Month: September 2007

The Pied Piper of Crawford

by digby

The bizarre and dishonest National Intelligence chief, Michael McConnell, is back up on the hill pushing for a permanent expansion of the warrantless wiretapping law he browbeat the congress into passing last August. Only this time making sure that his former (and future?) employers, the telcoms, are granted immunity from any liability for illegally spying on their customers and handing the information over to the government without a warrant.

He’s very reassuring:

The National Security Agency has not conducted wiretapping without warrants on the telephones of any Americans since at least February, the nation’s top intelligence officer told Congress on Tuesday.

Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told the House Judiciary Committee that since he took office that month, the government has conducted electronic surveillance only after seeking court-approved warrants.

That’s nice. Why then did he and the administration feel it was necessary to ram through that bill last August? I don’t suppose the fact that he very, specifically and explicitly said “wiretapping without warrants on the telephones of any Americans” might lead one to believe that he is once again doing a little misdirection is he? After all, he is known to be an outright liar.

Is that too harsh a word? I don’t think so:

Congress agreed to give President Bush and the nation’s intelligence agencies extra authority to spy on Americans just hours before lawmakers left for a month-long recess in August. In the legislative session’s final week, news emerged of an impending plot by foreign terrorists to attack the US Capitol, and Republicans pointed to the reports as justification to expand the administration’s powers.

“That specific intelligence claim, it turned out, was bogus; the intelligence agencies knew that,” Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) said at a forum on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act organized by the Center for American Progress in Washington. However, lawmakers did not learn of the claim’s unreliability until “the day” they approved the FISA expansion, she said.

If they aren’t spying on Americans then they don’t need a law giving them permission to do so. It’s that simple. They should not renew that bill.

This allegedly independent Michael McConnell, who stabbed the Democrats in the back last August by reneging on the deal he’d made after the White House yanked his chain and then ran around screaming “the terrorists are coming to kill all of you in your offices RIGHT NOW if you don’t support this bill” is a bad actor. He’s a liar and a kook and the congress ought to steer clear of him. This administration has cried wolf so many times, it’s completely pointless to believe anything they say. Just follow the constitution.

For some reason, the Democrats are reportedly thinking of giving this immunity to the telcoms, which means, as Greenwald points out today, that there will no longer be any forum in which to uncover just what in the hell has been going on these last few years. That’s very depressing. (What else is new?)

Jane Harmon, to her credit, seems to have had an epiphany on these issues and is far more skeptical than she used to be. And if you don’t want to believe a hawkish Democrat, there’s always the conservative Bruce Fein who pointed out the obvious:

“Unchecked spying invariably leads to abuses in collection for political purposes, not national security purposes,” Fein said. The danger inherent in giving Bush — or any president — authority to spy on Americans without oversight is that “it will be hijacked to advance a political agenda.”

You would think that, facing a probable Democratic president, other Republicans would be worried about such things. But they aren’t. They just keep following their Dear Leader over the cliff like he’s the Pied Piper of Crawford. They don’t care about the presidential race. They don’t even seem to care about preserving themselves.

Today they inexplicably covered the president’s ass once again allowing him to avoid having to veto a piece of legislation that would allow the troops a decent interval between deployments. (I won’t even mention that also endorsed torture and indefinite imprisonment again today. They actually like that one though. They just wish they could use it on everybody.) What’s odd is that he’s not running again and they are. And they know they have a big problem.

Joan Walsh writes:

Rep. Jack Murtha says Republicans are telling him they won’t buck the party’s rabid pro-war base until after primary season. Does that sound familiar? Back in the spring, GOP leaders were telling reporters they’d give the president until this September — the traditional start of the political season — to turn things around in Iraq, and if he hadn’t, they’d demand a course change. September came, and that didn’t happen, so why should we expect things to be any different after the primaries? As Chris Matthews noted on “Hardball” today — I was on the Hardball Panel — with 60 to 90 Americans dying every month, the cynical Republican inaction guarantees another 600 to 900 dead American soldiers, at minimum, before GOP leaders have the guts to stand up to their isolated, pro-war base next summer. And I have no reason to believe they’ll grow a spine by then.

No they won’t. They are still so far under Bush’s thumb that they are willing to lose their seats rather than buck this loathed leader and the ever shrinking neanderthal base that still loves his misbegotten war.

But then, that’s an old story, isn’t it? Atrios wrote today that someone had once said that depending on moderate Republicans to do the right thing is a fools errand. I couldn’t agree more. There have been many examples of GOP congressional perfidiousness over the past few years, but none so disgusting as the Republican caucus so afraid of an historically unpopular president that they will willingly let people die and throw away their own political careers to spare him having to veto popular legislation. It’s almost inhuman to see them so afraid to stand up for themselves and their constituents.

