Month: October 2007

“You cannot protect America in the long run if you fail to protect our Constitution”

by digby

This morning I took one of those tests * to determine which presidential candidate most closely reflects your views. I’m a liberal, as you know, with pretty orthodox views (except for perhaps a stronger civil liberties streak than some) so I expected that I would come up Kucinich, the person generally perceived to be the most liberal candidate. If a person’s vote were based solely on their positions on the issues, I always figured he’d be my guy. (Of course the choice is more complex than that.)

But it isn’t Kucinich. It’s this guy.

And when I read things like this, it makes a lot of sense:

Mr. President, for six years, this President has demonstrated time and time again that he doesn’t respect the role of Congress nor does he respect the rule of law.

Every six years as United States Senators we take the oath office to uphold the Constitution. Our colleagues on the House side take that oath every two years. That is important.

For six years this President has used scare tactics to prevent the Congress from reining in his abuse of authority. A case and point is the current direction this body appears to be headed as we prepare to reform and extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Many of the unprecedented rollbacks to the rule of law by this Administration have been made in the name of national security.

The Bush Administration has relentlessly focused our nation’s resources and manpower on a war of choice in Iraq. That ill conceived war has broken our military, squandered resources and emboldened our enemies.

The President’s wholesale disregard of the rule of law has compounded the damage done in Iraq and has made our nation less secure and as a direct consequence of these acts, we are less secure, more vulnerable and more isolated in the world.

Consider the scandal at Abu Ghraib – where Iraqi prisoners were subjected to inhumane and humiliating acts by U.S. personnel charged with guarding them.

Consider Guantanamo Bay. Rather than helping to protect the nation, the prisons at Guantanamo Bay have instead become the very symbol for our weakened moral standing in the world.

Consider the secret prisons run by the CIA and the practice of extraordinary rendition that allows them to evade U.S. law regarding torture.

Consider the shameful actions of our outgoing Attorney General who politicized prosecutions – who was more committed to serving the President who appointed him than the laws he had sworn to uphold.

And consider, of course, the Military Commissions Act – a law that allows evidence obtained through torture to be admitted into evidence.

It denies individuals the right to counsel.

It denies them the right to invoke the Geneva Conventions.

And it denies them the single most important and effective safeguard of liberty man has known – the right of habeas corpus, permitting prisoners to be brought before a court to determine whether their detainment is lawful.

Warrantless wiretapping, torture – the list goes on.

Each of these policies share two things in common.

First, they have weakened our ability to prosecute the global war on terrorism – if for no other reason than they have made it harder, if not impossible, to build the international support and cooperation we need to fight it.

And second, each has only been possible because Congress has not been able to stop this President’s unprecedented expansion of executive power, although some in this body have tried.

Whether or not these policies were explicitly authorized is beside the point. In every instance, Congress has been unable to hold this Administration to account for violating the rule of law and our Constitution. In each instance, Republicans in the Congress have prevented this body from telling this Administration that “a state of war is not a blank check.”

And those aren’t my words, Mr. President – those are the words of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who was nominated by Ronald Reagan.

And today, it appears that we are prepared to consider the proposed renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – a law that in whatever form it eventually takes will almost certainly permit the Bush Administration to broadly eavesdrop on American citizens.

Legislation, as currently drafted, that would grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that helped this Administration violate the civil liberties of Americans and the law of this country.

Mr. President while it may be true that the proposed legislation is an improvement on existing law, it remains fundamentally flawed because it fails to protect the privacy rights of Americans or hold the Executive or the private sector accountable if they choose to ignore the law.

That is why I will not stand on the floor of the United States Senate and be silent about the direction we are headed.

It is time to say “no more.”

No more trampling our Constitution.

No more excusing those who violate the rule of law.

These are our principles.

They have been around at least since the Magna Carta.

They are enduring.

What they are not is temporary. And what we do not do in a time where our country is at risk is abandon them.

My father was Executive Trial Counsel at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals during 1945 and 1946.

What America accomplished at those historic trials wasn’t a foregone conclusion. It took courage – when Stalin and even a leader as great and noble as Winston Churchill wanted to simply execute the Nazi leaders, we didn’t back down from our belief that these men—as terrible as they were—ought to have a trial.

We did not give in to vengeance.

As then, the issue before us today is the same.

Does America stand for all that is still right with our world? Or do we retreat in fear?

Do we stand for justice that secures America? Or do we act out of vengeance that weakens us?

Mr. President, I am well aware that this issue is seen as political. I believe that Democrats were elected to strengthen the nation – elected to restore our standing in the world.

I believe we were elected to ensure that this nation adheres to the rule of law and to stop this Administration’s assault on the Constitution.

But the rule of law is not the provenance of any one political party – but of every American who has been safer because of it.

Mr. President, I know this bill hasn’t even been reported out of the Judiciary Committee yet.

But I am here today because if I have learned anything in my 26 years in this body—particularly during the last 7 years—it is that if you wait until the end to voice your concerns, you will have waited too long. That is why I have written to the Majority Leader informing him that I will object to any effort to bring this legislation to the Senate floor for consideration.

I hope that Senator Leahy is able to remove this language – he is a dear friend and I know his respect for the rule of law runs deep.

But if he cannot, I am prepared to filibuster this bill.

President Bush is right about one thing: this debate is about security. But not in the way he imagines.

He believes we have to give up certain rights to be safe.

I believe the choice between moral authority and security is a false choice.

I believe it is precisely when you stand up and protect your rights that you become stronger, not weaker.

