Month: August 2007

Stone Evil

by digby

So good old ratfucker Roger Stone is up to his old tricks again, this time trying to scare an 83 year old man for political gain:

Lawyers representing Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s father, Bernard Spitzer, say a prominent political consultant who has been working for State Senate Republicans threatened the elder Mr. Spitzer this month in an anonymous, invective-laced phone message.

The allegations against the consultant, Roger J. Stone Jr., were laid out in a letter sent Tuesday to Senator George H. Winner Jr., an upstate Republican who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Investigations and Government Operations. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

Mr. Stone, a seasoned practitioner of hard-edged politics who worked for Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan and for George W. Bush in the 2000 recount battle, adamantly denied the allegation in an interview, calling it “the ultimate dirty trick.” He asserted that allies of Governor Spitzer may have gained access to a phone in his Manhattan apartment to make the threatening call.

The message, left at Bernard Spitzer’s Manhattan office just before 10 p.m. on Aug. 6, says that Mr. Spitzer, 83, a wealthy real estate developer, would be “compelled by the Senate sergeant at arms” to testify about “shady campaign loans” he made to his son during Eliot Spitzer’s unsuccessful campaign for attorney general in 1994.

The last time I heard anything this juicy about Stone was in 2004, when I wrote this:

New York Post (link now dead)

The hot rumor in New York political circles has Roger Stone, the longtime GOP activist, as the source for Dan Rather’s dubious Texas Air National Guard “memos.”

The irony would be delicious, since Rather became famous confronting President Nixon, in whose service a very young Stone became associated with political “dirty tricks.”

Reached at his Florida home, Stone had no comment.

I’ve written about Roger many times. He’s the slimy gift that keeps on sliming. And one thing I always try to do whenever I write about him is make sure that I note this prominently, just to make sure it’s always associated with his name:

Big time political strategist Roger Stone and his wife Nikki: The former Bob Dole adviser and his wife were swingers and The Vault was a favorite haunt.

“Roger and Nikki were our customers for a long time,” Marini says. “They were heavy duty swingers and ran ads on the Internet and in many sex publications. They were heavy players.”

Roger was one of the top advisers who urged Dole and other Republican politicians to emphasize family values and integrity.

“Regardless of his status in politics, Roger never came to the club in disguise,” Marini recalls. “He looked like a Ken doll. He was tall, blond, handsome and muscular and his wife was curvaceous and very sexy. She would wear leather bras and tantalizing outfits and he would wear collars, chaps and a leather vest with no shirt underneath.”

Then in 1996, an ENQUIRER investigation revealed that Roger and his wife frequented group sex clubs and engaged in group sex orgies. In two blockbuster articles, we published evidence, including a shocking ad the couple had placed in a swingers’ magazine soliciting lovers for group sex, a handwritten note arranging a sexual encounter, and revealing photos from sex magazines of Roger and Nikki barechested.

Hours after The ENQUIRER story hit the stands, it was picked up by dailies around the country — and Dole’s campaign ended its association with Roger Stone.

Dana Milbank wrote about it in The New Republic:

“There were photos of her in a black negligee and him bare-chested, and there was an enumeration of her personal measurements. Stone said he had been set up.”

That happens to him a lot.

In all seriousness, Stone is involved in a major dirty tricks operation to destroy Eliot Spitzer in New York. The Albany Project has the details and it’s vintage Republican ratfucking. These guys never quit.

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Remainder Bin

by digby

I haven’t read Matt Bai’s book new about what’s wrong the with the Democratic party (bloggers and billionaires apparently) and I probably won’t since from what I can tell he makes such a fundamental mistake from the beginning that his entire thesis is tainted by it. According to Joan Walsh, who reviewed the book for Salon today:

… for all its love of big bold ideas, “The Argument” is premised on a big, bold idea that’s simply wrong: that Republicans seized and held power in the Nixon-Reagan-Bush I generation by selling Americans on a positive platform of new programs for national renewal, while Democrats, by contrast, are now winning merely by not losing, bashing Bush for wrecking the country while never explaining to voters what they’d do instead.

Bai’s book is flawed by his failure to grapple with the negativity, lo, the hatred behind the Republican revolution of the ’70s and ’80s, some of which is still politically operative today. Does he really think Reagan rode to power on the Laffer curve, not by bashing Cadillac-driving welfare queens, scruffy war protesters and big bad government? Both Nixon and Reagan (George Bush I was merely Reagan’s long tail) were the political beneficiaries of a resentful, sometimes racist reaction to the perceived excesses of the 1960s and ’70s, associated with the Democrats, far more than they were the avatars of a wildly popular new way of running the country.

