Month: July 2007

“A Man Like This”

by digby

I don’t know about you, but I was quite moved by this part of Bush’s commutation statement. In fact I almost cried:

`I respect the jury’s verdict,” Bush said in a statement. “But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.”

He is compassionate after all, isn’t he? Thirty months is just too excessive. Well, at least when it comes to the right kind of people: He has different plans for everyone else:

WASHINGTON, June 13, 2007

The Bush administration is trying to roll back a Supreme Court decision by pushing legislation that would require prison time for nearly all criminals.

The Justice Department is offering the plan as an opening salvo in a larger debate about whether sentences for crack cocaine are unfairly harsh and racially discriminatory.

Republicans are seizing the administration’s crackdown, packaged in legislation to combat violent crime, as a campaign issue for 2008.

In a speech June 1 to announce the bill, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urged Congress to re-impose mandatory minimum prison sentences against federal convicts — and not let judges consider such penalties “merely a suggestion.”

Such an overhaul, in part, “will strengthen our hand in fighting criminals who threaten the safety and security of all Americans,” Gonzales said in the speech, delivered three days before the FBI announced a slight national uptick in violent crime during 2006.

Judges, however, were livid over the proposal to limit their power.

“This would require one-size-fits-all justice,” said U.S. District Judge Paul G. Cassell, chairman of the Criminal Law committee of the Judicial Conference, the judicial branch’s policy-making body.

“The vast majority of the public would like the judges to make the individualized decisions needed to make these very difficult sentencing decisions,” Cassell said. “Judges are the ones who look the defendants in the eyes. They hear from the victims. They hear from the prosecutors.”

The debate, pitting prosecutors against jurists, has been ongoing since a 2005 Supreme Court ruling that declared the government’s two decades-old sentencing guidelines unconstitutional. The ruling in United States v. Booker said judges are not required to abide by the federal guidelines — which set mandatory minimum and maximums on sentences — but could consider them in meting out prison time.

The Justice Department wants to return to the old system of mandatory minimum sentences, under which judges could grant leniency only in special cases. Without those required floors, Justice officials maintain that different judges could hand out widely varying penalties for the same crime.

Justice officials also point to a growing number of lighter sentences as possible proof that crime is on the rise because criminals are no longer cowed by strict penalties.

I heard GOP strategist Ed Rollins say earlier that “it’s always hard to see a man like this go to jail,” which is so true. He’s not “one of them” you know. (Like these awful people, for instance.)

I just saw the Fox Allstars practically pole dancing over this, saying outright that Libby’s pals are going to pay his fines for him and that he’ll have no problem finding work. High fives all around. They got so excited that they forgot they were supposed to be all dour and somber over the horrible, awful punishment that poor little Scooter is going to have to endure even though he isn’t spending a day in jail.

Joe DiGenova on CNN just spent what seemed like a half hour saying over and over again that Libby was a great American and the next step is an investigation into prosecutorial misconduct by Patrick Fitzgerald and hopes that more will come out during “the appeal.” Patrick Fitzgerald is about to see his career permanently destroyed by these scumbags.

This is a very, very depressing day, even though we knew it would happen in one way or another. It’s just a continuation of this administration’s complete disregard for the law and their belief that they are entitled to special treatment because, well, they are just, so special.

Bush has just slapped a jury, four Republican judges, and the American people right in the face and blatantly instigated a cover-up of his illegal acts by giving his former aid amnesty. And the hits just keep on coming.

Update: I just heard on Olbermann that Fitzgerald issued a statement reaffirming Bush’s right to commute the sentence but went into great detail about Bush’s claim that the sentence was excessive, saying that it was within the guidelines and that everyone should stand equal before the law.

That’s a nice idea. But who’s being naive, Pat?

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Enraged

by digby

So Bush did it. The bastard commuted little Scooter’s sentence, leaving the conviction in place. I’m not a lawyer, but I have to assume that this means he can still appeal — which means he can still take the fifth if the congress calls him to to testify. Very convenient.

Suzanne Malveaux (who is suffering from Stockhom Syndrome as the white house correspondent) said that “a lot of people” were in favor of this. Bill Schneider actually set her straight by saying that a large number of Democrats, Independents and even some Republicans were going to be enraged. Their last poll had 72% saying they didn’t think Libby should be pardoned and only 19% saying he did.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty enraged. What can we do about it?

And by the way — Sentelle was in on this. No doubt in my mind.

Update: Marcy Wheeler agrees about the fifth … and says Bush is obstructing justice:

Well, George did it. Made sure that Scooter wouldn’t flip rather than do jail time. He commuted Libby’s sentence, guaranteeing not only that Libby wouldn’t talk, but retaining Libby’s right to invoke the Fifth.