The damage that was done to our country on 9/11 was stunning. It changed the world forever.

But when you start diminishing our rights as a people, you compound that tragedy. You cannot protect America in the long run if you fail to protect our Constitution. It is that simple.

Mr. President, history will likely judge this President harshly for his war of choice and for fighting it with a disregard for our most cherished principles.

But history is about tomorrow. We must act today to stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law.

Mr. President, this is the moment. At long last, let us rise to it.

There are many things that engage me in politics. But what evokes my passion are civil liberties and social justice. The fundamental underpinning of those values in the American experiment reside in the Declaration of Independence and our constitution. I wish we could rely on people’s good natures or the evolution of our civilization to make those ancient documents unnecessary, but it’s quite clear that we can’t. Without them, all of those fine ideals will never be realized. Indeed, we won’t even be able to hang on to what we already have.

It’s more obvious today than it ever was since rather than progressing as we mostly have in our history, America is backsliding at a rather alarming rate at the very time when the stakes couldn’t be higher. We are the most powerful nation on earth and in grave danger of becoming the most loathed nation on earth. That is a very dangerous place to be.

Standing up for our constitution is essential to our liberty as citizens and our safety as a country. Chris Dodd is leading the way, and good for him. You can sign the Harry Reid petition here, and if you’re of a mind, you can contribute to his campaign here.

Update: Dodd will be on Meet The Press this Sunday for the full hour as part of Russert’s ongoing series with the presidential candidatres. I’m sure it will cover many issues (and Dodd will have to explain in detail every passing comment he made in 1974) but it is an opportunity for him to expand on this issue. Monsignor Tim may even allow him to talk a bit about it since he’s written a book about his Dad the Nuremberg Prosecutor.

* It should also be noted that the questions in that poll seem to be reflective of the confines of the debate as currently constructed by the campaigns rather than offering all possible options. It’s been pointed out that the questions on immigration are particularly narrow, which is unfortunate.

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Republicans Are Hopelessly Bad At Keeping You Safe

by tristero

Yesterday, I blogged about a Republican governor, now presidential candidate, who was so ignorant and fanatically ideological that he enthusiastically worked to free a serial rapist and murderer, stupidly and tragically providing him an opportunity to rape and kill one, if not two, more victims. That should give anyone pause about the rightwing’s persistent claim that they, because they are illiberal and not distracted by humanistic niceties, can keep America safe.

Last night, I picked up the latest issue of Wired and read an article about a housewife who spends her spare time entrapping terrorists. It is a very interesting but strange article. While it posed for me a number of questions regarding how much of it is real, how much of it a deliberate plant, and how much might be disinformation,* let us take it at face value for now. What do we learn?

Ostensibly, we learn that an amateur, in her spare time, self-educated herself in Arabic, the geography of the Middle East, and the mores of radical Islamists, became a regular presence in their cyber-hangouts, and conned at least four very seriously creepy individuals into a close, lasting relationship – albeit involuntarily so – with divers manifestations of American law enforcement.

More importantly, we learn that, even today, the arrest and conviction rate of members of al Qaeda and associates is incredibly low; that the FBI computer system is hopelessly busted; that when an FBI agent wants to set up a Yahoo account, s/he has to ask permission; and that FBI agents, at least in Montana don’t have Internet access and have to go to the local library to sign on.

And that immediately raises the question of how the hell, after some 6 years of Bush’s oversight of national security, that Republicans can pretend to be keeping us safe.

And it raises the further question of what the hell Republicans think they’re doing with all that data mining, illegal wiretapping, retroactively immunizing telcos, and so on. I’m not sure they’re entirely aware that you need at least a computer and a phone line to collect much of this data and that it helps if you have access to something called broadband. And once you collect all that info, how y’gonna store it? On a big stack of floppy disks?

Let me cut to the chase. Assuming the people in the article are describing the situation at the FBI in an accurate manner, then Democrats have an opportunity to create a perfect storm around the issue of Republican incompetence at national security. There surely are no laws that forbid the FBI from signing on to the Internet from their offices, although there may be some security regulations that should have been revised a long time ago. Ditto, the kind of paperwork required to open up a Yahoo account.

I’m not suggesting that these things should be as casually easy for the FBI to do in an official way as they are for the average citizen; obviously, we’re talking investigations and procedures here. But let’s face it. For an FBI agent to be forced to use the local library for internet access is insane. But it is precisely the kind of insanity we have come to expect from Republican management of the resources of the United States government. Anyone remember those pallets of cash that were misplaced in Iraq? Or the apparently quite accidental transport of nuclear weapons recently? Or, dare I say it, the summer of 2001?

It is an indication of how inept Republican administrations are at national security that FBI’s dangerously bad failures of their high tech still exists, apparently, today. It is also an indication of how little the powers Bush is demanding Congress cede to him have to do with keeping this country safe.

Finally, both the neglect of basic national security needs and the obsession with unconstitutional, intrusive spying demonstrate how deeply committed Bush and the Republican Party is to undermining the very structure of the American government and transforming this country permanently into an authoritarian state.

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*I am not casting any aspersions on the reporters here. I have no reason to doubt that Jack Hitt and Will Sedlack reported honestly what they saw and what they were told. But when you think about the details… I have questions. One example: There are probably enough clues in the story for an American sympathetic to al Qaeda to locate Rossmiller, or other characters mentioned, even assuming she lives in a state other than Montana. Then, there is Rossmiller’s remarkable ability to understand Arabic and converse with terrorists despite having picked up the language cold only 6 years ago and having, apparently, no one to practice with other than while on the job – ie, while trying to convince terrorists she’s a native Arab speaker.

