Month: October 2006

Pedafoleya Round Two

by poputonian

Desperate times call for desperate measures. It wasn’t with the same lightening speed as RatherGate and the forensic fonts, but it’s the same play out of the same playbook. Apparently, the chess-master in the White House has moved a blog-pawn one square in order to out the identity of Mark Foley’s victim. And like Pavlov’s Dog, the right-wing reptiles know without thinking what to do next: attack the media and attack the victim. (Yesterday’s post outing the young man already has 21 trackbacks and 61 technorati links, and the story is seeping into the MSM.) For those keeping score at home, the victim is being accused of being of age at the time he was allegedly victimized by the pedafoleyac, and ABC News is being accused of knowing that. Raw Story, however, refutes what the chamber is currently echoing. My take is that this will only be a temporary obfuscation of the larger story and won’t grow legs like RatherGate did.

Values Schmuck

by digby

So Holy Joe thinks calls for Denny Hastert to resign are too “partisan.” I guess we can say he’s a full fledged member of the GOP torture and molestation club now. Even that liberal Democrat Tony Blankley thinks Hastert should resign.

All I can say is that it’s a good thing Foley wasn’t having an extra-marital affair with an adult woman because Holy Joe would have a fit — after all, that behavior tells our children that values and morals are fungible.

Covering up cyber-sex with 16 year olds? Hey, let’s not rush to judgement. Somebody might think you are too partisan.

.

Meanwhile, Back In Iraq

by digby

The United States and allies cannot resolve the current sectarian violence in Iraq, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said today during a lecture in Minneapolis.

[…]

In Iraq, “staying the course isn’t good enough because a course has to have an end,” Powell said…In the U.S. today, a challenge the war poses is a question of whether an essential “bond of trust that must exist within a nation…has been shaken,” he said. The extent of the damage to trust will be measured in the November elections, he said.

How about the damage to our troops? It’s a meat grinder over there right now:

Two months after a security crackdown began in the capital, U.S. military deaths appear to be rising, even as fatalities among Iraqi security forces have fallen, U.S. military sources and analysts said.

The U.S. military Tuesday revised to eight its count of American deaths in the capital on Monday, the highest daily toll in a month. In September, 74 U.S. troops died nationwide, about a third of them in Baghdad, according to the military.

21 have died just since Saturday.

Observers also noted recent statements by Al Qaeda in Iraq that reveal a strategy to redirect its attacks from Iraqi troops to U.S. forces.

Well, George said to bring it on …

…although Al Qaeda is the most virulently anti-American insurgent force in the country, it is by no means the only one. The Sunni Arab insurgency is composed of many elements, including former members of Saddam Hussein’s toppled regime. Iraq’s national security advisor, Mowaffak Rubaie, said last month that 80% of the insurgency was made up of local fighters.

The latest casualties come as the U.S. military’s focus has shifted from a broad, national counterinsurgency effort to suppressing sectarian fighting in Baghdad.

The rising number of U.S. fatalities is dwarfed by the tally of violent Iraqi deaths, which in July and August reached the highest point since 2003: more than 5,000 in Baghdad alone, according to the United Nations. The Iraqi government is planning to release September’s death toll this week.

The high number of slain civilians, many of whom were Sunni Arab victims of Shiite death squads, suggests that U.S. forces eventually may have to take on Shiite militias as vigorously as they have fought insurgents — a prospect that probably would lead to even more American deaths.

“As long as they are fighting the Sunni insurgents, you don’t have a problem with the Shiites,” said Anthony Cordesman, a Washington-based military analyst. “But the minute they try to deal with the overall sectarian violence — you can’t do that without coming into occasional conflict with sectarian and ethnic elements who are not insurgents and not terrorists. These are things that don’t offer easy choices to make.”

The U.S. military has not released data on the number of attacks against Americans by Shiite fighters, but anecdotal evidence suggests that they may be rising.

“We’ve seen attacks by various groups of extremists on both sides of the equation,” Army spokesman Johnson said.

A senior U.S. military official said last month that Shiite militias were obtaining high-quality bombs from Iran that were occasionally used against U.S. and British troops.

U.S. forces have been met with heavy resistance during occasional raids on Shiite militia strongholds such as Sadr City, a poor Baghdad neighborhood named for the father of anti-U.S. cleric and Al Mahdi militia founder Muqtada Sadr. On Sunday, U.S. forces engaged in a shootout with militiamen as they attempted to detain a suspected death-squad leader.

U.S. officials have complained that Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite, has blocked a more concerted effort to combat militias in Shiite neighborhoods.

