider, who covered the four-and-a-half month trial in the Washington Post, “is that, instead of 22 people, most of them killed only one or two.” The Wall Street Journal pointed out, “This is a young man duly convicted of taking unarmed prisoners entirely at his mercy, throwing them in a ditch, and shooting them. Is this nation really to condone such an act, as a strange coalition of super-patriots seems to urge?” The Washington Star said “the day this country goes on record as saying that unarmed civilian men, women, and children of any race are fair game for wanton murder, that will be the day that the United States forfeits all claims to any moral leadership of this world.” Scott Reston, in the Newspaper of Record, wondered whether “somebody were going to propose giving Lieutenant Calley the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

Above and beyond all the commotion, Nixon spied simple commonality: super-patriots and peace were on the same side.

The White House had done its polling. 78 percent disagreed with Calley’s conviction and sentence; 51 percent wanted him exonerated outright. Within 24 hours the White House got 100,000 telegrams, calls, and letters. They were 100 to one for Calley’s release. Meanwhile the President’s handling of Vietnam in general he was heading into Lyndon Johnson territory: 41 percent approval, 47 percent disapproval. On March 30 the White House alerted the media that on March 7 the President would go on TV to announce more troop cuts. Then they got to work exploiting Calley.

Nixon delegated the legal questions to John Dean’s office. Overnight his staff became experts on military law. The conclusion: the conviction was by the book, the sentence would likely be reduced on appeal, the President was extremely limited in his power to intervene, and that any White House interference mitigating “a gross violation of the customary law of war” could have a domino effect weakening the good order of the military justice system.

Military justice be damned. Nixon conferred with his new favorite political enforcer John Connally. He complained to Haldeman and Ehrlichman the “lawyers provide no political gain for us on the argument.” It was Chuck Colson who came up with his first move: he could immediately order Calley released from the stockade until his appeal was decided. On April 1 President made the call to Admiral Moorer. “That’s the one place where they say, ‘Yes, Sir,’ instead of ‘Yes, but,'” he pronounced with satisfaction. The action was announced at the House of Representatives; the floor broke out in spontaneous applause (the President was so proud of the response he noted it in his memoirs).

And a man convicted by fellow Army officers of slaughtering 22 civilians was released on his own recognizance to the splendiferous bachelor pad he had rented with the fat proceeds of his defense fund, as featured in a November 1970 Esquire feature laid out like a Better Homes & Gardens spread–padded bar, groovy paintings, and comely girlfriend, who along with a personal secretary and a mechanical letter opener helped him answer some 2,000 fan letters a day.

April 2, in San Clemente, the leader of the Free World allotted almost a full day for discussion of l’affaire Calley (save for three hours with the governor of California to try to talk him down from sabotaging the Family Assistance Program as part of Reagan’s “all-out war on the tax taker”). White House polls showed 96 percent of the public was following the case, the highest they’d recorded on any subject. They had to move: it was time for some virtuoso difference-splitting. The Old Man ordered a course “on the basis of what does us most good”–anything to to buck up his approval rating to end Vietnam “our way.” Ehrlichman summarized the final recommendation: “The President does nothing”–in a way that strongly hinted at a future pardon.

At the next day’s morning briefing Ron Ziegler said before any sentence was carried out the President would “personally review the case and finally decide it.” Ehrlichman took the podium: this “extralegal ingredient” was appropriate in a case which had “captured the interest of the American people,” and which required “more than simply the technical, legal review which the Code of Military Justice provides.” The officers involved in the appeal, he reassured the press, would be in no way influenced by their Commander in Chief.

The political reviews were stellar. Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, the “Conscience of the Senate,” released a statement: “I think the President performed a very wise and useful service to his nation…. it was impressively evident that the President caused many Americans to pause in their judgement, to gain perspective, and to replace emotion with reason.” Senator Robert Taft (whom Nixon called in other contexts a “son of a bitch…peacenik”) said he had restored the morale of the military. The White House’s private polling showed his actions found favor with 75 percent of the American people. Only 17 percent disagreed.

The legal reviews were not so salubrious. Privately, Secretary Laird complained, “Intervention in the Calley case repudiates the military justice system.” Publicly, the case’s prosecutor, Captain Aubrey Daniel, wrote the President, in a four-page single-spaced letter made available by Senator and presidential candidate George McGovern’s office, “The greatest tragedy of all will be if political expedience dictates the compromise of such a fundamental moral principle as the inherent unlawfulness of the murder of innocent persons.” Bill Greider asked in the Post: “Should it open the doors at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and release all the other soldiers convicted of the same offense as Calley?”

Then there were those enraged the President hadn’t gone nearly far enough. On the front page of The New York Times on April 4, one of the Green Berets charged but never tried for killing a Vietnamese civilian, Robert F. Marasco, now a life insurance salesman in New Jersey, announced he had carried out murder on “very, very clear orders” from the CIA. “He was my agent and it was my responsibility to eliminate him with extreme prejudice.”

John Dean once more proved his usefulness to the President by crafting the White House’s subsequent talking point: in such ongoing legal cases, “it would be improper and inappropriate for White House staff members to make any comments or statements.”