A while back when I was watching the first warrantless wiretap hearings, I wrote a post about these people that I was reminded of today when they sold their beloved military down the river one more time so that George W. Bush could save face. Yes, they really are even worse even than the Democrats who aren’t exactly setting the world on fire with their daring-do. They are the biggest bunch of cowardly whiners this country has ever produced:

The Eunuch Caucus

I’ve been digesting this morning’s hearings and I am dumbstruck by the totality of the Republicans’ abdication of their duty. These men who spent years running on Madisonian principles (“The essence of government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse”) now argue without any sense of irony or embarrassment that Republican Senators are nothing more than eunuchs in President Bush’s political harem. They have voluntarily rendered the congress of the United States impotent to his power.

I’ve watched this invertebrate GOP caucus since 2000 as they submitted themselves to this lawless administration again and again, shredding every bit of self respect, every figment of institutional pride, every duty to the constitution. The look in their eyes, which is somehow interpreted as strong and defiant by the equally servile media, is actually a window to empty little men who have given up their manhood to oblige their master. The only reward they seek is unfettered access to the taxpayers money for their own use.

We are looking at fifty-five of the most powerful people in the country. Collectively the Republican Senators represent almost a hundred and fifty million citizens. And they have allowed a callow little boy like George W. Bush along with his grey eminences Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to strip them of their consciences, their principles and their constitutional obligations. What sad little creatures, cowardly and subservient, unctuously bowing and scraping before Karl Rove the man who holds their (purse) strings and dances them around the halls of congress singing tributes to their own irrelevance at the top of their lungs. How pathetic they are.

Barry Goldwater is rolling over in his grave.

Oh, and don’t get excited about Huckleberry Graham’s “tough” questions. This is his schtick. Going all the way back to the impeachment hearings, he has done this. He hems and haws in his cornpone way how he’s “troubled” by one thing or another until he finally “decides” after much “deliberation” that the Republican line is correct after all and he has no choice but to endorse it

.

And now these mindless lemmings are willing to follow this 29% president over a cliff.

Why? What makes Republicans so servile that they can’t even exercise the tiniest bit of personal conscience or even self-preservation?

And what in God’s name makes them think this country will put up with these silly, time wasting antics when people are dying?

Update: Sidney Blumenthal discusses the new Draper book on Bush that speaks to why these Republican sheep are so eager to cover for him even at this late date:

Bush’s deployed his fetish for punctuality as a punitive weapon. When Colin Powell was several minutes late to a Cabinet meeting, Bush ordered that the door to the Cabinet Room be locked. Aides have been fearful of raising problems with him. In his 2004 debates with Sen. John Kerry, no one felt comfortable or confident enough to discuss with Bush the importance of his personal demeanor. Doing poorly in his first debate, he turned his anger on his communications director, Dan Bartlett, for showing him a tape afterward. When his trusted old public relations handler, Karen Hughes, tried gently to tell him, “You looked mad,” he shot back, “I wasn’t mad! Tell them that!”

At a political strategy meeting in May 2004, when Matthew Dowd and Rove explained to him that he was not likely to win in a Reagan-like landslide, as Bush had imagined, he lashed out at Rove: “KARL!” Rove, according to Draper, was Bush’s “favorite punching bag,” and the president often threw futile and meaningless questions at him, and shouted, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Those around him have learned how to manipulate him through the art of flattery. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld played Bush like a Stradivarius, exploiting his grandiosity. “Rumsfeld would later tell his lieutenants that if you wanted the president’s support for an initiative, it was always best to frame it as a ‘Big New Thing.'” Other aides played on Bush’s self-conception as “the Decider.” “To sell him on an idea,” writes Draper, “aides were now learning, the best approach was to tell the president, This is going to be a really tough decision.”

But flattery always requires deference. Every morning, Josh Bolten, the chief of staff, greets Bush with the same words: “Thank you for the privilege of serving today.”

Dear God.

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Going After Gore

by tristero

I urge everyone to read Going After Gore by Evgenia Peretz in Vanity Fair. It’s as good as Somerby says it is. And for those you who are just coming of political age now and weren’t aware of 2000, you will surely recognize that what the press is doing now – obsessing over Democrats’ haircuts while admiring the handsome presidential mien of the Republicans – was done back then. To catastrophic result. Here’s one part that really struck me as an example of exactly how low is the character of the reporters who trashed Gore:

[Ceci] Connolly, too, at The Washington Post, wrote about Gore’s “grubbing for dollars inside a monastery,” and “stretching the [fund-raising] rules as far as he can.” Her stories about the distortions extended the life of the distortions themselves. In one article, she knocked Gore for “the hullabaloo over the Internet—from [his] inflated claim to his slowness to tamp out the publicity brush fire.” In another, co-written with David Von Drehle, she claimed, “From conservative talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh and the New York Post (headline: ‘Liar, Liar’) to neutral papers across the country, the attack on Gore’s credibility is resonating.”

