Month: March 2007

Five Stages Of Spin

by digby

If you aren’t reading Mahablog (along with TPM, of course) on the US Attorney scandal, you should be. She has lot’s of great analysis and sources in many posts over the last few days.

I particularly like this one:

You’ve no doubt heard of the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). I’ve come to realize something like that goes on among righties whenever a new Republican scandal washes ashore. I propose that the five stages of reaction to a scandal are:

1. Ignoring
2. Belittling
3. Blaming the Media
4. Evoking Bill Clinton.
5. Boredom

That last stage allows the sufferer to return to stage 1 and ignore the issue. Also note that righties don’t necessarily go through these stages in order or even one stage at a time.

Haha. I think she leaves out one important stage — righteous indignation and evocations of unamerican, unpatriotic motives on the part of critics. Certainly, when we criticize the Justice Department for its political purge of Republicans with integrity, we are prove how much we hate the troops.

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Depends On The Specific Meaning Of “Specific”

by digby

President Pissypants goes on the record, which may be a mistake. (C&L has the video):

Q Thank you. The Attorney General acknowledged yesterday that there were mistakes in the firing of prosecutors. What is his future in your cabinet? Do you have confidence in him? And more importantly — or just as important — how effective can he be in Congress going forward when he’s lost a lot of confidence among Democrats and doesn’t have any defenders among Republicans?

PRESIDENT BUSH: I do have confidence in Attorney General Al Gonzales. I talked to him this morning, and we talked about his need to go up to Capitol Hill and make it very clear to members in both political parties why the Justice Department made the decisions it made, making very clear about the facts. And he’s right, mistakes were made. And I’m, frankly, not happy about it, because there is a lot of confusion over what really has been a customary practice by the Presidents. U.S. attorneys and others serve at the pleasure of the President. Past administrations have removed U.S. attorneys; they’re right to do so.

The Justice Department recommended a list of U.S. attorneys. I believe the reasons why were entirely appropriate. And yet this issue was mishandled to the point now where you’re asking me questions about it in Mexico, which is fine. If I were you, I’d ask the same question. This is an issue that — let me just say, Al was right, mistakes were made, and he’s going to go up to Capitol Hill to correct them.

I appreciate the fact that he’s taken some action, because anytime anybody goes up to Capitol Hill, they’ve got to make sure they fully understand the facts, and how they characterize the issue to members of Congress. And the fact that both Republicans and Democrats feel like that there was not straightforward communication troubles me, and it troubles the Attorney General, so he took action. And he needs to continue to take action.

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Q Thank you, Mr. President, President Calderon. On the dismissal of U.S. attorneys, there have been allegations that political motivations were involved. Is political loyalty to your administration an appropriate factor? And when you talked to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last year, what did you say, and what did you direct him to do?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Thanks, Kelly. I’ve heard those allegations about political decision-making; it’s just not true. Secondly, just so you know, I get asked — I get complaints all the time from members of Congress on a variety of subjects — this senator, this congressperson so-and-so — there’s occasionally frustration with the executive branch. And they will pull me aside and say, are you aware of this, are you aware of that? And I did receive complaints about U.S. attorneys.

I specifically remember one time I went up to the Senate and senators were talking about the U.S. attorneys. I don’t remember specific names being mentioned, but I did say to Al last year — you’re right, last fall — I said, have you heard complaints about AGs, I have — I mean, U.S. attorneys, excuse me — and he said, I have. But I never brought up a specific case nor gave him specific instructions.

Q Sir, might he have inferred that you discussed it with him was a need for him to take action?

PRESIDENT BUSH: You’re going to have to ask Al that question, but as I say, I discuss with my Cabinet officials complaints I hear. When members of the Senate come up and say to me, I’ve got a complaint, I think it’s entirely appropriate and necessary for me to pass those complaints on. I don’t every single time, but people view their moment with the President sometimes as an opportunity to unload their frustrations about how things may be working in their state — or congresspersons how things may be working in their district. And whether it be the Attorney General or the Secretary of State or other members of my Cabinet, I pass those complaints on at times.

I guess it depends on what the meaning of the phrase “specific cases” is:

Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, told reporters traveling with Bush in Mexico on Tuesday that the White House had received complaints about U.S. attorneys’ handling of election fraud cases in New Mexico, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and Bush had a brief conversation with Gonzales about the complaints in October.

All of these alleged complaints were bullshit Karl Rove obsessions that Bush just happened to pass-on the month before the election. Uh huh.(Here again, is Rove speaking to the Republican National Lawyers Association last year.)