All of this, and more, could pose questions not about the reporting, but rather about what the reporters saw and didn’t see. However, in the absence of more information, there is no truly convincing reason to consider the story as anything other than exactly what it seems to be: the story of an amateur counter-terrorist who may be doing a better job than the FBI.

Pop Torture

by digby

The other night when I was feeling particularly under the weather from the smoke in the air, I was surfing through the channels and landed on one of the ubiquitous “Law and Order” shows. It was a meandering tale about a cub reporter who had been killed tracking a story about rendition and torture. It ended as these shows always do, with a trial, in this case of a female psychiatrist who had volunteered after 9/11 to help the government interrogate prisoners and ended up being implicated in one of the victims’ deaths. The trial ended in a mistrial, and as these shows are wont to do, it took no strong stand, although in this case anyway, it seemed to be at least saying that it was dicey for a medical professional to lend her expertise to something that caused terrible pain and ultimately death. (No kidding.)

Anyway, I was curious about the show and went online to see who wrote it and what people were saying about it and it turns out that the NY Times “TV decoder” blogger had discussed the episode that day and says the idea sprang from the fact that shows like “24” were depicting torture with an unambiguous slant and they wanted to explore it with a little bit more nuance. The headline was “A Screenwriter’s Dilemma: How To Address Torture” (which says a lot right there.)

Here’s an excerpt of the only comment to that item:

When I saw the DA give that “I’m going to get them” nod after hearing the tales of “torture” – “they made me eat pork” or “I peed myself” – I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.

Torture, real torture, is perpetrated by our enemy in this war. They chop off heads, they burn victims, and commit other unspeakable atrocities.

What the left-wing forces of this country – Hollywood and hardcore liberal newspapers like the New York Times – deem torture is merely a way to interrogate or deprive prisoners to gain important information to save innocent lives and our armed forces. These are terrorists that we are talking about.

Every regular on the show took the liberal viewpoint. I doubt seriously if real cops would all join in lockstep on this subject. That’s why screenwriters, by and large, can not be trusted to broach these subjects. Their bias can’t help but overtake a rational, intelligent discussion of this issue.

Unusually literate for a torture advocate, but typically wingnutty nonetheless. (And naturally, he neglects the important story point, based on true accounts, that long term hypothermia causes a serious form of heart disease, which is what killed the fictional victim — or the horrors of the victim’s prolonged “interrogation” in a stress position for more than 36 hours that tore both of his rotator cuffs.)

I then clicked on the show’s fan site and found these kinds of comments:

When lives are in danger from Islamo-fascists you do what is necessary to save the lives. Western values are so totally foreign to these terrorists that they laugh at our attempts to be “humanitarian” in our attitudes toward them. They will give any infidel 3 choices: 1)become a muslim, 2) become a dhimmi (recognize the superiority of islam and pay a tax for the right to exist as a sub-human), 3)die. I reject all three choices in the sure and certain knowledge that one day there will be no more islam and no more muslims.

and this:

Yeah..I think I’m pretty much over this show. I bet if those same tactics were used and 911 had been stopped ,,people would be alittle more open to the idea. We torture by depriving sleep and giving cold baths..well..I bet ya its better than having your HEAD CUT OFF! […] This country and some of it’s people amaze and sadden me.To all you Islamic sympathizers,please do us all a favor…leave the US…

This is an old and tiresome (basically racist) argument, and because it features the usual right wing neanderthal ranting, one that wouldn’t normally be worth discussing at this point. But the show featured something I thought was unique and important: it drew a direct parallel between torturing terrorism suspects and torturing criminal suspects, something I have blogged about many times but which I’ve rarely seen argued by others.

I’ve always felt that logic dictates that if you think it’s ok to torture terrorism suspects, even if only in a “ticking time bomb” situation, you cannot believe it wouldn’t be right to torture a criminal suspect in similar situations. In this show, one of the characters bluntly says that he affirmatively believes in torture because when he was a cop he broke the arm of a suspect in three places to get him to reveal where a kidnapped child was being held and ended up saving her. He is disgusted by the fact that the perpetrator could not be tried because of what he’d done.

The DA in the show replies, “what if you’d been wrong?” which is, to me and I assume most others, the ultimate question. Torturing an innocent person and, worse, forcing them to confess to something they didn’t do is one of the worst sins you could commit in my book. On some level it’s just pure evil. And yet, that is what torture is really all about, going all the way back to the inquisition and before. It’s not designed for finding the truth. It’s designed to coerce confession, which is not the same thing.

(This is not to say that I think torturing guilty people is morally permissible. Cruel and unusual punishment is banned in the constitution for a reason — it makes barbarians of all of us. Even that bleeding heart Antonin Scalia, stretching as hard as he can to say that intent, original and otherwise, is what counts, would not be able to uphold the Bush torture regime as proper punishment under the 8th Amendment.)

I don’t believe that people who think the way those angry “Law and Order” fans think, are concerned with any of that, though. They just don’t care if someone is wrongly accused, and they could not care less about torture or cruel and unusual punishment. In other words, to people like this, our entire system of due process is absurd. Terrorism is the least of it. They would not care if it were you, or their neighbor or anyone else — and they are unable to see that it could be them. They simply don’t have the imagination or the empathy to do it. And if you were to read these horrific stories to them, or even show them pictures, they would believe that the victims deserved it.