…Gore staffers came to feel that if Connolly was denied the access or information she wanted there would be a price to pay in terms of her coverage. In one of her pieces Carter Eskew, a former tobacco-industry adviser, was described in a quote as being “single-handedly accountable for addicting another whole generation of American kids” to smoking. When asked about the article, Eskew recalls how Connolly had called him the day before for a comment about an environmental group’s endorsement of Bill Bradley. After he gave her something perfunctory, he says, she went after him. “She goes, ‘That’s all you’re going to say?'” recalls Eskew. “And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s all we’re going to say.’ And she goes, ‘Do you know how stupid that is, Carter?’ And then she threatened me, ‘Well, if that’s the kind of relationship you want to have with me, then you’ll find out the kind of relationship we’re going to have’—something to that effect.” (“I never threatened Carter Eskew,” says Connolly. “It’s possible I pressed him for something more than a ‘perfunctory’ answer.… It’s odd that he would think my story was journalistically out of bounds or retribution for something as trivial as a mediocre quote.”)

It’s not odd at all, Ceci. That’s how you behave.

I was a bit puzzled by the ending of the piece:

The pundits, however, invariably come around to the same question: “But if he ran, would he revert to the ‘old Gore’?” Another question—in light of countless recent stories about John Edwards’s haircut—might be: Would the media revert to the old media?

Clearly what Peretz meant was

The pundits, however, invariably come around to the same question: “But if he ran, would he revert to the ‘old Gore’?” The real question—in light of countless recent stories about John Edwards’s haircut— should be: When will the American media stop trivializing and distorting the real issues at play in national elections?

Alas, we know the answer to that one. But I’m not sure they can get away with the same level of unspeakable viciousness. First of all, there’s the reality of the Bush administration. And there are the blogs, which are not unread by the media. We would demand her guts on a stick, to quote the inimitable Mel Gibson, if Maureen Dowd described the next Democratic presidential nominee in the way she did Gore, as “practically lactating.”

Then again, she is one very sick soul in a very sick miliieu.

Another Painless Filibuster

by digby

…that makes the Dems look like losers. Again.

The Senate just voted 56 to 44 on Sen. Jim Webb’s (D-VA) amendment “requiring that active-duty troops and units have at least equal time at home as the length of their previous tour overseas.” The bill failed to garner the 60 votes needed to move forward.

The FoxNews All-stars are high-fiving all around. They’re happy the GOP said “fuck the troops.” They don’t make the rules. Chickenhawks do. You’ll stay in Iraq and you’ll like it. The Empty Codpiece needs to save face.

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Make Em Talk

by digby

It’s really too bad that we now have a new rule that nothing ever passes the Senate without 60 votes. I’m not sure when this became business as usual, but the media seem to have absorbed it as if it were set forth in the constitution. No explanations necessary, just a matter of fact.

Kevin Drum beat me to it, but I’m going to re-run the same chart he did to illustrate what a crock this is:

As Kevin says:

As you can see, Republicans aren’t just obstructing legislation at normal rates. They’re obstructing legislation at three times the usual rate. They’re absolutely desperate to keep this stuff off the president’s desk, where the only choice is to either sign it or else take the blame for a high-profile veto. As things stand, though, Republicans will largely avoid blame for their tactics. After all, the first story linked above says only that the DC bill “came up short in the Senate” and the second one that the habeas bill “fell short in the Senate.” You have to read with a gimlet eye to figure out how the vote actually broke down, and casual readers will come away thinking that the bills failed because of some kind of generic Washington gridlock, not GOP obstructionism…Would it really be so hard for reporters to make it clear exactly who’s responsible for blocking these bills?

Uhm, yes. Aside from telling gripping “stories” about the candidates’ inner psychological selves the media believes it has no responsibility to report anything but who’s up and who’s down and who “wins” and who “loses” in the “game” of politics. The fact that this new 60-vote gambit is purely to protect the president to ever have to veto anything that’s popular never comes up. Neither, however, does the the press bother to report this as unusual or that the Republican congress is, in effect, vetoing popular legislation by filibustering everything in sight. In fact, the press is reporting this as if the democrats have failed to move their popular legislation even though they have a majority — never mentioning that a majority is no longer enough, something that I doubt the public knows.

The Democrats are going to have to force real filibusters. I know that it will disrupt the business of the senate, but there’s really no other choice. Look at that chart. The Republicans have successfully halted virtually anything worth doing with these EZ-Filibusters. Forget cloture. Make ’em talk.

