Mad As Heck
by digby
Following up on the Fox All Stars little taunting session of yesterday, Instaputz finds that they are not the only ones. Various wingnuts of all stripes are having quite a hissy fit that the British haven’t declared war on the Iranian navy and all its ships at sea. Why they’re stomping their tiny feet and holding their breath til’ they turn blue, by god!
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Mind Games
by digby
Atrios flags this nice Grover Norquist quote from Garance Franke-Ruta and, correctly I think, notes that it doesn’t mean the base wants to leave Iraq. It just means they will go along with whatever Bush wants to do. In other words, Bush isn’t being obstinate about Iraq because he’s afraid that his base will desert him. He’s not running, neither is Cheney, and neither one of them appear to particularly care about the fortunes of the Republican party. He’s obstinate about Iraq for purely personal, philosophical reasons that have little to do with politics at this point.
So he is not subject to normal political pressure. As Norquist says, the base will stick with him come hell or high water. (I believe it’s a mistake, however, to think it has anything to do with him personally — the base of the Republican party are authoritarians who will blindly follow their leader no matter who he is, which is why they need to be kept away from the brown shirt section of Macy’s.) This is now a mind game between the Democrats and Bush/Cheney. The Republicans in congress are nearly irrelevant except to the extent a couple of them can help get legislation passed and feed the GOP disarray. All negotiations going forward will necessarily be strategized with that in mind.
So this is very interesting:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Monday that he was backing legislation to cut off almost all money for the war in Iraq by next March, further escalating the Democratic confrontation with President Bush over the 4-year-old conflict.
The move comes after the Senate and House narrowly passed emergency war spending bills last month that set timelines for withdrawing U.S. troops. Neither measure proposed to cut funding for the war.
Reid, who will co-sponsor the bill with outspoken war critic Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.), has never backed legislation that would use congressional control of the budget to stop paying for the war.
He almost certainly will have a difficult time rounding up a majority of votes for a bill that could leave Democrats open to charges of abandoning the troops.
But it means that Reid, who has endorsed increasingly bold steps to end the war, will be able to steer the Senate into another debate that highlights Republican support for the president’s unpopular war.
President Pissypants responds:
President Bush, calling Democratic congressional leaders “irresponsible” for debating a war-spending bill containing timelines for withdrawal from Iraq that he is certain to veto, suggested today that they should stop their “political dance” and “get down to business” in the funding of frontline troops.
If the standoff over a $100-billion-plus supplemental budget for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan goes into May, the president said, the Army will have to consider extending the deployments of soldiers already at war while training of new forces and repair of military equipment is jeopardized by a lack of funding.
Counting the 57th day since he delivered his bid for additional war-spending to Congress, the president said during an impromptu Rose Garden press conference that congressional leaders should rush their bill to his desk so that he can promptly veto it and get on with a new spending bill.
“In a time of war, it’s irresponsible for the Democrat leadership in… Congress to delay for months on end while our troops in combat are waiting for the funds,” Bush said.
And Reid fires back:
Washington, DC—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, released the following statement today after comments made by President Bush at the White House:
The President today asked the American people to trust him as he continues to follow the same failed strategy that has drawn our troops further into an intractable civil war. The President’s policies have failed and his escalation endangers our troops and hurts our national security. Neither our troops nor the American people can afford this strategy any longer.
Democrats will send President Bush a bill that gives our troops the resources they need and a strategy in Iraq worthy of their sacrifices. If the President vetoes this bill he will have delayed funding for troops and kept in place his strategy for failure.
Meanwhile, we find out that the “57 day delay” that Junior was squealing about is actually happening at warp speed compared to the last congress which was so busy counting its ill gotten gains, covering up for child predators and trying to stay out of jail that they could hardly take the time to pass a supplemental at all:
During the reign of the Do-Nothing 109th Congress, Bush submitted two major supplemental spending requests. Each request experienced a delay far more than 57 days with hardly a peep of anger from the Commander-In-Chief. Details below:
February 14, 2005: Bush submits $82 billion supplemental bill
May 11, 2005: Bush signs the supplemental
Total time elapsed: 86 days February 16, 2006: Bush submits $72 billion supplemental bill
June 15, 2006: Bush signs the supplemental
Total time elapsed: 119 daysAfter the 119 day delay, Bush did not say an “irresponsible” Congress had “undercut the troops” or that military families had “paid the price of failure.” Instead, Bush told the conservative-led Congress, “I applaud those Members of Congress who came together in a fiscally responsible way to provide much-needed funds for the War on Terror.”
Many of the June Cleaver Dems are quaking because they see this as a reprise of the government shutdown in 2005 which marked the end of the “Republican Revolution.” But I would submit that Harry Reid is nothing like that arrogant jerk Newt Gingrich, whom the country had come to viscerally loathe by that time. And George W. Bush is definitely no Bill Clinton.
Let the mind games begin.
