Month: May 2007

Ifill Glower

by digby

If you missed Gwen Ifill interviewing Gore about his book last night, you missed the latest in a series of obtuse, eye-rolling interviews by the high school cheerleading squad that calls itself the news media. Ifill was practically chewing gum and popping bubbles in Gore’s face as she asks him about his, like, totally boring book.

The transcript doesn’t do it justice, but here’s how she started:

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Vice President, welcome.

AL GORE, former vice president of the United States: Thank you.

GWEN IFILL: The book reads as a screed. It’s an attack on media, on politics, and mostly against George W. Bush. Is that what you intended?

I have not finished the book, but I can tell you already that a screed it is not. Among the beltway wags, however, it is taken as a matter of faith that anything Al Gore says is both boring and slightly crazed, which I suppose could be defined as a political screed to them.

The thing that really gripes me about Ifill is that she doesn’t have to be an eye-rolling, gum-popping cretin; she isn’t subject to ratings or political pressure from on high. (Not that that would be an excuse, but it does explain part of it at least.) And yet in appearances like these and her regular gig at Washington Week in Review she often takes that contemptuous “in crowd” tone anyway. Nobody else at her network adopts that derisive Dowdian attitude. She behaves like a kewl kid because she wants to.

Watching Gore have to endure all these interviews with people who are too stupid to grasp what he’s saying or are being willfully thick about it out of reflexive Gore loathing and social pressure, is an amazing sight to see considering the thesis of his book. With every one of these interviews, where they insist on the snotty “are you on a diet” and “are you running” idiocy, they prove his point. I can’t figure out if they know it and don’t care or if they really are as dumb as they look. Either way, it’s quite clear that these people won’t be stepping in to stop the assault on reason any time soon.

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Freddie’s Back

by digby

The good news is that Judge Walton will let us see all the fawning letters from Scooter’s bff’s like Hollywood Fred. The bad news is that it probably won’t stop Fred from tarring the likes of Patrick Fitzgerald with Ken Starr’s fetid reputation.

Here’s the line of garbage Thompson threw out recently at a meeting of our conservative overlords about Fitzgerald:

…After years of sacrifice and service to his country, he sits at home with his wife and two children awaiting a prison sentence. His name is Scooter Libby.

As you may recall, for some inexplicable reason, the CIA sent the husband of one of its employees to Niger on a sensitive mission. She had suggested it. He came back to the U.S. and proceeded to publicly blast the administration. Naturally, everyone wanted to know “who is this guy?” and “why was he sent to Niger?” Just as naturally, the fact that he was married to Valerie Plame at the CIA was leaked.

Having virtually guaranteed that Ms. Plame’s identity would be ultimately disclosed by using her, shall we say, “politically active” husband, the CIA then demanded that this leak of her name be investigated by the Justice Department for a possible violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

The Justice Department, bowing to political and media pressure, appointed a Special Counsel to investigate the leak and promised that the Justice Department would exercise no supervision over him whatsoever — a status even the Attorney General does not have.

The only problem with this little scenario was that there was no violation of the law, by anyone, and everybody — the CIA, the Justice Department and the Special Counsel knew it. Ms. Plame was not a “covered person” under the statute and it was obvious from the outset.*

Furthermore, Justice and the Special Counsel knew who leaked Plames’s name and it wasn’t Scooter Libby. But the Beltway machinery was well oiled and geared up so the Special Counsel spent the next two years moving heaven and earth to come up with something, anything. Finally he came up with some inconsistent recollections by Scooter Libby, who had been up to his ears studying National Intelligence Estimates. But he worked for Dick Cheney, so that apparently was enough for the special counsel.

I didn’t know Scooter Libby, but I did know something about this intersection of law, politics, special counsels and intelligence. And it was obvious to me that what was happening was not right. So I called him to see what I could do to help, and along the way we became friends. You know the rest of the story: a D.C. jury convicted him.

In our system all citizens are guaranteed equal protection. And when we appropriate unlimited resources and give unlimited power and direct it all toward one individual, there had better be extraordinary circumstances. There were none here. Just a case of public officials without the courage to do the right thing and stop this farce before it began. In no other prosecutor’s office in the country would a case like this one have been brought.

[…]

I have called for a pardon for Scooter Libby. When you rectify an injustice using the provisions of the law, just as when you reverse an erroneous court decision, you are not disregarding the rule of law, you are enforcing and protecting it.

