Month: January 2007

Back To The Future

by digby

Reader Colin reminded me of this little nugget from a year ago, which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up:

Special Forces May Train Assassins, Kidnappers in Iraq
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq

Jan. 8 – What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called “the Salvador option”—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. “What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are,” one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. “We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing.” Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking “the back” of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported “nationalist” forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal…

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called “snatch” operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

[…]

Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, “are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them.” He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

After doing a little googling, I see that others have been talking about this for some time as the mutilated and headless bodies and mass graves began to appear — a striking similarity to the campaign of terror waged in El Salvador in the 1980’s.

Laura Rozen wrote last November:

So the US is no hapless bystander to the Shiite death squads we are seeing, but they are the product of deliberate Pentagon policy? Is Cambone going to be hauled before Congress or what? Talk about missing the black helicopter crowd. One cannot but long for justice for these guys. Could some forward looking European nation please arrest them next time they stop over, just to give them a scare? A little Pinochet-like unpleasant episode, if not a full fledged trial? Doesn’t this country deserve to know what is being done in our name? If these guys believe in what they’re doing, if they believe it’s in the interest of US national security, why don’t they have the courage to admit it openly? Why are they trying to organize Shiite death squads in secret? Because it would be bad for the US to be seen to be behind this policy? Or because they are concerned about their own legal vulnerability?

Did we actually perpetuate sectarian violence to force the Sunni population to “pay a price?” Did we create this civil war?

I would think that was nuts except for the fact that it is completely in keeping with the arrogance and idiocy of this administration to have thought this was a good idea. The idea behind the Salvadoran death squads, you’ll recall, was to show the spics/wogs/animals that they were up against something so ruthless and violent that they would just give up and surrender. Now ask yourselves if that would have sounded reasonable to this crew, particularly since they view El Salvador as a rousing success. (In fact, the presence of war criminal Eliot Abrams in the White House may just be the most compelling clue.)

I wish I didn’t believe this could be true, but it explains the strange lethargy the administration had over the past year. They had a secret plan to end the war — training Shia death squads to put the Sunni in their place. Shockingly, it doesn’t seem to have worked.

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Were We Wrong?

by digby

Kevin Drum asks:

If anti-war liberals were right about the war from the start, how come they don’t get more respect? Here’s the nickel version of the answer from liberal hawks: It’s because they don’t deserve it. Sure, the war has gone badly, but not for the reasons the doves warned of.

Is this true? I wish my memory were more detailed about what anti-war liberals were saying back in 2002, but it’s not. I once thought about browsing through old archives to at least see what the high-traffic liberal blogs were saying back then, but that turned out to be easier said than done. Matt, Josh, and I all supported the war for a while, so we don’t count. Kos and Tapped seem to have lost their archives from that far back. C&L, Firedoglake, Aravosis, Greenwald, and the Huffington Post didn’t exist back then. Atrios still has his archives, but he didn’t post obsessively about the war and didn’t write the kind of essays where he explained his position in detail anyway.

I didn’t start my own blog until January 2003, (well before the war started and I wrote plenty about it.) But before that I was writing furiously on other blogs, particularly for Atrios, who put this on his front page on September 29, 2002, calling it The Digby Doctrine:

I don’t object to going into Iraq because I think Saddam doesn’t want nukes. Of course he does. So do a lot of people, including al Qaeda. And a lot of unstable regimes already have them, like the countries of the former Soviet Union and Pakistan. I object because I don’t believe there is any new evidence that he’s on the verge of getting them or that he had anything to do with 9/11, or that he’s crazy because he gassed his own people (without our objection at the time), or that he’s just plain so evil that we simply must invade without delay, all of which have been presented as reasons over the past few weeks. There are reasons why we are planning to invade Iraq, but they have nothing to do with the reasons stated and are based upon political and ideological not security goals.

I particularly object because I deeply mistrust the people who are insisting that Saddam presents an urgent danger because they have been agitating for invasion and regime change, offering a variety of rationales, for 11 years. Pardon me for being skeptical but there is an entire cottage industry in the GOP devoted to the destruction of Saddam for a variety of reasons, none of which have anything to do with an imminent threat to the US. Until they concocted this bogus 9/11 connection, even they never claimed that the threat was to the US, but rather to Israel, moderate Arabs and the oil reserves.