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Rabid Hobgoblins
by digby
One day you see this:
In February, Vice President Cheney traveled to Australia to visit with his close ally Prime Minister John Howard. At the top of Howard’s agenda was a plea to release Australian Gitmo detainee David Hicks. Last Friday, Hicks became the first person to be sentenced by a military commission convened under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, accepting nine months of imprisonment and a gag order that will not allow him to discuss the case for 12 months. Howard lobbied Cheney during the February visit for the trial to “be brought on as soon as humanly possible and with no further delay.” The plea bargain itself was brokered by Susan Crawford, the top military commission official and a former Department of Defense inspector general under then-Secretary of Defense Cheney, without the knowledge or input of the lawyers prosecuting Hicks. The lead prosecutor expressed shock over the light sentence. Given the nature of the deal, suspicions are being raised that the plea agreement may have been an orchestrated gesture by Cheney to benefit Howard in his re-election fight. Howard, who is lagging behind Labor Party rival Kevin Rudd in the polls, faces a tough election contest in less than nine months. Now, legal experts on both continents are sounding alarms.
The next day you see this:
The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear urgent appeals from two groups of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. The 45 men sought to challenge the constitutionality of a new law stripping federal judges of the authority to hear challenges to the open-ended confinement of foreign citizens held at the American naval base in Cuba and designated as enemy combatants.
The court’s action leaves standing a ruling six weeks ago by the federal appeals court here that upheld the jurisdiction-stripping provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The justices’ refusal to hear the case at this point, before any of the detainees have availed themselves of alternative appeal procedures that their lawyers argue are unconstitutionally truncated, does not foreclose eventual consideration by the court after those appeals have run their course.
The men have all been held at Guantánamo Bay for more than five years, and none has been charged with a crime. They filed petitions for habeas corpus, challenging their continued confinement, before Congress ordered in the 2006 law that all such petitions must be dismissed and no new ones could be accepted for filing.
And you are reminded that the US government has gone stark raving mad. How our diplomats and businessmen and military can hold their heads up when they’re overseas, much less to make a case for American leadership, is beyond me. It must be very painful to have to try to explain just what in God’s name is going on here.
Update: And then there’s this. It seems the US has screwed up another bit of spook work, and this time it’s led to the taking of British sailors as hostages. I have to admit that I was one who thought this speech was one of his all time wierdest, and that’s saying something:
US officials in Washington subsequently claimed that the five Iranian officials they did seize, who have not been seen since, were “suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraq and coalition forces”. This explanation never made much sense. No member of the US-led coalition has been killed in Arbil and there were no Sunni-Arab insurgents or Shia militiamen there.
The raid on Arbil took place within hours of President George Bush making an address to the nation on 10 January in which he claimed: “Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops.” He identified Iran and Syria as America’s main enemies in Iraq though the four-year-old guerrilla war against US-led forces is being conducted by the strongly anti-Iranian Sunni-Arab community. Mr Jafari himself later complained about US allegations. “So far has there been a single Iranian among suicide bombers in the war-battered country?” he asked. “Almost all who involved in the suicide attacks are from Arab countries.”
It seemed strange at the time that the US would so openly flout the authority of the Iraqi President and the head of the KRG simply to raid an Iranian liaison office that was being upgraded to a consulate, though this had not yet happened on 11 January. US officials, who must have been privy to the White House’s new anti-Iranian stance, may have thought that bruised Kurdish pride was a small price to pay if the US could grab such senior Iranian officials.
What an excellent idea. I wonder which secret prison they’ve stashed them in?
Has there ever been a president in history that you so wished didn’t have access to military power? Not only is his every policy exceedingly stupid, he seems to mess them up in ways that make that bad idea seem good by comparison to what he actually does. I’ve never seen anything like it.
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Where Is The Iron Lady When You Need Her?
by digby
An American citizen is missing in Iran, the State Department said today.
Sources tell ABC News that the missing American was a former FBI agent, although they stressed that he was now a private citizen and that his trip to Iran was on “private business” and not associated with official U.S. matters.
State spokesman Sean McCormack said that the United States had been monitoring this case for several weeks and today had sent a message to Iran through diplomatic channels for more information on his whereabouts.
State Department officials say that Iran has yet to respond with any information. Because the United States does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, the message was passed on by the Swiss Embassy in Tehran.
McCormack said the United States had been in touch with the man’s family and employer, who were the first ones to report him missing. A senior State Department official tells ABC News the man was last seen in early March in Iran.
The official says that right now nobody seems to know where he is, but that the United States is asking Iran for any information because that’s where he was last seen. According to one official, there is “no reliable information” that the American is being detained by Iran.
McCormack denied any connection between this case and that of the 15 British sailors and marines being held by Iran for allegedly straying into Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf.
“There is no linkage with this or any ongoing cases that may have been in the news recently,” he told reporters.
Well that’s a relief.
I doubt that certain influential people in the right wing noise machine will agree, however. I suspect they will be screaming to high heaven by the end of the week. They were already up in arms about the British sailors and Tony Blair’s “wimpy” response.