That is correct. Reagan’s great gift was his ability to make the ugly politics of resentment feel sunny and bright. Aside from the perennially popular idea of a free lunch, GOP “Big Ideas” were window dressing at best. It’s all about teh hate. That Bai projects the 40 years of extreme, relentless liberal bashing onto lefty bloggers who allegedly suffer a “debilitating hatred” of Bush says much more about him than it does about us.

The rest of Bai’s book sounds similarly wrong, certainly as concerns the blogosphere. From Walsh’s description it seems to have been conceived some time in 2004, at a moment of extreme disappointment and disequilibrium in progressive circles. It was temporary. Here on the internets things move very quickly. I’m afraid that even if his insights were valid, they’re already out of date. I’ll pass.

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Ich Bin Ein Big Conner

by digby

I’m going to be doing some blogging over at the Campaign For America’s Future blog “The Big Con” (in addition to keeping these home fires burning), and I’ve just posted my first one on the racist dimensions of the Katrina response.

My long time readers will remember that I did a long series of posts on that subject as the horrors were unfolding and I thought it would be good to revisit that topic during Campaign For America’s Future’s look back at Katrina this week. Check out Perlstein’s series as well.

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The Bush Dog Whisperers

by digby

The guys over at Open Left are running a campaign against what they are calling the Bush Dogs. These are Democrats, many of whom identify themselves as part of the conservative Blue Dog caucus, who have consistently betrayed progressive principles, heck even centrist middle of the road principles, to vote with one of the most unpopular presidents in American history. (It should be noted that not all of those who identify as Blue Dogs are also Bush Dogs — these BD’s are a special breed.)

There was a time when a cross party conservative coalition was a natural part of the political spectrum. It was a function of the unusual New Deal coalition brought about by the crisis of the Great Depression. But we are now in a partisan world in which the two parties have naturally split along pretty clear ideological lines. Members like the Bush Dogs are relics who are skewing the new order in ways that only serve the Republicans. (You’ll notice that they don’t have any Reid Dogs or Nancy Dogs.)

These people are called Bush Dogs for a simple reason: they have no self-respect and they have no sense of dignity. They are faithful hounds who continue to love the man who beats them no matter what. The Republican congress of the last six years is equally pathetic, of course, but these Bush Dogs are so much more so. They are loyal to a man who isn’t even their master. They get nothing in return, no money, no help no support — and they never did. Yet still they sit at Bush’s feet and beg for his kick.

I think Open Left is right to call these people out. There are good reasons for people to be moderate or conservative Democrats in certain areas, even in this partisan era. There are votes and policies that they will want to influence and there are times when they will use their clout to block votes. That’s politics in a big coalition.

But empowering the most unpopular, failed president in history, voting affirmatively with him on issues that the majority of the country are against and which will bring them no credibility with their own constituents is just blind, drooling devotion for no good reason. Bush is serving up nothing but poison, even to Republicans. These pooches are foolishly begging for tainted table scraps.

The Bush Dogs need to be retrained. It’s for their own good. They’ll be much happier.

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Catapulting the Puppies and Horsies

by digby

Yesterday I wrote that I thought the press would barely mention that amazing op-ed by the non-coms about the situation in Iraq. Greg Sargent followed up this morning with a post showing the stark difference between the giddy reception of the O’Pollack dog and pony report and that op-ed.

Guess what was the big story this afternoon on Blitzer:

BLITZER: Two influential U.S. senators are home from Iraq, and they’re throwing themselves back into the red-hot debate over the war and when to bring the troops home. They’re the current and former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committees. That would be Democrat Carl Levin and Republican John Warner. Their progress report today is both mixed and provocative to a certain degree.

Let’s go to our congressional correspondent, Dana Bash.

What are Levin and Warner saying, Dana?

DANA BASH, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, what they’re saying is actually pretty surprising, considering the fact that these are two men who oppose sending more troops to go to Iraq.

What they are saying coming back from this trip to Iraq is that on the military side, the president’s strategy is actually having some progress. He said — they are saying that there is some — there are some positive results that they actually witnessed on the ground in Iraq.