I’m still looking forward to hearing Huckleberry Graham doing his dramatic reading of Miss Mellie’s death scene. And I hear St John McCain does an amazing rendition of Captain Queeg’s “strawberries” soliloquy. Let ’em stand there and blather on until they’re hoarse. It’s the only way to break this silly deadlock and instruct the country about who’s stopping the congress from getting anything done. The press certainly isn’t getting the job done. Everybody’s blaming the Dems for being ineffectual so they really have no choice but to force these Republicans to filibuster for real or risk paying the price at the ballot box when the Republicans run against the “do-nothing congress.”

The restore habeas bill only got 54 votes today. A majority, which had the senate’s business been conducted as properly conceived would have either resulted in the Republicans standing up for days and defending the use of torture and indefinite imprisonment or they would have caved and forced their delicate little prince to have to veto the damned thing. Either way it would have been clear that it was the Republicans who like torture, not the Democrats.

And surprisingly, torture and indefinite imprisonment aren’t actually popular:

A solid 63% majority of American voters say they favor passage of legislation that would “give Guantánamo detainees the legal right to have their detention reviewed in federal court, and require the government to demonstrate that it has a lawful reason to imprison them.” Only one-third (32%) of voters express opposition. This level of support for habeas is more impressive still when one considers that survey participants had been informed that the detainees are “accused terrorists.”

Support for the habeas legislation is broad, extending across many demographic lines (see table). For example, we find majority support among both men and women; among whites, African Americans, and Hispanics; and in all regions of the country. Crucial swing political constituencies also voice solid approval, including 66% of independents, 69% of presidential swing voters, and 71% of moderates. Although Republicans are opposed by 58% to 39%, strong opposition is limited to a narrow political base of conservative Republicans (66% opposed) and GOP men (69% opposed). By contrast, a majority of GOP women (53%) and a plurality of moderate-to-liberal Republicans (50%) favor the habeas legislation.

Why should the Republicans in congress get away with shielding themselves and their loathed president from responsibility for doing all this stuff the public doesn’t support? Make ’em explain themselves for as long as it takes to break their damned filibuster.

Update: Another good reason to make ’em stand up and defend this crap in a real filibuster:

Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray write in The Washington Post: “With a difficult war debate looming and presidential vetoes for a host of popular legislation threatened, moderate Republicans in Congress are facing a tough choice: Stand by President Bush or run for their political lives.

“Votes are due soon on Iraq, an expansion of a children’s health insurance program and an array of spending bills. GOP leaders hope to use them to regain credibility with their base voters as a party for strong defense and fiscal discipline. But moderates, many of them facing the possibility of difficult reelection bids next year, are dreading the expected showdowns.”

Republicans are between a rock and a hard place. Democrats should be squeezing as hard as they can.

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Torturing The Troops And Their Families

by digby

Oh fergawdssake. Here we go again with St John McCain and Mr Elizabeth Taylor pretending to care about the military when they’re actually just trying to save their miscreant leader’s face and kicking the can down the road a few more FU’s. (I wonder where the third Musketeer Huckleberry is this morning? He must be working overtime to ensure they can’t get enough votes to keep the US Government from torturing and indefinitely imprisoning anyone the Boy King deems his enemy. Busy day.)

Anyway, here’s the latest lame maneuver from the Torture Twins:

Speaking on the Senate floor this morning, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), an ardent opponent of a pro-troop measure to relieve the stress on the overstretched armed forces, announced he will propose a toothless, watered-down substitute to the Webb amendment.

McCain said he and Sen. John Warner (R-VA) have teamed up to put together a “sense of the Senate” amendment to express “very clearly that we all want all our troops home and we understand the stress and strain that’s been inflicted on the men and women in the military and the guard and reserves.”

Sorry flyboy. Your “sense of the senate” isn’t going to do jack about this:

While generals and politicians debate strategy and funding for the Iraq war on Capitol Hill, the cost of the conflict is tallied in places like this quiet subdivision, where Kelly Bridson each night listens to her 10-year-old son’s bedtime prayers for his stepfather’s safety: “The light of God surrounds you. The love of God enfolds you. The power of God protects you. …”

Army Spc. Joe Bridson is stationed in the volatile city of Samarra, Iraq, about 80 miles north of Baghdad. The prayers could well be goodnight hugs if not for the vagaries of military service in the era of the volunteer army: Joe Bridson is now in the 14th month of what originally was to have been a four- to six-month deployment in Iraq.

Bridson’s situation is hardly unique. Scores of readers of msnbc.com’s Gut Check America project wrote of loved ones in similar situations, either repeatedly deployed to the combat zone or languishing there months after their deployments were to have ended.

Their stories put a human face on stark statistics showing that the U.S. military — a small force by historical standards — is stretched thin after more than four years in Iraq and six in Afghanistan. Repeated deployments of active military members and reservists and diminishing “dwell times” between postings to the war zone have taxed soldiers and taken a growing toll on the home front.