Here’s a little excerpt from the Fox All Stars from last week:
Kondracke: I’ve got to say , Tony Blair is not exactly acting like Margaret Thatcher would act under these circumstances. He’s acting like Jimmy Carter would act. It’s “tip-toe” you know. one idea that I heard today was that britain might threaten to close an Iranian port and if the Iranians said, well, you don’t have any ships around to do that — oh yes, we do, we have submarines and they wouldn’t know where the submarines are and close down a port and ratchet up the problem.
Hume: Does that come from someonw who knew that the Brits might do this?
Kondracke: Uhm. No.
Barnes: Hey they could use American ships. There are two carrier groups in the gulf. And I would think that the thing President Bush would have done would have been to call Tony Blair and say, “Look, these are your people and we’ll back you on whatever your policy is, including a military option if that is what has to take place.”
Hume: Our correspondent James Rosen is reporting that this is a series of steps, that you sort of walk through the UN to try to get this to something that might matter…
Barnes … that’s a strategy of “strong letter to follow.” It’s really not much.
Hume: Is it worth going to the UN at all?
Barnes: Well, you know, they’re “low keying” it …
Hume: Well, that’s a first step
Barnes: I know, but the last step is some resolution sanctioning the Iranians and they’re already defying another one in the nuclear…
Easton: …the British…you’ve gotta be careful with this regime. This reveals a regime that wants to be considered a government. It’s already been marginalized with the sanctions that the UN passed by the security counsel this Saturday. They’re acting like a rogue terrorist outfit. Trotting this woman out. The letter. They’re acting like a terrorist organization. They’re a terrorist organization with a lot of economic power. Already we saw oil prices spike up. There’s analysts saying it could go up as high as 80,90,100 dollars a barrel…
Barnes: … the point she’s making is that they’re making money on this. The longer they keep it going. Look, there’s one thing you could do and it doesn’t mean shooting at anybody and that’s we could block the ships from leaving port with oil. Just block then in the gulf. We could do it. We certainly have the naval power there to do it.
Easton: You have to weigh the cost of doing that. Obviously that would be a huge economic shock.
Barnes: That would be up to the British.
Kondracke: You would think this would offer an opportunity to those in the west — the president, by the way, has not said a word about it, he’s letting Tony Blair handle it — but this would be an opportunity to rally everybody involved as to the nature of this regime. This is totally blackmail. They are behaving utterly irresponsibly on the nuclear front and on this front and this is the time to put the whammy on them.
Hume: How?
Kondracke: By going to the Europeans and saying now is the time for real sanctions. the Russians don’t want to go along but the Europeans, the allies of Tony Blair, could certainly do it.
Hume: You think for the sake of 15 British sailors you could get places like France…?
Kondracke: Right now it’s 15 British soldiers, it could be anybody’s soldiers, it could be anybody’s civilians. This is hostage taking. And it’s illegal by every rule of international law. This is an outlaw rogue regime and it ought to be treated like one.
Barnes: It’s up to the British to decide. Look, you know President Bush would be glad to be condemning the Iranians every day if Tony Blair said it would help. But remember the British, in the first place, when the Iranians snatched the 15 in Iraqi waters, not Iranian waters, there was a British ship that could have fired on the Iranians. They could have stopped it. And they didn’t. And they’ve followed pretty much a wimpy policy since then. And they haven’t gotten anybody back either.
It’s hard to believe that any of those people are over the age of 17, but there you have it. Even if Tony Blair has managed to retain enough sanity not to fall for such sophomoric foreign policy “advice” it is quite worrisome that the spoiled miscreant in the White House might not be able to resist responding to such taunts. He certainly won’t want to face again the harsh reaction he faced from the right over this. The empty codpiece is all he’s got left.
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Screwball
by digby
When the Washington Nationals play their home opener this afternoon at RFK Stadium, the president won’t be there to toss out the ceremonial first pitch.
For the second straight year, reports the Washington Post, President Bush has turned down an invitation to participate in a Washington baseball tradition started by President William Howard Taft in 1910.
Mr. Bush was there in 2005, to help celebrate the return of the nation’s pastime to the nation’s capital after a 33-year absence, but last year he left the first-pitch duties to Vice President Cheney. This year, neither man will be there.
The Post says that except for during World Wars I and II, only two other presidents have missed two opening days in a row – Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon.
So why can’t Mr. Bush, an ardent baseball fan and former part owner of the Texas Rangers, make it out to the ballpark this year? A White House spokeswoman says Mr. Bush will be in Washington today, but “it’s not possible with his schedule. … It just wasn’t going to work out.”
With the president’s approval ratings stuck below 40 percent, was Mr. Bush concerned that he might get booed? “No,” the spokeswoman said. “Certainly not.”
