Month: February 2007

Lead, Follow Or Get Out Of The Way

by digby

I know this has made the rounds of the blogosphere already, but I can’t let it pass.We have got a lot of problems in this world. Islamic extremism is one of them, but despite what the right insists, it is not the equivalent of the martians in “War of the Worlds” landing and killing everything in sight. They are people and they can be dealt with as the world has dealt with crazy tribal, religious and ideological challenges since time began.

Global warming, however, is a global problem on a scale we’ve never dealt with before. It is going to take some extremly imaginative and creative thinking, as well as cooperation across the entire planet to successfully head off an impending disaster. It is a test of our species like no other.

So who are the ostriches with their heads in the sand refusing to face up to what may be the most important global challenge in human history? Guess.

This is one that really separates the men and women from the children. That chart shows that they fail on such a huge scale that I have to wonder how anyone can call such people leaders.

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“Feels Good!”

by digby

We have talked a lot lately about Dick Cheney’s delusional behavior and his childlike strategic foreign policy vision. It seems as if even the dunderhead Bush seems less threatening and freakishly out to lunch than Cheney. In fact, it’s hard to find any Republicans wearing the fogged-up, rose colored glasses that Cheney sports these days. But there is one guy who equals Cheney for sheer magical thinking and schoolboy worldview; it’s Holy Joe Lieberman, the Supreme Allied Commander of the War against Islamofascism.

From this week’s New Yorker:

Three days after the hearing, I went to see Lieberman in his office. He was cheerful and easygoing and more convinced than usual of the essential rightness of his vision. I asked him if he thought that Democrats who voted for the resolution would truly be giving encouragement to the enemy. “The enemy believes—Ahmadinejad has said this repeatedly—that we don’t have the will anymore for a long battle,” he said, referring to the President of Iran.

Excuse me? I didn’t know we were actually at war with Iran. But in Joe Lieberman’s fevered imagination, this isn’t even Cheney’s silly formulation where withdrawing from Iraq will give al Qaeda reason to believe the US has no balls. In Lieberman’s mind, we must not only prove to bin Laden that we have balls, we must prove it to all of our “enemies,” especially Iran. (Man, I sure hope the Chinese don’t start trash talking about our manhood or it really will be WWIII.)

Actually, I doubt this was an accident. Lieberman is just taking the neocon line as he always has. Nothing new. It’s just that he is out there all alone now with the nuttiest of GOP nuts, so it’s even more remarkable:

In another conversation, he told me that he was reading “America Alone,” a book by the conservative commentator Mark Steyn, which argues that Europe is succumbing, demographically and culturally, to an onslaught by Islam, leaving America friendless in its confrontation with Islamic extremism.

“The thing I quote most from it is the power of demographics, in Europe particularly,” Lieberman said. “That’s what struck me the most. But the other part is a kind of confirmation of what I know and what I’ve read elsewhere, which is that Islamist extremism has an ideology, and it’s expansionist, it’s an aggressive ideology. And the title I took to mean that we Americans will have ultimate responsibility for stopping this expansionism.”

That is crackpot Bell Curve nonsense straight out of the hard wingnuttosphere — Powerline or LGF. This guy has truly gone down the rabbit hole.

I watched a movie called “Jarhead” the other night, a film many of you have probably seen. It featured a scene where a bunch of young, stoked marines on the verge of being sent to the first Gulf War watch “Apocalypse Now.” They jump up, pumping their fists at the scene in which the helicopters strafe the village, shouting at the screen, “kill that fucker!” It was a bizarre and uncomfortable scene for a civilian like me, but the story required that you recognize these young men were trained warriors who were being revved up to go to battle. These rituals have been played out in armies for millenia.

I couldn’t help but think of that scene when I read this:

Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was “Behind Enemy Lines,” in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his fist and said, “Yeah!” and “All right!”

That is a 60ish US Senator from New England, not a 21 year old marine preparing to go to war. There’s something very disturbing about that picture.

In case anyone is wondering whether he’s prepared to leave the Democratic Party,
Lieberman drew the line:

In the campaign, Lieberman said that he would join the Democratic caucus if elected, and his victory was the deciding one that gave the Democrats control of the Senate. But he told me recently that his attachment to the Party is based in some measure on sentiment, and should not necessarily be thought of as eternal.