On Tuesday, U.S. military sources said that U.S. Army Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, which has operational control of ground forces in Baghdad, canceled a planned raid on a national police station. The predominantly Shiite police brigade is suspected of kidnapping 26 Sunni Arabs from a Baghdad meat processing plant Sunday. Most of the abductees have been found dead.

Mohammed Daini, a Sunni Arab legislator, said that warrants were issued Tuesday for 15 members of the police brigade but that 12 of them fled before they could be detained.

Meanwhile, police said they found 15 bodies in Baghdad on Tuesday, most of them bearing bullet wounds and signs of torture. Attacks killed at least 12 Iraqis in the capital, and two in Kirkuk.

Jesus oh jesus. What are we doing in the middle of that hell? (Why did Bush create that hell?) Every day, they find piles of dead bodies that have been tortured and beheaded!

This is a nightmare.

I’m firmly in favor of beating the shit out of the Republicans with this disgusting Foley thing or Woodward’s book or whatever. This world desperately needs someone to put some brakes on Bush and Cheney. But, really, no matter what happens now, what they have done to Iraq is so huge, so horrible, so fundamentally immoral I don’t know what the United States can ever do to make it right. We invaded a country that was under political repression and turned it into a chaotic bloodbath in which neighbor is killing and torturing neighbor.

There was no need to invade it. These guys just wanted to prove their manhood. But then, old Dick Cheney has been angling for just such a manhood proving bloodbath for years. He didn’t really care where:

In “A World Transformed,” the memoir that he and Bush senior published in 1998, [Brent] Scowcroft makes it clear that while all Bush senior’s top advisers had different perspectives, the fundamental division lay between Defense Secretary Richard Cheney and everyone else. By his account, and by those of others in the administration, Cheney never trusted Gorbachev. In 1989 Cheney maintained that Gorbachev’s reforms were largely cosmetic and that, rather than engage with the Soviet leader, the US should stand firm and keep up cold war pressures. In September 1991 Cheney argued that the administration should take measures to speed the breakup of the Soviet Union—even at the risk of encouraging violence and incurring long-term Russian hostility. He opposed the idea, which originated with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, that the US should withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe and South Korea. As a part of the preparations for the Gulf War he asked Powell for a study on how small nuclear weapons might be used against Iraqi troops in the desert.

The man is a psycho.

Taylor Marsh has more on the ongoing hell on the ground, including some video from Baghdad that will make your hair curl.

.

Nuts And Dolts

by digby

I’m really beginning to resent all those people who say Bush really is smart, he’s just incurious. No. He’s clearly an idiot and an arrogant, immature idiot at that. He’s been manipulated by a bunch of wily, evil men with competing agendas creating lawlessness, chaos and incoherence in our government.

Over the last six years when we watched Bush shift uncomfortably and babble incomprehensibly in response to complicated questions, when we saw him lash out at anyone who dared to question his judgment or his authority, when we observed him humiliating those around him, we weren’t hallucinating and it wasn’t an act. This intellectually deficient, petulent man-child was exactly what he appeared to be — and his inept, arrogant administration is a perfect reflection of him.

What you see is what you get. And (via sadly no!) here’s another shocking revelation from Woodward’s book:

One of the more troubling subplots running through “State of Denial” involves Prince Bandar, the long-time Saudi ambassador to the United States. By Woodward’s account, when then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush decided to run for president, his worried father enlisted Bandar, an old family friend, to tutor the son on foreign policy. When Bandar arrived in Austin, the younger Bush blithely observed that while he had lots of ideas about domestic policies he didn’t have a clue about foreign affairs. The Saudi took him under his wing, but he proved a trying pupil, who addressed his mentor as “asshole” and “smart aleck.” (Perhaps this is how hereditary princelings affectionately address each other?) At one point, the younger Bush peevishly demanded to know why he needed “to care about North Korea.” Bandar pointed out that, if he became president, he would have 35,000 American troops sitting on the DMZ.

Oh, right….

Later, with a Bush back in the White House, Bandar bullied the president into explicitly endorsing a two-state solution to the Israeli-conflict by threatening a total cutoff of Saudi support for U.S. policies. (Bush may never have played poker, but Bandar obviously has.) In another instance, the Saudi prince imperiously demanded — and, worse, obtained — two CIA officials to accompany him on a wild goose chase to Pakistan, where he hoped to kill Bin Laden. During a meeting in the Oval Office, according to Woodward, Bush personally thanked Bandar because the Saudis had flooded the world oil market and kept prices down in the run-up to the 2004 general election.

You don’t have to be Michael Moore to find all this unsettling. Equally disquieting, Woodward’s source for all this has to be Bandar or one of his intimates, acting at the Saudi’s behest. What that suggests is that, after decades of arduously cultivating the Bush family, one of the shrewdest operators on the world stage has written off George W. Bush.