Somebody’s going to be mighty deflated:
Going back to 9/11, Matthews found himself blown away not by Bush’s political or military response but by his ability to throw a baseball. He compared the man to–I kid you not–Ernest Hemingway. “There are some things you can’t fake,” he explained breathlessly. “Either you can throw a strike from sixty feet or you can’t. Either you can rise to the occasion on the mound at Yankee Stadium with 56,000 people watching or you can’t. On Tuesday night, George W. Bush hit the strike zone in the House that Ruth Built…. This is about knowing what to do at the moment you have to do it–and then doing it. It’s about that ‘grace under pressure’ that Hemingway gave as his very definition of courage.”
Oooh baby.
Actually Bush made quite clear his definition of courage many years ago:
“I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes.”
What a man, what a man, what a mighty dumb man.
Be sure to read the whole Alterman piece on Tweety’s man crushes. I’ve been sayin’ it for years. Why just last week he drooled all over Tom Delay and Fred Thompson and even gushed about how much he loved Dick Armey because he was a “Knights of Columbus”(?) kind of guy. This is a very confused fellow.
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June Cleaver Democrats
by digby
Matt Stoller does good work here taking this egregious WaPo Jonathan Weisman piece apart. He also addresses the one quote that came leaping out at me when I read it:
Leon E. Panetta, who was a top White House aide when President Bill Clinton pulled himself off the mat through repeated confrontations with Congress, sees the same risk. He urged Democrats to stick to their turf on such issues as immigration, health care and popular social programs, and to prove they can govern.
“That’s where their strength is,” Panetta said. “If they go into total confrontation mode on these other things, where they just pass bills and the president vetoes them, that’s a recipe for losing seats in the next election.”
I don’t know about anyone else, but when I read that my immediate reaction was as if he’d said:
“You girls need to stick to the subjects people think you’re good at — cooking and cleaning and childcare. That’s where your strength is. If you try to confront the big boys on the important stuff like national security, war and foreign policy, it’s a recipe for losing seats.”
This, by the way, was the advice coming from the establishment Dems for years. Here’s the memo(pdf) that Stan Greenberg, Bob Shrum and James Carville sent around in 2002 before the Iraq war vote:
This decision 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).2 In additionwe found that a Democrat supporting a resolution runs stronger than one opposing it. For half the respondents, we presented a Democratic candidate supporting the resolution. Among these voters, the generic congressional vote remained stable, with the Democrats still ahead by 2 points at the end of the survey. In the other half of the sample, we presented a Democrat opposed to the resolution. In this group, the Democratic congressional advantage slipped by 6 points at the end of the survey.
[…]
The debate and vote on the resolution will bring closure on the extended Iraq debate that has crowded out the country’s domestic agenda as Congress concludes. But there is substantial evidence, as we indicated at the outset, that voters are very ready to turn to domestic issues. It is important that Democrats make this turn and provide a compelling reason to vote Democratic and turn down the Republicans.
In this survey, we tested two message frameworks – one offers a transition to the domestic agenda (“We need independent people in Washington who will be a check on what is going on and pay attention to our needs at home”) and one focuses on corporate influence (“Washington should be more responsive to the people and less to big corporate interests”). Both frameworks defeat the Republican alternative that begins with support for the President’s efforts on security.
(To be fair, they did say that the vote was one of conscience and gave advice on how to make the argument most effectively if you were going to vote against the war.)
But it is worth noting that we lost that election and the vote for the war has twisted presidential candidates up in knots ever since then. This was just terrible advice. There was never going to be any margin in Democrats backing Bush’s war if it went well and if it didn’t, voting for it would dog them.
And at the crux of it was the notion that Americans want Democrats to talk about domestic issues and all this national security stuff is something to get off the table. It just doesn’t work that way. The issues are the issues and Democrats have to address them with seriousness of purpose no matter what they are.
Even if you buy into this ridiculous mommy party/daddy party nonsense, as the establishment seems to do, you should ask yourself if “mommy” has any responsibility for keeping the family safe and being a good neighbor or if she’s just supposed to sit at home and care for the grandparents and tend the childrens’colds? No healthy family that I know of divides the labor like that in the modern world and this outmoded stereotype of Democrats as June Cleaver almost killed us.
The 50’s sitcom fantasy of the good wife is not a definition of leadership, whether it’s as a parent or a president, and Democrats who persist in seeing the two parties this way need to take a look at their assumptions. People care about domestic matters and foreign policy and national security and health care and —- everything. These things are prioritized according to circumstances and the times, but the responsibility for the whole panoply of issues falls to every politician who seeks office. You don’t get to take any issues off the table and any party that does that is in trouble.
I would suggest that it was when the Democrats finally took the issue of Iraq seriously that the country began to take them seriously. And it wasn’t because it was a “daddy issue.” It was because it was the most important issue on the table. It still is.
There are a number of domestic issues that are also becoming priorities and people will expect the Democrats to deliver. And they will, I have no doubt. The Democrats are brimming with ideas from all over the political spectrum about how to deal with economic policy, health care, immigration, labor etc. But they are going to have to walk and chew gum at the same time. In fact, after the mess the Republicans have made, they are going to have to walk, talk, dance and levitate while blowing bubbles in order to set things straight. But they have to do them all and they have to do them well. Ignoring the illegal Iraq occupation and the ever expanding list of Bush crimes won’t make them go away.