It’s hard to know how Bush speaks to his minions in private. But we do have a clue about how he speaks to foreign leaders when he doesn’t know the mic is on:

Bush: Yo Blair How are you doing?
Blair: I’m just…
Bush: You’re leaving?
Blair: No, no, no not yet. On this trade thingy…[inaudible]
Bush: yeah I told that to the man
Blair: Are you planning to say that here or not?
Bush: If you want me to
Blair: Well, it’s just that if the discussion arises…
Bush: I just want some movement.
Blair: Yeah
Bush: Yesterday we didn’t see much movement
Blair: No, no, it may be that it’s not, it maybe that it’s impossible
Bush: I am prepared to say it
Blair: But it’s just I think what we need to be an opposition
Bush: Who is introducing the trade
Blair: Angela
Bush: Tell her to call ’em
Blair: Yes
Bush: Tell her to put him on them on the spot.Thanks for the sweaters it’s awfully thoughtful of you
Blair: It’s a pleasure
Bush: I know you picked it out yourself
Blair: Oh, absoultely, in fact I knitted it myself
BUSH: “Right . . . What about Kofi? That seems odd. I don’t like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything else happens.”
BLAIR: “I think the thing that is really difficult is you can’t stop this unless you get this international presence agreed.” . . .
Bush: Yeah
Blair: I don’t know what you guys have talked about but as I say I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is but you need that done quickly because otherwise it will spiral
Bush: I think Condi is going to go pretty soon
Blair: But that’s that’s that’s all that matters. But if you, you see it will take some time to get that together
Bush: Yeah, yeah
Blair: But at least it gives people…
Bush: It’s a process, I agree. I told her your offer to…
Blair: Well…it’s only if I mean… you know. If she’s got a…, or if she needs the ground prepared as it were… Because obviously if she goes out, she’s got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk
Bush: You see, the … thing is what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over
Blair: [inaudible]
Bush: [inaudible]
Blair: Syria
Bush: Why?
Blair: Because I think this is all part of the same thing
Bush: Yeah.
Blair: What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way…
Bush: Yeah, yeah, he is sweet
Blair: He is honey. And that’s what the whole thing is about. It’s the same with Iraq
Bush: I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to Bashad [Bashir Assad] and make something happen
Blair: Yeah

Notice how he orders the prime minister of Britain about, tasks him to give the president of Germany her marching orders and then talks about the UN Secretary general like his the gay houseboy in “La Cage Aux Folles.” Does the man in that excerpt sound like the type who wouldn’t inappropriately give his Attorney General orders? And do you suppose that Attorney General who owes his entire professional career to this president wouldn’t get the message?

George W. bush thinks every utterance is an order. He is not the president, he’s “the decider.”

This is quintessential codpiece:

The American people must understand when I said that we need to be patient, that I meant it. And we’re going to be there for a while. I don’t know the exact moment when we leave, David, but it’s not until the mission is complete. The world must know that this administration will not blink in the face of danger and will not tire when it comes to completing the missions that we said we would do. The world will learn that when the United States is harmed, we will follow through.

The world will see that when we put a coalition together that says “Join us,” I mean it. And when I ask others to participate, I mean it.

Sure, it’s totally believable that when that guy “mentioned” these complaints about voter fraud in the month before the election, his Attorney General just ignored him.

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It’s The Reason, Stupid

by digby

The WSJ editorial page published a typical fun-house mirror version of reality this morning when they wrote about Clinton’s firings, suggesting that he did it in order to stop the Rostenkowski prosecution and Whitewater investigations. They gloss over the salient fact that Rosty went to jail — and that even a partisan Republican independent counsel with a blank check couldn’t find any wrongdoing in Whitewater.

Regardless of the WSJ‘s distortions about Clinton, as Joe Conason points out in his column today in the NY Observer there was a precedent for the particular brand of politicization of the Justice Department we are seeing today. Poppy had a little episode that might have been the prototype:

There was once another Republican prosecutor who insisted on behaving professionally instead of obeying partisan hints from the White House. His name was Charles A. Banks, and the Washington press corps said nothing when he was punished for his honesty by the administration of the first President Bush.

The cautionary tale of Chuck Banks begins during the summer of 1992, as the Presidential contest entered its final months with Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton leading incumbent President George H.W. Bush.

At the time, Mr. Banks had already served for five years as the United States Attorney in Little Rock. As an active Republican who had run for Congress and still aspired to higher office, he counted Mr. Clinton among his political adversaries. The first President Bush had recently selected him as a potential nominee for the federal bench. Nothing could have better served Mr. Banks’ personal interests than a chance to stop the Clintons and preserve the Bush Presidency.

In September 1992, a Republican activist employed by the Resolution Trust Corporation provided that opportunity by fabricating a criminal referral naming the Clintons as witnesses in a case against the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association (the small Arkansas savings and loan owned by Whitewater partner and Clinton friend James McDougal).

The referral prepared by L. Jean Lewis lacked merit—as determined by both Mr. Banks and the top F.B.I. agent in his office—but Ms. Lewis commenced a persistent crusade for action against the hated Clintons. The F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney repeatedly rejected or ignored her crankish entreaties.