“Families are truly exhausted,” says Patricia Barron, who runs youth programs for the National Military Families Association. “They are starting to feel the stresses of separation more acutely.”

Kelly and Joe’s story is but one of thousands that illustrate how the lack of resolution plays out on a personal level.

Fears rise when the phone calls stop

Kelly waits anxiously for each phone call from her husband. They come almost daily and trigger fears of the worst kind when they don’t. That often means that someone in his company has been injured or killed and the military has cut off phone access until the next of kin has been notified. That’s when Kelly starts looking out the window, fearing the worst.

“There have been times when we’ve gone seven, eight days,” says Kelly. “After 48 hours, you know it’s not yours. … And I know it sounds terrible, but then you think, ‘Thank God it’s not mine.’”

When the phone finally rings, Kelly sinks into the crimson-and-rust cushions of her sofa and listens as Joe describes his days on patrol.

While it is a relief to hear his voice, their conversations raise other concerns. Joe’s moods are unpredictable, ranging from tenderness to rage.

“I never know who I’m going to get on the phone,” Kelly said. “He’s really been in the thick of it. … He worries that he won’t be the same person when he gets back.”

The couple had been together about six months when Joe learned he would be deployed to Iraq in August 2006 with the rest of the 3rd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., as a machine-gunner for his squad in Charlie Company.

It was a blow, though not entirely unexpected. And the separation seemed manageable. Kelly had spent years as a single mom and built a successful career as an insurance agent.

They decided to get married when Joe was on a short leave in December, even though his deployment was coming to an end — or so they thought. Young Chase, Kelly’s son from a previous marriage, was a beaming best man in the ceremony.

“We knew it would be tough,” Kelly said.

‘The guessing … makes you crazy’

But extensions of his unit’s tour of duty and the uncertainty of how long he would be in Iraq made it worse.

“One month (extension) stretched into two, two months stretched into three,” Kelly recalled. “… The unknowing, the guessing, that makes you crazy. It makes the soldiers crazy.”

The war has not slowed for the 150 soldiers of Charlie Company, who have conducted hundreds of missions over the past year trying to root out insurgents in Samarra, a city of 200,000.

Samarra has been hit by two major insurgent attacks in recent months. In June, a bomb destroyed the minarets of a sacred Shiite site, the Golden Dome mosque. In August, dozens of gunmen raided the city’s police station, killing three people.

Eleven members of Charlie Company have been killed and 40, including Joe, have been awarded Purple Hearts for battle wounds. He was shot in the forearm last month but was back out on patrol three days later. Kelly says he’s also suffered two concussions — one from an IED and another from a grenade blast.

Still, what may have been the worst moment of the war for Joe and Kelly came in April, when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that U.S. Army tours would be extended from 12 months to 15.

Joe heard the news not from his commander, but by phone from Kelly. She said he couldn’t believe it would include his company.

“His exact words were: ‘It better not be us. I will f—ing lose it,’” recalled Kelly. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God, is something in his brain going to snap?’”

It would be one thing if this war had any real purpose beyond saving Junior Bush from the embarrassment of having to withdraw before his term was up. Or if the congress and the president were willing to tell the American people that they need to reinstitutue the draft (which was always the plan for long term military operations like this.) But they know that this country has no intention of allowing that so they are putting the burdens on these soldiers and marines to prove their manhood for them and save their sorry political asses — just like so many of them did when they were young.

Add this despicable willingness to break the military they purport to love to the pile of horrors these Republicans have wrought. Really, is there anything these people are too ashamed to do? I don’t think so.

Calls:

Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)
DC: 202-224-6665
Anchorage: 907-271-3735

George Voinovich (R-Ohio)
DC: (202) 224-3353
Cleveland: (216) 522-7095

Elizabeth Dole (R-North Carolina)
DC: 202-224-6342
Raleigh: 866-420-6083

John Warner (R-Virginia)
DC: (202) 224-2023
Roanoke: (540) 857-2676

Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky)
DC: 202-224-2541
Louisville: 502-82-6304

Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania)
DC: 202-224-4254
Harrisburg: (717) 782-3951

From Christy at FDL:

Bonus – Ask Harry Reid to “don’t let Republicans obstruct – make them stand and filibuster”:

Harry Reid
DC: 202-224-3542
Las Vegas: 702-388-5020

You can email, here.

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Time To Shock The Monkeys

by digby

As we hold our breath to see if the Senate will Restore Habeas Corpus (go to the link to find the appropriate numbers to call) I thought I would reprise my post from the day the heinous bill was signed:

A Day Which Will Live In Infamy

Today President Bush took the constitution and tore it into little pieces.