I don’t think these people are all that unusual, which why we ask leaders and judges and priests and teachers to sort out moral questions like this for people who have no natural human empathy and cannot deal with such abstractions. It’s why we need the rule of law. And that’s why it’s so dangerous to see so many people in leadership positions not only fail to promptly and decisively condemn these acts, even though most of them know very well that it is a matter of fundamental American values, but actively endorse it. The best the right wing can summon on this issue, including the religious right, is to simply assert that we can believe that the United States doesn’t torture or we can believe what our eyes tell us:

Yesterday, Republican front runner Rudy Giuliani confirmed that he thinks waterboarding is not necessarily torture — as long as it’s done by the right sort of people:

At the town hall, Rudy was asked about Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey’s hedging on the question of whether waterboarding is torture. “I’m not sure it is, either,” said Rudy. “It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.” And as for the media, Rudy said they’ve exaggerated the nature of waterboarding. “Sometimes they describe it accurately. Sometimes they exaggerate it,” Rudy said. “So I’d have to see what they really are doing, not the way some of these liberal newspapers have exaggerated it.

Actually, it’s pretty much the same, no matter who does it.

Spanish inquisition:

Cambodian Communists

here’s how it was done then by the Inquisitors:

Here’s how it’s done now by the United States:

Water boarding

Source: Guantanamo commanders requested permission to use “wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation” in an Oct. 11, 2002, memo to the Pentagon. Rumsfeld denied permission in his memo of Dec. 2, 2002. The New York Times reported in May 2004 that water boarding was used by CIA officials to interrogate “high value” detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, held by the United States at secret locations.

Description: According to University of Wisconsin history professor Alfred McCoy, this technique was first developed by the French and published in a 16th – century interrogation manual. Practitioners of “water torture,” or “question de l’eau,” placed a piece of cloth over the victim’s mouth and nose, and then poured water into the mouth to force the cloth down the victim’s throat. The effect was to make breathing impossible, thus creating the psychological perception of drowning.

If you believe that anything the US does is by definition “good” then you might agree that whether or not this act is torture “depends on who’s doing it”, I suppose. But the technique is exactly the same down through the ages, so there is no way that it depends on “how it’s done.”

The administration and the Republicans running for president refuse to admit that this practice is immoral and illegal. So does the president’s nominee for Attorney General, a man who is currently a judge and someone that anyone could point to as being among the most elite, establishment legal thinkers. You can’t really blame all those “Law and Order” fans for publicly going ballistic that their show would even tepidly imply as it did that such practices may be wrong. Their leaders certainly don’t seem to think so. Whatever taboo there once was has been completely removed.

And I believe that everyone should brace themselves for the inevitable stretching of this concept to the criminal justice system. If the current belief is that torture is necessary to protect people from terrorist attacks, there is simply no way to argue that it isn’t also ok to use torture to protect people from criminal attacks. Why wouldn’t it be?

President Rudy Giuliani will be the first in line to do the stretching, I’m sure. He already knows all about it.

Update: Anonymous Liberal has more on this.

Update II: Joe Conason has some information for Rudy should he decide to go waterboarding.

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Turkey

by tristero

The situation in Turkey has, for a long time been one of those slo-mo train wrecks that characterize the Bush era, where anyone with half a brain can foresee the calamities that seem to arrive as a complete and utter shock to the people we pay to protect us. The latest toot of the train horns:

The speaker of Iraq’s parliament warned Turkey on Thursday that his government would cut off the flow of oil from northern Iraq if Ankara followed through on its threat to level economic sanctions against the country.

Mahmoud al-Mashhadani’s comments came a day after Turkey’s top leadership agreed to recommend the government take economic measures to force cooperation by Iraqis against Kurdish rebels who have been staging cross-border attacks against Turkish troops.

“Northern Iraq cannot be pressured,” al-Mashhadani told reporters in the Syrian capital of Damascus. “Iraq is a rich country, and if there are economic pressures, we will cut off the Ceyhan pipeline,” he said, referring to two oil pipelines that run from northern Iraq to Turkey’s Ceyhan oil terminal on the Mediterranean Sea.

Turkey has threatened to stage an incursion into northern Iraq if Iraqi Kurds and U.S.-led coalition forces do not crack down on Kurdish rebels based there, particularly following a rebel ambush Sunday that killed 12 Turkish soldiers near the border.

And who may benefit from this crisis? Syria:

[Iraqi speaker of the Iraqi parliament, Mahmoud] Al-Mashhadani, who is on a five-day visit to Syria, said Syria is considering mediating between Turkey and Iraq in an effort to end the crisis.

“There is a plan for mediation,and it will be announced at the right time if the conditions are met,” he said following talks with Syrian President Bashar Assad and his deputy, Farouk al-Sharaa.

Al-Mashhadani did not elaborate but said Assad expressed readiness to assume a positive role in solving the problem.

Privatizing The Constitution

by digby

According to this site, a General Counsel of a large communications corporation makes around $300,000 a year, before bonuses, stock options and the rest. One assumes that he or she also has many Ivy league trained attorneys on staff and retains at least one outside law firm, probably more, which bills the company at top rates. All of these people are undoubtedly among the highest quality corporate lawyers in the world.

And yet the Bush administration wants the people of this country to grant their employers immunity from lawsuits brought by ordinary Americans because their lawyers took the word of the Bush administration that they weren’t breaking the law by eavesdropping on their customers without a warrant. We are supposed to believe that the best lawyers in the world — who specialize in the field of communications — didn’t know nothin’ bout no fourth amendment.