Update: Greg Sargent reads all the articles in the Washington Post so the writers and editors don’t have to. Unsurprisingly, he finds that their latest poll contradicts everything Weisman said.
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Digging The Dirt
by digby
Following up on my post below and Dennis Hartley’s DVD wish list from last night, I would like to add “Digging The Dirt”, the BBC documentary about the Bush oppo shop of the 2000 election, to my list. It should be required viewing for the House and Senate Judiciary Committees so they can better understand the kind of people Bush installed in the Justice Department.
The link above has a couple of clips (Josh Marshall features a bit more, here) and a transcript, so it’s at least possible to get a sense of the show.
Here’s an interesting excerpt, featuring both Tim Griffin, the recently installed US Attorney in Arkansas and Mark Corallo the spokesman who replaced Barbara Comstock at the DOJ. (Monica Goodling is in the film but doesn’t speak):
MARSHALL
Tim Griffin and his colleagues do oppo – opposition research. It means they look for any slip by the enemy – Al Gore.GRIFFIN
Research is a fundamental point. We think of ourselves as the creators of the ammunition in a war. Research digs up the ammunition.MARSHALL
You make the bullets.GRIFFIN
That’s right, we make the bullets.MARK CORALLO
I’m ready to just respond to anything that Gore says.MARSHALL
And they feed their anti-Gore research to the American press and TV.CORALLO
It’s an amazing thing when you have top line producers and reporters calling you and saying “We trust you, we need your stuff.”
It’s actually not really amazing at all. The Bush hit squad knew the media were openly hostile to Gore from early on in the campaign:
To read the major newspapers and to watch the TV pundit shows, one can’t avoid the impression that many in the national press corps have decided that Vice President Al Gore is unfit to be elected the next president of the United States.
Across the board — from The Washington Post to The Washington Times, from The New York Times to the New York Post, from NBC’s cable networks to the traveling campaign press corps — journalists don’t even bother to disguise their contempt for Gore anymore.
[…]
From the media’s hostile tone, one might conclude that reporters have reached a collective decision that Gore should be disqualified from the campaign.
At times, the media has jettisoned any pretext of objectivity. According to various accounts of the first Democratic debate in Hanover, N.H., reporters openly mocked Gore as they sat in a nearby press room and watched the debate on television.
Several journalists later described the incident, but without overt criticism of their colleagues. As The Daily Howler observed, Time’s Eric Pooley cited the reporters’ reaction only to underscore how Gore was failing in his “frenzied attempt to connect.”
“The ache was unmistakable — and even touching — but the 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out by it,” Pooley wrote. “Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.”
Hotline’s Howard Mortman described the same behavior as the reporters “groaned, laughed and howled” at Gore’s comments.
Later, during an appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Salon’s Jake Tapper cited the Hanover incident, too. “I can tell you that the only media bias I have detected in terms of a group media bias was, at the first debate between Bill Bradley and Al Gore, there was hissing for Gore in the media room up at Dartmouth College. The reporters were hissing Gore, and that’s the only time I’ve ever heard the press room boo or hiss any candidate of any party at any event.”
You can understand why the Republican dirty tricksters seemed so confident about their ability to get members of the press corps to do their bidding. They had the same agenda. This November 2000 review of the film by Martin Lewis in TIME magazine shows the media were all too eager to help the Republicans advance their campaign narrative — a narrative that I believe was at least partially devised because they knew the media’s pre-existing loathing of Gore would make it irresistable. A loathing, by the way, that could be traced to the far too cozy relationships the press developed with the rightwing character assassins during the Lewinsky scandal when they were among that small minority of Americans who believed that Clinton should be driven from office over that ridiculous, trumped up sideshow:
The Bush campaign’s brilliant intuition was that if this unattractive trait [embellishing his accomplishments] could be vulcanized as being the CORE of Gore rather than just one of the many aspects – good and bad of a man – then they were made. How to do this? Simple. Establish a massive database of every utterance in Gore’s 26 years in public service – and then pounce on any and every discrepancy – like a bulldog lawyer seeking to impeach a witness. It wouldn’t matter how tiny the variance. Any deviation could be characterized as an embellishment… an exaggeration… an untruth… a dishonesty… and then finally the word that would superglue Gore to Clinton. A lie.
Nail Gore on sufficient discrepancies – AND be certain to trumpet each and every occurrence as yet another example of an established pattern – and the Gore goose would be cooked.
The BBC documentary shows how this worked in brilliant detail.
Lewis also noted:
During their months of filming BBC producers also observed producers for NBC’s Tim Russert among others calling to enquire if the team had any new material.