Hollywood hated the independent counsel law going back to his days covering up for Reagan, so it isn’t surprising that he would be skeptical of a special prosecutor. Well it wouldn’t be if he weren’t a complete hypocrite, that is. Here he is complaining about the independent counsel statute back in 1999. While recognizing that some previous prosecutors had been overzealous, this was his main concern in the moment:

… recently, we’ve been exposed to a new flaw in the process, and this is they’re vulnerable, the independent counsels themselves are vulnerable from attack by those who they are investigating.

Let’s just say that like most Republicans (and addled TV celebrities) consistency isn’t his strong suit.

So it’s perfectly fine to slander Patrick Fitzgerald in front of the Cabal of National Policy, but defending yourself against the man wholeaked every dirty little insinuation that passed through his depraved mind to the mindless little sponges in the press was a “flaw in the process.”

Fitzgerald has not leaked the tiniest bit of information about the case to the press. even though his sterling reputation is being flayed daily by the likes of Thompson’s former proteges, Mr and Mrs Victoria Toensing. He stoically endures this because decent prosecutors with integrity are above partisan politics and take the heat when this happens, letting their case speak for itself. (As far as Thompson and his hypocritical cronies are concerned, of course, prosecutorial integrity, the rule of law and even jury verdicts are inoperative if they don’t like the outcome.)

Meanwhile Judge Kenny Boy Starr is still dishing dirt to Jeff Gerth. I can hardly believe it:

A Media Matters review of Her Way by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. identified at least 33 citations of conversations with officials in the former Office of Independent Counsel (OIC) that investigated Whitewater, at least seven of which refer to an interview with former independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

You remember Ken the pious, Christian conservative man of integrity, don’t you? He’s a great guy, just like Hollywood Fred the “social conservative” who is makes the pundits swoon and the Republicans turn cartwheels.

I guess we should be grateful they didn’t just hire Kiefer Sutherland to play Jack Bauer as president and get it over with. But it’s just a matter of time. They can’t win on the merits so they have to turn every election into a phony campaign pageant filled with special effects and costumes so hiring actors to play politicians really makes sense. Don’t understimate their abilities — they are master showmen. After all, they were able to convince an awful lot of people that Junior was a hero instead of the nasty little socialite in a cowboy suit he really is. If it takes hypocritically assassinating the characters of honest prosecutors while defending cheap political smear artists to do it, they have no problem with that. It’s all part of the show.

*Actually we know now that Wilson was a “covered” person under the statute — the likely reason it wasn’t prosecuted is that Fitzgerald was unable to prove the required intent because of Libby’s repeated lying to cover up for that malevolent reptile, Dick Cheney.

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Destiny

by digby

Joe Klein says:

I still think that what the Davids–and others–are picking up is lobbying from the rest of the administration, especially Gates and Rice, against the Cheney draft-deferred zealots, hoping to win the President’s heart and mind…

Yeah, that’ll happen:

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated “I am the president!” He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of “our country’s destiny.”

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The Bad Pun At The Heart Of Creationism

by tristero

Sam Brownback’s ghost writer gives us the Republican candidate’s opinion of science and reality. He’s against ’em both. On principle. The amount of deliberate misinformation, bad science, and even worse theology in this op-ed achieves a new high on the Idiocies Per Sentence Index ™. However, while there is plenty of stupidity to unpack in Brownback [update: PZ Myers tears into Brownback with a vengeance], I’d like to focus on only one small rhetorical detail, which is usually ignored during triage by first responders to the latest “intelligent design” creationist atrocity:

If [belief in evolution] means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

One word interests me here: “materialistic.” Brownback, or rather, Brownback’s ghost, is punning on the meaning of “materialism.” Doing so is a small but important piece of standard “intelligent design” creationism rhetoric. And it highlights exactly how cheap a fraud it is.

The following is from the mission statement of leading ID creationist William Dembski’s blog:

Materialistic ideology has subverted the study of biological and cosmological origins so that the actual content of these sciences has become corrupted. The problem, therefore, is not merely that science is being used illegitimately to promote a materialistic worldview, but that this worldview is actively undermining scientific inquiry, leading to incorrect and unsupported conclusions about biological and cosmological origins. At the same time, intelligent design (ID) offers a promising scientific alternative to materialistic theories…

Three “materialistics” in three contiguous sentences. The repetition hammers home the point: Materialism is bad. Very bad.