That would turn off some problems. Secretary Laird, Colonel Daniel, Robert F. Marasco, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and all the rest would have to howl in the wilderness.

*****

Luckily for the President the Post and Times weren’t howling as loudly as they might. Two days later, on April 5, Senator Hatfield read the “Winter Soldier” testimony from Detroit into the Congressional Record. He stated on the floor that they revealed “the institutionalized racist attitudes of the military in the training of men who are sent to Vietnam–training which has indoctrinated them to think of all Vietnamese as ‘gooks’ and subhuman,” and that atrocities were the consequences of “policies adopted by our military commanders.” If the Times had reported on it readers would have learned about, from SP/4 Gary Keyes, the time “there were some fishermen out on the ocean and a couple of our sergeants thought it would be good sport to use them as target practice”; or of Marine Sergeant Scott Camil, whose buddy, when a woman one of their snipers shot asked for water, “stabbed her in both breasts, they spread her eagle and shoved an E-tool up her vagina, an entrenching tool, and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out and they used a tree limb and then she was shot.” Or the prisoner of war interrogator, Lt. Jon Drolshagan–discharged soldiers bravely using their names and stepping up publicly didn’t risk court martial any more, just ostracization from their communities–who described one of their “normal things”: “The major that I worked for had a fantastic capability of staking prisoners, utilizing a knife that was extremely sharp, and sort of filleting them like a fish. You know, trying to check out how much bacon he could make of a Vietnamese body to get information.”

The Times did, however, run a sentimental story on Nixon’s latest appeal to the silent majority.

He went on TV Wednesday, April 7 from the Oval Office at 9 PM (first he read a handwritten note from Henry Kissinger: “Because you go on tonight I want you to have this note to tell you that–no matter what the result–free people everywhere will be forever in your debt. Your serenity during crisis, your steadfastness under pressure have been all that has prevented the triumph of mass hysteria. It has been an inspiration to serve”).

The speech was the usual: it announced a dizzying new pace of troop withdrawals; included the selective historical review, the optimistic assessment (“tonight I can report that Vietnamization has succeeded…. Look again at their chart on my left. Every action taken by this administration, every decision made, has accomplished what I said it would accomplish”); the affirmation of the selflessness of the American effort (“never in history have men fought for less selfish motives–not for conquest, not for glory, but only for the right of a people far away to choose the kind of government they want”); the mournful lament that the only roadblock to progress was the recalcitrance of the enemy negotiators in the face of generous American offers, the wild-eyed insanity of setting a date for withdrawal (“we will have thrown away our political bargaining counter to win the release of American prisoners of war…we will have given enemy commanders the exact information they need to marshal their attacks against our remaining forces at their most vulnerable time…. Shall we leave Vietnam in a way that–by our own actions–consciously turns the country over to the Communists?”). He again mobilized the trope of shame as cheap shot at those who argued for a different way (“I know there are those who honestly believe that I should move to end this war without regard to what happens in South Vietnam. This way would abandon our friends. But even more important, we would abandon ourselves…. We would lose respect for this nation, respect for one another, respect for ourselves”).

Then finally, as ever, he wound up for the sentimental dénoumente. Which this time was a masterpiece. “While we hear and read much of isolated acts of cruelty, we do not hear enough of the tens of thousands of individual American soldiers–I have seen them there–building schools, roads, hospitals, clinics, who, through countless acts of generosity and kindness, have tried to help the people of South Vietnam. We can and we should be very proud of these men. They deserve not our scorn, but they deserve our admiration and our deepest appreciation….”

His voice took on a honeyed Norman Rockwell tone.

“The reason I am so deeply committed to peace goes far beyond political considerations or my concern about my place in history, or the other reasons that political scientists usually say are the motivations of Presidents.

“Every time I talk to a brave wife of an American POW, every time I write a letter to the mother of a boy who has been killed in Vietnam, I become more deeply committed to end this war, and to end it in a way that we can build lasting peace.”

(You cared about peace because you cared about those brave Americas left behind in the Hanoi Hilton. They, on the other hand, do not.)

“I think the hardest thing that a President has to do is present posthumously the nation’s highest honor, the Medal of Honor, to mothers or fathers or widows of men who have lost their lives”–he was nearly whispering–“but in the process have saved the lives of others.”

This was a rhetorical gambit. It let him end with a story about little Kevin: the Checkers of 1971.

“We had an award ceremony in the East Room of the White House just a few weeks agao. And at that ceremony I remember one of the recipients, Mrs.–Karl–Taylor.

“He charged an enemy machine gun single-handed and knocked it out. He lost his life. But in the process the lives of several wounded Marines in the range of that machine gun were saved.

“After I presented her the Medal, I shook hands with their two children, Karl, Jr.–he was 8 years old–and Kevin, who was 4. As I was about to move to the next recipient, Kevin suddenly stood at attention and saluted.”

Pause.

“I found it rather difficult to get my thoughts together.”

His voice deepened.

“My fellow Americans, I want to end this war in a way that is worthy of the sacrifice of Kevin Taylor.”

He was speaking very slowly.