However, and there is a big “but” here, they are still saying that they’re pretty pessimistic on the progress on the political front. And in their joint statement, senators Warner and Levin said, “While we believe that the surge is having measurable results and has provided a degree of breathing space for Iraqi politicians to make the political compromise,” they said, “we are not optimistic about the prospects for those compromises.”

That story was being run all afternoon on CNN.

In the comments yesterday there was some discussion about why I was bitching since, you know, the op-ed had appeared in the pages of the NY Times and all. Atrios said something very important about this today that I don’t think I’ve ever seen put into quite these words before:

I think people often miss, there’s the “news” and then there’s the “talking about the news.” The latter is how most people ultimately get their information, how conventional wisdom and subsequent coverage is generated, etc. No matter what the circulation of the New York Times, if an op-ed lands on its pages and Wolf Blitzer doesn’t hear about it one cannot conclude that it made a sound.

Today, Carl Levin made some news by calling for the “removal” of Maliki. But that wasn’t what led the news on CNN — it was that he and Warner, “war critics,” said the surge was working. They’d been on a dog and pony adventure in Iraq and came back with the same news everyone whose been on the same dog and pony adventure has said ever since Bagdad Bergner and Steve Schmidt went over there and taught the military a thing or two about catapulting the propaganda.

They are getting their word out, the press sensing a new narrative is playing along (yea we’re winning!) and dissent once more gets drowned out. This is a huge problem for the left and one that we’d better learn how to deal with. It’s not censorship — it’s “news management,” which gets them to the same end.

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Hail Caesar

by digby

I’ve been getting a lot of emails about this group Family Security Matters which boasts such right wing luminaries as Barbara Comstock, Monica Crowley, Frank Gaffney, Laura Ingraham and James Woolsey among others on its board of directors. It seems like they are just another of the dozens of wingnut welfare programs devoted to throwing good money after bad keeping conservative operatives gainfully employed.

The emails I’m getting say they are busily scrubbing articles all over the place. When you look at what they’ve left up you have to wonder what could possibly be so bad they have to scrub it.

This one is still in the Google cache for now, and it’s certainly a keeper. Here, for posterity is:

Exclusive: Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy
Philip Atkinson

Author: Philip Atkinson
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: August 3, 2007

While democratic government is better than dictatorships and theocracies, it has its pitfalls. FSM Contributing Editor Philip Atkinson describes some of the difficulties facing President Bush today.

Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy
By Philip Atkinson

President George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States. He was sworn in for a second term on January 20, 2005 after being chosen by the majority of citizens in America to be president.

Yet in 2007 he is generally despised, with many citizens of Western civilization expressing contempt for his person and his policies, sentiments which now abound on the Internet. This rage at President Bush is an inevitable result of the system of government demanded by the people, which is Democracy.

The inadequacy of Democracy, rule by the majority, is undeniable – for it demands adopting ideas because they are popular, rather than because they are wise. This means that any man chosen to act as an agent of the people is placed in an invidious position: if he commits folly because it is popular, then he will be held responsible for the inevitable result. If he refuses to commit folly, then he will be detested by most citizens because he is frustrating their demands.

When faced with the possible threat that the Iraqis might be amassing terrible weapons that could be used to slay millions of citizens of Western Civilization, President Bush took the only action prudence demanded and the electorate allowed: he conquered Iraq with an army.

This dangerous and expensive act did destroy the Iraqi regime, but left an American army without any clear purpose in a hostile country and subject to attack. If the Army merely returns to its home, then the threat it ended would simply return.

The wisest course would have been for President Bush to use his nuclear weapons to slaughter Iraqis until they complied with his demands, or until they were all dead. Then there would be little risk or expense and no American army would be left exposed. But if he did this, his cowardly electorate would have instantly ended his term of office, if not his freedom or his life.

The simple truth that modern weapons now mean a nation must practice genocide or commit suicide. Israel provides the perfect example. If the Israelis do not raze Iran, the Iranians will fulfill their boast and wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Yet Israel is not popular, and so is denied permission to defend itself. In the same vein, President Bush cannot do what is necessary for the survival of Americans. He cannot use the nation’s powerful weapons. All he can do is try and discover a result that will be popular with Americans.

As there appears to be no sensible result of the invasion of Iraq that will be popular with his countrymen other than retreat, President Bush is reviled; he has become another victim of Democracy.