This amounts to nothing less than obstruction of justice.

I hope nobody’s expecting the DC press corps to see it that way. From what I’m seeing, this is just more good news for Republicans, like everything else.

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Trash Talk Anniversary

by digby

There is a lot of competition for the stupidest Bush comment ever. “Mission Accomplished” always leaps to mind. But in my informal survey of my own household (including the cat) and personal friends, this is the one that makes everyone groan the loudest. Four years ago today, this was the top report on CNN:

Thursday, July 3, 2003 Posted: 10:54 AM EDT (1454 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) –Challenging militants who attack U.S. forces in Iraq, President Bush said Wednesday they would be dealt with harshly, and declared, “Bring ’em on.“

For the second day in a row, Bush vowed that attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq will not shake his administration’s resolve to stay in that country until a strong and stable democratic government takes root.

“Anybody who wants to harm American troops will be found and brought to justice,” Bush said. “There are some that feel like if they attack us that we may decide to leave prematurely. They don’t understand what they are talking about if that is the case. Let me finish. There are some who feel like the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring ’em on.“

This was the ultimate expression of Bush’s puerile trash talk style of leadership. (And an awful lot of people thought at the time that it was sooo manly and virile and hot.)

Here was where we stood that day:

Since May 1 — when Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq — there have been more than two dozen “hostile” U.S. military deaths in Iraq, according to the Pentagon.

Bush said on Tuesday that rebuilding Iraq, following a U.S.-led invasion there, will be a “massive and long-term undertaking,” one that he suggested would require further sacrifice.

[…]

The administration has not provided a specific timeline for when the United States will pull troops out of Iraq.

“We’re not leaving until we accomplish the task,” Bush said Wednesday.

Nearly 3500 hundred Americans have died since then and tens of thousands have been wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead and millions are refugees. They brought it on alright.

“Bring it on” may not have been the stupidest thing he ever said, but it had the gravest consequences. With that comment, he verified once and for all that he was a fool whose biggest weakness was that he saw all opposition as a personal attack on his manhood. They’ve been working him ever since. With great success.

Update: Joan Walsh notes that Bring It On Day was very special for another reason as well.

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The Incomplete Man

by digby

This article on Junior in today’s Wapo is almost sad. In fact, I’m starting to get worried that the pity factor is going to start boosting his ratings. After years of media worship in which the man was often compared (with a straight face!) to Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln, even I can’t help but be a bit disoriented when I see things like this in print:

These are the questions of a president who has endured the most drastic political collapse in a generation…

No modern president has experienced such a sustained rejection by the American public.

The picture of poor George floudering around trying to get his bearings is almost poignant. And then we come back to reality:

In public and in private, according to intimates, he exhibits an inexorable upbeat energy that defies the political storms. Even when he convenes philosophical discussions with scholars, he avoids second-guessing his actions. He still acts as if he were master of the universe, even if the rest of Washington no longer sees him that way.

“You don’t get any feeling of somebody crouching down in the bunker,” said Irwin M. Stelzer, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who was part of one group of scholars who met with Bush. “This is either extraordinary self-confidence or out of touch with reality. I can’t tell you which.”

I can. It’s both. The latter leads to the former.

The piece confirms what I’ve been speculating about for the last year — he literally believes that history will vindicate him after he’s dead:

Bush has virtually given up on winning converts while in office and instead is counting on vindication after he is dead. “He almost has . . . a sense of fatalism,” said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), who recently spent a day traveling with Bush. “All he can do is do his best, and 100 years from now people will decide if he was right or wrong. It doesn’t seem to be a false, macho pride or living in your own world. I find him to be amazingly calm.”

I don’t think “fatalism” is something we can countenance in a political leader. In fact, it’s downright scary. I have believed for a long time that Bush thinks all these troubles will be “a comma” in his legacy — that somewhere down the road he will be credited with being a great president — like Give ’em Hell Harry and Churchill. The problem is that it’s the kind of fantasy that leads puny intellects to be easily brainwashed by smart manipulators into doing reckless things, like attacking Iran, for instance. A hundred years from now everyone will look back on those “birth pangs” and be grateful, right?

And for all of his alleged soul searching, he hasn’t taken action to actually change anything — he’s just trying to understand why people no longer see him as the hero he really believed he was during those heady days of hyped up bullhorns and codpieces. He still adheres religiously to his (very light) schedule, he refuses to cut Gonzales loose when everyone knows he’s dragging him down, and although he’s allegedly obsessed with Iraq, he stubbornly refuses to admit that everything he’s done there has turned out badly.