What a precedent this sets. The government can “privatize” spying on citizens — or any other unconstitutional activity — and promise the corporate contributors who get the contracts that they will be granted retroactive immunity for the laws they’ve broken. If nobody can sue them in court, then there is no avenue to legally pursue the case and determine its constitutionality. (Privatizing the CIA with a deal like this would certainly solve those messy issues about torture. If I were Blackwater, I’d be kicking some ass right now to get their deals in writing.)

Those corporations knew exactly what they were doing. Not one of the lawyers they employed could have possibly believed that it was ok to take the government’s “word” for it that they weren’t breaking the law. In fact, I think it’s highly, highly unlikely they ever would have done it if they hadn’t been promised in advance that they would never be held liable for it.

So today, we are once again trying to make the Democratic leadership take a stand for the constitution. It’s wearying and depressing that we have to prod them to do the right thing on issues like this, but we do. To that end it would be very helpful if you would sign this letter to Harry Reid asking him to honor the hold Chris Dodd has put on any legislation that offers amnesty to these corporations that broke the law.

The Senate is considering a bill that would grant immunity to any telecom company that assisted in the administration’s illegal wiretapping. Chris Dodd promised to put a hold on any such bill, and Joe Biden and Barack Obama pledged to uphold it. We believe that any bill coming before the Senate that includes provisions for so-called ‘amnesty’ for large companies involved in illegally spying on Americans should be opposed, and have authored a letter to this effect addressed to Majority Leader Reid. You can co-sign it below. The letter will also be sent to Senate Democratic leadership and the Senate Judiciary Committee members. You can read the full text of the letter here.

You can also call Senator Harry Reid at 202-224-3542

These gigantic corporations apparently just saluted smartly when Dick Cheney told them that the fourth amendment no longer applied to their companies. That was a huge mistake. If they broke the law, no matter who told them it was “ok”, they should have to face the consequences in court just like anyone else who did such a thing.

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These Are (NY) Times That Try Men’s Souls

by tristero

[Update: This post is long, for which I apologize. Let me summarize:

1. As governor of Arkansas, Republican Mike Huckabee enthusiastically worked to free a serial killer from prison because the rapist and murderer-to-be had become a cause celebre on the right.

2. Today Gail Collins of the Times wrote a column saying that Huckabee, while he’d make a terrible president, is a nice guy who essentially made just an error of compassion in freeing the serial killer.

3. Collins claimed that even though Huckabee is a rightwing nut, the other rightwing nuts won’t support him because Huckabee supports child healthcare. The notion that the real reason might be that he pardoned a serial killer and that anyway you slice it, voters will think that is Not a Good Thing – that notion was really not considered by Collins.

4. In an earlier post, readers commented that I was being too hard on poor Ms. Collins. I think I wasn’t angry enough.

Long version below. ]

I’m beginning to feel like my dear friend Bob Somerby over at The Daily Howler. It truly is incredible how manifestly corrupt our mainstream discourse has become. There is Gail Collins, with an opportunity in the NY Times to inform us about issues vital to understanding how to vote for the president of the United States in 2008 – literally, a history-changing election however it turns out – and she clowns around, and deceives, for an entire column about a loser candidate who even she admits would make a “terrible president.”

But maybe, I think in my most mordant moods, we deserve such a discourse. In comments to that post, several folks said that actually, Collins was not supporting Huckabee at all – I never thought she was – and that actually the column was “about” how the right won’t even get behind someone who seems to share so many of their crazy ideas because he’s for children’s health care.

Oh really? Apparently, it never occurred to Ms. Collins – or, alas, to the usually very astute readership of this blog – that the reason the right wasn’t supporting Huckabee had nothing to do with his flirtation with the sticky, sensuous, liberal pleasures of socialized medicine and everything under the sun to do with Huckabee’s bizarre support for Mr. Wayne Dumond, a little example of misplaced compassionate conservatism Ms. Collins indeed discusses, and to a great extent, absolves Huckabee for his role in the subsequent… But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Who the hell is Wayne DuMond? I’m glad you asked. Let’s start here with “Murray Waas’ prize-winning article for the Arkansas Times in 2002” about how far Mike Huckabee went to win good old boy Wayne Dumond’s freedom. Turns out, Mr. Dumond raped a young girl. Said girl identified him. Some inexcusable things happened to Mr. Dumond at the hands of some sick Deliverance wannabes and an equally psychopathic sheriff, about which more later. Mr. Dumond went to jail.

Then things got interesting. “Interesting.” Y’might wanna remember that word. Anyway, Mr. Dumond became a rightwing cause celebre for several reasons related to then governor Bill Clinton who wouldn’t pardon him. it just so happens that the girl who was raped was Clinton’s distant relative. Get it? Dumond’s mutilation (see below) and incarceration was Clintonian- style revenge.

To make a long, sleazy story shorter, Governor Huckabee, who succeeded Jim Guy Tucker who succeeded Bill Clinton, really, really believed Dumond got a “raw deal.” Huckabee was, as you might expect nearly totally clueless about the actual details of Dumond’s case. His sources for the passion of his belief in Dumond’s “raw deal?”

Jay Cole, like Huckabee, is a Baptist minister, pastor for the Mission Fellowship Bible Church in Fayetteville and a close friend of the governor and his wife. On the ultra-conservative radio program he hosts, Cole has championed the cause of Wayne Dumond for more than a decade.