By elevating popular fancy over truth, Democracy is clearly an enemy of not just truth, but duty and justice, which makes it the worst form of government. President Bush must overcome not just the situation in Iraq, but democratic government.

However, President Bush has a valuable historical example that he could choose to follow.

When the ancient Roman general Julius Caesar was struggling to conquer ancient Gaul, he not only had to defeat the Gauls, but he also had to defeat his political enemies in Rome who would destroy him the moment his tenure as consul (president) ended.

Caesar pacified Gaul by mass slaughter; he then used his successful army to crush all political opposition at home and establish himself as permanent ruler of ancient Rome. This brilliant action not only ended the personal threat to Caesar, but ended the civil chaos that was threatening anarchy in ancient Rome – thus marking the start of the ancient Roman Empire that gave peace and prosperity to the known world.

If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.

He could then follow Caesar’s example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.

President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become “President-for-Life” Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.

There you have it.

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Nostalgia Act

by digby

One of the things that has been bugging me about the Karl Rove farewell tour is the insistence by the punditocrisy that Bush was a real compassionate conservative who changed his spots once he came into office. The truth was that they ran him as a compassionate conservative in 2000 because the nasty, pinch faced image of the impeachment crazy GOP with its nose buried in the white house’s boxers and briefs was vastly unpopular with everyone but the hard core Clinton haters. It was a slogan like the puerile “reformer with results” that Karen Hughes came up with to answer McCain’s candidacy.

And the beauty of compassionate conservatism was that it was multipurpose. It not only separated Bush from the mouthbreathers among independents, it was a dogwhistle to the base at the same time. “Compassionate conservatism” had been coined by Marvin Olasky as a slogan defining the faithbased policies the Christian Right was pushing in the late 90’s.

And there was a third bit of cleverness that hasn’t been discussed much:

It’s hard to remember now, but well before Rove became a household name, Thompson was among the folks considered to be the future of the GOP. Along with fellow 1990s Republican governors Jim Edgar (Illinois), John Engler (Michigan), George Voinovich (Ohio), George Pataki (New York), Tom Ridge (Pennsylvania), Christine Todd Whitman (New Jersey), William Weld (Massachusetts) and Marc Racicot (Montana), the Wisconsin governor was portrayed as the thinking man’s Republican, mixing conservative ideals with the practical job of governing–a neat counterpoint to the snarling, obstructionist, impeachment-happy culture warriors in the party’s congressional leadership. While the cohort’s stellar reputations may have owed less to their executive brilliance than to the booming economy of the Clinton era, they collectively presented an image of a party voters might trust to educate their children, protect their drinking water, and otherwise engage in the bland, grown-up business of running a country.

It was no surprise, then, that when the 2000 election rolled around, Rove busily cast his candidate as yet another member of the earnest GOP governors’ club.

That Governor’s Club was a big deal during that period because they represented the sane, moderate side of the GOP that everyone believed could win that ever elusive swing voter. After the debacle of the 1998 election, the big money boyz knew they needed to put up somebody who wasn’t a polarizing incubus like Gingrich. They were in trouble and they knew it.

Everyone’s saying that Karl was unable to parlay the GOP majority into his dream of an enduring realignment, which is pretty obvious. But they are missing the fact that Rove’s dream was so hubristic as to be delusional. Joshua Green’s great article from this month’s Atlantic shows how he was trying to bring about the kind of cataclysmic partisan shift that’s only ever happened through major external cultural or economic shifts in the past, through sheer will and corrupt coalition building. What isn’t so widely recognized, I think, was that he was also doing it at a time when his party’s dominance had been on the wane for some time.

From conservative Christopher Caldwell’s article “Why The GOP Is Doomed” from 1999:

The party faces a crisis of confidence that has many symptoms—repudiation in the most sophisticated parts of the country, widespread distrust of the Republican leadership, an inability to speak coherently on issues. All of them grow out of the same root cause: a vain search to rediscover the formula that made that unformulaic president Ronald Reagan so broadly appealing—even beloved. […]

Since the 1960s Republican gains at the national level have been built on two trends. One is regional—the capture of more and more southern seats. The other is sociological—the tendency of suburbanites to vote Republican. The party’s 1994 majority came thanks to a gain of nineteen seats in the South. In 1996 Republicans picked up another six seats in the old Confederacy. But that only makes their repudiation in the rest of the country the more dramatic. The party has been all but obliterated in its historic bastion of New England, where it now holds just four of twenty-three congressional seats. The Democrats, in fact, dominate virtually the entire Northeast. The Republicans lost seats in 1996 all over the upper Midwest—Michigan, Wisconsin (two seats), Iowa, and Ohio (two seats). Fatally, they lost seats in all the states on the West Coast. Their justifiable optimism about the South aside, in 1996 it became clear that the Democratic Party was acquiring regional strongholds of equal or greater strength.