“And I think he would want me to end it in a way that would increase the chances that Kevin and Karl, and all those children like them here and around the world, could grow up in a world where none of them would have to die in a war; that would increase the chance of Americans to have what it has not had in this century–a full generation of peace.”

Yesterday, one of the masterminds of President’s Bush’s torture regime, William Haynes, testified before a Senate committee. He was not there to answer for his crimes. He was there because George W. Bush has nominated him to be a federal appeals court judge. He explained that the problems we’ve all heard about are the result of a few “bad apples” and they are all being properly dealt with. As of today, it’s not known if he will be confirmed. digby

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Saving Western Civ

by digby

So the big protest against the NY Times took place yesterday and all the heavyweights showed up. Atlas Shrugged was there and took pictures:

Gavin adds:

It’s also why we drink booze, woo a flooze, and take poos in our shoes — because hey buddy, you snooze, you lose.

But indeed, why doesn’t the New York Times quit it with all that high-flown cloak-and-dagger ‘warrantless spying’ stuff, and simply haul off and print a New York City subway map, so that al-Qaeda can know where all the secret and never-advertised subway routes are?

Atlas also claims that these guys are anti-semites.

Update: Wolcott’s protest review.

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Presidentin’ For Dummies

by digby

Q Well, Mr. President, you’ve known Mr. Prodi for a long time, and you’ve known Mr. Berlusconi — you’ve known both of them. And how would you assess the personal relationship that you had with Mr. Prodi and with Mr. Berlusconi? Is there a difference how comfortable would you feel with one or the other?

THE PRESIDENT: I feel very comfortable with both. The first thing that’s important is I feel comfortable with the people of Italy. We’ve got very close ties.

And let me just take a step back. What’s interesting about our country is that we’ve got — we’ve had close ties with a lot of countries. My ranch was settled by Germans.

Q Really?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. There’s a huge number of Italian Americans. A lot of Russian Americans. You know, Norm Mineta in my Cabinet is a Japanese American. In other words, so when you talk about relations with an American President, you’ve got to understand that there’s a — at least I have, I know my predecessors have, connections, close connections with people who have fond — either fond memories and/or great pride in their motherland.

Who knew?

How embarrassing it must be these days to be John Podhoretz, who wrote this in his hilariously ill-timed tome, Bush Country, How Dubya Became A Great President While Driving Liberals Insane:

The consistent inability of Democrats and liberals to pay proper respect to their adversaries has surely done more damage to them than to their adversaries. Their misunderestimation will continue to cost them as long as they persist in their comforting delusion that the whip-smart George W. Bush is an idiot.

And, by the way, Norm Mineta’s resignation was official last week.

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Norquistian Boogeyman

by digby

Jonathan Chait expands upon his Sunday op-ed, noting that I offered up “a fairly cogent and persuasive, albeit profanity-laced, case against Lieberman.” (I did say shit and fuck once each. Oops, I did it again.)

Chait reiterates that he dislikes Lieberman but is concerned that if Lieberman loses he will become a martyr. I suppose he probably will. But he will be one without a platform in the US Senate. He will do much less damage as a Fox News analyst or an AEI fellow — or even Sec Def reporting to his good pal Dick Cheney. (Even I don’t think he’s worse than Rumsfeld — who is?) In any event, he will no longer be an elected Democrat from a liberal state deriding his own party and enabling the Republicans. That is its own reward.

Chait worries even more that if Lieberman actually wins the primary, or the general as an independent, he’ll be angry and alienated from liberals. Frankly, I’m not sure what that means. Will the man of integrity suddenly begin changing his stance on the issues? If the worry is that he will become more rhetorically abusive toward the base of his own party, well what else is new? He already went on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal and said we were undermining national security by speaking out against the president. His disdain for us (and I would argue in that case, for American values) is manifest already and has been for years.

Chait’s larger point is that the netroots are a danger to liberalism because of our alleged “party line.” He begins with this:

Since I have space here, I’d offer up two prime examples of the party line. The first is Iraq. To be on the side of the angels, one must favor withdrawal and believe that there was no rational case to be made for war given the publicly-known information in 2002.

I find this interesting because to the best of my knowledge, virtually the entire Democratic party is in favor of some kind of withdrawal from Iraq. This is a mainstream position. Indeed, there were only six Democrats in the senate who voted against the Levin-Reed resolution that called for a phased redeployment: Sens. Mark Dayton of Minnesota, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Bill Nelson of Florida and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Only one of them is taking heat for his position on Iraq. There is no litmus test — but Blue State Democrats in safe seats who defy their constituents’ wishes on this matter risk being challenged — by their constituents.

The second part of his argument — “one must … believe that there was no rational case to be made for war given the publicly-known information in 2002” is puzzling. After all, the rationale for the war in Iraq was absurd on its face: al Qaeda had attacked us so we attacked Iraq. We could have attacked New Zealand for all the sense it made.

Now I realize that they dazzled a lot of people with a lot of bullshit but the fact remains that even if the publicly known information had turned out to be true it still wouldn’t have made any sense. The world was full of potential threats. Why Iraq? Why then? Why the rush? Why alienate our allies? Why take our eye off the ball? Why not North Korea or Pakistan, both of which at that very moment presented a more obvious threat? Those are questions that have not to this day been adequately answered. Hell, the questions have barely even been asked by the mainstream press.