Eventually, however, officials in the Bush White House and the Justice Department heard whispers about the Lewis referral. Obviously, that document had the potential to save the President from defeat in November by smearing the Clintons as corrupt participants in a sweetheart land deal. (They had actually lost a large sum of money in Whitewater.)

That fall, Edith Holiday, secretary to the Bush cabinet, asked Attorney General William Barr whether he knew anything about such a referral. Although Mr. Barr knew nothing, he quickly sent an inquiry to the F.B.I. Weeks later, the President’s counsel, C. Boyden Gray, posed a similar improper question to a top Resolution Trust Corp. official.

The queries and hints from above created intense pressure on Mr. Banks to act on the Lewis referral despite his opinion, shared by the F.B.I., that her work was sloppy and biased. After Mr. Barr ordered him to act on the referral no later than two weeks before Election Day, he replied with a roar of conscience.

“I know that in investigations of this type,” he wrote in a remarkable memo to his boss, “the first steps, such as issuance of … subpoenas … will lead to media and public inquiries of matters that are subject to absolute privacy. Even media questions about such an investigation in today’s modern political climate all too often publicly purport to ‘legitimize what can’t be proven’ ….

“I must opine that after such a lapse of time, the insistence for urgency in this case appears to suggest an intentional or unintentional attempt to intervene into the political process of the upcoming presidential election ….

“For me personally to participate in an investigation that I know will or could easily lead to the above scenario … is inappropriate. I believe it amounts to prosecutorial misconduct and violates the most basic fundamental rule of Department of Justice policy.”

Needless to say, Banks no longer had a career in GOP politics. And L. Jean Lewis later gave one of American history’s most memorable testimonies before congress when she “fainted” under Democratic questioning. (She and her husband were both rewarded with jobs in the Junior Bush administration.)

Unfortunately the GOP spin is penetrating. I was talking to a fellow liberal this morning who has received all his news about the US Attorney scandal from TV and this is what he said, “Well, they all do it, right? Didn’t Clinton fire all the prosecutors so he could put his own people in?”

So, I would suggest that we stop discussing this in terms of a “purge” or “firings” because the truth is that the firings in themselves are not the problem. It’s the reasons for the firings. These prosecutors were removed because they failed to prosecute Democrats for political reasons — or they insisted on prosecuting Republicans on corruption charges. (One was removed in order to give a patronage job to Karl Rove’s little buddy and the fact that it was in Arkansas should not be ignored. Hillary Clinton is running for president, after all.)

And you have to wonder how many other GOP prosecutors played ball with Karl Rove on this stuff. I think a cloud hangs over the whole department in light of this. These recent firings aren’t the only cases of political interference:

Former Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) said Tuesday that White House political adviser Karl Rove told him in the spring of 2001 that he should limit his choice for U.S. attorney in Chicago to someone from Illinois.

According to Fitzgerald, who was determined to bring in a prosecutor from outside the state, Rove “just said we don’t want you going outside the state. We don’t want to be moving U.S. attorneys around.

Fitzgerald said he believes Rove was trying to influence the selection in reaction to pressure from Rep. Dennis Hastert, then speaker of the House, and allies of then-Gov. George Ryan, who knew Fitzgerald was seeking someone from outside Illinois to attack political corruption.

Fitzgerald said he announced his choice, Patrick Fitzgerald (no relation), a New Yorker, on May 13, a Mother’s Day Sunday, to pre-empt any opposition.

A year or so later, according to Peter Fitzgerald, Rove “said to me that Fitzgerald appointment got great headlines for you, but it ticked off the base.” Peter Fitzgerald said he believes the “base” was Illinois Republican insiders upset at the prosecutor’s assault on corruption.

Aides to Hastert say they never heard about any directives regarding the appointment.

“He [Sen. Fitzgerald] set up his own process, never talked to anyone about the process and then released the name before he told the president,” said Mike Stokke, who was Hastert’s deputy chief of staff at the time.

Oh, the irony.

Update: The WSJ says that the Washington State US`Attorney is a Democrat:

But it should have been enough to prompt Mr. McKay, a Democrat, to investigate, something he declined to do, apparently on grounds that he had better things to do.

Mckay is a Republican, isn’t he?

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Conduits

by digby

I wrote earlier about the Washington State Republican party’s effort to phony up a voter fraud scandal where none existed. And I had some strong suspicions that this GOP voter fraud fraud is a very special Karl Rove initiative.

Well, guess what:

The Seattle Times reports tonight that a chairman of the Washington state Republican Party with ties to Karl Rove pressured U.S. Attorney John McKay to launch a criminal probe during the hotly contested 2004 governor’s race, which had been certified in favor of the Democratic candidate. The ex-chairman, Chris Vance, “said that he was in contact with the White House’s political office at the time.”