With his presidency crumbling around him, he still hasn’t taken charge:

Yet Bush can seem disengaged. When he flew to New York to visit a Harlem school and promote his education program, he brought along New York congressmen on Air Force One, including Democrat Charles B. Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. The White House was in the midst of tough negotiations with Rangel over trade pacts. But Bush did not try to cut a deal with Rangel, chatting instead about baseball. “He talked a lot about the Rangers,” Rangel said. “I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.”

I doubt that he even knew there was a trade pact or that it was being negotiated. He still doesn’t see such trivia as being his job. He’s the Commander in Chief, the Decider. When the deal is done and Dick slips it under his pen for signature, then he’ll “decide” whether to sign it.

And for all of his alleged soul searching about why the world doesn’t like him, he’s still the arrogant, self-centered fool we’ve always known. This is almost unbelievable to me:

Still, that trip demonstrated that Bush cannot escape his burdens. King, the GOP congressman, introduced him backstage to a soldier injured in one eye. Bush teared up and asked the young man to take off his dark glasses so he could see the wound, King recalled. “Human instinct is when someone has a serious injury to look the other way,” King said. “He actually asked him to take them off. He actually touched the eye a little. It was almost as if he felt he had to confront it.”

Moving, isn’t it? He needed to actually see the wound and touch it — the way six year olds do — in order to understand it. And like some sort of religious figure or demi-God, in doing that he apparently “became” that wounded man:

As they headed back to Washington a few hours later, with the televisions aboard Air Force One tuned to the New York Mets game, King mused that Bush must be feeling the weight of his office.

“My wife loves you, but she doesn’t know how you don’t wake up every morning and say, ‘I’ve had it. I’m out of here,’ ” King told him.

“She thinks that?” Bush replied. “Get her on the phone.”

King dialed but got voice mail. Bush left a message: “I’m doing okay. Don’t worry about me.”

That he could have that moment with a soldier who lost his eye and then immediately turn around and reassure the wife of a supporter that she needn’t worry about him, that he’s doing ok, is mind boggling. He honestly seems to think he’s a wounded soldier himself, bravely getting up every day to face the enemy’s fire. No shame, no guilt, no conscience, no understanding that he does not have the right to even address such concerns or “reassure” anyone about his own state of health or mind as long as men and women are coming home from his misbegotten war without their eyes!

There’s something unformed and incomplete about this man, even after sixty years on the planet and over six years as president of the most powerful nation on earth. He’s missing something essential in his psyche.

Update:

Regarding Bush’s fatalism, in other news, the administration is cranking up a propaganda campaign essentially accusing Iran of declaring war on the United States. Let’s hope he hasn’t decided that future historians need another reason to place him among the greats a hundred years from now …

Update II: Out Of It: Trust Perlstein to see the perfect historical parallel.

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She Sells Books

by digby

I thought it was awfully odd that Chris Matthews would have Ann Coulter on his show for the full hour, using the excuse that “she sells books” and calling her “a brilliant writer” of all things. (Brilliant plagiarist and fantasist, would be more accurate.) Sure, she probably generates some ratings, but the cost is fairly high for MSNBC which just came off a big controversy with Don Imus. Everything about the booking of that crazy woman just seemed off.

Mediabloodhound notices that Coulter and Matthews have something interesting in common, which Matthews fails to disclose on his show, but which might just explain why Matthews is so willing to use his show as an hour long infomercial for Coulter’s genocidal ravings. It’s entirely possible that Matthews(like George W. Bush) may have a habit of unthinkingly parroting arguments people have made to convince him to do something, when they weren’t meant for public consumption. Who told Matthews “say what you will, she sells books?”

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Place Your Bids

by digby

YKOS is having an auction to help defray costs for the their convention and they have some excellent stuff to bid on. I’d bid on the Jon Stewart or Live Aid tix if I were going to be in NY any time soon, but that’s just me.

Check it out. It’s for a good Kos.

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He Warned Us

by digby

I’ve been enjoying all the shocked pearl clutching this week as Washington insiders suddenly discover that their favorite party guest Dick Cheney is a secretive megalomaniac. But if the insiders and the press had not been so blinded by Bush’s adorable obsession with PB&J sammiches and his “pull my finger” style of boyish humor, (followed by a smooth shift into embarrassing codpiece worship after 9/11) perhaps someone might have wondered if his babysitter might have some odd ideas. After all, his love of monarchical presidential power is the one thing he hasn’t been secretive about:

November 1987
Congressman Richard Cheney was the ranking Republican on the congressional committee investigating the Iran-contra affair, in which Reagan administration officials secretly diverted the proceeds of arms sales to Iran to fund the contras in Nicaragua, who were fighting to oust the left-wing government. Below are excerpts from the section of the committee’s minority report on presidential power, which Cheney and his staff authored.