He claims it happened on both sides, but there is little doubt that the GOP narrative about Gore was hugely favored by the press during the election; they treated Bush as if he were a living example of “honor and integrity” and therefore “the better man” than the lying Al Gore. (They also liked Bush better because his campaign served lobster and Dove bars on the plane instead of those granola bars that icky old Al Gore served. And they wonder why we call them mediawhores…)
The Daily Howler has chronicled this story in more detail than I would even attempt to distill here. But after revisiting those archives and seeing how many of the assassination squad are involved, it’s obvious to me that the ethical squalor of the Bush oppo-research crew of the 2000 campaign has played a role in these Justice Department scandals. As I wrote below, alarm bells should have been clanging all over Washington when Bush gave important jobs in the Federal Police agencies to these political hatchet-people. Even Nixon didn’t install G. Gordon Liddy as a senior advisor to John Mitchell.
And given that, I have a question. Tim Russert and many members of the DC press corps clearly had relationships with Comstock, Griffin, Carollo and Goodling in their capacity as dirt delivery people in 2000. So why hasn’t even one of them brought it up? Are they “protecting their sources” again?
How much do they know that they aren’t telling us about this one do you suppose?
Update: Thisarticle by Josh Green in The Atlantic (subscriber only — sorry) also discusses the film and how Tim Griffin, our new US Attorney was promoted from his assistant Prosecutor job in 2004 to return to the Bush campaign to head it’s dirty tricks division. That’s quite the unusual revolving door, don’t you think? And it sure does make the appointment to Arkansas US Attorney in advance of the 2008 election all the more suspicious.
What was remarkable about the 2000 effort was the degree to which the process advanced beyond what Barbara Comstock, who headed the RNC research team, calls “votes and quotes”—the standard campaign practice of leaving the job of scouting the target to very junior staff members, who tend to dig up little more than a rival’s legislative record and public statements. Comstock’s taking over the research team marked a significant change. She was a lawyer and a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill who had been one of Representative Dan Burton’s top congressional investigators during the Clinton scandals that dominated the 1990s: Filegate, Travelgate, assorted campaign-finance imbroglios, and Whitewater. Rather than amass the usual bunch of college kids, Comstock put together a group of seasoned attorneys and former colleagues from the Burton Committee, including her deputy, Tim Griffin. “The team we had from 2000,” she told me recently, to show the degree of ratcheted-up professionalism, “were veteran investigators from the Clinton years. We had a core group of people, and that core was attorneys.”
Comstock combined a prosecutor’s mentality with an investigator’s ability to hunt through public records and other potentially incriminating documents. More important, she and her team understood how to use opposition research in the service of a larger goal: not simply to embarrass Gore with hard-to-explain votes or awkward statements but to craft over the course of the campaign a negative “storyline” about him that would eventually take hold in the public mind. “A campaign is a lot like a trial,” Comstock explained. “You want people aggressively arguing their case.”
Update II: Thanks to my favorite tipster BB, I’m reminded of this bizarre tale about Comstock from Blinded By The Right:
One night in the winter of 1995, as the scandal over the firings of workers in the White house travel office reached a crescendo on the Hill [think about that —d] I received a late night telephone call from one of Ted’s colleagues on an investigative committee, Barbara Comstock. Around the committee, the two Barbaras [Comstock and Olsen] were known s “the Barbarellas,” a reference to the 1968 movie starring Jane Fonda as a space-age vixen whose cosmic adventures take her to bizarre planets via rocket ships. Late night calls from Barbara Comstock were not unusual. She often telephoned with the latest tid-bit she had dig up in the thousands of pages of administration records she pored through frantically, as if she were looking for a winning lootery ticket she had somehow mislaid. A plain woman with tousled reddish brown hair, she once dropped by my house to watch the rerun of a dreadfully dull Whitewater hearing she had sat through all day. Comstock sat on the edge of her chair shaking, screaming over and over again, “Liars!” As Comstock’s leads failed to pan out and she was unable to catch anyone in a lie, the Republican aid confided that the Clinton scandals were driving her to distraction, to the unfortunate point that she was ignoring the needs of her own family. A very smart lawyer by training and the main breadwinner for her charismatic, happy-go-lucky husband and kids, Comstock remarked that maybe she couldn’t get Hillary’s sins off her brain “because Hillary reminds me of me. I am Hillary.” In this admission a vivid illustration of a much wider “Hillary” phenomenon can be seen. Comstock knew nothing about Hillary Clinton. Comstock’s “Hillary” was imaginary, a construction composed entirely of the negative points in her own life.
Comstock invited me to go along on an expedition to the Washington home of senior White House aid David Watkins, the central figure in the travel scandal Olsen and Comstock were probing. A short time later, Republican lawyers Comstock, Olson, and other congressional investigators, including David Bossie, and Whitewater investigator Christopher Bartomolucci, pulled up outside my house in an SUV. Though I wasn’t sure what the group hoped to accomplish — they were visibly frustrated with their inability so far to incriminate Watkins — I went along for the ride. Olsen explained that Congressman Sonny Bono had cleared us into the privated, gated community where both Bono and Watkins lived, in the northwest section of Georgetown. When we arrived at our destination, Olsen giddily leapt from the truck, trespassed onto Watkins’s property, and hopped down a steep cliff that abutted his home. Barbara peered into Watkins’s window where she observed him — watching television. No crime there. (Blinded by The Right by David Brock, p 208,209.)