And who would disagree with that? “Materialism” means Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole, Donald Trump, and Gordon Gecko. It means greed, obsession with status, celebrating the perverse attitude that he who dies with the most toys, wins. Stretch Hummers. No question about it: Materialism is one ugly, ugly concept, representing All That Is Evil In Modern Life (unless you’re a Republican fat cat, and then it’s ok).

And the corollary to this rejection of materialistic values is, There’s an alternative to shallow materialism. A view of life that prizes really important things, like the indomitable human spirit. As Paul McCartney – that paragon of anti-materialism – once put it, “Money can’t buy me love” (well, actually… but you get the idea).

And here comes the pun. Science is all about what it calls materialism, by which it means not wretched excess, of course, but simply reality. It means only that science does not concern itself with woowoo. Not that science can’t appear downright spooky to us layfolk – try mixing up some cornstarch and water to create a non-Newtonian fluid sometime. But a scientific explanation invokes only properties of …you got it … matter. Hence, the term “materialism.”

What’s wrong with that? Absolutely nothing, of course. And that’s the point of the creationist’s pun, to confuse the everyday notion of evil materialism with the morally neutral meaning of the word within science. In everyday life, we’re appalled by materialistic behavior like the vulgar accumulation of vast wealth (GOP excepted). But that is light years removed from being appalled by one of the major operating premises of science, that reality has a natural explanation. Dembski and Brownback deliberately confuse the two, punning on our rejection of materialistic moral values to create sympathy for a rejection of scientific materialism (ie, epistemological standards).

And once you reject scientific materialism and open science up to – their term, not mine- supernaturalism, well, then astrology becomes a scientifically plausible theory. And UFOs. And ESP. And “intelligent design” creationism.

And,believe it or not, that is exactly what a leading proponent of “intelligent design” creationism argued at the Dover trial:

[Michael] Behe was called to the stand on Monday by the defence, and testified that ID was a scientific theory, and was not “committed” to religion. His cross examination by the plaintiffs’ attorney, Eric Rothschild of the Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton, began on Tuesday afternoon.

Rothschild told the court that the US National Academy of Sciences supplies a definition for what constitutes a scientific theory: “Theory: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.”

Because ID has been rejected by virtually every scientist and science organisation, and has never once passed the muster of a peer-reviewed journal paper, Behe admitted that the controversial theory would not be included in the NAS definition. “I can’t point to an external community that would agree that this was well substantiated,” he said.

Behe said he had come up with his own “broader” definition of a theory, claiming that this more accurately describes the way theories are actually used by scientists. “The word is used a lot more loosely than the NAS defined it,” he says.

Rothschild suggested that Behe’s definition was so loose that astrology would come under this definition as well. He also pointed out that Behe’s definition of theory was almost identical to the NAS’s definition of a hypothesis. Behe agreed with both assertions.

The exchange prompted laughter from the court, which was packed with local members of the public and the school board.

Indeed. “Intelligent design” creationism is just a bad joke. A very bad joke. It prizes punning over reality. And no one, Republican or Democrat or otherwise, who puts any credence in this joke should be taken seriously for the position of dogcatcher, let alone president of the United States.

Asymetrical PR

by digby

Hey, did you hear about the latest terrorist attack?

A Saudi Arabian detainee at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay apparently committed suicide Wednesday, the U.S. military said.

Lest you think I’ve gone nuts, recall that the US government considers prisoners committing suicide in Guantanamo an act of war. I’m serious. Remember this?

Rear Admiral Harris is adamant that the people in his care are well looked after and are enemies of the United States.

He told me they use any weapon they can – including their own urine and faeces – to continue to wage war on the United States.

The suicide of three detainees, he reaffirmed to me, amounted to “asymmetrical warfare.”

The state department disagreed. They saw the Gitmo suicides as a PR tactic:

“Taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly is a good P.R. move,” Graffy said of the deaths. Drawing on knowledge gleaned from work “on improving the United States’ image abroad, especially in Islamic countries” (a detail The New York Times pulled from her State Department bio), Graffy elaborated on her remarks on the BBC show “Newshour”: “It does sound like this is part of a strategy–in that they don’t value their own lives, and they certainly don’t value ours; and they use suicide bombings as a tactic.”