President Bush signed legislation Tuesday authorizing tough interrogation of terror suspects and smoothing the way for trials before military commissions, calling it a “vital tool” in the war against terrorism.

Bush’s plan for treatment of the terror suspects became law just six weeks after he acknowledged that the CIA had been secretly interrogating suspected terrorists overseas and pressed Congress to quickly give authority to try them in military commissions.

[…]

The American Civil Liberties Union said the new law is “one of the worst civil liberties measures ever enacted in American history.”

“The president can now, with the approval of Congress, indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero.

“Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act,” he said.

Yet, here is the very next sentence in that AP report:

The swift implementation of the law is a rare bit of good news for Bush as casualties mount in Iraq in daily violence.

I assume that was written without irony.

I don’t ever want to hear anyone on the right talk about moral values again. They are concepts which they clearly do not understand. And if they dare to bring up the Bible or Jesus Christ after this I will laugh in their faces, knowing that by their own standards they are going straight to hell for what they’ve done.

Remember these faces:

Where’s St. John McCain? How odd that he isn’t there to enjoy the poisonous fruits of his labor.

Update: Jack Balkin talks about the new law, here.

Let’s fix this POS. It’s a disgrace.

h/t to the great Billmon for the monkey pic

Surprise, Surpise, Surprise

by digby

So His Eminence John Warner is going to screw the troops again.

..in an interview Tuesday, the senator said he is “reconsidering his position” in light of the administration’s willingness to move closer to him on expediting some reduction in U.S. troop levels this year in Iraq. “It took a lot of convincing to make the first units come home before Christmas,” Mr. Warner said. “There is a lot of importance in that.”

Yeah, there’s a lot of “importance” in Warner and George W. Bush hosting a treacly Christmas pageant featuring a handful of troops who were scheduled to come home anyway.

I have written a longer piece on the perfidy of Senator Lucy Van Peldt Warner’s predictable habit of pulling the football out from under Democrats over at CAF. I don ‘t know why any Democrat ever trusts him. (Good riddance to the bastard.)

This is nonsense. The Dems should force these republicans to vote on the amendment every single day and explain why they think it’s a good idea to wear out the military to the breaking point.

Here’s Jim Webb:

Update: Act For Change has a nice message you can send to your senators here.

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Dial For Freedom

by digby

The cloture vote on the Restore Habeas Amendment is coming up for a vote tomorrow morning. We need to call Senators who apparently must be nudged by their pesky constituents to care about the rule of law.

Restore-Habeas.org is doing a whip count, with all the necessary numbers and info, that you can access by clicking here:

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Abizaid The Double Agent

by digby

Well that didn’t take long. I checked to see what the right was saying about General Abizaid’s comments and naturally Michael “ding dong Khameni is dead” Ledeen is appalled:

“There are ways to live with a nuclear Iran,” Abizaid said…”Let’s face it, we lived with a nuclear Soviet Union, we’ve lived with a nuclear China, and we’re living with (other) nuclear powers as well.”

I’m grateful for this bit of enlightenment from the former commander of Central Command, whose failed strategy in Iraq led us to fight more effectively, especially against the Iranians’ depredations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It was under Abizaid that the copious evidence of Iranian activity was suppressed, and we, let’s say, took it easy on the thousands of Revolutionary Guards killers running all over the country.

Gosh, it sounds like Ledeen is accusing Abizaid of something rather unpleasant, don’t you think?

Some of the commenters at LGF are a bit less opaque in their criticism:

Abizaid is of middle eastern descent IIRC, is that right?

BINGO!

It’s a sad thing when the suspicion can arise ( with validity ) that the ethnicity of a General Officer of the United States Army, may influence, even trump his patriotism.

The Iranians are not arabs, as is Abizaid, but…

Certainly, he’s a world class moron.

Wesley Clark, proved beyond doubt that one can attain the rank of General in the USA, despite being devoid of character or intellect. Abizaid,
sets this fact in stone.

This was good too:

Hmmm, Abizaid leaves and the situation in Iraq starts improving.

Coincidence?

A lil’ double loyalty perhaps?

The Freepers also weigh in:

He’d probably feel welcome back in Lebanon, Italy, or someplace like that.

[…]

I think General Abizaid’s ethnicity (I know, he’s of Arab, not Persian, extraction, but from the Mid-East nonetheless) is playing him false on this one. I’ve seen more than one General Officer miscalculate what the enemy would do based on his perception of what he would do in a similar situation; sometimes you really do have to examine the “worst case scenario”.

[…]

Abazaid is a darling poster child of the “anti war” movement…. he has a long history iof this, add to that he is of questionable patriotic character in my book, seeing he is a first generation import from Saudi Arabia ! a fellow like Abazaid getting to that level is just plain bizzarre, All arabs are smiling backstabbers and that is not “racism” it is a demographic reality

When a poster points out that they are criticizing a General, we have the piece de resistance in response:

Only Moveon calls them liars and traitors. Big difference.