This was not a tough call on the merits, regardless of the lame demagogic gobbledygook (drone planes anyone?) about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction.” That is unless you supported the ridiculous Bush Doctrine that permits the US to “take out” any country that might someday think of posing a threat. Or you agreed with the puerile notion that we had to prove our manhood in the middle east by kicking somebody’s ass — didn’t matter whose. I reserve the right to not support people who thought things like that — or who believed that it made sense after 9/11 to invade a country in the mid-east that had not attacked us. They were very foolish about something very serious.

I do not, however, think that the Democrats in congress believed any such thing. I’m not so naive that I don’t know that the political exigencies of the moment put Democrats in a tough spot. I wish they had had the courage to stand up and say, “wtf?” but the militant zeitgeist demanded that they genuflect to the flag every five minutes or be called terrorist loving traitors. It was not easy, particularly since the memory of the Democratic votes against the first Gulf War seemed fresh to many of those geezers.

Still, 22 Democratic senators and Jim Jeffords voted against the use of force resolution, so it’s not like this view was way out there. And I have no doubt that not one of those 23 saw even the remotest justification for war with Iraq. (I seriously doubt the rest of them did either.)

Today, most Democrats who voted for the resolution have found ways to publicly distance themselves from that moment. I think they know that history is going to judge them harshly for their weakness. It will judge America harshly. But while I do insist on my prerogative to boldly assert that up was up and down was down back in 2002, I’m not suggesting that every Democrat who voted for the war be booted out of office. I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone is doing that. You will recall that Democrats, including the entire blogosphere, supported John Kerry and John Edwards in overwhelming numbers, both of whom voted for the war. It just ain’t so that we are hardline doctrinaire on this subject. (At least until Commandante Markos orders us to be.)

As for political writers who continue to insist that the war was rational in 2002, I no longer respect their opinions. So what?

Chait’s other example of a party line is that we bloggers demand that everybody kiss our asses:

To be in the good graces of the activists, one must believe not only that the rise of Internet activism has some potentially positive ramifications, but to signal that one accepts a Manichean battle between virtuous people-powered activists and corrupt Washington insiders.

I am unaware of that requirement, but speaking for myself I could not care less if people believe that we are the second coming or even that they think “the rise of Internet activism has some potentially positive ramifications.” (I do have to wonder how much you have to hate internet activism to think that there aren’t even any potential positive ramifications of it, though.) Perhaps there are those who feel that politicians must signal that they accept the “Manichean battle between virtuous activists and corrupt Washington insiders” but I didn’t get the memo. Requiring everyone to see us as heroes is a little grandiose, even for the elite blogofascist cabal.

It should be noted that the observation that the political establishment is corrupt is pretty mundane stuff, however. It’s been a staple of politics forever. And the belief that “the people” need to take back control of their government is also pretty mundane. It’s even got a name. It’s called populism. Only the delivery system is new. After nearly two decades of DLC corporatism and Democratic losses, did anyone not anticipate that that there might be exactly this sort of backlash? Whose fault is that?

It’s certainly fair enough to criticize populism on the merits. There are ongoing debates within the blogosphere on that very topic. I will admit that defending the political establishment probably won’t find you Kos level readership (a sad reality of which I’m sure that the publishers of TNR are all too well aware.) But the blogging marketplace is wide open to anyone and if someone wants to defend the establishment they are free to do so and there are plenty of blogs that do it. There are even official establishment blogs. The worst thing they face from people who disagree is criticism.

Chait quotes Kevin Drum who wrote:

Last I heard, Grover Norquist had built an entire career on insisting that every last Republican politician kiss his pinkie ring and pledge never to vote for a tax increase. And the Republican Party seems to have done pretty well as a result.

and then adds:

I think the citation of Norquist is telling. Some of the liberal internet activists consciously fashion themselves after Norquist (who, by the way, fashions himself after Lenin) and would like to replicate on the left the comintern-like apparatus he has constructed on the right. It is true that the Norquist mentality has helped Republicans win elections. But plenty of conservatives wonder whether it has actually helped advance conservatism. Government, after all, has grown under Republican rule, and the fact that it now funnels more of its largesse to GOP-affiliated interests is of small comfort to honest conservatives.

(That’s actually a cheap shot at Drum. He was making a rhetorical argument not advancing that theory.)

If there are those in the blogoshpere who are consciously fashioning themselves after that corrupt putz Grover Norquist, I’m unaware of it, and I think I’d know. The only people anywhere who are wearing that particular tinfoil are the writers of TNR.

Certainly Democrats of all stripes have awakened to the notion that the partisan infrastructure the Republicans created must be met with something. We are at a huge disadvantage. But that isn’t a netroots thing. Ask John Podesta or Simon Rosenberg or any number of others who are working to set up think tanks and publishing houses and all kinds of organizations that have nothing to do with the netroots. I honestly don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

I would welcome a little more organization and communication in the netroots and look forward to the medium maturing as an effective way to advance liberalism. But all we’ve got right now is a very loose confederation of activists, writers, gadflys and humorists — and millions of readers — who all agree that Republicans (and Joe Lieberman) are bad for the country and we are doing whatever we can to replace them. We also tend to agree that something has gone awry in the Democratic party — the fact that we are completely out of power being the big clue. We discuss that a lot. Some bloggers raise money for candidates. Some write emails to each other about topics they are interested in and try out new ideas on each other. Is that really so threatening?