I very much object because among these obsessives are the authors of the Bush Doctrine, which is nothing more than a warmed over version of the PNAC defense policy document that was based upon Cheney’s 1992 defense dept. draft laying out the neocon case for ensuring the continued status of the US as the only superpower after the cold war. They did not take the threat of terrorism into account when they formulated this strategy and have made no adjustments since the threat emerged. Instead they are cynically using the fear created by 9/11 to advance goals that have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism and in fact will make another attack more likely. We will not be able to protect ourselves against another 9/11 by asserting a doctrine of unilateral preventive war in Iraq or anywhere else. Terrorism is a different animal that requires a completely fresh approach with an emphasis on cooperative intelligence, creative police work and stealthy military strategies. We can’t invade every country that contains people who are potential terrorists. And the more we try to solve this problem through military force the more terrorists we will create.

This is my main objection to invasion of Iraq without convincing evidence of collusion in 9/11, without mideast allies and using a dubious doctrine of a right of preventive war. I believe it will make more terrorist attacks on the United States more rather than less likely. We should be trying very hard to avoid that rather than rushing toward it at warp speed without due consideration.

I’m not the only one who thinks this. The Republican establishment itself is divided on this issue. Plenty of very smart, hard headed realists know that this new doctrine of pre-emptive unilateral regime change is a bad idea and their lobbying succeeded in convincing the President that he should go to the UN over the objections of his more unilaterally minded advisors.

The result has been that the administration position has been incoherent ever since. One day we must invade because Saddam is close to getting nukes, another it’s that he already has chemical and bio weapons. The next he’s a genocidal maniac. Blair and Powell say they want disarmament one day, Rummy and Cheney argue that regime change is the goal the next. According to next week’s Time Magazine, an administration source admits that they are throwing everything out there and hoping that something will “stick.”

Now the process is getting bogged down again, the inevitable is not looking quite so inevitable. Saddam might acquiesce to inspections. The security council is not cooperating. Public opinion is opaque. The bandwagon effect may not be working. So what do they do? After weeks of insisting that the reason for “regime change” is Saddam’s impending acquisition of nukes (“we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”) suddenly the rationale is once again that Iraq is harboring al Qaeda.

How fucking convenient. No more need for the UN, no more need for congressional resolutions or convincing the public, now we can [theoretically]invade on the basis of the post 9/11 resolution giving Bush the power to attack any country associated with the attack on the WTC.

Doesn’t this inconsistency make you just the tiniest bit suspicious of what’s really going on?

I have said before that if Bush will take yes for an answer and allow the UN to make another resolution demanding inspections, I will be more than happy to let him take credit for a hugely successful bluff. If Saddam fucks up we will then at least have the support of the international community to go to war on the basis of his intransigence instead of on the basis of a spurious right to “pre-emptive regime change” without convincing evidence of a threat.

More importantly we will not have implemented the delusional Bush Doctrine or engaged in unilateral “pre-emptive” military action in the mideast and thoroughly screwed up the coalition needed for terrorism prevention by striking at the hornets nest of Islamic anti-Americanism for no good reason. At this point, I’ll be thrilled if we can avoid WWIII and keep from burning all of our bridges in the very countries where we need cooperation to prevent more terrorism on US soil.

You’ll recall that Saddam did let in the inspectors and Bush would not take yes for an answer so he pulled them out and invaded. (Still, he seems to have a delusion that this never happened.)

It was just a year after 9/11 and I was terribly concerned at the time about two things: creating more hatred (and terrorism) toward America in the Muslim world for completely inexplicable and useless reasons — and establishing a doctrine of preventive war. (It never occurred to me that we would carry out a torture and gulag regime and specifically screw things up so badly that Iraq would be in civil war, with us in the crossfire, nearly five year later. How naive of me.)

It doesn’t all hold up but most of it was proven correct. And while it’s not the most sophisticated take on what was happening, it’s more on target than all the liberal hawks who jumped on the Alice In Wonderland ride with the neocons.

I was sitting in my little cottage in Santa Monica, reading books and papers, watching television and writing on the internet. It really wasn’t that hard to figure out what was going on.

Also, what Atrios said.

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More Moron

by digby

I just don’t think I can take much more of this kind of puerile, ignorant bullshit:

MR. LEHRER: Let me ask you a bottom-line question, Mr. President. If it is as important as you’ve just said – and you’ve said it many times – as all of this is, particularly the struggle in Iraq, if it’s that important to all of us and to the future of our country, if not the world, why have you not, as president of the United States, asked more Americans and more American interests to sacrifice something? The people who are now sacrificing are, you know, the volunteer military – the Army and the U.S. Marines and their families. They’re the only people who are actually sacrificing anything at this point.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night. I mean, we’ve got a fantastic economy here in the United States, but yet, when you think about the psychology of the country, it is somewhat down because of this war.