Vance said then-U.S. Attorney John McKay made it clear he would not discuss whether his office was investigating allegations of voter fraud in the election. He said McKay cut off the conversation. “I thought it was part of my job, to be a conduit,” Vance, who now operates a consulting business, said in a telephone interview. “We had a Republican secretary of state, a Republican prosecutor in King County and a Republican U.S. attorney, and no one was doing anything.“

Vance’s revelation may be new evidence of a wider level of involvement by Karl Rove in the U.S. Attorney purge. Vance and Rove reportedly worked closely on state politics. The Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2004, Dino Rossi, was the candidate “Vance and Rove wanted,” the Seattle Times noted in 2005. Rove and Vance also reportedly worked to get Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-WA) to launch a Senate bid. McKay is a Republican and was appointed by President Bush. The alleged voter fraud he was being pressured to probe had already been investigated by prosecutors in his office and the FBI, who “never found any evidence of criminal conduct.” Nevertheless, he was pressured both by a GOP official and Rep. Doc Hastings’s (R-WA) office to convene a federal grand jury.

I can’t help but bring up again how we were just treated to day after day of Republicans self-righteously howling about how poor little Scooterpie was railroaded by an out of control prosecutor who shouldn’t have pursued him once he knew that there was no underlying crime.

These people are simply breathtaking in their total, all encompassing intellectual and moral corruption.

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Wankerrific

by digby

Atrios names Bob Shrum Wanker of the day based upon this post by Will Bunch. It’s a good call:

WASHINGTON (AP) – Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was skeptical about voting for the Iraq war resolution and was pushed into it by advisers looking out for his political future, according to an upcoming book by one of his former consultants.

Democratic strategist Bob Shrum writes in his memoir to be published in June that he regrets advising Edwards to give President Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq. He said if Edwards had followed his instincts instead of the advice of political professionals, he would have been a stronger presidential candidate in 2004.

[…]

Shrum writes that Edwards, then a North Carolina senator, called his foreign policy and political advisers together in his Washington living room in the fall of 2002 to get their advice. Edwards was “skeptical, even exercised” about the idea of voting yes and his wife Elizabeth was forcefully against it, according to Shrum.

But Shrum said the consensus among the advisers was that Edwards, just four years in office, did not have the credibility to vote against the resolution and had to support it to be taken seriously on national security. Shrum said Edwards’ facial expressions showed he did not like where he was being pushed to go.

Like Bunch I don’t blame Edwards alone for this. After all, the entire House and Senate presidential hopeful club adhered to this advice, not just Shrum. They all followed that advice because it wasn’t just good old Bob wearing his loser presidential campaign hat:

The 2004 election proved that the Democratic Party needs leaders—not poll-driven consultants, who too often sacrifice principle for what appears expedient.

For example, Kerry voted for Bush’s Iraq war resolution, following the “guidance” offered by Democracy Corps, a non-profit “dedicated to making the government of the United States more responsive to the American people.”

On October 3, 2002, prior to the Iraq war resolution votes, Democracy Corps (founded in 1999 by James Carville, Stan Greenberg and Bob Shrum) advised Capitol Hill Democrats: “This decision [to support or oppose an Iraq war resolution] will take place in a setting where voters, by 10 points, prefer to vote for a member who supports a resolution to authorize force (50 to 40 percent).”

The mistake was not only in the rank immorality of voting for this ridiculous war (on the basis of 10 points in the polls, no less.) It was also a huge tactical political error. If the war went well, it was going to be nearly impossible to beat Bush in 2004 and everyone knew it. If the war was going badly, then a vote for it was going to tie these candidates up in knots and make them look weak and irresolute, which is exactly what happened to Kerry. There was no margin in Democratic presidential candidates voting for the war.

These so-called strategists were wrong on the substance and wrong on the strategy on the most important vote in decades. You’d think they’d be just a little bit more humble.

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Legitimate Beef

by digby

Matt Stoller has an excellent op-ed on The Politico site about the FOX debate issue that I think is worth reading:

We argued that Fox News is not a news channel, but a propaganda outlet that regularly distorts, spins, and falsifies information. Second, Fox News is heavily influenced or even controlled by the Republican Party itself. As such, we believe that Fox News on the whole functions as a surrogate operation for the GOP. Treating Fox as a legitimate news channel extends the Republican Party’s ability to swift-boat and discredit our candidates. In other words, Fox News is a direct pipeline of misinformation from the GOP leadership into the traditional press.

Thankfully, Fox News immediately proved our point with a press release after the debate cancellation that made the following remarkable claim: “News organizations will want to think twice before getting involved in the Nevada Democratic caucus which appears to be controlled by radical, fringe, out-of-state interest groups, not the Nevada Democratic Party.”

That certainly sounds like an unbiased news network, doesn’t it?