It is true that the Norquist mentality has helped Republicans win elections. But plenty of conservatives wonder whether it has actually helped advance conservatism. Government, after all, has grown under Republican rule, and the fact that it now funnels more of its largesse to GOP-affiliated interests is of small comfort to honest conservatives.

Yes, isn’t that something? Now that it is falling under its own venal, corrupt weight, all the “honest conservatives” are suddenly realizing that it isn’t conservative at all. How very convenient. Chait is falling for the oldest trick in the book and my regular readers know exactly what I’m talking about. Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. (If you want to see a purge in full glory, keep your eyes on the right if they lose the election. Nobody does it better. Not even Stalin.)

Chait claims the blogosphere is paranoid and sectarian and he worries what it will do to liberalism. I’m frankly worried about the paranoia and sectarianism at The New Republic, a magazine I’ve been reading for 30 years. This notion that Kos is some sort of commander of the blogofascist empire is ridiculous. Kos is a successful, respected blogger, but believe me, I don’t take orders from anybody and I don’t know any other bloggers who do. The blogosphere is a kind of organism. To the extent there’s a hierarchy, it’s not manufactured, it’s organic, and there is no recognized leadership — there’s readership. This idea of a Stalinist comintern is a misunderstanding of epic proportions. The blogosphere has the most open distribution of power of any human endeavor I’ve ever participated in. If a certain amount of groupthink occurs, it’s certainly no more than what you see at the DLC — or The New Republic.

People in Washington need to wrap their minds around the fact that this stuff really is bubbling up from below and it’s real. Bloggers are merely in the vanguard of a rising leftwing populist sentiment around the country. It is a predictable reaction when a party ceases to be responsive to its voters. Liberalism has been moribund for some time now. This is a chance to at least begin the process of resuscitation and could be used by the political establishment as a useful counter-weight to help drag the country back from the brink of rightwing extremism.(If that’s what they want, that is.) Smart politicians will accept this and find a way to use its strength strategically, not fight it.

Jay Rosen wrote in the comments to Chait’s post:

In my view… The TNR writers just cannot accept that liberal opinion journalism of the insider variety has been invaded or at least affected by the unbelievably crude, overheated and totally unsavvy writers in the Kos, Townhouse orbit, and that people in politics, specifically the Democratic party, actually pay attention to these activist-loudmouths. The “perch” they thought TNR represented just isn’t the same in the Net era, which to them isn’t fair. They hate it. They wanted their turn to sneer at the unsubtleties of left activists so as to demonstrate TNR-style Washington savvy.

They went to good schools; they know people on the inside. They want those gates (around liberal opinion journalism) back up. The gates were good to them.

I didn’t say it, he did.

I would just again point out that the characterization of the “Kos Townhouse” orbit as being a group of “unbelievably crude, overheated and totally unsavvy … activist-loudmouths” is only partially correct. (I proudly wear the labels, others may not.) But to the extent you believe it’s true, keep in mind that it reflects the frustration of millions of politically active progressive citizens who have been scapegoated and derided for decades by the political insiders who now find themselves on the other end of the attack. These people are the base of the Democratic Party. If people think the party can prevail in this modern hyper-partisan era by continuing to insult its most active and ardent supporters, then have at it. But no one should be surprised then when those supporters decide to take matters into their own hands. Democracy is untidy that way.

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MMMM Peach-Mint Tea

by digby

I consider it my duty to promote young liberal entrepreneurs whenever I can, so here’s a little product you might find refreshing as we go into the dog days of summer.

I have not tried it yet, but it sounds really, really good to me.

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What To Do?by poputonian

I didn’t get the memo from Carville, so I don’t know if he warned Democrats to tip-toe around religious issues and instead suggested that more votes could be had by assisting the religious right in their attempts to take over the government. But I wanted to revisit the statement made a few days ago by Barack Obama where he paid lip service to religious conservatives by stating Democrats should embrace the evangelical end of the spirituality spectrum. He crossed a line, in my opinion, when he said this:

“It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase ‘under God.'”

Lately I’ve been reading through Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, a work that earned him the Bancroft Prize in American History, along with a Pulitzer in the same category. In the book, Bailyn cited A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law where John Adams essentially lays out his views on church and state (or what he refers to as the canon and feudal law):

Since the promulgation of Christianity, the two greatest systems of tyranny that have sprung from this original, are the canon and the feudal law. The desire of dominion, that great principle by which we have attempted to account for so much good and so much evil, is, when properly restrained, a very useful and noble movement in the human mind. But when such restraints are taken off, it becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power. Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves; but in none of them were they ever more successful than in the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law.