Now, here in Washington when I say, “What do you mean by that?,” they say, “Well, why don’t you raise their taxes; that’ll cause there to be a sacrifice.” I strongly oppose that. If that’s the kind of sacrifice people are talking about, I’m not for it because raising taxes will hurt this growing economy. And one thing we want during this war on terror is for people to feel like their life’s moving on, that they’re able to make a living and send their kids to college and put more money on the table. And you know, I am interested and open-minded to the suggestion, but this is going to be –

MR. LEHRER: Well –

PRESIDENT BUSH: — this is like saying why don’t you make sacrifices in the Cold War? I mean, Iraq is only a part of a larger ideological struggle. But it’s a totally different kind of war, than ones we’re used to.

People are sacrificing their peace of mind. He really said that.

Oh, and our economy is fantastic but people are down about Iraq so they are sacrificing it being even more fantastic whivh means that we can’t raise taxes to pay for the war. Better to have your kids and grandkids pay for it rather than these blue millionaires who have to sacrifice their beautiful minds by seeing all that unpleasantness on television.

I will never be able to forgive the fat cat Republicans who had the everlasting gall to foist this mentally deficient meathead on the world. How dare they.

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Coming or Going?

by digby

Bush gave another incoherent interview to Jim Lehrer today, which I will have to go back and parse later because I’m tied up. For right now, I wonder if someone who knows more about this would care to comment:

MR. LEHRER: What does success mean in these terms now, Mr. President?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah, well, success, Jim, means a government that is providing security for its people. A success means for the American people to see Iraqi troops chasing down killers with American help initially. A success means a Baghdad that is, you know, relatively calm compared to last year so that people’s lives can go forward and a political process can go forward along with it. Success means the government taking steps to share the oil wealth or to deal with a de-Baathification law, to encourage local elections. Success means reconstruction projects that employ Iraqis. Success also means making sure al-Qaeda doesn’t get a foothold in Iraq, which they’re trying to do in Anbar province. So success is measurable; it’s definable; and last year was a year in which there was a setback to success.

(What a long way we are from the Democracy Domino Theory…)

Later in the interview he said this:

And then the final option is secure the capital and at the same time chase al-Qaida into Anbar.

He also says that four thousand of the new troops are assigned to Anbar.

So what do you suppose this is really all about? He says that al Qaeda is trying to gain a foothold in Anbar and then says that the plan calls for the troops to chase Al Qaeda into Anbar. Assuming there’s some way of making sense of that — is it wise to say it publicly?

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Justice Delayed

by digby

… but not denied.

Everyone knows that Firedoglake is the go-to blog for live Libby Trial blogging and analysis, right? Think of it as the internet equivalent of all those OJ shows on the cablers, except smart and literate.

They have trial press passes and they will be there every day telling us what’s what. If you want to get up to speed on the case to really understand what’s going down, you need to buy Marcy Wheeler’s Anatomy of Deceit: How the Bush Administration Used the Media to Sell the Iraq War and Out a Spy. She knows everything there is to know about the case — and she’s going to be blogging it for FDL, along with the usual suspects, Christy, Pach and Jane.

(Jeralyn will also be doing expert analysis at Talk Left, so be sure to check in there frequently as well.)

This is the first time since 2000 that anyone has officially taken the Bush administration to task. Patrick Fitzgerald has run the tightest lipped investigation in Department of Justice history and the only things we really know about his case are from official filings and informed speculation. Anything could happen. Dick Cheney is probably going to testify. Maybe Rover.

So keep your bookmarks poised and some popcorn handy. The Bush administration is finally going on trial.

Update: BTC News’ white house reporter will also be covering the trial. Go bloggers.

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Legal Assault

by digby

The rightwing assault on the legal system continues apace. First you have this strange Pentagon lawyer and spokesman Cully Stimson obviously cooking up a rightwing noise machine operation with Monica Crowley and the Wall Street Journal editorial page to run a boycott on law firms that represent prisoners at Guantanamo. The Pentagon eventually “distanced itself” from his remarks but this guy has been out there saying all kinds of crazy stuff for some time. (In fact, all the people involved with Guantanamo often sound like psychos for some reason. Do they look for these creepy types specifically?)

Anyway, Cully Stimson has a history of saying nonsensical things in public. Like this:

O‘DONNELL: Welcome back to HARDBALL. You heard the claims of torture and abuse by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, but what really goes on there? Here to tell us is the official in charge of U.S. policy on interrogation and other matters in the prison is Cully Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs.[Right. He’s going to tell us what “really goes on?” Excellent intro Nora — ed]

Good evening to you, Cully. Let me begin by asking you about this Ruhel Ahmed. He says that he was held for two years in Guantanamo Boy is he a terrorists?