Cole has repeatedly claimed that Dumond’s various travails are the result of [rape victim] Ashley Stevens’ distant relationship to Bill Clinton.

The governor was also apparently relying on information he got from Steve Dunleavy, first as a correspondent for the tabloid television show “A Current Affair” and later as a columnist for the New York Post.

Wanna know who Steve Dunleavy is? I thought not. Nevertheless, here is what that cocksucker wrote in the NY Post only a few weeks after 9/11:

October 2, 2001 — IT IS amazing how liberals, whom I regard as traitors in this time of crisis, like to quote the Constitution.

And now you know Steve Dunleavy.

So, partly due to Cole, but also apparently on the basis of Dunleavy’s “reporting” – and by all means consult the Arkansas Times article to get a flavor of how reliable a source Dunleavy is – Dumond enthusiastically supported efforts to release Dumond, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks (go ahead, read the Arkansas Times article some more, I’ll wait).

Now, who was Cole, Dunleavy, and Huckabee trying so hard to set free? Oh, and did I mention that Dumond was of the Caucasian persuasion? Not that that had anything whatsoever to do with the championing of Dumond’s cause:

Had Huckabee examined in detail the parole board’s files regarding Dumond, he would have known Dumond had compiled a lengthy criminal resume.

In 1972, Dumond was arrested in the beating death of a man in Oklahoma. Dumond was not charged in that case after agreeing to testify for the prosecution against two others. But he admitted on the witness stand that he was among those who struck the murder victim with a claw hammer.

In 1973, Dumond was arrested and placed on probation for five years for admitting in Oregon to molesting a teen-age girl in the parking lot of a shopping center.

Three years later, according to Arkansas State Police records, Dumond admitted to raping an Arkansas woman. (Dumond later repudiated the confession, saying he was coerced by police.) Dumond was never formally charged in that case; the woman, saying she feared for her life, did not press charges.

That all happened before Cole, Dunleavy, and Huckabee succeeded in springing Mr. Dumond, which, God have mercy on their souls, they did. What happened after Mr. Dumond was released?

When the board paroled Dumond in January 1997, he had been in prison since 1985 for the rape of Ashley Stevens, a Forrest City high school student.

The board made Dumond’s parole conditional upon his moving out of state, but initially authorities in Florida, Texas, and other states declined to allow him to move there. Dumond was finally released in October 1999, when he moved to DeWitt to live with his stepmother.

In August 2000, Dumond moved to Smithville, Mo., a rural community outside Kansas City. He had married a woman from the community who was active in a church group that had visited Dumond in prison and believed him to be innocent.

Only six weeks after Dumond moved to Missouri, Carol Sue Shields, of Parkville, Mo., was found murdered in a friend’s home. She had been sexually assaulted and suffocated.
In late June 2001, Missouri authorities charged Dumond with the first-degree murder of Shields. The Clay County, Mo., prosecutor’s office asserted that skin found under Shield’s fingernails, the result of an apparent struggle with her murderer, contained DNA that matched Dumond’s.

Missouri authorities also say that Dumond is the leading suspect in the rape and murder of a second woman, Sara Andrasek, of Platte County, Mo., though he has not yet been charged with that crime.

Andrasek was 23. Like Shields, Andrasek had her brassiere cut from her body; Dumond cut Stevens’ bra off before he raped her.

“It’s as if he wanted to leave us his calling card,” a Missouri law enforcement officer said.

That’s right. Mike Huckabee worked hard to parole a serial killer.

But yes, it is because of Huckabee’s support of child health care that the extreme right shuns Mike Huckabee. Uh-huh.

It is in the light of the above story, I would like you to read the following comments left by various and sundry in that previous post:

…the fact that [Huckabee] is both insane and likable makes him a rather interesting person… Obviously, Huckabee made a big mistake in letting him go but it isn’t that hard to see how he could have made it…

—

I’ll also join the bandwagon of Collins’ supporters here. She was pointing out the hipocrisy [sic] of the religious right…

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[Collins] was obviously trying to point out the hypocrisy of the Christian right supporting the likes of Giuliani or Romney, while overlooking the candidate that is the lease [sic] sanctimonious of the group. She was merely a little clumsy. Cut her some slack

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Collins said that [Huckabee] is a human being. He has made mistakes. He is not all around evil, but his party is so overwhelmed with hypocracy [sic] that these qualities are not enough for him to be considered, they just want another semi-fascist to get them the power.
I would love for Huckabee to run, because he is such a weak personality, and has such a strange name…

Folks, we are talking about electing the president of the United States here. I have a pretty good sense of humor but there is nothing funny about an entire column devoted entirely to a candidate who’d make a “terrible president” [update: but not only because he would be terrible.] As for Collins touting him as an example of rightwing hypocrisy – however you spell it – because they shun him on account of his support for healthcare? Please, the real reason is because Huckabee was so utterly out of it he let an idiot like Dunleavy tell him what’s real. And because of that, Huckabee worked hard to get a serial killer out of prison, so he could rape and kill tragically and stupidly providing him fresh opportunities to rape and kill.*

Huckabee’s an “interesting” man, all right. And Collins is behaving in an utterly irresponsible fashion.

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PS. I somehow forgot to add this. Caution: Very gruesome description coming up. While out awaiting trial for the ’85 rape, two men broke into Dumond’s house, forced him to suck one of them off, then cut Dumond’s balls off [NOTE: See important update below.]. The local sheriff then came by, scooped up the newly liberated testicles and displayed them in a jar for a while. The extreme right believes Clinton was behind this. That’s because, well, let’s let Wayne Dumond tell us himself:

One of [the guys who castrated him] , DuMond later said, chortled, ‘Mr. C would be proud.’ They left him to be discovered by his children.