As Walter Dean Burnham, a political scientist at the University of Texas, has noted, the 1996 elections almost diametrically oppose those of 1896. (See accompanying maps.) Anyone who is today middle-aged or older was born in a country with a solidly Democratic South and a predominantly Republican Midwest and Northeast and probably will die in a country in which the Republicans hold the old Confederacy and the Democrats dominate from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. In effect, the two parties have spent the twentieth century swapping regional power bases.

One of the things that the TNR article I excerpted above points out is that Rove couldn’t have been too happy with the outcome in 2000. The Republicans had had to run in 2000 as “compassionate” conservatives to set themselves apart from what everyone knew to be the hideous face of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh’s GOP. And it wasn’t enough. With all their soft-peddling and schmoozy sombrero swinging outreach they still had to steal it. The 2002 and 2004 elections were dramatically skewed by 9/11 and the chauvinistic orgasm that followed. They were anomalies. They managed to pull off a couple of tepid victories while the smoke still lingered, but things finally settled back to where they would have been in 9/11 hadn’t happened.

Rove was hailed as a genius because he told everyone he was a genius. (And there was a certain genius in being able to get such a patently unacceptable candidate into high office.) But the truth is that he has been swimming against a strong tide for some time. We have all been thinking that the Bush II administration was the high water mark of the conservative era, but it was actually a decade earlier — around 1994. Then we entered into a period of parity and now, finally, the momentum seems to be on the progressive side.

Miraculously, 9/11 only temporarily stalled that momentum politically but it didn’t reverse it, largely because Karl Rove missed the opportunity to actually change the course of that slow moving realignment by having Bush reach out to the Democrats and the rest of the world and forge a new sort of consensus. Rove had Bush go the other way and stoke the base. It was a fatal error. And it is the ultimate proof of Rove’s arrogant mediocrity. He was given a chance to possibly accomplish what up to then had only been hype and he made the wrong choice, most likely because he couldn’t give up the idea that he could make it happen through his own strength of will. (We don’t need no stinking consensus…)

The media, as usual, is way behind the curve on all this and didn’t even catch on to conservative dominance until it was pretty much over. (As recently as three years ago I heard Chris Matthews smugly retorting to a guest, “the liberals run everything around here.”) Now that the zeitgeist has definitively turned our way, they are convinced that the country is polarized and the Democrats need to move to the right on social issues. (Welcome to 1998.)

Karl Rove really only had one “insight” (if you can call it that): that some people would vote for you if they perceive you are a winner — the bandwagon effect. He won elections through the clever manipulation of the media with lots of talk about “the math” and inevitability and his own mystique. When he was riding the 90’s zeitgeist in red Texas, it worked. When he had to run nationally, not so much, but he still tried even in the face of his ignominious defeat in 2006.

The worst part of this is that Bush administration applied the same theory to running the country: the “you can believe me or you can believe your eyes” style of governance.You remember:

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

I don’t know if that was Karl or not, but it doesn’t matter. That was Karl’s view and Cheney’s view and the whole GOP establishment’s view. They thought they could outrun progress and outspin reality in every circumstance, but they couldn’t.

I was listening to one of the blond GOP bombshells this morning on C-Span, Kelly Ann Fitzpatrick, lecturing some college Republicans on making the case for conservative ideas. I could anticipate everything she said before she said it. I was mouthing the words as if it were an old top 40 song that I would be happy never to hear again. It’s predictable, tired and dull — and it brings back bad memories.

Until they reinvent themselves into something new, their movement is moribund and has been that way for a lot longer than all of us realized. For the Republican party it’s always morning in America, 1984. They are a nostalgia act and don’t even know it.

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Real Men

by digby

One of the blogger types I mentioned in “that speech” were “stay at home Dads” and I was actually surprised by how many of my blogger friends later told me they appreciated the mention. There are many more than you think and they are all great.

Here’s one now, whom you all know, with a lovely essay about being a manly man who stayed home to raise his little girl.