CULLY STIMSON, DEP. ASST. DEFENSE SECRETARY: Yes, he is a terrorist, he is a dangerous person. We had a right to pick him up. He was waging war against America and we were right to take him there.

O‘DONNELL: So why did we let him go?

STIMSON: We transferred him back to his home country, and I can assure you that the Brits are mitigating the threat that he poses.

O‘DONNELL: But many people may ask, if he‘s a terrorist, why is he still not there at Guantanamo Bay?

STIMSON: The president has said that we don‘t want to be the world‘s jailer. That‘s true. This is a world problem here, Norah. I mean what does the world do with hardened Islamic extremists, who are waging the war against basically western culture? And so we don‘t want to be the world‘s jailer, and we want to take responsibility for those that we have at Guantanamo and we‘re going through that process right now.

O‘DONNELL: And as you know Ruhel Ahmed is suing the defense secretary for $10 million. He claims that he was tortured at Guantanamo Bay. He says he was put in stress positions, in temperatures below freezing. Was he tortured?

STIMSON: No, he was not tortured. We have to under the law and for policy investigate every allegation of torture, no matter how ridiculous. We investigated his allegations and they were not found to be true. What is interesting to note, is that the Brits went to Guantanamo and visited him six times, and during each of those six visits, he never mentioned anything to them. And there were no marks, no nothing to support his allegation and lies of being tortured.

O‘DONNELL: Well lets set the record straight here. What is the U.S. policy regarding interrogation methods? In other words are things like isolation and extremely hot confinement areas, stress positions, shackled to the floor for long periods, are all of those legal and commonly used?

STIMSON: The interrogation techniques are open for the world to see. They are found in the army field manual. It‘s number 2452. You can put it in Google and figure it out. No, the techniques authorized by the army field manual are lawful, and they comply with the McCain amendment. They‘re legal and they comply with our obligations, our international obligations.

O‘DONNELL: So stress positions and hot and cold temperatures, those fall under the U.S. army manual?

STIMSON: Yes, I mean you can you read the army field manual and see for yourself. The interrogation techniques that we use at Guantanamo today are laid out for the world to see.

O‘DONNELL: Can you speak, some people, have, of course, accused the United States of torture in Guantanamo Bay. Can you speak to what type of care and feeding are the detainees receiving there at Gitmo?

STIMSON: Be happy to. We‘re proud of the care and treatment we provide detainees at Guantanamo. They get three square meals a day, culturally sensitive meals, blessed by an Imam. They have a menu Norah, that they get to order from every couple weeks. They have freedom of religion. They practice called to prayer five times a day. There are arrows pointing towards Mecca with the distance to Mecca listed everywhere. They get first class medical care, dental care.

O‘DONNELL: Is it true they get McDonald‘s?

STIMSON: During some interrogations, which are no different than you or I sitting across from each other today, some of them ask for McDonald‘s and sure, I‘ve watched some interrogations where they‘re chowing down on a Big Mac.

O‘DONNELL: Because they want to?

STIMSON: Yes, they want to.

O‘DONNELL: Let me ask you specifically about this movie, of course which we just talked about in the last segment, “The Road to Guantanamo,” which is a docudrama. Are you concerned, and are there concerns at the Pentagon, that this could change some public opinion? As you know most Europeans don‘t like the policy. The President of the United States has said that he thinks Guantanamo Bay should be closed down. Are you concerned that this could shift public opinion even further?

STIMSON: Not at all. You can call it a docudrama. I call it a propaganda film. This is pure fantasy. He would have you believe, I have not seen the film, and I am not going to pay my money because I don‘t know where the money is going to go, quite honestly, if I paid to see this movie.

This is essentially the same dark conspiracy-type charge he made against the lawyers who represent the prisoners. He implied they were being funded by terrorists. Here, he claims that the maker of this film is working for terrorists.

He is quite convinced, as are so many of these wingnut freaks, that anyone who doesn’t sign on to the program, no questions asked, is in bed with terrorists. This man should be nowhere near the government or the Pentagon. He’s paranoid, terrified, stupid or some combination of all three.

O‘DONNELL: You know Ruhel Ahmed, just on this show, called Osama bin Laden a terrorists and then a second later, he called President Bush a terrorist.

STIMSON: I heard that. It sort of shows you the mentality of this guy.

O‘DONNELL: Well except then you have to wonder, what then is he doing out on the lose in England?

STIMSON: Look, here is what he did. It‘s interesting, as I understand the film starts in 2002. They should have gone backwards a little bit and started in 2001, because in 2001, he was visiting Islamic extremist book stores. In September of 2000 he went to Pakistan and trained at terrorist training camps for about 40 days. And then went to the front lines and fought with the Taliban. And then he would have us believe, if I understand the way the movie plays out, he would have us to believe he was going to a wedding.