Got that? Clinton’s distant cousin gets raped. So, as he would later with Vince Foster, according to the ever so Reverend Falwell, Clinton indulged in some ultraviolence and paid back the “alleged” rapist (oh, Dumond raped the girl, alright) by having him castrated.

And that is why the right just loooooooooooved Wayne Dumond and worked to pardon him, so he could kill at least once, if not twice, a pardon which put an extremely disturbed man back among the public where, in less than a year he raped and killed at least once, if not twice.*

Oh, by the way, Dumond died in prison coupla years ago. LIke anyone cares, but thought you should know.

[UPDATE: Digby herself has written about Dumond and Huckabee here. ]

[UPDATE: In an email Gene Lyons wrote:

I think it’d be worth an update noting there was never any evidence of vigilante justice in DuMond’s castration. Only his say-so. State police thought he probably did it himself.

He was all alone in a trailer at the end of a dirt road in a cotton field. No sign of intruders.

Grotesque as it seems, it’s apparently not unheard of for crazed sex offenders to geld themselves.

Seems to me like more circumstantial evidence that Dumond was far more disturbed than Huckabee, Cole, or Dunleavy either bothered to learn about or let on they knew.

Clinton, on the other hand, ignored and/or turned away the right’s efforts to reduce Dumond’s sentence or parole him. Back in May, Gene Lyons posted about Dumond here.]

*Originally this sentence was ambiguous and could be read in such a way as implying that I believed the right released Dumond in order to kill. That is, of course, ridiculous but the original wording does have that as a valid interpretation. So I struck it and rephrased it. Hat tip to My Man Godfrey for noticing and my apologies for not originally believing him.

A Little Night Nuance

by tristero

In a post titled “A Little Nuance”Matt writes:

Perhaps this is just pointless hairsplitting, but I feel I should say that while I’m not at all happy with the precedents Bush is setting with regard to presidential power, that I think the case for strong executive power as such is actually pretty strong. The trouble comes from the nexus…[etc.]

We’ll get to whether or not there’s a little nuance, a lot, or none, in Matt’s post in a moment. But one thing I can certainly say is that Matt was not splitting hairs. The trouble comes from the nexus between the world of reality and the assertion of a non-existent realm of principles (ideas) co-existent with that reality but independent of it. In short, there’s a little bit of an epistemological incoherence goin’ on.

Inadvertently, Matt has fallen for one of the oldest trick in the rightwing’s rhetorical playbook. They often assert a crude dualism where principles are divorced from reality, where mind exists apart from the matter of the brain, where you can just decide things and make them happen. Some examples of this strategy in action:

Regarding Alito, I was once asked, “Don’t you think that, in principle, a president has the right to pick a Supreme Court justice in agreement with his ideology?” “In principle, isn’t the removal of Saddam Hussein a good thing?” “Looked purely in regards to whose position it furthers and whose it doesn’t, were not the peace protestors of early 2003 ojectively pro-Saddam?”

The problem with such characterizations is that the rhetorical tactic of “in principle” reifies a supernatural world. In principle, liberating people from a harsh tyrant should spread democracy. In principle, taxes should be for an absolute minimum of government service. In principle, the abolition of property will lead to greater happiness. In principle, I clearly deserve a Lamborghini for my next birthday.

Despite the obvious contradiction that leads to sophomoric late night yakking – hey dude, you’re saying that in principle, discussions that take place on the “in principle” playing field are meaningless – there is no way to have a conversation about such things in the abstract, let alone a nuanced one. The only truly nuanced way to engage the fundamental questions that lurk behind this kind of rhetoric is to talk about specific examples rooted in a specific reality. I’m talking the actual world here, not some hypothetical idea dump.

It’s not, “what are the “principles” involved?” But what does “liberation” mean and what does it look like? Which people? Which tyrant? What is specifically meant by democracy? What is the cost? What are the alternatives? What are the legal and moral issues? And so on.

Yes, Matt never says “in principle” He simply talks about a “strong case” to be made for a “strong executive” if we set aside any specific examples, such as Bush. In other words, he’s speaking abstractly. Or in principle.

But the point of the “unitary executive” bullshit is not, and never has been about, an abstract principle. It was merely a rhetorical tactic designed to obscure quite specific actions that have morphed the office of the president of a democratic republic into the seat of a proto-dictatorship. This is not an argument about principles (update: within an agreed democratic framework) but a struggle with people bound and determined to effect a paradigm shift (or if you prefer, a revolution). That is all it is. And that is enough.

It is plain weird, to say the least! to talk about a “case” pro or con “strong executive power” divorced from any specific instance. That is especially true when the country is grappling with a president who wants to, and does, order people to be tortured; orders prisoners held without trial or any cause except his whim; seeks to immunize retroactively those who colluded with him on the illegal spying of Americans; orders wars to be fought for no clear reason; and so on through the list of horribles we are all to familiar with.

There is no nuance whatsoever in such an attempt at a discussion. Nor is Matt splitting hairs because there are no hairs, ie, nothing real, to split. There is simply dissociation.

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[Updated immediately after posting for clarity and to correct typos.]

Dear Gail Collins

by tristero

[Update: I address the issues in this post in more detail here.]