It is incomprehensible to me that we even have to make the argument that FOX News is a white house propaganda outfit and Republican Party adjunct. It is obvious to anyone with eyes and ears. You can argue that that’s ok, that they have a right to have a “point of view” and that conservatives feel they don’t get a fair shake in the media so they need an outlet that speaks to their concerns. Fine. But please, please don’t try to sell me this nonsense that they aren’t biased or that they are a legitimate news organization. It’s ridiculous on its face.

Eric Boehlert has another good piece on this today. Here’s a little taste:

Fox News is still fighting the last war. Busy arguing that it truly is fair and balanced, Fox News execs haven’t noticed that, thanks to the Nevada showdown, the real question now on the table is not about Fox News’ fairness. It’s about whether or not Fox News is a legitimate news organization. That’s precisely where Ailes does not want this media branding debate to go. And that’s why the Fox News team has exerted so much energy in recent years trying to bully any doubters. It’s the reason a Fox News flack swung back wildly in October 2003, when a former producer there, Charlie Reina, wrote publicly about the daily internal Fox News memo that instructs staffers how to spin new stories, often in a partisan manner. Rather than address Reina’s factual points, in what must have been a corporate media first, Fox News VP-news operations Sharri Berg issued a public statement in which she quoted an anonymous Fox News employee who belittled Reina as being a nobody and worse, he “NEVER had a job in the newsroom,” which was supposed to raise doubts about Reina’s credibility. (Reina tells me Berg had to resort to using an anonymous quote because Berg herself knew the statement about Reina never working in the newsroom was false.) It’s why when Ben Smith, blogging for the New York Daily News, observed that Fox News projects an “unmissable, insistent slant,” Fox News responded with an oddly personal, schoolyard-quality taunt: “Ben has struggled to regain relevance since leaving the New York Observer, which is why you need a blood hound to find his column. We’re happy he’s making more than the $29,000 he made at the Observer … then again, you get what you pay for.”

As they say, read on, if only for an amazing rundown of nasty, puerile FOX tantrums whenever anyone criticizes them. I think Ann Coulter must be advising them on rhetoric.

Unfortunately there are some establishment political and media figures who are also up in arms about this because the crazy fringe has infiltrated their friendly little club and insisted that Democratic primary candidates not play ball with a Republican propaganda arm. Well, boo hoo. I have rarely heard the kind of derisive, contemptuous language used by the mainstream media (or certainly the Republicans) to describe the base of the GOP that I hear commonly used to describe people like me. I don’t make a huge deal out of that, if they feel they need to disparage me in order to be accepted by Americans who don’t support them then I guess there’s not much I can do about it.

And there’s probably not much we can do if the media and party establishment wants to kiss Rupert Murdoch’s butt and brownnose Drudge on an everyday basis. It makes no sense to me for either commercial or political reasons, but I guess it’s part of their social network and they are such conformists they can’t even look out for their own interests.

But I am damned if I’m going to fail to exercize legitimate grassroots political power in the nomination process of my party, which is what happened in this case. It’s called “democracy” and if certain political poohbah’s and media mavens don’t like it, that’s just tough. Candidates vying for the nomination of the Democratic Party have to respond to the voters. Contrary to Kondracke and O’Reilly’s hysterical rantings, that’s as far from Stalinsim and Nazism as you can get.

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Seeding The Future

by digby

I have speculated that Rove was pursuing a phony voter fraud strategy for 2006 and was thwarted by his boy’s catastrophic governance and some US Attorneys who refused to file charges.

Here’s what one the ousted US Attorney from Washington has to say on that:

Former U.S. Attorney John McKay said Monday night he was “stunned” to hear President Bush told Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last October that Bush had received complaints about U.S. attorneys who were not energetically investigating voter-fraud cases.

McKay doesn’t know if Republican unhappiness over his handling of the 2004 election cost him his job as U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, but the new revelations contained in a Washington Post story are sure to reignite questions about McKay’s dismissal and whether it was connected to Washington state’s hotly contested governor’s race.

“Had anyone at the Justice Department or the White House ordered me to pursue any matter criminally in the 2004 governor’s election, I would have resigned,” McKay said. “There was no evidence, and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury.”

For those who didn’t follow the whole saga in Washington state (like me) this article gives a full rundown of what happened and the Republicans’ insistence that the election was stolen by the Democrats despite no proof that any such thing happened. The Justice Department never “ordered” the US Attorney to do anything. Rove isn’t that bold. He had local surrogates do it, just as he did in New Mexico. And when Mckay refused to play ball he was first denied a federal judgeship and then fired.

As Josh Marshall noted last night, the GOP cries of voter fraud go back a long way. It’s an extension of their old habits of disenfranchising blacks in the south and latinos in the southwest (as Joe Conason outlines here.)

But since the 2000 election the Democrats have been the ones complaining about voter irregularities and I think that Rove recognized that he could deftly twist the public awareness we created and turn it back on us. His problem was that the Democrats won the election by too wide a margin in 2006 for them to cry fraud in any systematic way — and some US Attorneys refused to play ball.