O‘DONNELL: If these guys are so bad, and terrorists, why not bring them to trial, charge them with murder, terrorism and put them to death?

STIMSON: That‘s a great question. And this is important for the viewers to understand. During a time of war, let‘s say during World War II, that everyone can remember, sort of basic history there. This country is entitled to detain enemies against it. We don‘t have any obligation to give them a quarter so they can call a lawyer. We don‘t have any obligation when we had 400,000 Nazis here in this country at the beginning of World War II, to give them a trial.

When he isn’t ginning up a boycott of law firms who have the temerity to defend prisoners, this man speaks incoherent gibberish. He needs to be fired.

But they aren’t firing him. They are, instead, firing a bunch of other lawyers — US Attorneys some of whom have been doing investigations into Republican malfeasance. A whole bunch of them — seven so far, an unprecedented number. And they are being replaced by GOP dirty tricks operatives. I’m not kidding. From Josh Marshall:

Okay, so we already know that the White House has now taken the unprecedented step of firing at least four and likely seven US Attorneys in the middle of their terms of office — at least some of whom are in the midst of corruption investigations of Bush administration officials and key Republican lawmakers. We also know that they’re taking advantage of a handy provision of the USA Patriot Act that allows the White House to replace these fired USAs with appointees who don’t need to be approved by the senate.

Read on to see what kind of people they are naming to replace these US Attorney’s. You won’t believe it.

Dianne Feinstein made a speech about this on the Senate floor this morning. (You can see the Youtube here.)

This is a scandal. The administration is firing federal prosecutors for no reason and putting their cronies in office without senate confirmation to get them through the next two years. They are working with political operatives to intimidate law firms into not representing terrorist suspects. They are, once again, undermining the spirit of our constitution and our legal system as they have been doing since they took office in 2000. The country voted for oversight last November to put the brakes on just this kind of behavior.

The administration is not acting like people who believe they can prevail if they play by the rules set forth in our legal system. Or maybe it’s just another outright power grab by the executive branch. Either way, it’s the latest in a long line of constitutional outrages and the congress must thoroughly investigate it and expose it to the public. The Republicans are trying to set new precedents with this stuff and it will only work if the Democrats fail to step in and say no.

We need immediate hearings on this issue.

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Family Values

by digby

For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results.

In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.

Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time, the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.

How interesting. But what difference does it make?

In a year with high turnout, unmarried women increased their numbers, and were one of the few demographic groups to increase their share of the electorate. As a percentage of the electorate, they moved from 19 percent in 2000 to 22.4 percent in 2004, an increase of roughly 7 million votes. Unmarried women constituted as large a share of the electorate as African Americans, Latinos and Jews combined.

The marriage gap is one of the most important cleavages in electoral politics. Unmarried women voted for Kerry by a 25-point margin (62 to 37 percent), while married women voted for President Bush by an 11-point margin (55 percent to 44 percent). Indeed, the 25-point margin Kerry posted among unmarried women represented one of the high water marks for the Senator among all demographic groups.

The marriage gap is a defining dynamic in today’s politics, eclipsing the gender gap, with marital status a significant predictor of the vote, independent of the effects of age, race, income, education or gender. Marital status had a significant effect on the way in which these voters performed, whereas a voter’s gender did not. This was true of all age groups. Younger unmarried women supported Kerry while younger married women supported President Bush. Unmarried 18-29 year olds gave Kerry a 25 point margin, while younger married women, like their older counterparts, gave President Bush an 11 point margin.

The 2004 election brought many new unmarried women to the polls. Nineteen percent were voting for the first time, versus only 6 percent of married women….

White voters supported President Bush overall, but Kerry performed well among white unmarried women. White voters generally supported President Bush in the election (58 percent to 41 percent), but Kerry performed strongly among white unmarried women (55 percent to 44 percent).

Unmarried women are social and economic progressives advancing a tolerant set of values. They believe government should play a role in providing affordable health care, a secure retirement, equal pay, and education opportunities for themselves and their children. They support a woman’s right to choose and gay rights, including marriage.

Unmarried women were strongly opposed to the war in Iraq. They believe that the Bush Administration’s pursuit of the war made America less safe, not more secure. This is the opposite conclusion from that drawn by many blue-collar voters.

These women represent the tolerant, liberal base of the Democratic party and there are a huge number of them. I would hope that the Democratic party understands which side it’s bread is buttered on and keeps that in mind as they move forward.