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The Grown-Ups Of the 82nd

by digby

I was just on the Sam Seder Show with Jack Hitt and we talked about this amazing op-ed in today’s NY Times by seven non-coms currently deployed in Iraq. We all wondered if it will get the kind of wall-to-wall coverage that the O’Pollack piece did a week or so ago, at the clear behest of the right wing who were pimping them like hookers to any TV John who would have them. The consensus is no, unfortunately.

My feeling is that they will not get the coverage for a couple of reasons. The first is that, as Hitt pointed out on the show, the Dems don’t seem to have any kind of apparatus to “catapault the propaganda” (or seemingly any desire to have one) and the second is because I think the right will go into overdrive to present these guys as good and decent patriotic non-coms (who-aren’t-all-that-bright-if-you-know-what-I-mean-shhhh.) They aren’t capable of seeing the big picture there with their big clumsy boots on the ground and their heads in the sand. They’re very sweet, but let’s get serious. Very Serious People know a little bit more about these Very Serious issues than these well-meaning boys.

It’s what they did to John Murtha. Up until the time he came out for withdrawing for Iraq everyone in town considered him a go-to person on military affairs. An “expert” if you will. After he took his stand you heard a lot of people saying that he was just a sentimental old man who ghoulishly liked to hang around Walter Reed and blubber.

Here’s St. John himself:

John Murtha is “a lovable guy,” but “he’s never been a big thinker; he’s an appropriator.” Using language that Bush never could, McCain tells me that Murtha has become too emotional about the human cost of the war. “As we get older, we get more sentimental,” McCain says. “And [Murtha] has been very, very affected by the funerals and the families. But you cannot let that affect the way you decide policy.”

Furthermore, the right and the political media have many things in common, but nothing more than their absolute faith in “grown-ups.” And “grown-ups” are designated as “rock-stars,””experts” and “leaders.” The average soldiers, much less average citizens, do not fit in those categories and should stay in their place when it comes to Very Serious issues.

I would hope that any Democratic spokesman appearing in the media in the next few days will have the names of these seven soldiers memorized and ready to trip from their tongues at every given opportunity. These men deserve to be treated with respect, particularly since they are clearly not Bush hating DFH’s who hate America.
Unfortunately, everyone’s on vacation.

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“The Intent Here Was Pure”

by digby

Jonathan Alter is very shrill:

I hate to sound melodramatic about it, but while everyone was at the beach or “The Simpsons Movie” on the first weekend in August, the U.S. government shredded the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the one requiring court-approved “probable cause” before Americans can be searched or spied upon. This is not the feverish imagination of left-wing bloggers and the ACLU. It’s the plain truth of where we’ve come as a country, at the behest of a president who has betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution and with the acquiescence of Democratic congressional leaders who know better. Historians will likely see this episode as a classic case of fear—both physical and political—trumping principle amid the ancient tension between personal freedom and national security.

[…]

With Congress, the courts and President Bush squabbling over his illegal wiretapping program, the government was actually conducting less surveillance of foreign nationals than before 9/11, which was crazy. We had to do more listening in, especially with scary new intelligence “chatter” suggesting an unspecified attack on the U.S. Capitol this summer. Congressional sources who attended the late-July classified intel briefings, but won’t talk about them for the record, say these threats didn’t sound like spin. After all, we’re not talking here about trumped-up Iraqi WMD, but Al Qaeda terrorists who have already tried to kill us.

So members of Congress are legitimately afraid that they and their families will get blown up this summer. Fair enough. But then they lost their heads and sold out the Constitution to cover their political rears while keeping the rest of us mostly in the dark

There has been a good deal of discussion about why the Democrats really did this, with opinions basically dividing into it being either a desire to allow the Bush administration to do anything it feels it needs to to protect us or a political fear that the Bush administration would call them soft on terrorism if they failed to pass the bill.

Both are despicable reasons for shredding the fourth amendment. The idea of being called soft on terrorism if they failed to pass the bill is predictable Democratic political malpractice. But I actually became convinced that it was the other reason that motivated them: they believe the president should have these extra-constitutional powers. And that reason is the one that really scares me. A majority of our representatives apparently agree that the constitution can be set aside if they are afraid of something.

And nobody has yet explained to me exactly how passing this FISA bill was supposed to stop these impending terrorist attacks that the administration had been “chattering” about in Washington all summer on the q.t. Was there some reason to believe that they had not been able to nail something down because they were so afraid of breaking the law — the law which they’d already been breaking for years? It makes no sense.