If Rove had been successful, however, I suspect that he could have pulled off something even more subversive for 2008. He could have had in place pliant US Attorneys who are willing to keep open all of these cases of “voter fraud” and pursue new ones from the 2008 election. If a Republican wins the presidency, no harm no foul, they just keep pressing, suppressing the vote and pushing the new meme about Democrats stealing elections. If a Dem wins, they exert political pressure to keep these US Attorneys in place for reasons of “justice department integrity” and a Democratic president finds him or herself battling their own Justice Department — which has been salted with Karl Rove’s partisan clones who cannot be fired.

The problem for Karl was that a handful of US Attorneys with integrity wouldn’t be pressured with the usual inducements and so they had to be forced out. The problem for Democrats, however, is that if they don’t handle this carefully, the scenario I outlined above could happen anyway. You can bet that nothing any Republican says now will stop them from screeching like rabid howler monkeys if a Democratic president tries to replace even one Bushh appointed US Attorney in 2009.

Remember, Republicans have retired the concept of hypocrisy. Consistency and intellectual integrity are for losers.

For instance, Marshall notes today:

I’m not sure if it’s more a matter of entertainment or just grim confirmation, but it is worth cataloging all the Republicans who are now willing to come forward and spin out arguments about how federal prosecutors always pursue political investigations and are little more than cat’s paws for the party apparatus of the president who appointed them. Rule of law. Rule of law. Rule of law. I’ve said it a number of times in recent months: the rule of law and creeping authoritarianism has to be at the center of any sensible politics today. The degradation is so great and the bar has fallen so low.

No kidding. And keep in mind that these same people were saying just last week that the administration should not have allowed a special prosecutor to handle the Libby matter and should have left it to career prosecutors who can be trusted because they are sworn to uphold the law over all political concerns.

It’s surprising they don’t get whiplash.

Update: Marshall caught Pat Buchanan saying that there was nothing wrong with the president passing along his concerns about “crimes” being committed to the AG. No word on whether there’s any problem with the president asking his AG to pursue completely bogus claims of voter fraud in order to maintain his party’s political power, do favors for cronies and punish his enemies.

But then Buchanan was one of Nixon’s favorite boys, isn’t he? Using the Justice Department to punish your political enemies and cover up your own crimes is SOP to these guys.

And they wonder why we balked when it was revealed that they were doing surveillance on American citizens without any oversight…

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Smokin’ The Good Stuff

by digby

Yesterday on The Situation Room, JC Watts insisted that the Democrats are just as unhappy with their candidates as Republicans are:

WATTS: Wolf, this is typical primary politics, I think on the Republican and Democrat side.

I can say the same thing for a Democratic candidate. But it doesn’t mean that the Democrats are not going to be united when they get a candidate.

(CROSSTALK)

WATTS: And I — and I think the Republicans are going to be the same way. We’re…

CARVILLE: But, J.C., I’m saying something different.

WATTS: We’re going to…

CARVILLE: Democrats are satisfied, by and — by and large, are satisfied with their choices. Republicans are dissatisfied with their choices.

WATTS: Well, I — I think you probably would find the same dissatisfaction on both sides, because, you know, you’re always going to find about 20, 25 percent of the electorate on either side is going to be unhappy, regardless of who you have in the race.

I guess he was tippling that morning with Andrea Mitchell, because he was just as wrong as she was when she insisted later that a majority of people want Scooter Libby pardoned. When in doubt, repeat what you overheard in the powder room at Fred Hiatt’s house, I guess.

It is really incomprehensible to these people that Republicans are unpopular or are at each other’s throats. They are still the “grown-ups” as far as DC is concerned, while the grubby American public are all a bunch of wild-eyed revolutionaries who just don’t get it.

And speaking of living in an alternate universe, check out what Carville said in the same segment:

CARVILLE: And — and I also think that there’s a good chance that the Republican nominee is not even in the race yet.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: So, give me some names.

CARVILLE: Jeb Bush. He’s — he’s the only person I know who could unify the Republican Party.

Carville really needs to stop listening his wife (or sharing the bottle with Watts and Mitchell.) She is practically the last fan of the Bush family in the entire country, having been their glorified servant for most of the last two decades. Even Republicans (other than Mary Matalin and Fred Barnes) would rather stick kabab skewers in their eyes than have another Bush for president. These people are more out of touch than I realized.

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Hats Off In Swamp

by digby

Jay Carney at TIME takes his hat off to Josh Marshall and the blogosphere for “having been right in their suspicions about this story [the US Attorney purge] from the beginning,” while he was rudely dismissing their claims with this:

Of course! It all makes perfect conspiratorial sense!

Except for one thing: in this case some liberals are seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist.

It’s good of Carney to admit his mistake. It’s far more than most MSM writers ever do when dealing with the blogosphere.