Update: Meanwhile, Sadly No! finds that the Republicans can’t help lovin’ those men of theirs. But we knew that.

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He Has Not Listened

by digby

I got yer plan for ya right here:

BLITZER: Are you in favor of using the power of the purse that Congress has to try to stop this war?

GOV. BILL RICHARDSON (D), NEW MEXICO: Yes. I believe because the president has not listened to the Congress, he hasn’t listened to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and to the American people, that overwhelmingly want a change of course, I believe that’s the function of the Congress, to deal with the appropriations process, find ways to at least this surge, to deny the funds to make it happen, because this is going to add to sectarian violence.

I would support a phased withdrawal, tie it to a political solution. There is no military solution. I would also organize a regional conference to get other states to help with the security and civil administration. I would talk to Iran and Syria to try to get the situation to at least a stable level.

I just believe that this is an ultimate decision by the Congress. But since the president doesn’t listen, he’s off in, I think, his own bubble. Unfortunately, that’s the course I believe the Congress needs to take.

Richardson is not given to shrillness. He’s probably running for president and he’s running as a national security specialist, which he is. This is no joke. If he’s saying this then Bush is in for trouble in the congress.

Not that it will do any good, mind you:

In July 1987, then-Representative Dick Cheney, the top Republican on the committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal, turned on his hearing room microphone and delivered, in his characteristically measured tone, a revolutionary claim.

President Reagan and his top aides, he asserted, were free to ignore a 1982 law at the center of the scandal. Known as the Boland Amendment, it banned US assistance to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua.

“I personally do not believe the Boland Amendment applied to the president, nor to his immediate staff,” Cheney said.

Most of Cheney’s colleagues did not share his vision of a presidency empowered to bypass US laws governing foreign policy. The committee issued a scathing, bipartisan report accusing White House officials of “disdain for the law.”

Cheney refused to sign it. Instead, he commissioned his own report declaring that the real lawbreakers were his fellow lawmakers, because the Constitution “does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power.”

The Iran-contra scandal was not the first time the future vice president articulated a philosophy of unfettered executive power — nor would it be the last. The Constitution empowers Congress to pass laws regulating the executive branch, but over the course of his career, Cheney came to believe that the modern world is too dangerous and complex for a president’s hands to be tied. He embraced a belief that presidents have vast “inherent” powers, not spelled out in the Constitution, that allow them to defy Congress.

Cheney bypassed acts of Congress as defense secretary in the first Bush administration. And his office has been the driving force behind the current administration’s hoarding of secrets, its efforts to impose greater political control over career officials, and its defiance of a law requiring the government to obtain warrants when wiretapping Americans. Cheney’s staff has also been behind President Bush’s record number of signing statements asserting his right to disregard laws.

A close look at key moments in Cheney’s career — from his political apprenticeship in the Nixon and Ford administrations to his decade in Congress and his tenure as secretary of defense under the first President Bush — suggests that the newly empowered Democrats in Congress should not expect the White House to cooperate when they demand classified information or attempt to exert oversight in areas such as domestic surveillance or the treatment of terrorism suspects.

Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor, predicted that Cheney’s long career of consistently pushing against restrictions on presidential power is likely to culminate in a series of uncompromising battles with Congress.

“Cheney has made this a matter of principle,” Shane said. “For that reason, you are likely to hear the words ‘executive privilege’ over and over again during the next two years.”

Cheney declined to comment for this article. But he has repeatedly said his agenda includes restoring the presidency to its fullest powers by rolling back “unwise” limits imposed by Congress after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

“In 34 years, I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job,” Cheney said on ABC in January 2002. “I feel an obligation…to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors.”

He couldn’t make it any clearer. My ongoing crusade to drive a stake through the conservative zombies is based on this very thing. This presidential infallibility doctrine came from the true father of the modern conservative movement, Richard Nixon. (Reagan was a prop.) Cheney’s not that smart and he isn’t that original. In fact he’s a rather simple Nixonian machine.

Despite the historically inept bleatings of journalists like Howard Fineman, who say that support for the war broke down on partisan lines, by 1970 both parties were divided on the war. In June of that year, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. But as the NY Times reported at the time:

The legal effect of the vote which was 81 to 10 is probably minimal since the Nixon administration has stated that it is not relying on the resolution, requested by Lyndon B Johnson, as authority for policies in Indochina.

What do you suppose he was relying upon? Inherent powers, anyone?

Nixon said, “when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” Bush and Cheney obviously agree with that. (Cheney said it outright with respect to the Boland Amendment.) If he persists in being completely impervious to public criticism or congressional pressure, the only thing the congress can do to stop him is withhold funds or impeach him. That’s it. It remains to be seen if they have the stomach for it. Bill Richardson coming out for using the power of the purse is a good sign.