By the former of these, the most refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing constitution of policy that ever was conceived by the mind of man was framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandizement of their own order. All the epithets I have here given to the Romish policy are just, and will be allowed to be so when it is considered, that they even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that God Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of heaven, whose gates they might open and close at pleasure; with a power of dispensation over all the rules and obligations of morality; with authority to license all sorts of sins and crimes; with a power of deposing princes and absolving subjects from allegiance; with a power of procuring or withholding the rain of heaven and the beams of the sun; with the management of earthquakes, pestilence, and famine; nay, with the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine the flesh and blood of God himself. All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge. Thus was human nature chained fast for ages in a cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude to him, and his subordinate tyrants, who, it was foretold, would exalt himself above all that was called God, and that was worshipped.

In the latter we find another system, similar in many respects to the former; which, although it was originally formed, perhaps, for the necessary defense of a barbarous people against the inroads and invasions of her neighboring nations, yet for the same purposes of tyranny, cruelty, and lust, which had dictated the canon law, it was soon adopted by almost all the princes of Europe, and wrought into the constitutions of their government. It was originally a code of laws for a vast army in a perpetual encampment. The general was invested with the sovereign propriety of all the lands within the territory. Of him, as his servants and vassals, the first rank of his great officers held the lands; and in the same manner the other subordinate officers held of them; and all ranks and degrees held their lands by a variety of duties and services, all tending to bind the chains the faster on every order of mankind. In this manner the common people were held together in herds and clans in a state of servile dependence on their lords, bound, even by the tenure of their lands, to follow them, whenever they commanded, to their wars, and in a state of total ignorance of every thing divine and human, excepting the use of arms and the culture of their lands.

But another event still more calamitous to human liberty, was a wicked confederacy between the two systems of tyranny above described. It seems to have been even stipulated between them, that the temporal grandees should contribute every thing in their power to maintain the ascendancy of the priesthood, and that the spiritual grandees in their turn, should employ their ascendancy over the consciences of the people, in impressing on their minds a blind, implicit obedience to civil magistracy.

Thus, as long as this confederacy lasted, and the people were held in ignorance, liberty, and with her, knowledge and virtue too, seem to have deserted the earth, and one age of darkness succeeded another, till God in his benign providence raised up the champions who began and conducted the Reformation. From the time of the Reformation to the first settlement of America, knowledge gradually spread in Europe, but especially in England; and in proportion as that increased and spread among the people, ecclesiastical and civil tyranny, which I use as synonymous expressions for the canon and feudal laws, seem to have lost their strength and weight. The people grew more and more sensible of the wrong that was done them by these systems, more and more impatient under it, and determined at all hazards to rid themselves of it; till at last, under the execrable race of the Stuarts, the struggle between the people and the confederacy aforesaid of temporal and spiritual tyranny, became formidable, violent, and bloody.

It was this great struggle that peopled America. It was not religion alone, as is commonly supposed; but it was a love of universal liberty, and a hatred, a dread, a horror, of the infernal confederacy before described, that projected, conducted, and accomplished the settlement of America.

I don’t think Democrats should acquiesce on the fundamental principle of religious separation, one of the root causes of the American rebellion, and instead should make hay from something recently brought back into view by the euthanizing of right wing icon Ken Lay. It also happens to be something the Carville memo indicates is ripe for harvesting; it’s the corruption of the American system of free enterprise, which is now dominated by hierarchical schemers and corporate thieves. The current administration favors restricted competition, monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels because it makes it easier to play the market, and because in the short run it protects the big boys by stifling competition.
But the losers in the corrupted game are the workers (voters), including honest entrepreneurs and innovators, who are left frustrated and anxious by a system that rewards cheaters. Everyone is being eaten alive by the sharks in the water. The endless cycle of mergers and acquisitions keeps the money flowing up the pyramid, where it is then siphoned off for personal gain by pyramid-squatting CEOs.
So if the Democrats need to be righteous about something, and want something to reclaim from the opposition, I would say to reclaim the integrity of the marketplace, which this administration has utterly corrupted and destroyed. A marketplace free from abuse yields a symbiosis between a Republic and her people. Government infused with religion has the opposite impact, as John Adams so eloquently wrote long ago.

Change Agents

by digby

All this handwringing amongst the cognoscenti about the barbarians at the gates ruining everything for the Democratic party (again) and what do I find in my mailbox but this strategy memo from insider Dem establishment polling outfit, Democracy Corps run by none other than Carville and Stan Greenberg. And lo and behold, here’s what they have to say:

The Democrats need to catch up with the country, which wants to vote for outsiders, is demanding change and ready to respond to the Democrats’ message and definition of the election. All things considered, this is not a bad problem to have, but it requires a new intensity and focus to grab ahold of the forces for change and take the Democrats to a new level.

Change dynamic one: The Iraq war. This is the biggest voting issue for Democrats (and independents and change voters). While voters are divided on policy issues(like timetable for withdrawal), the continuing attention to the war increases dissatisfaction and elevates the change vote.

This means that it is not a loser to run against the war. It has always been self-evident to me, but for some reason the Democratic leadership and the punditocrisy can’t seem to grasp this. Indeed, this Lamont challenge may just help other candidates around the country because it shows that the Democratic party is serious about challenging the Republican “stay the course” policy.