But it doesn’t have to make sense because it isn’t about a particular program, which most members of the congress are all to happy not to know anything about. The problem is that they have bought George W. Bush’s authoritarian paternalistic mantra that the president’s primary job is to “keep us safe.”

Do you ever remember hearing that before 9/11? I don’t. I don’t recall any civics classes or history books saying that the president’s primary responsibility is to protect the American people.” In fact, the oath of office says something very specific about what the president is supposed to “preserve and protect” and it’s the constitution. We were supposed to be a brave nation of hardy yeoman farmers and bourgeois businessmen — individualists who came together when under attack to protect ourselves.I don’t ever remember, in my lifetime anyway, the president constantly saying that we should be “comforted” by the fact that he was doing everything in his power to keep us safe from harm. It’s rubbed me the wrong way from the beginning. It makes us sounds like a nation of infants.

Yet I think that idea has taken hold somehow — that we need to let our Daddy/president do what he has to do to keep the family safe, and if that means beating cousin Tommy senseless because you found a couscou in his backpack and then locking us all in the basement for our own good, well, so be it. And even if it’s clear he’s been watching too much “24” and popping Mom’s prescription diet pills — we have to let him do whatever he thinks is necessary because he’s the only one who can keep us safe. Don’t ask questions, father knows best.

As long as the president, any president, can set off a chain of rumors in Washington that the boogeymen are coming to kill all the congressmen and their families in their beds if they don’t let him (or her) do what he wants, then they are going to be able to pretty much do anything in the name of national security, aren’t they, particularly if they’ve all internalized this nonsense that the president’s main job is to “protect them” by any means necessary. Even if it makes no sense. Even if it won’t work.

Bin laden needn’t have bothered taking down the world trade center. It appears that the DC operation would have sufficed to get the US to turn itself into an mindless bowl of jelly.

Alter explains what happened behind the scenes and it’s so ugly, I can barely read it without feeling nauseous.

Here’s what we do know. We know that the Democratic leadership rightly conceded to Adm. Michael McConnell, the once widely respected director of National Intelligence, to allow eavesdropping on foreigner-to-foreigner communications routed through American phone companies (no biggie; we’ve always spied on foreigners). We know that the Democrats thought they had a deal until McConnell, who is supposed to be nonpartisan, went back to the White House and got fresh marching orders to squelch reasonable judicial oversight by the FISA court. And we know that the administration’s new position was that the attorney general (the disgraced Alberto Gonzales) should have the sole authority to spy without a warrant on any American talking to a foreigner, even if it’s you and the guy from Mumbai fixing your printer.

Then the Democrats said: “Wait a minute! That’s unconstitutional!” Right? Actually, no, they didn’t. Even liberals like Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, argued in two heated, closed-door meetings on Aug. 3 that the Democrats might as well cave. Otherwise, they would be pounded during the August recess for ignoring national security and destroyed as a party if the country were actually attacked. Even though the leadership and 82 percent of House Democrats voted against the bill, they did not block it, delay the recess and hold the Congress in session. The private excuse was that the liberal base wouldn’t be satisfied no matter what they did, and that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid couldn’t make the more conservative Senate go along anyway.

Aside from the disgusting cravenness of that, what does it tell you that Reid couldn’t get the “more conservative” Senate to go along? It means that the more conservative Senate — including a fair number of Democrats — believes that the President should have the right to eavesdrop on you when you call in to argue about your credit card receipt with some customer service clerk (you don’t know is) in Mumbai.

And now we find out that the legislation was actually much worse than we knew before:

Broad new surveillance powers approved by Congress this month could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include — without court approval — certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans’ business records, Democratic Congressional officials and other experts said.

Administration officials acknowledged that they had heard such concerns from Democrats in Congress recently, and that there was a continuing debate over the meaning of the legislative language. But they said the Democrats were simply raising theoretical questions based on a harsh interpretation of the legislation.

[…]

“This may give the administration even more authority than people thought,” said David Kris, a former senior Justice Department lawyer in the Bush and Clinton administrations and a co-author of “National Security Investigation and Prosecutions,” a new book on surveillance law.

Several legal experts said that by redefining the meaning of “electronic surveillance,” the new law narrows the types of communications covered in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, by indirectly giving the government the power to use intelligence collection methods far beyond wiretapping that previously required court approval if conducted inside the United States.