“Judgments about the Iran-Contra Affair ultimately must rest upon one’s views about the proper roles of Congress and the President in foreign policy. … [T]hroughout the Nation’s history, Congress has accepted substantial exercises of Presidential power — in the conduct of diplomacy, the use of force and covert action — which had no basis in statute and only a general basis in the Constitution itself. … [M]uch of what President Reagan did in his actions toward Nicaragua and Iran were constitutionally protected exercises of inherent Presidential powers. … [T]he power of the purse … is not and was never intended to be a license for Congress to usurp Presidential powers and functions.
I think you have to preserve the prerogative of the President in extraordinary circumstances not to notify the Congress at all.

…

“The boundless view of Congressional power began to take hold in the 1970’s, in the wake of the Vietnam War. The 1972 Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s report recommending the War Powers Act [which requires presidents to seek Congressional authorization if they deploy U.S. troops for longer than 60 days], and the 1974 report of the Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (chaired by Senator Frank Church and known as the Church Committee), both tried to support an all but unlimited Congressional power by invoking the “Necessary and Proper” clause. That clause says Congress may ‘make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing [legislative] Powers, and all Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department of Officer thereof.’ The argument of these two prominent committees was that by granting Congress the power to make rules for the other departments, the Constitution meant to enshrine legislative supremacy except for those few activities explicitly reserved for the other branches.

“One must ignore 200 years of constitutional history to suggest that Congress has a vast reservoir of implied power whose only limits are the powers explicitly reserved to the other branches. … The Necessary and Proper clause does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power. A law negating Predidential powers cannot be treated as if it were ‘necessary and proper for carrying’ Presidential powers ‘into Execution.’ To suggest otherwise would smack of Orwellian Doublespeak.

…

“Justice Louis D. Brandeis … wrote that the ‘doctrine of separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787, not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.’ His statement has been accepted in some Congressional quarters as if it holds the force of conventional wisdom, but it misses half of the historical truth.

“The fallacy of Brandeis’ statement becomes apparent when one considers the defects of the U.S. Government before the Constitution. The Constitutional Convention, among other things, was taking the executive from being under the legislature’s thumb, not the legislature from being under the executive’s. After suffering through the Articles of Confederation (and various state constitutions) that had overcompensated for monarchy, the 1787 delegates wanted to empower a government, not enfeeble it. Brandeis was partly right to point out that the Framers did not want power to be used arbitrarily, and that checks and balances were among the means used to guard against arbitrariness. But the principles underlying separation had to do with increasing the Government’s power as much as with checking it.

Read on, if you dare…

It’s not like he didn’t warn us that he was nutty as a fruit cake. It’s just that everyone was so distracted by Gore’s sighs and Bush’s assurances that he’d never have sex in the White House that nobody paid attention.

This year maybe we can put the blogosphere to work to make sure that doesn’t happen.

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Flying Squads

by digby

McClatchy has a new article up called “Was campaigning against voter fraud a Republican ploy?”

Uhm, yeah.

And here was an early clue:

Between 1958 and 1962, when Rehnquist was a private attorney in Arizona, he served as the director of Republican “ballot security” operations in poor neighborhoods in Phoenix. Rehnquist was part of Operation Eagle Eye, a flying squad of GOP lawyers that swept through polling places in minority-dominated districts to challenge the right of African Americans and Latinos to vote. At the time, Democratic poll watchers had to physically push Rehnquist out of the polling place to stop him from interfering with voting rights.

Two decades later, during Rehnquist’s 1986 Senate confirmation hearing for appointment to head the Supreme Court, he denied targeting minority voters. Some election watchers, who had personally observed Rehnquist’s tactics in Phoenix, accused him of lying to Congress.

This is an old story. What’s new is that Karl Rove tried to use the Justice Department itself to steal elections rather than relying on “flying squads” of GOP thugs to suppress the Democratic vote. But then, Rove was the most successful election stealer in American history, so it’s not exactly a surprise.

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The Republican Muse

by digby

Glenn Greenwald wrote a great post today the other day discussing the authoritarian mind. He highlights a typically vapid conversation between Tucker Carlson and Jonah Goldberg:

CARLSON: But I’m bothered by Cheney’s — but does — Cheney’s secrecy, his penchant for secrecy. I mean, this is a cliche, a stereotype, but it’s rooted, apparently, in truth. The guy really is secretive to a degree we haven’t seen in a while. That is — I mean, we do have a right to know what our government is doing, don’t we?