This is why the pearl clutching among the right wingers and their media allies is so laughable. On the right, they treat all Generals and troops who disagree with them like garbage, in the most despicable terms possible. Look what they did to John Kerry. Why any DC liberal takes their little “patriotic” game seriously is beyond me.

Scott Horton wrote an excellent post a couple of weeks ago about all this that should be read by every Democratic consultant in Washington. They need to stop playing these silly games on Republican turf:

A recently retired flag officer friend of mine, who describes himself as a “once solid, and now wavering Republican” tells me:

Most officers, you know, are Republicans, but we all do our best to ensure that we wear no party allegiance when we put on our uniforms. It’s common to think that the Republicans love the military and the Democrats despise us. But our actual experience over the last couple of decades is that the Democrats, whether they despise us or not, leave us free to manage our own affairs and don’t interfere too much. Whereas the Republicans seem to love us so much that they know better than the career officer corps about just about everything. I’m really close to thinking that I prefer those Democrats, whether they despise us or not.

He went on to tell me that one of the things that bugged him the most about the Pentagon in recent years was the fairly overt process of politicization. “The White House was always involved in picking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a handful of other positions, of course, but the process further down the line, especially two-stars and lower, was really peer-review. There is still a peer-review, but now it’s politicos who make the decisions, and their suspicion of where people stand in terms of party politics seems to weigh very heavily. This just ain’t right.”

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The Department of Defense has limited access of military personnel to certain websites. In general, in the area of political commentary and reporting, the DOD view is that websites tightly aligned with the Republican Party or firmly committed to support the administration are fine. Websites associated with the Democratic Party or critical of the Administration are off limits.

A good example of this was recently reported by the Center for American Progress’ blog, thinkprogress.org.

ThinkProgress is now banned from the U.S. military network in Baghdad.

Recently, an avid ThinkProgress reader — a U.S. soldier serving his second tour in Iraq — wrote to us and said that he can no longer access ThinkProgress.org… The ban began sometime shortly after Aug. 22, when Ret. Maj. Gen. John Batiste was our guest blogger on ThinkProgress. He posted an op-ed that was strongly critical of the President’s policies and advocated a “responsible and deliberate redeployment from Iraq.” Previously, both the Wall Street Journal and Washington Times had rejected the piece.

Here’s what Major General Batiste, a Republican–but apparently not a sufficiently loyal Republican–had written that appears to have provoked the ban:

It is disappointing that so many elected representatives of my [Republican] party continue to blindly support the administration rather than doing what is in the best interests of our country. Traditionally, my party has maintained a conservative view on questions regarding our Armed Forces. For example, we commit our military only when absolutely necessary . . .

The only way to stabilize Iraq and allow our military to rearm and refit for the long fight ahead is to begin a responsible and deliberate redeployment from Iraq and replace the troops with far less expensive and much more effective resources–those of diplomacy and the critical work of political reconciliation and economic recovery. In other words, when it comes to Iraq, it’s time for conservatives to once again be conservative.

Of course, Rush Limbaugh, the team at Fox News, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and Commentary can all be read with no interruption.

Read the whole post. The politicization of the military — and the harsh treatment meted out to those in (and retired from) the military who fail to toe the line, is something that should be publicly discussed instead of running from it like a bunch of scared little bunnies every time some wingnut shows up in a uniform waving the GOP flag. This nonsense about being required to respect only the most loyal Republican officers is unamerican.

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Behind Village Walls

by digby

The Villagers swat at phantoms.

Via TPM, I see that there’s a new poll out proving that the media and political elites were right: all that distracting stuff about Move-On using the word “betray” in the same breath as a General really screwed the Democrats. People are now supporting the surge.

Not:

Most Americans continue to want troops to start coming home from Iraq, and most say the plan President Bush announced last week for troop reductions doesn’t go far enough, according to a CBS News poll released Monday. . . .

Sixty-eight percent of Americans say that U.S. troop levels in Iraq should either be reduced or that all troops should be removed – similar numbers to those before Mr. Bush’s speech.

[…]

The poll also found that despite optimistic assessments of the U.S. troop surge by Mr. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Americans are unconvinced that the surge is working.

Only about one in three (31 percent) said the surge has made things in Iraq better, while more than half (51 percent) say it’s had no impact. Eleven percent [11 percent] say it’s made things worse.

Now:

Increased 6%
Kept same 21%
Reduced 39%
Remove all troops 29%

Pre-speech, 9/4-8/2007:

Increased 11%
Kept same 19%
Reduced 35%
Remove all troops 30%

The Bush administration rolled out their biggest guns, hid behind the General’s salad and the troops’ dead bodies, demanding that everyone listen to Petraeus’s spin and obfuscation as if it were delivered directly from God himself and it didn’t do a bit of good.