But this episode perfectly illustrates the problem with the mainstream media’s coverage during the last six years. The Bush administration has been the most secretive and ruthlessly partisan in recent memory and yet the Washington bureau chief for TIME reflexively assumed a benign explanation for what was obviously at least a questionable process.

Here’s Carney:

When this story first surfaced, I thought the Bush White House and Justice Department were guilty of poorly executed acts of crass political patronage. I called some Democrats on the Hill; they were “concerned”, but this was not a priority.

One of the silliest conventions of modern journalism is that the press can’t tell a story if “the other side” isn’t screaming about it. Republicans are always screaming (and often are the ones feeding the scandal to the press in the first place) so it’s very easy to find that hook. Democrats don’t have the institutional infrastructure to successfully manufacture scandals and are often slow off the mark in seeing real ones, so the press doesn’t feel they have any reason to pursue them. (And I guess stories about crass political patronage, even in the justice department, just aren’t considered news anymore. That’s a sad comment all by itself.)

In the case of the US Attorney purge, it was left to the victim to be brave enough to come forward before the mainstream press saw a story — and likely it was mostly because the man who did it was an evangelical Christian and a Republican that made them take notice.

The problem here is that many in the press seem to see their role as some sort of referee and conduit for the two parties instead of independent fact finders and purveyors of truth.

Here’s an echo of that from Richard Wolff a couple of weeks ago:

in my humble view, I think the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards in covering politics in general. And the, um, the interesting thing in, in looking at the political coverage as people try to guess what we do is, is that they want us to play a role that really isn’t our role.

Our- our role is to ask questions and get information. But it- the press briefing isn’t Prime Minister’s question time. It’s not a chance for the opposition to take on the government and grill them to a point where they hand- throw their hands up and surrender. Now, obviously there’s a contentious spirit there- we’re trying to get information, but, it’s not a political exercise, it’s a journalistic exercise, and I think often the blogs are looking for us to be political advocates, more than journalistic ones.

I like Wolff and Carney generally and they aren’t the worst offenders by far. But this attitude is pervasive in Washington circles and it’s causing some serious problems. (Partisan impeachments against the will of the people. Illegal wars. Out of control executive branch.) It comes at least partially from the fact that journalists think that by simply telling the public what the politicians are saying (much of it on double super-secret backround) they are doing their jobs. They allow both sides to play out their political games in the mainstream media and then provide running color commentary on who’s “winning.” In their minds, if the Democrats aren’t as good at stoking scandals or creating an atmosphere of political terrorism, then it’s not their job to uncover what the Republicans are doing. Democrats need to “play better” if they want to “win.” (You often see a kind of admiration for the bold machismo of the Republican character assassins in the press — they are winners.)

The fact that the Republicans are better at dirty politics and hand-feeding the kind of scandals to the press that they like should not be what controls the coverage of politics. A nose for news should be and it’s clear that some combination of intimidation, laziness, commercial concerns, habit and, yes, political and cultural bias (see the disparate degrees of MSM revulsion shown toward the Democratic base and the GOP base when they exert their influence on their party)have tilted this ridiculous “playing field” waaay to the right.

And I hereby fearlessly predict that what you will see if the Democrats gain control of the government in 2008 will be a revival of 90’s style “crusading” journalism in which the press will take every ginned up scandal the Republicans come up with and run with them like they are the reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow, thus proving in their own minds that they aren’t servants of power after all. And they will say it’s what we wanted during the Bush years and now we are complaining which proves we are partisan and they aren’t.

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Stealin’ It

by digby

Before the election last November I wrote a post about what I thought Karl Rove might have up his sleeve. I wrote:

We have created an ear worm that the Republicans are going to appropriate — and they will use it much more aggressively and effectively than our side did. They are already gearing up for it. As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections:

QUESTION: The question I have: The Democrats seem to want to make this year an election about integrity, and we know that their party rests on the base of election fraud. And we know that, in some states, some of our folks are pushing for election measures like voter ID.

But have you thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive?

ROVE: Yes, it’s an interesting idea. We’ve got a few more things to do before the political silly season gets going, really hot and heavy. But yes, this is a real problem. What is it — five wards in the city of Milwaukee have more voters than adults?

With all due respect to the City of Brotherly Love, Norcross Roanblank’s (ph) home turf, I do not believe that 100 percent of the living adults in this city of Philadelphia are registered, which is what election statistics would lead you to believe.

I mean, there are parts of Texas where we haven’t been able to pull that thing off.

(LAUGHTER)

And we’ve been after it for a great many years.

So I mean, this is a growing problem.

The spectacle in Washington state; the attempts, in the aftermath of the 2000 election to disqualify military voters in Florida, or to, in one instance, disqualify every absentee voter in Seminole county — I mean, these are pretty extraordinary measures that should give us all pause.