“A lot of Democrats are essentially pacifists and somewhat isolationist,” he told me. He had particular problems with Senator Edward Kennedy’s proposal to deny the President funding for a troop surge, and with an idea recently raised by the senior senator from Connecticut, Christopher Dodd, to cap the number of American soldiers in Iraq. Lieberman was not willing to say whether he would remain a Democrat if the Party cut off funding for the war. “That would be stunning to me,” he said. “And very hurtful. And I’d be deeply affected by it. Let’s put it that way.”

There you have it. We’re pacifist and isolationist (“unhinged,” too, perhaps?) and if we even try to cut funding for the surge — he’s jumping.

H/T tp rp

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The Evilosity Of The RightWing Noise Machine

by tristero

In case you have any doubt about how insidious and dangerous the lies are that the rightwing spreads, here’s a little tale for you.

Some of you may recall this report by Lara Logan about the brutal fighting on Haifa Street and how, very unusually, she circulated a plea for people to watch the report online because CBS News was unwilling to broadcast it.

Well, recently, I was at dinner with a friend who is a major journalist at a major media outlet in New York City. (I will not identify the person further, including whether my friend is male or female, or what kind of media s/he works for – video, print, or online). In the course of the conversation, I brought up the Lara Logan video and s/he said, with certain authority, “I know about that. Y’know, there’s a lot of controversy because she used footage from al Qaeda in the reporting.”

“Wha?” sez I, “I never heard that.”

“Yes,” said, my friend. “I was searching around for it and saw there was a huge controversy about her sources. That could very well have been the reason they didn’t broadcast it. After all, it’s not like there’s much reluctance anymore to hold back on damaging reports on the Bush administration.”

I promised to look into it. And I did. It turns out that Michelle Malkin and friends have been up to their old tricks again. You can read all about it at this link to Media Channel, but the short version: it’s a bullshit insinuation meant to smear CBS and Logan, who has done some of the finest network reporting on the Bush/Iraq war.

And it worked, My friend, a highly-respected journalist (and rightly so), was gulled into questioning Logan’s integrity.

Now before you jump down her/his throat and say, “Your friend should have known better,” I should mention that my friend’s beat is not Iraq or the Bush administration, or the rightwing. Even so, I’ll concede that perhaps s/he should have known better in this particular instance. But the larger point is that there is so much garbage like this being put out every day – Obama the Manchurian Candidate, Clinton the gossip-monger to name a recent set of whoppers – that it is impossible for anyone who is (rightly) skeptical of all public figures and celebrities to separate the truth from ALL the nonsense the rightwing puts out without serious digging.

And that’s the objective of slime like Malkin and Co., to pollute the discourse so it cannot be trusted, even when it’s telling the truth.

Now, why didn’t CBS broadcast Logan’s report? I suspect that among the reasons were the one they actually gave out, that it is was too graphic for primetime. Click on the link above and make up your own mind. And I think my friend truly underestimates how much all media, especially CBS, self-censors information that is damaging to Bush, even at this late date. But one thing is certain: Logan’s reporting has been excellent and honest. To insinuate that she is serving as a conduit for al Qaeda propaganda is outrageous, even if it’s not surprising behavior from Malin.

The Drumbeat Gets Louder

by digby

It isn’t just us dirty hippy bloggers or even magazine writer James Fallows who are suggesting strongly that the congress step in right now to stop an attack on Iran. Here’s Leonard Weiss, senior science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and Larry Diamond, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution in today’s LA Times:

Iran is still years away from being a nuclear threat, and our experience with “preventive war” in Iraq should teach us a thing or two. Launching another such war without international approval would leave us even more politically isolated and militarily overstretched. Attacking a Middle Eastern country — one much stronger than Iraq and with the ability to cut off oil supplies from the Strait of Hormuz — could inflame the region, intensify Shiite militia attacks on our soldiers in Iraq and stimulate terrorist attacks on Americans and U.S. interests worldwide.

But recklessness, not prudence, has been the hallmark of this administration’s foreign policy. Beyond this, the president and vice president subscribe to what some call the “unitary executive,” which is a fancy way of saying they believe that Congress cannot prevent the president from doing almost anything he wants. The 1973 War Powers Act, passed in the wake of our disastrous war in Vietnam, allows the president to put U.S. troops in a combat situation under certain conditions before obtaining any congressional authorization to do so. When Bush signed the Iraq war resolution, he issued a statement challenging the constitutionality of the War Powers Act, indicating that he could take the nation to war without obeying its restrictions. Unfortunately, even if the president were to agree to the act’s restrictions, he could still attack Iran and have up to 90 days before being required to get congressional authorization for the attack.