These new powers include the collection of business records, physical searches and so-called “trap and trace” operations, analyzing specific calling patterns.

For instance, the legislation would allow the government, under certain circumstances, to demand the business records of an American in Chicago without a warrant if it asserts that the search concerns its surveillance of a person who is in Paris, experts said.

It is possible that some of the changes were the unintended consequences of the rushed legislative process just before this month’s Congressional recess, rather than a purposeful effort by the administration to enhance its ability to spy on Americans.

“We did not cover ourselves in glory,” said one Democratic aide, referring to how the bill was compiled.

But a senior intelligence official who has been involved in the discussions on behalf of the administration said that the legislation was seen solely as a way to speed access to the communications of foreign targets, not to sweep up the communications of Americans by claiming to focus on foreigners.

“I don’t think it’s a fair reading,” the official said. “The intent here was pure: if you’re targeting someone outside the country, the fact that you’re doing the collection inside the country, that shouldn’t matter.”

The intent was pure. Oh my god.

It’s impossible for me to believe that all this is an accident or that it’s just a case of extreme political malpractice. The biggest political story of the summer was the stunning revelation by James Comey that the entire upper echelon of the Department of Justice was prepared to resign in 2004 if the administration continued its illegal wiretapping program. The Attorney General himself is accused of committing perjury in his testimony about that event. Editorial pages throughout the country and senior senators of both parties have said he should resign. There has been a serious dialog about impeaching the president, vice president and the attorney general largely on the basis of this particular case. The political implications, with it’s high drama and resonance with Watergate, are huge.

The degree of imeptitude required to allow this potent political issue to be completely destroyed by passing this legislation and essentially codifying the program in question into law seems a bit much even for the challenged Dems. I actually give them more credit than that. It’s hard for me to believe anyone could be this stupid. They got the bill passed because they wanted to give the president the authority he needs to do “whatever it takes to protect us.”

And anyway,

…the liberal base wouldn’t be satisfied no matter what they did

That’s just not true. If they had passed a bill that allowed some technical changes to the law that already allows foreign-to-foreign wiretapping that did not intrude on American’s fourth amendment rights, as they said they were going to do, I really doubt many of us would have objected. But they went much further than that and what we are left with is a law that blows another hole in the fourth amendment with an assurance by The Bush Administration that their “intent was pure.” And their argument about the warrantless wiretapping has been unceremoniously flushed down the toilet. An accident? Really? ok…

It’s a good thing our Daddy loves us. It hurts him more than it hurts us to have to do this.

Update: Tommy Stevenson of Tuscaloosa News.com has this quote from Democratic congressman, Artur Davis:

“Should the perfect be the enemy of the good?” Davis said. “Now in an ideal world, I would like to see us in a place where if a communication touched someone in the United States you would have go get a warrant, but the problem is that wasn’t one of the options we had before us.

“Sometimes in the process you’ve got to make hard choices in real time.”

In this case, Davis said he thought the most important thing was to close the loophole that had been made public and ripe for exploitation by terrorists.

“We closed the gap involving foreign-to-foreign communication that passes through U.S. portals,” he said. “Everybody knew that needed to be fixed because communication that passes though U.S. ‘wires’ does not attach Fourth Amendment protections.

“if we had not closed that gap, that gap would be real and in existence today and ready to be exploited by, say, terrorists in Islamabad communicating with people in Canada to plan an attack.”

The more cynical of the critics of the changes Congress made to the FISA law say the Democrats who crossed over to vote with the Republicans and gave Bush what he wanted, especially the House members all of whom are up for reelection next year, were afraid of being branded as “soft on terror” in the election.

Davis, Alabama’s only black member of Congress, has a relatively safe seat, at least as far as GOP opposition goes, in his majority black district. In fact, since the former Birmingham lawyers and assistant federal prosecutor did not come up through the ranks of the black political establishment, he will always be most vulnerable in the Democratic primary, where a vote against the FISA changes would not have hurt him one bit.

But the second-term congressman shrugged off that analysis.

“The most important thing we had before us last week was closing that glaring loophole that everybody in the world who would do us harm knew about,” he said.

“Besides, this legislation is good for only six months, when we will come back and revisit the issue,” he said. “I am hopeful we can get some more oversight back into the FISA law then.”

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