Dear Gail Collins,

Given that Republican Mike Huckabee has an overabundance of utterly insane ideas, doesn’t even believe in evolution, has no chance of being elected, and is a candidate who even you believe would make, and I’m quoting here, “a terrible president” –

Given all that, Ms. Collins, why on earth did you devote an entire column – one that runs on one of the most important op-ed pages in the world – to an upbeat portrait of a man who is such a sterling judge of character that he wrote a fan letter to a sex offender who then went on to rape another woman and then murder her?

Are you trying to outdo Maureen Dowd in sheer irresponsible inanity? Do you seriously think the US, after George W. Bush, can afford to waste time devoting attention to candidates whose only claim to the presidency is they can crack a joke you find funny?

Or are you intent on becoming the next David Brooks, a typist of such monumental stupidity that readers won’t use his writing to line birdcages from fear the ASPCA might report them for pet abuse? Or is it, Ms. Collins that you’re simply so utterly bereft of good ideas and commonsense that you don’t know how to write something useful and intelligent about politics?

Nevermind. I answered my own questions. Have a good day.

Love,

tristero

Wondering? Wondering? Who’s Wondering?

by tristero

Stupid understatement of the day:

Tucked inside the White House’s $196 billion emergency funding request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is an item that has some people wondering whether the administration is preparing for military action against Iran.

I stopped wondering a long time ago.

The item: $88 million to modify B-2 stealth bombers so they can carry a newly developed 30,000-pound bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator, or, in military-speak, the MOP.

The MOP is the the military’s largest conventional bomb, a super “bunker-buster” capable of destroying hardened targets deep underground. The one-line explanation for the request said it is in response to “an urgent operational need from theater commanders.”

What urgent need? The Pentagon referred questions on this to Central Command.

ABC News called CENTCOM to ask what the “urgent operational need” is. CENTCOM spokesman Maj. Todd White said he would look into it, but, so far, no answer.

There doesn’t appear to be any potential targets for a bomb like that in Iraq. It could potentially be used on Taliban or al Qaeda hideouts in the caves along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but there would be no need to use a stealth bomber there.

So where would the military use a stealth bomber armed with a 30,000-pound bomb like this? Defense analysts say the most likely target for this bomb would be Iran’s flagship nuclear facility in Natanz, which is both heavily fortified and deeply buried.

In casue you’re wondering, Natanz is located below and more maps are available here. I can’t help but wonder how much money that raid would waste. There are tens of millions of ways that money could be better spent actually making the US secure. I’d be curious to know what our more military-savvy commenters think about such a mission, given that it is pretty much in the very center of the country and a mere 130 miles or so south of Tehran :

The Compassionate Conservative

by digby

I’d forgotten about this, but our friend Glenn Beck, the twisted firehater, has long had issues with disaster victims:

I wonder if I’m alone in this — you know it took me about a year to start hating the 9-11 victims’ families? Took me about a year. And I had such compassion for them, and I really wanted to help them, and I was behind, you know, “Let’s give them money, let’s get this started.” All of this stuff. And I really didn’t — of the 3,000 victims’ families, I don’t hate all of them. Probably about 10 of them. And when I see a 9-11 victim family on television, or whatever, I’m just like, “Oh shut up!” I’m so sick of them because they’re always complaining. And we did our best for them. And, again, it’s only about 10.

But the second thought I had when I saw these people and they had to shut down the Astrodome and lock it down, I thought: I didn’t think I could hate victims faster than the 9-11 victims. These guys — you know it’s really sad. We’re not hearing anything about Mississippi. We’re not hearing anything about Alabama. We’re hearing about the victims in New Orleans. This is a 90,000-square-mile disaster site, New Orleans is 181 square miles. A hundred and — 0.2 percent of the disaster area is New Orleans! And that’s all we’re hearing about, are the people in New Orleans. Those are the only ones we’re seeing on television are the scumbags — and again, it’s not all the people in New Orleans. Most of the people in New Orleans got out! It’s just a small percentage of those who were left in New Orleans, or who decided to stay in New Orleans, and they’re getting all the attention. It’s exactly like the 9-11 victims’ families. There’s about 10 of them that are spoiling it for everybody.

And he also qualified that only a handful of those who lost homes in Southern California are America haters, so it’s not like he hates everybody.

C’mon, CNN, what does this guy bring to the party? His ratings are terrible, he’s nearly incoherent half the time and he’s got a disgusting attitude. I just don’t see why any responsible mainstream news outlet thinks it’s a plus to have him on their airwaves.

Oh, and he’s also an idiot. From the Carpetbagger Report:

CNN’s Glenn Beck, apparently going all out to win the award for dumbest television personality, blamed the fires on the “damn environmentalists” and their “bad environmental policies.” To bolster his “argument” (I use the word loosely), Beck chatted with R.J. Smith of the Exxon-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Chris Horner, author of the Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism. Remember, CNN pays this guy to go on the air every day.

Update:

Kelsey Grammer was among those who fled Malibu …Grammer made light of the evacuation for the sake of his 6-year-old, Mason.”My daughter was nervous in the beginning,” he told the E! entertainment channel Monday. “I said, ‘Oh, honey, it’s nothing. Just relax. Come on, we’re going to have some fun.’ So she shined the flashlight around and we got out. … We’re safe. We got the dog, we got the kids.”

You remember Kelsey Grammer, right? Big Bush supporter and right wing Republican?

And then there was this left wing, American hating bastard:

Hollywood mogul David Geffen opened up his recently renovated Malibu Beach Inn to firefighters and rescue workers for free, the trade paper Daily Variety reported.

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