Those evil terrorist bastards. All that bellyaching about torture and being innocent and locked up forever with no end in sight is just a fancy-pants marketing strategy. It’s ingenious. See, suicide bombings and committing suicide in prison are both acts of war against the US because they make us look bad. (Which would logically mean that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are committing terrorist attacks against the US every time they open their mouths.)

I’m jesting here, but it really isn’t funny. Guantanamo is indeed a PR disaster for the United States and it’s entirely self inflicted. And now we have presidential candidates talking about “doubling it” to wild applause by American citizens. I think somebody needs to stop these nutzoid Republicans from hurling their rhetorical feces as weapons and committing acts of asymetrical warfare against the rule of law as soon as possible.

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Boondoggle Alert

by tristero

Call me cynical about the Bush administration, if you like. I can take it. But this sounds like an open invitation for porkers to feed at the public trough while keeping criticism muted because, well, no one would dream of criticizing Bush for actually doubling the funding of overseas AIDS spending to $30 billion.

What makes me so suspicious? It’s this little line from Our Leader, embedded in perhaps the dumbest sentence published by the New York Times in at least…an hour or two:

“This money will be spent wisely,” Mr. Bush said in the White House Rose Garden, where the brilliant sunshine and the music of birds seemed incongruous, given the seriousness of the subject.

That’s right. Bush actually said, “This money will be spent wisely.” If that ain’t a tipoff, I dunno what is. Remember “We do not torture”?

For those of you who even now, give the Bush administration the benefit of a doubt – after we learned that we do indeed torture, after all those reported helicopter crashes due to “mechanical failure” rather than missile attacks – fair warning: Your faith in God’s Own Codpiece is misplaced. Bush is up to no good here.

My guess is that within 2 years the stories of corruption will ooze out. Maybe it’ll go to some utterly useless chastity programs jointly run by Newt Gingrich and Mark Foley. Maybe it’ll be a “get in touch with your inner hetero” program spearheaded by Ted Haggard. Or some Aids drug rehab scam that enriches the already enriched Rush Limbaugh. Or maybe it’ll be just plain old theft and fraud. Or all of the above.

Whatever, the pigs are squeaking expectantly today, ’cause soon they’re gonna be well-fed, courtesy you and me.

Exceptional Idiocy

by digby

This TB patient is a perfect small-scale example of idiotic American exceptionalism:

A man with a form of tuberculosis so dangerous he is under the first U.S. government-ordered quarantine since 1963 had health officials around the world scrambling Wednesday to find passengers who sat near him on two trans-Atlantic flights.

The man told a newspaper he took the first flight from Atlanta to Europe for his wedding, then the second flight home because he feared he might die without treatment in the U.S.

[…]

Health officials said the man had been advised not to fly and knew he could expose others when he boarded the jets from Atlanta to Paris, and later from Prague to Montreal.

The man, however, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that doctors didn’t order him not to fly and only suggested he put off his long-planned wedding in Greece. He knew he had a form of tuberculosis and that it was resistant to first-line drugs, but he didn’t realize it could be so dangerous, he said.

“We headed off to Greece thinking everything’s fine,” said the man, who declined to be identified because of the stigma attached to his diagnosis.

He flew to Paris on May 12 aboard Air France Flight 385. While in Europe, health authorities reached him with the news that further tests had revealed his TB was a rare, “extensively drug-resistant” form, far more dangerous than he knew. They ordered him into isolation, saying he should turn himself over to Italian officials.

Instead, the man flew from Prague to Montreal on May 24 aboard Czech Air Flight 0104, then drove into the United States at Champlain, N.Y. He told the newspaper he was afraid that if he didn’t get back to the U.S., he wouldn’t get the treatment he needed to survive.

Regardless of whether, knowing what he knew, he should have ever gone on this trip in the first place, this selfish and thoughtless man has been brainwashed by malevolent conservatives like Rudy Giuliani who spews nonsense about how “nobody goes to Europe for health care,” to make an ideological point about “socialized medicine”, despite the fact that their health care is actually superior to ours.

According to the news conference I just heard, the CDC was even trying to find a way to get this man back to the US, but this fellow was so “afraid” of being under the care of furriners until they could transport him back that he took off without telling anyone where he was going.