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(Keep in mind that this is the same Comstock who is defending Scooter Libby despite his conviction of perjury and obstruction.) What an excellent choice to have in the United States Justice Department.
And it’s just great to have Tim Griffin, Barbara “I am Hillary” Comstock’s little errand boy down in Arkansas with the full force of the federal government behind him, too.
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Caught In The Buzzsaw
by digby
TPM highlights this interesting profile of our little friend Monica Goodling at Law.com. She is, as Pach at FDL pointed out last night, a protege of recent Libby flack Barbara Comstock, the best GOP oppo character assassin since Don Segretti. Comstock brought Goodling with her into the Justice department after their stint ended as RNC oppo “researchers.”
Comstock is a very special operative, involved in the seamiest of hit jobs over the last decade. That she was allowed anywhere near the federal legal apparatus is shocking in itself:
Comstock…was viewed with suspicion by many career employees as someone more apt to look out for the personal interests of the Attorney General and political interests of the Republican party during her tenure, three Department officials said in interviews.
While at the RNC, Comstock was in charge of the Republican party’s “opposition research.” Prior to that, she was investigative counsel of the House Committee on Government Reform, then chaired by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.). Burton broke precedent with his predecessors who focused on the workings of government agencies, to instead focus almost exclusively on investigations of then President Clinton.
She was in the middle of the Plame leak when she was a Justice and inside the department was widely considered one of the reasons that Ashcroft had to recuse himself:
Several senior federal law enforcement officials in recent days have spoken privately among themselves of what they believe to be an increasing necessity by Attorney General John Ashcroft to formally recuse himself from any further role in the probe as to who leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame. Their concerns have intensified as investigators have begun to interview a number of personal friends and political associates of Ashcroft.
That belief among the senior law enforcement officials has only intensified in recent days since as many as a half-dozen White House officials have been asked by federal investigators about contacts they had with the Republican National Committee and conservative political activists. Investigators apparently are looking at whether the contacts were aimed at discrediting Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.
So, the political operative/Justice Department nexus has been a subject of some consternation for some time in DOJ circles.
Today the Washington Post shows that “Brownies” were baked in to the Justice Department all over the place:
About one-third of the nearly four dozen U.S. attorney’s jobs that have changed hands since President Bush began his second term have been filled by the White House and the Justice Department with trusted administration insiders.
The people chosen as chief federal prosecutors on a temporary or permanent basis since early 2005 include 10 senior aides to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, according to an analysis of government records. Several came from the White House or other government agencies. Some lacked experience as prosecutors or had no connection to the districts in which they were sent to work, the records and biographical information show.
The new U.S. attorneys filled vacancies created through natural turnover in addition to the firings of eight prosecutors last year that have prompted a political uproar and congressional investigations.
No other administration in contemporary times has had such a clear pattern of filling chief prosecutors’ jobs with its own staff members, said experts on U.S. attorney’s offices. Those experts said the emphasis in appointments traditionally has been on local roots and deference to home-state senators, whose support has been crucial to win confirmation of the nominees.
The pattern from Bush’s second term suggests that the dismissals were half of a two-pronged approach: While getting rid of prosecutors who did not adhere closely to administration priorities, such as rigorous pursuit of immigration violations and GOP allegations of voter fraud, White House and Justice officials have seeded federal prosecutors’ offices with people on whom they can depend to carry out the administration’s agenda.
[…]
As Congress pursues its investigation, some Democrats have indicated they want to explore who has been hired, in addition to the firings that have been the focal point of hearings on Capitol Hill — and of calls from both parties for Gonzales to resign.
“If we have eight U.S. attorneys dismissed because they were not ‘loyal Bushies,’ then how many of the remaining U.S. attorneys are?” asked Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), borrowing a phrase that Gonzales’s former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, used in an internal e-mail to describe criteria by which prosecutors were chosen to be fired.
And that brings us back to Ms Goodling:
Interviews for U.S. Attorney replacements took place with only a handful of people: David Margolis, the department’s top-ranking career official and a 40-plus year veteran; a member of the White House Counsel’s Office; the head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys; and Goodling.
Charles Miller, whom Gonzales appointed as interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, interviewed with the panel in the fall of 2005. “They asked me what I’d done to support the president,” Miller says. It wasn’t a question Miller expected. He told them he’d voted for Bush.
But a former prosecutor who did not get a U.S. Attorney post was left with a sour feeling after his interview in 2006. “Monica was in charge, in essence, of the interview,” recalls the former supervisory assistant U.S. Attorney. “I walked out of that room and thought, ‘Wow, I’ve just run into a buzz saw.'”