Yes, I do find it somewhat disquieting to know that our president needed to be told why he should care about North Korea. But then, we all pretty much knew he wasn’t exactly well informed on world affairs before he was elected, didn’t we? He was quizzed on that radio show and mumbled and sputtered like a 6th grader, showing that he didn’t even have rudimentary knowledge of foreign affairs. But everyone said it was snobbish to complain, that it wasn’t necessary for a president to have none ‘o that book smarts because he would have all these grown-up around him. Like these:

Vice President Cheney is described as a man so determined to find proof that his claim about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was accurate that, in the summer of 2003, his aides were calling the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, with specific satellite coordinates as the sites of possible caches. None resulted in any finds.

But then, this shouldn’t have been a surprise either, should it?:

Having figured out that the general was being too cautious with his fourth combat command in three decades of soldiering, Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being “as bad as it could possibly be… But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn’t die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney’s staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait.”

That well-known kook was the grey eminence who was supposed to wisely guide Junior through the difficult decisions he would have to make as president. (We also thought Daddy Bush would be a prominent advisor, but Junior couldn’t take the competition. Nutballs only needed apply.)

As for the Bandar stuff, I also have to admit that it’s a little unsettling that dimwit Junior was being tutored in foreign affairs by the ambassador of Saudi Arabia in the first place. It’s even more disconcerting that the little princelings were concocting hairbrained schemes to sneak Bandar into Pakistan to get bin Laden when the administration had already shown they had no particular interest in doing it. But then terrorism has never really been taken seriously by this administration. They wanted a war like Uncle Dick Nixon’s or Daddy’s, only they’d do it much, much better than those old poops ever did.

Honestly, when all the smoke has cleared (if it ever does) I think the overriding lesson we can take from all this is that when someone looks and acts incredibly stupid or incredibly crazy they probably shouldn’t be elected president and vice president of the United States. Perhaps this is the insight that could heal the red-blue divide once and for all.

.

Coup, Coup Cajoob

by digby

It’s pretty clear to me that it will be a miracle if Hastert survives, mainly because his own lieutenants are turning on him like a pack of slavering heathers:

As conservatives debated whether House Speaker Dennis Hastert should resign over his handling of the complaint, the House majority whip, Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said he would have done things differently if he’d known about it. He was the acting majority leader when the complaint was raised.

Although he did not criticize Hastert, his remarks to reporters in Springfield, Mo., were no endorsement of the speaker’s actions.

“I think I could have given some good advice here, which is you have to be curious, you have to ask all the questions you can think of,” Blunt said. “You absolutely can’t decide not to look into activities because one individual’s parents don’t want you to.”

Palace coups are a staple of Republican house leadership and sometimes they fail quite spectacularly. But this one is such a doozy that I don’t think Hastert survives even though highly moral religious leaders like James Dobson support his covering up for sexually predatory congressmen:

Here’s Bauer at the same event.

Apparently the leaders of the Christian Right have decided that they will win this argument by accusing the Democrats of hypocrisy and whining about the unfairness of the media.

I don’t doubt that a number of their followers, for whom Christianity is no more than tribal identity or a team sport, will be more than willing to go along. But there must be some for whom this creates a terrible cognitive dissonance. In one breath their leaders condemn the libertine, liberal culture (Bauer even going so far as to claim common cause with foreigners — terrorists? — who are aghast that we are exporting our deviant sickness.) In the next they are complaining that the media and the Democrats are being unfair to the Republicans on the subject. It’s hard to tell from these crude videos, but it sounded to me that the biggest applause lines came at the condemnation of the sexual predator while the whining about the media and the hypocrisy of the Democrats, not so much.

But even if I’m indulging in some wishful thinking, the inability of even the Christian Right leadership to work up a head of steam over a Republican cover-up of a predatory congressman says they are heading for a crack-up. They can blame it on the culture all they want, but at some point they are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they are being taken to the cleaners by the corrupt, immoral Republicans —- and the powerful Elmer Gantrys who are so enmeshed in the same corrupt, immoral system that they can’t fully condemn them.

Hastert might hang on, but it’s getting so ugly out there, I doubt it:

The chief of staff for Republican Congressman Tom Reynolds, Kirk Fordham, resigned after questions were raised about his role in the handling of the congressional page scandal, according to Republican sources on Capitol Hill.

Those sources said Fordham, a former chief of staff for Congressman Mark Foley, had urged Republican leaders last spring not to raise questionable Foley e-mails with the full Congressional Page Board, made up of two Republicans and a Democrat.

“He begged them not to tell the page board,” said one of the Republican sources.

People familiar with Fordham’s side of the story, however, said Fordham was being used as a scapegoat by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.