This attitude actually kills people. In this case it may be some poor schnooks who had the misfortune to come across this foolish man during his mad dash to get back to “civilization.” But it’s the same combination of hubris and stupidity that is making people all over the world recoil in horror at America’s leadership. Our culture is sick with arrogant, anti-intellectual provincialism. I wouldn’t blame the planet for wanting to quarantine the whole damned country.

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Empirically Wrong

by tristero

Scott Winsip::

Positioning on the Iraq war, however, tended to fall back on values far more heavily than either supporters or critics would prefer to admit, and that’s because the evidence necessary for an empirically-grounded position wasn’t available.

The hell it wasn’t. All you had to do was read, actually read, the testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, listen carefully to what Scott Ritter was saying, and most importantly, listen very carefully to what Bush and Co. were actually saying, as opposed to what people said they were saying.

Positioning on the Iraq War had little to do with values but a lot to do with how susceptible you were to being manipulated and panicked by authority figures. And the world learned the hard way that 2/3’s of this country was highly suggestible and, consequently, scared stiff by an administration doing everything possible to make them feel as terrified as possible.

Values? To the extent that keeping your wits about you when everyone was losing theirs, then yeah, I guess it was about values.

As for the rest of Scott’s argument, it’s the typical reified arguing of the “New Democrats,” that the American electorate leans right, implying that it always will lean right, and we just have to go along and accept that. But to Scott’s credit, at least he admits it’s a complicated picture. Indeed it is, and partly because it is a very inaccurate, blackandwhite picture.

Oh, and Scott? I’m a liberal. The word doesn’t scare me and it shouldn’t scare you.

Sullivan Goes All Godwin On Us

by tristero

It took him awhile, but he did finally notice:

Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I’m not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture – “enhanced interrogation techniques” – is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death. [Emphasis added.]

For the record, I do not believe that even those who commit heinous war crimes, including the ones described by Sullivan, should be put to death. Brought to trial, yes. And if convicted, they should serve long, hard sentences. But most importantly, they should be removed from goverment and/or positions of influence. Fast.

The Truth Will Set Us Free

by digby

Jonathan Schwartz over at A Tiny Revolution is reading “The Italian Letter” and finds a rather startling quote from a member of the Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center of the CIA(WINPAC):

He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center’s analysts: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.” The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.

Read the rest of Jonathan’s post to see the full atrocity.

As it happens I’m also reading “The Italian Letter” and was struck by another little tid-bit that I haven’t seen reported:

Within the Bush administration, Cheney was described as the leading architect of and cheerleader for the war with Iraq. Behind the scenes, former administration officials told us, Cheney and his secretive team of loyalists had maneuvered to make war inevitable.

Cheney at times had faced challenges inside the White house. Before the 2004 election, Karl Rove, the president’s powerful political advisor, privately sounded out social and fiscal conservative activists, who were unhappy with America’s foreign adventurism, about the possibility of dumping Cheney as Bush’s running mate. It is unclear whether Rove had th clout with bush to arrange such a makeover of th ticket or whether he was simply “playing to the conservative base,” according to0 a source who is a personeal friend and consultant to many conservative stalwarts. Nevertheless, Cheney soon found out about Rove’s secret conversations with the influential conservative backers. He was not happy. Yet Rove had reason to be concerned. His own internal polling six months before the election showed that Bush would gain 3.5 percent more if Iraq, strongly identified with Cheney ceased to be an issue — a critical margin in what would certainly be a close election.

Now, I’m actually surprised by this. I had thought Cheney was revered by the conservative base during that period. If he wasn’t I wonder why Dem polling didn’t pick up on it and play it up. I’m even more surprised that if Iraq was such a salient issue six months before the election, that the Dems were unable to prevail in the election.

Oh wait. No I’m not. Remember this book?

This fascinating and disturbing book is the official record of testimony taken by the Democratic Members and Staff of the House Judiciary Committee, presided over by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the Ranking Member. Originally published in January, 2005 by the Government Printing Office, it has been edited and re-designed for maximum readability. Both a riveting and alarming report on the status of our ailing presidential election process, this book provides new insights into the abuse and manipulation of electronic voting machines and the arbitrary and illegal behavior of a number of elected and election officials which effectively disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters in order to change the outcome of an election.

Imagine that.

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