Then they did their patented shrieking like a bunch of little old ladies at the unseemliness of Move-On’s horrible ad, hoping that the country was still listening and their blatant phony sanctimony would work on anyone but the media and political establishment Villagers. Apparently they still think — just as they did 10 years ago when the right pulled this crap with the Lewinsky scandal — that the American people are too dumb to see through the rich, decadent elites’ faux outrage. The ad, after all, said what a large majority of the country already believed — that The Man Called Petraeus was doing the loathed president’s bidding. The days when the GOP could evoke the smoke of 9/11 and emotionally blackmail the country into buying their cheap counterfeit sentiment are over.

Glenn Greenwald caught a perfect example of the disengaged beltway hysteria in his (must read) post today:

As but one highly illustrative example, let us revel in the Triumph of Petraeus from the Chris Matthews Show last Wednesday night:

JERRY DELLA FEMINA, ADVERTISING EXECUTIVE: Well, they’re doing a good job of it this week. Let me tell you, they couldn’t find anyone better than Petraeus. I mean, you just can’t beat a man in full uniform speaking to — well, I’ll give you Ollie North facing the Congress. You know, you stand up there, and he’s wearing a uniform. And boy, you can’t take a guy in uniform versus six overweight senators. . . .

I think the biggest mistake that was made was the anti — the “Petraeus Betray us” that ran just before that. I mean, what a setup that was. Snow could get up and say, Gee, this is a hero. How could we treat this man this way?

So if I was — you know, if this was a dirty tricks game, someone would say, Let’s put an ad in making fun of this war hero, and then let’s knock him down and show — so it was a terrible mistake…

MATTHEWS: Yes.

DELLA FEMINA: … and it really set the week off on the wrong note for people who were against the surge. . . .

[DANA] MILBANK [THE WASHINGTON POST]: Bush had a terrible August down on the ranch and then has explosive Septembers. And I think he’s won this battle already.

MATTHEWS: How so?

MILBANK: Petraeus –it’s no accident he had a Latin name. It looked like he was the Roman general returning to the republic in his gold and purple toga, and they were celebrating him and slaying white bulls. They could not get enough of this man. And anybody’s who’s even critical of the war wouldn’t dare criticize…

MATTHEWS: Right.

MILBANK: … except in the most polite way, General Petraeus because then you appear to be criticizing the troops. I think it’s game, set and match here.

Right. Except that normal American citizens who live outside the Village bubble knew before The Man Called Petraeus spoke that he would spin the war. And he did. Only in Republican establishment la-la land do people believe that generals are incapable of telling anything but the unvarnished truth. In fact, anybody who’s ever read “Beetle Bailey” or watched “MASH” (much less read “Catch 22” or any of the other great war novels) has a healthy view of the military’s fallibility. That’s part of American culture too. This embarrassing affected reverence for the General is as believable as Bush in a skin-tight Chippendales jumpsuit.

Sure, the Republicans and the media constantly drool and slaver and wax on about manly virtue and heroism no matter what the situation. They live in their own Disney-world. The rest of us know that at this point, six years on from 9/11 and mired down in a useless quagmire that they’re showing us a bad John Wayne movie circa 1958. It’s mildly entertaining, but most of us don’t mistake it for reality — or relevance.

Bush succeeded in shoring up the Republicans for one more FU. (He probably could have done it a lot more cheaply — the congressional Republicans are the most invertebrate bunch of jellyfish in American history and they’d ultimately go along with their Dear Leader if he suggested nuking Scotland.) But that’s it. He failed to change the general public’s thinking at all — indeed, if the CBS poll is correct, they may have even moved a few people in the other direction. All the sturm and drang of the last week was purely an inside the beltway circle jerk.

Update: Arianna Huffington has a great piece up on just what a masturbatory exercise it all was.

Update II: I saw Chris Cilizza somnambulently spinning the same tired tune on MSNBC this morning about the new Move-On Rudy ad. He claimed that it was a mistake because it would help Rudy in the primary in Iowa — as if Move-on was running the ad with the intention of trying to affect the GOP primary. (You could see that as he was saying it he suddenly understood that it didn’t make sense and that he might not have fully grasped the play.) When asked if the ad was accurate, he admitted that it was, but insisted that it was a problem because Republicans hate Move On. He, like the entire beltway establishment (except for Bill Schneider, of all people)has no clue about what the real strategy is here.

Chris Cilizza’s irrelevant analysis isn’t important at all. What is important is this ad, which MSNBC obligingly showed from beginning to end.

Share it with a friend.

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