What to do? Congress should not wait. It should hold hearings on Iran before the president orders a bombing attack on its nuclear facilities, or orders or supports a provocative act by the U.S. or an ally designed to get Iran to retaliate, and thus further raise war fever.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has warned the administration that it had better seek congressional authorization for any attack on Iran. But we need Senate and House hearings now to put the Bush administration on notice that, in the absence of an imminent military attack or a verified terrorist attack on the United States by Iran, Congress will not support a U.S. military strike on that country. Those hearings should aim toward passage of a law preventing the expenditure of any funds for a military attack on Iran unless Congress has either declared war with that country or has otherwise authorized military action under the War Powers Act.

The law should be attached to an appropriations bill, making it difficult for the president to veto. If he simply claims that he is not bound by the restriction even if he signs it into law, and then orders an attack on Iran without congressional authorization for it, Congress should file a lawsuit and begin impeachment proceedings.

This is precisely what the hippy blogger Arthur Silber has been saying, although he wisely says that Democrats should have the articles of impeachment drafted in advance.

They continue:

It is, of course, possible that the president’s truculent language and actions toward Iran are a bluff, an attempt to rein in its irresponsible behavior.

But the administration’s mendacious and incompetent course of action in taking the nation to war with Iraq gives us no reason to provide the president with the benefit of any doubt. And stiffening economic sanctions — at a time when Iran’s economy is ailing and the regime is losing popular support — offers a better and safer prospect of exerting leverage.

Another war of choice would only pour fuel on the fires of the Middle East. And the history of this administration shows that if Congress does not constrain this president, he could well act recklessly again, in ways that would profoundly damage our national interest.

Setting aside the morality and legality of attacking Iran without provocation (or a trumped up provocation), the situation is even more dangerous today than it was in 2002 when they started the insane drumbeat for war with Iraq without any real justification. This time, the president of the United States is both a proven liar and proven incompetent. You can’t predict what kind of miscalculations people can make when dealing with a superpower that has this kind of reputation and track record. Needless provocation is the last thing the US should be doing right now.

Christy Hardin Smith wrote an impassioned post today, based on my piece and the James Fallows article, entreating people to write to their congressional reps on this issue.

It’s a good idea. This is serious stuff and serious people from all over the place are saying that steps must be taken to stop this now. We can’t let it happen again.

Update: The British left is mobilizing on this. (H/t to PINC)

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Go Rudy!

by digby

We could do much worse than have a president who isn’t afraid to dress in drag.

He’s one of those few men who really looks good as a woman (at least when his make-up is done as artfully as it is here — it really brings out those dimples.)

This is a great step forward for the Republican party and I welcome it.

Update: Rudy has already nabbed one alleged Democrat. Chris Matthews is very, very excited today. He thinks that men in the suburbs will want to vote for Rudy because he is a man’s man.

Update II: Everyone should share this hilarious video with their conservative relatives and friends as a gesture of solidarity with Rudy. I’m sure conservative Christian message boards and blogs would enjoy it too. Who says we can’t all get along?

(BTW: It’s a different occasion than the picture taken above. Seems Rudy is really a Halloween-is-my-favorite-holiday kind of guy.)

Photo courtesy of Howie Klein at Down With Tyranny.
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Admirable Opportunist

by digby

This must be nipped in the bud, right now.

Joe Klein robotically parrots the conventional wisdom that McCain has been admirably consistent in his views and furthermore he says:

I admire McCain’s honorable willingness to take this unpopular position into the 2008 election.

Nonsense. He is fighting with everything he has to get back to where he was before Bush joined his team.

Everyone knows that in order for a Republican to win in 2008 he has to run away from Bush the incompetent and against the cut-n-run Democrats. As the presumptive front-runner, McCain looked ahead and saw that the best way to do this was to run on Bush’s right by saying he never committed the proper number of troops. (“We could have won, if only he’d followed my advice…”)

This wasn’t a stupid move. The conventional wisdom for years has been that there just weren’t enough troops available to make a difference. We heard that any escalation would “break the Army.” McCain logically thought that he could get away with advocating a position that was impossible to achieve and look like a tough guy warmonger compared to all the cowardly little pussycats in the Bush administration and the Democratic Party. (I could see the bumper stickers — “Make America proud again.”)