Also: One interesting thing to note here is that a “young Turk” Republican (as the NY Times referred to him) named Bob Dole seized control of that vote and pushed it through with another bill for complicated political reasons, royally irking the Democrats who accused them of rank partisanship. There was a lot of legislative jockeying going on during that period, as both parties prepared for the 1972 campaign. I would hope the Democrats would study this period to remind themselves how wily minority Republicans can politically work the war issue from the opposition as a Republican president does exactly what he wants to do under a theory of imperial presidency. This is deja-vu all over again and this time the Democrats have the benefit of hindsight.

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What The Hell?

by digby

Iraq hanged two aides to Saddam Hussein before dawn on Monday but government efforts to avoid a repeat of uproar over the ousted leader’s rowdy execution were thwarted when his half-brother’s head was severed by the noose.

Many of the government’s Shi’ite Muslim supporters rejoiced at the death of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam’s once feared intelligence chief who was accused of sending people to death in a meat grinder. But voices in Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority saw the decapitation as a deliberate sectarian act of revenge.

Government spokesmen said the severing of Barzan’s head was a rare hangman’s blunder. Critics said it may have been partly a result of Barzan’s illness with cancer.

Officials showed journalists film of Barzan and former judge Awad Hamed al-Bander standing side by side in orange jumpsuits on the scaffold, appearing pale and trembling with fear as the hangmen placed black hoods over their heads.

As the two trap doors swung open, the force of the rope jerked Bander’s head off. The head fell to the floor next to his body in a pool of blood as Bander’s corpse swung above it.

Not that I really need to know the details, but I can’t help but wonder how in the hell something like this happens? (And how convenient that he is “accidentally” beheaded, the preferred method of jihadist psychopaths.)

Needless to say, this isn’t going over well among the Sunni (and even some Shi’ites):

One official, Bassam al-Husseini, called the decapitation “an act of God.”

Barzan’s son-in-law hurled a sectarian insult at the government on Al Jazeera television. “As for ripping off his head, this is the grudge of the Safavids,” he said — a historical term referring to Shi’ite ties to non-Arab Iran.

Poor Shi’ites celebrated in Baghdad’s Sadr City slum. Moussa Jabor said: “(Barzan) should have been handed over to the people. Execution is a blessing for him.”

In Awja, where Barzan and Bander were buried close to Saddam, provincial governor Abdullah al-Juabra said: “People resent the way that Barzan has been executed.”

In Cairo, the Arab Organization for Human Rights called for an international medical investigation. The Moroccan Human Rights Association said the hangings were a “criminal political assassination masterminded by American imperialism.”

Some Shi’ites were appalled too. Ali Abbas Ridha, a 27-year-old in the northern city of Mosul, said: “What they’ve done incites people to sectarianism even more. Whether they were executed or not, what’s the use?”

Meanwhile:

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, told reporters the hanging of the two men was “an Iraqi decision, an Iraqi execution.”

Right. And who believes that?

What a travesty.

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Terrified Bean Counters

by digby

One of the things I think liberals find most irritating about the right (and they do it for that purpose as much as anything) is when they appropriate liberal icons and language and then disingenuously hit us over the heads with them. Most offensive is when they say we are racists, considering their revolting history in such matters.

Rick Perlstein wrote a piece for TNR last week that reminds us just how much they loved Martin Luther King in his time and why their current paeans to his greatness ring so hollow:

When Martin Luther King was buried in Atlanta, the live television coverage lasted seven and a half hours. President Johnson announced a national day of mourning: “Together, a nation united and a nation caring and a nation concerned and a nation that thinks more of the nation’s interests than we do of any individual self-interest or political interest–that nation can and shall and will overcome.” Richard Nixon called King “a great leader–a man determined that the American Negro should win his rightful place alongside all others in our nation.” Even one of King’s most beastly political enemies, Mississippi Representative William Colmer, chairman of the House rules committee, honored the president’s call to unity by terming the murder “a dastardly act.”

Others demurred. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond wrote his constituents, “[W]e are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case.” Another, even more prominent conservative said it was just the sort of “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.”

That was Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, arguing that King had it coming. King was the man who taught people they could choose which laws they’d break–in his soaring exegesis on St. Thomas Aquinas from that Birmingham jail in 1963: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. … Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.”

That’s not what you hear from conservatives today, of course. What you get now are convoluted and fantastical tributes arguing that, properly understood, Martin Luther King was actually one of them–or would have been, had he lived. But, if we are going to have a holiday to honor history, we might as well honor history. We might as well recover the true story. Conservatives–both Democrats and Republicans–hated King’s doctrines. Hating them was one of the litmus tests of conservatism.