The efforts in St. Louis to keep the polls opened — open in selected precincts — I mean, I would love to have that happen as long, as I could pick the precincts.

This is a real problem. And it is not going away.

I mean, Bernalillo County, New Mexico will have a problem after the next election, just like it has had after the last two elections.

I mean, I remember election night, 2000, when they said, oops, we just made a little mistake; we failed to count 55,000 ballots in Bernalillo; we’ll be back to you tomorrow.

(LAUGHTER)

That is a problem. And I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a vegetarian or a beef-eater, this is an issue that ought to concern you because, at the heart of it, our democracy depends upon the integrity of the ballot place. And if you cannot…

(APPLAUSE)

I have to admit, too — look, I’m not a lawyer. So all I’ve got to rely on is common sense. But what is the matter? I go to the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I’ve got to show a little bit of ID.

Why should it not be reasonable and responsible to say that when people show up at the voting place, they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID?

We can make arrangements for those who don’t have driver’s licenses. We can have provisional ballots, so that if there is a question that arises, we have a way to check that ballot. But it is fundamentally fair and appropriate to say, if you’re going to show up and claim to be somebody, you better be able to prove it, when it comes to the most sacred thing we have been a democracy, which is our right of expression at the ballot.

And if not, let’s just not kid ourselves, that elections will not be about the true expression of the people in electing their government, it will be a question of who can stuff it the best and most. And that is not healthy.

QUESTION: I’ve been reading some articles about different states, notably in the west, going to mail-in ballots and maybe even toying with the idea of online ballots. Are you concerned about this, in the sense of a mass potential, obviously, for voter fraud that this might have in the West?

ROVE: Yes. And I’m really worried about online voting, because we do not know all the ways that one can jimmy the system. All we know is that there are many ways to jimmy the system.

I’m also concerned about the increasing problems with mail-in ballots. Having last night cast my mail-in ballot for the April 11 run-off in Texas, in which there was one race left in Kerr County to settle — but I am worried about it because the mail-in ballots, particularly in the Northwest, strike me as problematic.

I remember in 2000, that we had reports of people — you know, the practice in Oregon is everybody gets their ballot mailed to them and then you fill it out.

And one of the practices is that people will go to political rallies and turn in their ballots. And we received reports in the 2000 election — which, remember we lost Oregon by 5000 votes — we got reports of people showing up at Republican rallies and passing around the holder to get your ballot, and then people not being able to recognize who those people were and not certain that all those ballots got turned in.

On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County — I’m going to mispronounce the name — but there were four of voting places in the city, for those of you who don’t get the ballots, well, we had to put out 100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library cards, voting at multiple places.

I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places, showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean, there’s a problem with this.

And I know we need to make arrangements for those people who don’t live in the community in which they are registered to vote or for people who are going to be away for Election Day or who are ill or for whom it’s a real difficulty to get to the polls. But we need to have procedures in place that allow us to monitor it.

And in the city of Portland, we could not monitor. If somebody showed up at one of those four voting locations, we couldn’t monitor whether they had already cast their mail-in ballot or not. And we lost the state by 5,000 votes.

I mean, come on. What kind of confidence can you have in that system? So yes, we’ve got to do more about it.

My speculation about Rove’s plans was greeted with some rather intense skepticism and in fact I was proven wrong. Rove didn’t do a thing about voter fraud.

But that’s not to say he wasn’t trying. With the NY Times reporting tonight that Bush was personally involved in the New Mexico matter by complaining to Gonzales about Iglesias’ refusal to pursue voter fraud charges, Josh Marshall writes:

There’s a sub-issue emerging in the canned US Attorneys scandal: the apparently central role of Republican claims of voter fraud and prosecutors unwillingness to bring indictments emerging from such alleged wrongdoing. Very longtime readers of this site will remember that this used to be something of a hobby horse of mine. And it’s not surprising that it is now emerging as a key part of this story. The very short version of this story is that Republicans habitually make claims about voter fraud. But the charges are almost invariably bogus. And in most if not every case the claims are little more than stalking horses for voter suppression efforts. That may sound like a blanket charge. But I’ve reported on and written about this issue at great length. And there’s simply no denying the truth of it. So this becomes a critical backdrop to understanding what happened in some of these cases. Why didn’t the prosecutors pursue indictments when GOP operatives started yakking about voter fraud? Almost certainly because there just wasn’t any evidence for it.

And when they refused to pursue bogus charges of voter fraud and Democratic corruption, they were bounced.

I don’t know if Rove will ever be caught red handed — he’s masterful at dirty tricks. (He taught the art of it when he was in his 20’s.) But when you see stuff like this anywhere near his vicinity you know he’s up to his armpits in it.

Stay tuned. This is shaping up to be a very serious scandal.

Check out the Wapo tonight, too.
The Attorney General definitely lied to congress, as did two of his closest aides.