Change dynamic two: Washington is working for big corporations and the privileged, not the people or the country. There is an abiding sense that things are out of balance in Washington, with political leaders working for the big corporate interests and the privileged, rather than trying to have America work for everyone. This is the top reason (along with rising costs) for wanting to change the Republican Congress.

Change dynamic three: They’re not taking care of America. Across a whole range of issues – Iraq, Katrina, the borders and immigration, and trade and manufacturing – voters think the political leaders are failing to step up and take care of America. This is why the House Republicans are trying to keep immigration focused on the borders.

Change dynamic four: This economy brings you high gas and health care costs and financial pressure for the middle class. Because the elites, journalists and the Republicans think this is a strong economy, the campaign thus far has neglected the great frustration with rising costs and financial pressures – for many groups, the top reasons to change the Congress.

Change dynamic five: They’ve bankrupted the country. There is a sense of foreboding in the country that this Republican government has bankrupted the country, run up the deficits and passed on our debts and obligations to future generations. They have made a mess of things financially and hurt the country. This is one of the top worries about any future Congress, and one of the key things voters want to put a halt to.

Now all that’s really funny to me because it is pretty much exactly the constellation of issues the netroots have been plugging for months now. As it turns out we aren’t a bunch of out of touch retreads who have no sense of what the silent majority really wants — it turns out we are the ones in tune with the zeitgeist. All these Lieberman defenders of the status quo are the ones who are failing to make the sale to the American people because they don’t have a fucking clue what the American people are looking for.

The Republicans are trying to deny Democrats the voters they need. Understand that those undecided and dislodged voters do respond to these conservative issues, yet these are the voters Democrats need to raise their vote. They have not closed the deal because the image of the Democrats has not improved over the last year and the number of Democratic identifiers has not risen.

Thus, Democrats must do better in identifying with the forces for change and making them matter in the election. If they do that, they will consolidate their vote, win over the undecided, increase turnout and demoralize the Republicans. But Democrats must also act aggressively to confound and undermine the efficacy of the conservative issues, thus allowing these voters to vote for change. That combination can take the Democrats to a dramatic level.

I would suggest that the whining about the horrible hippie horde that is challenging poor old Joe Lieberman might not be the best way to do this.

There’s a lot in the memo that’s quite interesting, but I’m going to highlight this because it’s an argument I’ve been howling about for months now, and have been increasingly demoralized because it seems Democrats are running as fast as they can from it:

The increased attention to Iraq, even when Republicans control the debate, hurts them when people decide their congressional vote. The country is divided on setting a deadline (50 to 49 percent) and we win an actual exchange on the issue by just 4 points (50 to 46 percent).

However, when we include accountability in the message – “exercise oversight and push for a new direction, not more of the same” rather than a deadline – Democrats’ advantage doubles to 8 points. More importantly, when we promise to send investigative committees to find the missing money, investigate the lack of armor and no-bid contracts, the lead nearly doubles again to 14 points (55 to 41 percent).

For some reason the Democratic leadership is convinced that if they run explicitly on accountability — on any subject — they will be seen as sourpusses and nobody wants to vote for a downer who will spend a bunch of time and money trying to sort out the atrocities of the last few years. This is clearly not the case. People are frustrated but they have no reason to believe that the Democrats will do anything about this situation in Washington. Why should they?

Up to now, I’ve only been going on instinct, but I have always felt that they will not get the turnout they need unless they make an explict case for why the Democrats will be able to make a difference if they win this election. I simply can’t see how they can do that without running on accountability. People know that Bush will be in for two more years, so any hope of enacting a positive agenda is impossible. He’d love to use that rusty veto pen of his. This is a referendum on the Republicans and we should run against them, hard.

I think war profiteering is a surefire winner. People know this has been a windfall for corporations and this is an excellent way to consolidate the Republican culture of corruption and the dissatisfaction with the war(the two most important issues according to this poll) under one umbrella. I think people are becoming outraged — they just don’t see that the Democrats will do anything about it. (I would also like to see a Democratic majority judiciary committee look into the abuse of presidential powers — hold some hearings, air this thing out in public. For the good of the country…)

In fairness, there is a bunch of stuff in the strategy memo about “reasurring” voters that we are against gay marriage, raising taxes on the middle class, sex and violence on TV and precipitously withdrawing from Iraq. The usual boilerplate defensive moves. They claim that these issues are salient with seniors and blue collar workers and must be finessed. I would think that these are the kinds of issues that each candiate needs to take into consideration depending on the make up of his or her constituency. The national party line should be 100% offense.

The good news is that we aren’t nuts. The people really are looking for change. We in the netroots and the grassroots are agitating for that change — and change is painful for entrenched interests so they are fighting us all the way. That’s ok. It’s the way it works. We will just keep hammering this and hope that candidates are listening to their potential constituents and that the establishment is reading the polls.

Last night on CBS the analysis was that “the left” is pulling the Democrats away from the mainstream and the Republicans would win going away because the “moderates” would be scared off. That analysis is wrong. These numbers quite clearly show that the grassroots of the Democratic party are not pulling the party away from the mainstream, they are pulling it toward it. This isn’t about left vs right. It’s about change vs. status quo.