The idea was expounded most systematically in a 567-page book that came out shortly after King’s assassination, House Divided: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther King, by one of the right’s better writers, Lionel Lokos, and from the conservative movement’s flagship publisher, Arlington House. “He left his country a legacy of lawlessness,” Lokos concluded. “The civil disobedience glorified by Martin Luther King [meant] that each man had the right to put a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on laws that met with his favor.” Lokos laid the rise of black power, with its preachments of violence, at King’s feet. This logic followed William F. Buckley, who, in a July 20, 1967 column titled “King-Sized Riot In Newark,” imagined the dialogue between a rioter and a magistrate:

“You do realize that there are laws against burning down delicatessen stores? Especially when the manager and his wife are still inside the store?”

“Laws Schmaws. Have you never heard of civil disobedience? Have you never heard of Martin Luther King?”

That thinking led inexorably to the Republican southern strategy code words “law and order” (cribbed from George Wallace) which had a powerful effect on frightened conservatives of all stripes. They turned the man who followed Gandhi’s precepts of peaceful civil disobedience into an inciter of violence. Neat trick.

The conservative argument, consistent and ubiquitous, was that King, claiming the mantle of moral transcendence, was actually the vector for moral relativism. They made it by reducing the greatest moral epic of the age to a churlish exercise in bean-counting. Shortly after the 1965 Selma voting-rights demonstrations, Klansmen shot dead one of the marchers, a Detroit housewife named Viola Liuzza, for the sin of riding in a car with a black man. Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended her funeral. No fair! Buckley cried, noting that a white cop had been shot by a black man in Hattiesburg shortly thereafter; “Humphrey did not appear at his funeral or even offer condolences.” He complained, too, of the news coverage: “The television cameras showed police nightsticks descending upon the bodies of the demonstrators, but they did not show the defiance … of those who provoked them beyond the endurance that we tend to think of as human.” (In actual fact, sheriff’s officers charged into the crowd on horseback swinging rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire.)

By now you may be asking: What is the point of this unpleasant exercise? Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on ideological sins? Well, not every conservative wrong has been righted. It’s true that conservatives today don’t sound much like Buckley in the ’60s, but they still haven’t figured King out: Andrew Busch of the Ashbrook Center for Public Policy, writing about King’s exegesis on just and unjust laws, said, “In these few sentences, King demolishes much of the philosophical foundation of contemporary liberalism” (liberals are moral relativists, you see, and King was appealing to transcendent moral authority); Busch (speaking for reams of similar banality you can find by searching National Review Online) also said that “he rallied his followers with an explicitly religious message” and thus “stands as a stinging rebuke to those today who argue that religion and politics should never mix”; and Matthew Spalding of the Heritage Foundation wrote in National Review Online that “[a]n agenda that advocates quotas, counting by race and set-asides takes us away from King’s vision” (not true, as historians have demonstrated). Still, why not honor their conversion on its own terms?

The answer is, if you don’t mind, a question of moral relativism versus transcendence. When it comes to Martin Luther King, conservatives are still mere bean-counters. We must honor King because there wasn’t a day in his life after 1955 when he didn’t risk being cut down in cold blood and still stood steadfast. Conservatives break down what should be irreducible in this lesson into discrete terms–King believed in points X, Y, and Z–but now they chalk up the final sum on the positive side of the ledger. But this misses the point: King alone among contemporary heroes is worthy of a national holy day not because he mixed faith and politics, nor because he enunciated a sentimental dream. It was because he represented something truly terrifying.

When King was shuttling back and forth to Memphis in support of striking garbage workers, Tennessee Governor Buford Ellington typified the conservative establishment’s understanding of him: He was “training 3,000 people to start riots.” What looks today obviously like transcendent justice looked to conservatives then like anarchy. The conservative response to King–to demonize him in the ’60s and to domesticate him today–has always been essentially the same: It has been about coping with the fear that seekers of justice may overturn what we see as the natural order and still be lionized. But if we manage to forget that, sometimes, doing things that terrify people is the only recourse to injustice, there is no point in having a Martin Luther King Day at all.

I have come to realize that conservatism’s single most identifiable characteristic is its fear (of progress, the other — everything.) And nothing scared conservatives more than the great progressive Martin Luther King, who faced them down peacefully with grim determination and awesome courage. Why, if African Americans could overcome, then what was to stop anybody from believing that “liberty and justice for all” applied to them too. Thanks, Reverend King for making it so.

And thanks to Perlstein for the elegant reminder.

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