But he made a big mistake last October when he offered up a specific number of 20,000, — and then Bush decided to take his advice. Since then he has been all over the place trying to put himself back on Bush’s right — but it’s very difficult since he openly advocated for 20,000 more troops just last fall and now he’s getting exactly what he wanted.

None of this has anything to do with being “admirably consistent” on the war and everything to do with political strategy. Many people of all political stripes have said that Bush made a huge tactical error in refusing to commit enough troops to keep down an insurgency in the early days. (It’s possible that he really thought he could bully the rest of the world into sending in more troops as necessary, but obviously that didn’t quite work out.) McCain has made a fetish of it, however, since 2003 — knowing full well that there were not enough troops available to make a difference.

It has, in other words, been almost entirely cynical and oppportunistic. Meanwhile, he supported Bush’s presidential bid in 2004 like he was his BFF.

No, McCain gets no credit for being consistent. His “consistent” cry for more troops was an empty proposition until he made a fatal mistake and asked for a specific number that was just few enough that Bush could actually fulfill his wish. (If I didn’t know better, I’d think the whole thing was a perfect Rove to Weaver coup de grace.)

Since then, as Greg Sargent illustrates here, he’s backtracked and zig-zagged like a snowboarder on acid trying to find that sweet spot where he can once again run as the “manwhowouldhavewonIraq” if the hippies and the Codpiece had only done what he said.

There is nothing at all admirable about any of it, either as a political strategy or a sign of leadership. Iraq, as we all know, was a failure from the moment this nation embarked on an illegal, preventive war of aggression. Everything follows from that. Mccain’s nonsense about magically conjuring hundreds of thousands of soldiers from thin air to win the war either prospectively or retrospectively is just a cheap political ploy.

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Death And Destruction

Iraq? Iran? Shia? Sunni? Al Qaeda? The U.S. Military?

No.

Bud Light, Doritos, Coca Cola, careerbuilder.com, King Pharmaceuticals, General Motors, Panasonic, and E*Trade.

Quiddity watched the SuperBowl ads so you didn’t have to. See the depressing summary.
UPDATE: Quiddity also links to a NYT article Super Bowl Ads of Cartoonish Violence, Perhaps Reflecting Toll of War.

Fasten Your Seatbelts

by digby

Matt Ortega, posting at FDL writes:

From NBC Investigative Reporter Lisa Myers’ report on MSNBC, entitled “Did Iraq contractor fleece American taxpayers?” The answer is, well, I’ll let you figure it out. (Also, appended at the bottom of her report is a statement from Parsons CEO Jim McNulty.)

WASHINGTON – New revelations have emerged about how tens of millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted in Iraq. A new report by government watchdogs singles out a big American contractor — Parsons — for shoddy work. Investigators charge that Parsons managed to turn a flagship project to help train Iraqi police into a hall of horrors using taxpayer money.

The Baghdad Police Academy was supposed to be a showcase to train Iraqi police — key to the U.S. strategy.

Yeah, and how did that work out?

Instead, Wednesday’s report says the American construction company turned it into a disaster from the start: incomplete and substandard designs, shoddy construction and no real quality control.

“This is the worst project that my inspectors have visited,” says Stuart Bowen, inspector general for Iraq.

This should be good:

Chairman Waxman Invites Witnesses for Waste, Fraud, and Abuse Hearing

Rep. Waxman has requested the testimony of three key witnesses regarding Iraq reconstruction efforts at an Oversight Committee hearing on waste, fraud, and abuse, to be held the week of February 6th.

L. Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, has been requested to testify regarding reconstruction activities during his tenure at the CPA, as well as an audit report from January 2005 that concluded that more than $8.8 billion in cash under CPA’s control was disbursed without adequate financial controls or accountability.

Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, has been requested to testify regarding the audits and field inspections conducted by his office related to reconstruction activities in Iraq.

Timothy Carney, Coordinator for Iraqi Transitional Assistance, has been requested to testify regarding the newly created position of Coordinator, his role in assisting the Iraqi government with reconstruction efforts, and his prior service in Iraq.

Between this and Monsignor Tim Russert on the stand (hopefully) February 6th promises to be a very exciting day.

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CFB’s

by digby

Memo to reporters: when George Will, Chris Matthews and other pundits complain that Clinton’s major problem is being too “strident” it’s a similar type of slur as saying Obama is “articulate.” This is a dogwhistle term; in this case it means “castrating feminist bitch.”