GOLDBERG: Yes, sure, although I think you would concede, even though you and I disagree about some foreign policy stuff, you and I would agree that there are some things that should be kept secret. We might disagree about what they are.

CARLSON: Right.

GOLDBERG: And you know, but I do think that what Cheney has learned after a lifetime in Washington as a power player, is that the person who holds the secrets has power. And he is using that for what I would say, or probably what he believes to be certainly good ends. A lot of people disagree on that, but he’s trying to do best as he can and he sees holding onto power as a tool to do that.

Glenn points out that Goldberg’s “trust big daddy” act has been mirrored recently by various TV airheads, but he missed the person who perfectly represents the thinking of the modern rightwing bimbo and someone Jonah can clearly look to as his intellectual mentor. Remember this?

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re going to be on the National Mall [in Washington, D.C.] soon performing for Pepsi and the NFL and also to support our troops. A lot of entertainers have come out against the war in Iraq. Have you?

BRITNEY SPEARS: Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens.

CARLSON: Do you trust this president?

SPEARS: Yes, I do.

CARLSON: Excellent. Do you think he’s going to win again?

If Hollywood Fred doesn’t work out I think we may have a contender. She’s from Louisiana, too.

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Mister Roberts

by digby

Big Tent Democrat at Talk Left makes a nice point today in his post called The Invidiousness of Expert Broderism, about the detached nature of the discussion surrounding the Supreme Court term by liberals and moderates who backed the Lieberdem impulse to put John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the high court because they were … well, great guys. (They’d had beers with them!)

My personal feeling is that this court is going to practice a form of radical right wing judicial activism that will transform our country over the next generation. (Remember, everything the right accuses the left of doing is what they actually are doing.) Democrats will spend a major amount of time when they are in power trying to find legislative and executive remedies for the dramatic judicial tilt toward big business, fundamentalist religion and racist, discriminatory outcomes — which will have been made in service to the Republican party and its donors. (After Bush vs. Gore I think we can finally dispense with any notion that the justices are non-partisan.)But we knew that didn’t we, when the gang of 14 decided they needed to keep their powder dry for a rainy day?

Roberts is a particularly unctuous character, with his sunny smile and youthful energy, while he dishonestly passes off wingnut bumper stickers like “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” as judicial reasoning. (I can hardly wait for him to read his decision on gun rights where he says “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”)

Rick Perlstein nails him to the wall with this passionate post about Roberts’ other fatuous punchline: “Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.”

If I were a high school teacher and young Johnny Roberts wrote this on an exam on civil rights history, I would give him an “F.” The idea that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court could cough up such a ludicrous hairball is evidence of a nation gone mad with amnesia. Or, if you prefer, a conservative intellectual class that knows the history full well, and has simply let itself lie.

Do educated people really need this explained to them? It wasn’t merely “before Brown” that “schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on their color of their skin.” It was long, long after the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka – for the next seventeen years at least.

I mean, do I really have to explain this? In 1955, the year after Brown, the Supreme Court specified the compliance language for the first decision: Southern school districts would have to comply “with all deliberate speed.”

Instead, they did not comply at all. Instead, the region staged a self-consious movement of “Massive Resistance.” Nearly every Southern congressman signed a manifesto pledging to defy the Court by “all lawful means.” In Virginia senator and former Klansman Harry Flood Byrd’s minions pushed through the state assembly an order to close any school under federal court order to integrate. And in 1957 in Little Rock – well, has Justice Roberts never heard of this?

Since most Dixie municipalities had one school district for whites and another entirely separate district for blacks blacks, and simply did nothing, the federal courts in 1964 ruled that all “dual school districts” not already under court order to do so would have to file desegregation plans with the Department of Health Education, and Welfare. Congress was able to help in 1965, after the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provided the first serious federal funding to local school districts. Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act had provided that no segregated public institution could get federal funds, this was, finally, a chance to punish the vast, vast majority of Southern school districts who – read this carefully, Justice Roberts – eleven years after Brown outlawed telling schoolchildren where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.

By that point only 6 percent of Southern schoolchildren attended classes with kids of another race. How did we know? Because the federal government counted.

The decision last week said that counting — the mechanism that showed that school districts were simply refusing to adhere to the law — is now illegal. Neat, huh? And in perfect inverted GOPtalk, Roberts smugly claims that he’s actually advancing the cause of school integration. He’s doing his mentors proud.

It is clear that the major legacy of the Bush administration will be this court. But then, the man became president in the first place due to a blatantly partisan Supreme Court decision, so I suppose there’s some symmetry in that.

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