And again, what were the Pat Robertson’ U grad Goodling’s primary qualifications before joining the Department of Justice? She worked with Barbara Comstock and Timothy Griffin (the US Attorney from Arkansas who Rove pushed through under the patriot act) at the Bush Cheney oppo research department in 2000.
It doesn’t automatically make her a criminal, but it sure stinks of unethical politicization of the Justice Department.
I heard Orrin Hatch filibuster for what seemed like hours this morning on Meet the Press about how there wasn’t a “shred of evidence” that there was any wrongdoing. Well, except for the totally unethical phone calls by Domenichi and Iglesias and the US Attorneys’ publicly stated suspicion that they were let go for partisan political reasons, I suppose not. But they need to lay off the tequila if they actually expect to get the benefit of the doubt about their good intentions after they populated the Justice Department with dirty tricksters in extremely sensitive jobs.
Many of us were told to pipe down when we complained that the Justice Department and the NSA had been involved in spying on Americans with no oversight. But now that we know that Barbara Comstock, Monica Goodling and Tim Griffin, Karl Rove’s personal smear artists, were promoted to the highest reaches of the federal police agencies with access to records on their political opponents and every other American, then it’s clear that we weren’t suspicious enough. At this point, I think we have to assume that with these people in charge and having the use of all the new powers of the Patriot Act, there have been no limits at all on the partisan, political use of the government’s investigative powers.
I am no longer confused about why Monica Goodling took the fifth. I have little doubt that there are many crimes that took place and she’s not taking any chances. This is bigger than the US Attorney scandal.
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Socks, Scissors, Paper
by digby
As we listen to Roger Ailes and Brit Hume howl about how Fox is just another news outlet, fair and balanced and unafraid, let’s ponder the fact that in the midst of several dozen unfolding scandals, they have put their unlimited resources toward an exposé of only one. It’s called “Socks, Scissors, Paper: The Sandy Berger Caper”, in which a massive cover-up is alleged. Who did the covering I don’t know, but I’m sure that all the brainwashed ditto-heads will have all the details by tomorrow morning.
Please tell me again why the Democratic party cooperates with these propagandists because I just can’t seem to remember.
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Saturday Night At The Movies
Release Me
By Dennis Hartley
Although the DVD format has been with us now for a good ten years, there is still a surprising amount of “back catalogue” that remains unreleased, for one reason or another.
In many cases, I’m sure lawyers are involved; estate wrangling, music soundtrack publishing issues, etc., but I suspect the biggest problem is the disconnect between the powers that be at the major releasing studios and the true movie buff zeitgeist .
There are some companies that “get it” (Criterion, Anchor Bay, Blue Underground, HVE, Kino, Rhino and New Yorker Video come to mind) but they seem few and far between.
I could easily list 100 titles, but here are my top ten desires on the “wish list”-
“Mickey One” – 1965 film from director Arthur Penn stars Warren Beatty as a stand up comic on the run from the mob. A Kafkaesque, noirish vision filmed in exquisite B&W.
“The Friends of Eddie Coyle” – I’ve discussed this lost 70’s noir gem before; Robert Mitchum at his world-weary best as an aging hood. Great support from Peter Boyle.
“O Lucky Man!” – The late Lindsay Anderson’s masterpiece remains MIA, despite a huge cult fan base. Thankfully, Alan Price’s magnificent soundtrack is available on CD.
“The New Age” – Overlooked yet brilliant mid-90’s social satire from writer-director Michael Tolkin (“The Rapture”). Great performances from Judy Davis and Peter Weller.
“Serial” – Another social satire, targeting a group of self-absorbed California trendies living in Marin county in the late 70’s. Hilarious stuff. With Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld.
“Dreamchild” – Unique 1985 entry blends Jim Henson’s muppetry with the poignant real-life story of the relationship between Lewis Carroll (Ian Holm) and young Alice Liddell.
“Stardust” – 1974 film starring British rocker David Essex in a stunning “rise and fall” portrait of a decadent, self indulgent rock star. (BTW its “prequel”, “That’ll Be The Day”, is in print.)
“Liquid Sky” – Sci-fi/androgynous alien love story/punk rock/ heroin chic/downtown NYC art scene satire has to be seen to be believed! (Was briefly available but went quickly out of print.)
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains” – Another cult favorite, starring a very young Diane Lane as the nihilistic leader of a feminist punk rock band. (Beware of the DVD-R bootlegs!)
“The Decline of Western Civilization” – Penelope Spheeris’ vital document of the early 80’s LA punk rock scene remains curiously unavailable. Darby Crash lives!
And now for some Good News: A few gems scheduled to see the light of day in 2007 –
April 3: “Bedazzled
April 10: “Brute Force 
April 17: “Thieves Like Us
May 15: “Vengeance Is Mine 
May 22: “Prince of the City 
Sometime in June: According to their website, Criterion is releasing Lindsay Anderson’s “If…
So what titles are you lusting after? Do tell!
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