I’ve never heard any of them ever complain that tub-thumping, preaching Republicans, male or female, are “strident” even though they most certainly are if you look at the literal meaning of the word:

stri·dent

1.making or having a harsh sound; grating; creaking: strident insects; strident hinges.
2. having a shrill, irritating quality or character: a strident tone in his writings.

For some reason it’s only liberal women who evoke this word among the chatterers.

You’d think that Hillary Clinton, of all people, would have put that stereotyping to rest, considering her painfully public marital problems and centrist-ish policy positions. But no. She’s the top Dem-Fem and therefore any passion or strength sounds “harsh” and “grating” to the delicate ears of the beltway mavens.

Poor lil fellas; it sure doesn’t take much to make their little minds shrivel, does it?

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A Fourth Branch?

by digby

We have all discussed the unprecedented power of Dick Cheney in this administration ad nauseum, but this post from David Kurtz at TPM introduced a whole new element I hadn’t been aware of.

I assumed that Cheney believed the power of the Vice President (such as it is) derived from the executive branch. Apparently, however, he believes the office of the Vice President has power of its own that derives from both the legislative and executive branch:

I’ve gone from being open to the idea of an Imperial Vice Presidency to being convinced that historians will debate whether something approaching a Cheney-led coup d’etat has occurred, in which some of the powers of the Executive were extra-constitutionally usurped by the Office of the Vice President.

Last week, in trying to break the lock on who actually works in the OVP–which the Vice President refuses to reveal–the guys at Muckraker stumbled across this entry from a government directory known as the “Plum Book”:

The Vice Presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch, but is attached by the Constitution to the latter. The Vice Presidency performs functions in both the legislative branch (see article I, section 3 of the Constitution) and in the executive branch (see article II, and amendments XII and XXV, of the Constitution, and section 106 of title 3 of the United States Code).

It appears that Cheney’s office submitted this entry in lieu of a list of its employees, as federal agencies must do. It sounds like something Cheney’s current chief of staff, David Addington, might have written. Cheney and Addington have been the among the most powerful proponents of the theory of a “unitary executive,” but there are indications that they have also advanced, though less publicly, a theory of a constitutionally distinct and independent vice presidency.

WTF?

I had always known that Cheney was running the show, but I assumed he did it purely by using the power of the executive branch and manipulation of the presdient. I had no idea that he might have secretly carved out a previously unenumerated institution that derives its power from both the legislative and executive branches. What in the hell has really been going on in this administration?

Larry Wilkerson called it a “cabal” around Dick Cheney. But it seems to have been more than that. They created a shadow government and developed a constitutional theory to support it.

The undemocratic streak in the Republican Party continues apace. Each time they get power, they seek ways to weaken the nation’s understanding of what is acceptable in our democracy and what our constitution provides. (And keep in mind that it is entirely self-serving — they will turn all of that around without a moment’s thought when it suits them to challenge the opposition.)

The Libby trial has provided an excellent opening to look into this issue. Kurtz writes:

A hearing on the constitutional role of the vice president might be an excellent place to start. From all indications, Cheney has amassed considerable power due to his experience and savvy vis-a-vis the President’s relative lack thereof. But that is a separate issue from the constitutional role of the OVP, and whether, or in what ways, various statutory regimens, particularly in the national security arena, apply to the OVP.

By custom and tradition, the Vice President’s role had been circumscribed by how little express power and authority the Constitution granted the position. Hence, all the jokes over the years about the vice presidency. But in a move that is decidedly anti-conservative, in the conventional sense, Cheney moved to fill the void. I fear that what we will eventually find are structural flaws that were deliberately exploited by the OVP, which in turn further undermined constitutional and statutory structures.

This is important and the congress should not let it pass unexamined. The nation needs to know if some precedent has been set for making a vice-president a power center outside the commonly understood three branches of government.

It’s something out of a political thriller, I know, and it’s hard to wrap your arms around. But there is a part of me that wonders if it wasn’t a plan. It never seemed likely to me that the big money boys of the GOP would trust their fortunes to the blithering fool they set forth as president. Let’s just say that I wouldn’t be surprised if some conversations before the fact took place.

Kurtz also wonders how, if this is true, Cheney deals with the supremely arrogant decider. It’s not hard for me to imagine at all. Arrogant morons are very easy to manipulate. You just tell them what to think and then tell them they thought of it.

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