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Pulitzer Prize Winning Senators

by digby

Everybody’s talking about the fact that Jon “Box Turtle” Kyl and Huckleberry Graham wrote a little play and tried to insert it into the congressional record as a transcript in the Hamdan case. I mentioned this in passing last week in my post about Bush’s “unusual” interpretation of the decision (which when you consider his interpretive signing statements, may be less of a joke than that I originally made it.)

Christy at FDL writes:

Knowingly filing false information with a court is grounds for disbarment in my state, and I would be very surprised if Arizona and South Carolina didn’t have the same standards — this sort of behavior skews the entire legal process and it cannot be tolerated. Period.

I cannot emphasize enough how much this is NOT done as an attorney, and how it clouds every single thing you ever do from that point forward. No judge, anywhere, is going to believe anything either man ever does or files after this without triple checking it. And when you don’t have your integrity and your honesty as an attorney, you are useless to your clients over the long run.

Actually that’s already happened. At the end of this informative John Dean article, he writes:

Out of an apparent concern for interbranch comity, the High Court has chosen to ignore the bogus brief filed by Senators Graham and Kyl, rather than reprimanding the Senators. Nevertheless, when Graham and Kyl sought to file the very same brief, a month later, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columba, Slate’s Emily Bazelon reports that court “issued an unusual order rejecting” their amicus brief alone, although they accepted five others.

No one familiar with this remarkable behavior by Graham and Kyl can doubt why the court did not want to hear from these senators.

Does anyone remember the entire alumni association of the Barbizon school of blond former prosecutors hissing and shrieking in unison over the threat to the legal system posed by Monica Lewinsky filing a false deposition in the dismissed Paula Jones case? I do. You see, it was an assault on the rule of law to file false documents in a court proceeding. Nothing was more of a slap in the face to our constitution and our American system of justice than to try to defraud the court.

Now Huck and the Turtle were only dealing with a case of the most serious magnitude imaginable, a direct constitutional question of the separation of pwoers that was headed all the way to the Supreme Court to decide. There were, to my knowledge, no blow jobs involved. (There have been allegations of sexual humiliation and torture. But only the good kind.) And Huck and the Turtle are, after all, Republicans, which means that when they defraud the court it is for the country’s own good.

Still, I will never get over the rank hypocrisy of Huckelberry Graham, the unctuous House Manager, who droned on day after day in the impeachment hearings pretending to care deeply about the rule ‘o law. One hopes that Christy is right and that any time the government tries to cite a Huckleberry colloquy going forward that the opposing counsel brings this up and requests that it be checked for veracity. Huck and his partner The Box Turtle have shown they have a remarkable talent for writing fictional dialog.

Update: I was remiss in not mentioning that this issue was discussed a couple of months ago on other blogs such as Slate and Unclaimed Territory. I was aware of it and I just assumed that everyone else was as well.

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Moderation In The Pursuit Of Ego Is No Virtue

by digby

Neil the Ethical Werewolf, subbing over a Ezra’s place yesterday, made some excellent points about the Lieberman challenge:

Criticizing “extremists” in your party and making opponents of the war look like unpatriotic radicals does nothing to help Claire McCaskill and Harold Ford win their Senate races. By painting a picture of unpatriotic extreme antiwar Democrats, Lieberman damages the party’s brand and hurts Democrats everywhere.

Triangulation makes sense as a strategy for individual candidates, but it’s not a strategy that an entire party can engage in. In a country with an established two-party system, the media will define the space of moderate opinion relative to the parties themselves. No party will be able to gain a lasting reputation for moderation by compromising and moving towards its opponents. All that’ll happen is that the space of moderation will be narrowed, and opinions that previously were considered moderate will be regarded as extreme.

[…]

I don’t want my safe-seat Democrats triangulating into moderate positions. I want them to explore new territory on the left, so that when our Arkansas and Nebraska Senators triangulate off of them, they end up in positions that are fairly good, or at least non-destructive. And that’s why I have no use for Joe Lieberman. Where Lamont would stretch the field leftward as a moderate personality with progressive views, Lieberman compresses it and perpetuates negative stereotypes of Democrats. It’s time to remove him from politics, and threaten anyone who follows his path with a similar fate. There’s more.

One of the things I think has not been discussed is the value of Joe not being elected as a Democrat if he wins the general election as an independent. Him not being allowed to speak for the party is a positive, he only hurts the ballclub. He’ll have to join the GOP team and just be one of a large crowd of rabid liberal haters. I’m sure it will not be nearly as ego gratifying. That’s a shame.

I realize that these Lieberman posts may be somewhat boring to some of you. But it’s important to me that grassroots Dems arm themselves with the cogent argument for why we are supporting this primary challenge. There is a willful misunderstanding on the part of the MSM and the establishment as to our motives, which does not surprise me, and I think it’s important to use the platforms we have as bloggers to make our case. Sometimes that requires redundancy. I hope you will bear with me, and consider the arguments I make and to which I link. I think we can change this silly out-moded narrative the establishment has concocted if we work at it. At least, I think it’s worth a try.

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