It sounds to me as if Fordham needs some friends to whom he can unburden himself. He’s been treated just terribly, don’t you think?

Update: Ooops. A staffer scorned…

Kirk Fordham told The Associated Press that when he was told about Foley’s inappropriate behavior toward pages, he had “more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene.”

The conversations took place long before the e-mail scandal broke, Fordham said, and at least a year earlier than members of the House GOP leadership have acknowledged.

.

Clark In Connecticut

by digby

So I read that Wes Clark is going to Connecticut to stump for Lamont. I’m sure it will make Holy Joe Tortureman pretty uncomfortable to know that General Clark also gave a speech at UCLA on Monday denouncing the torture legislation:

Clark — who was supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization under President Clinton and led a coalition of nearly a score of countries to successfully end Serbian oppression of Kosovo’s Albanians in 1999 — said the Bush administration’s insistence on more leeway in applying Geneva Convention standards to the interrogation of terrorism detainees runs counter to America’s history of observing international law.

[…]

Making his debut as a senior fellow at the Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations at the university’s International Institute, Clark called law “the ultimate human construct — more important than bridges, more important than [micro]chips…. Law is sacred in the American system.”

Clark’s appearance was the first in what he said would probably be monthly visits to UCLA to speak with faculty, address graduate seminars and participate in academic conferences. A former Rhodes scholar with a master’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University, he taught political science at the U.S. Military Academy for three years.

Recent congressional action authorizing the administration to try terrorism suspects before military tribunals and banning torture — while not prohibiting specific coercive techniques — will not silence the debate over the Geneva Convention, he said. The trials of the suspects will raise questions, he said: “What coercive tactics were used? How reliable was the information” thus obtained?

“It’s going to bring everything back to the surface,” Clark said.

Most important, he told the approximately 40 people who attended the breakfast roundtable, backtracking on the Geneva Convention represents a retreat from values America once promoted to the world.

“It was America that led to the creation of the Geneva Convention,” he said, “and now we’re walking away from it, from the very values we espoused?”

Apparently the highly moral Senator Tortureman finds that view very old fashioned.

I’m glad to see Clark going up to Connecticut to support Lamont. Any Dem politician who cares about having a Democratic Senate should do so too. Lieberman is openly blackmailing the Democratic caucus now pretty much saying that if he’s stripped of his seniority he’ll bolt to the Republicans. I wouldn’t have thought it would take more than him running as an independent against the Democratic nominee to prove that he is a disloyal backstabber, but this really should be the last straw. This man who has abandoned the Democratic party is now demanding that he be rewarded for his perfidy. He really needs to be defeated.

.

Heroes and Anti-Heroes

Who gave these instructions, Karl Rove or al Qaeda?

The most important thing is that you continue in your jihad in Iraq, and that you be patient and forbearing, even in weakness, and even with fewer operations… Do not be hasty. The most important thing is that the jihad continues with steadfastness and firm rooting, and that it grows in terms of supporters, strength, clarity of justification, and visible proof each day. Indeed, prolonging the war is in our interest, with God’s permission.

Where would the Republican heroes be without their al Qaeda anti-heroes?

What’ll You Tell The Children, Joe?

by digby

Joe Lieberman, the man who very publicly fretted about the effect a presidential affair would have on the nation’s children, voted for torture last week and this week he’s MIA on teen sex cyberstalking in the halls of congress. I guess he’s been busy observing the High Holy Days.

They’re over now and it’s time somebody asked him the question. Does Holy Joe think the Republican leadership should be held responsible for covering up for a sexual predator? Or is he trying to keep his options open in case he wins and gets an offer he can’t refuse from the GOP?

.

GOP Scandal Digest

by digby

For those of you who have demanding lives and can’t keep up with the many dirty emails, embarrassing videotape and lame excuses the latest GOP scandals revealed while you were picking up a quart of milk or checking you messages these days, your one stop blog is Down With Tyranny. It even features your essential daily requirement of Jon Stewart.

Also: Gilliard is having a fundraiser. If you’ve got a little extra scratch, it’s a good place to spend it. Steve is one of the most fearless bloggers around.

.

Open Letter To Democrats

by tristero

Dear Democratic candidate for Congress,

If your consultants don’t take this story and combine it with this one, then add numerous references to this unbelievably outrageous stunt and urge you to flay the Republicans over their dangerous incompetence, their sheer inability to perceive reality, their malicious lies, and their unparalleled moral hypocrisy…If instead, your consultants insist that in the next month you ignore all these genuine gifts so you can re-emphasize prescription drugs or concerns over the economy, fire them immediately, sue them for fraud, then grab them by their throats, stick ’em in an empty room and force them to listen to the complete recorded works of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Over and over. For a week. No. make it two weeks.

Love,

tristero