Month: March 2008

Great And Prescient Moments In Recent Presidential History

by dday

There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says…

Fool me once – by publicly releasing the NIE on Iran showing they gave up their nuclear ambitions four years ago – shame on, shame on you…

Fool me twice…

A new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is scheduled to be completed this month, according to U.S. intelligence officials. But leaders of the intelligence community have not decided whether to make its key judgments public, a step that caused an uproar when key judgments in an NIE about Iran were released in November.

…you can’t get fooled again.

Intelligence officials said that the National Intelligence Board — made up of the heads of the 16 intelligence agencies plus McConnell — will decide whether to release the Iraq judgments once the estimate is completed. But they made clear that they lean toward a return to the traditional practice of keeping such documents secret.

In internal guidance he issued in October, McConnell said that his policy was that they “should not be declassified.” One month later, however, the intelligence board decided to publicly release key judgments from an NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, saying that it had weighed “the importance of the information to open discussions about our national security against the necessity to protect classified information.”

I’m surprised they got the Iran one through. Obviously, the nature of how that blew up in the Administration’s face is keeping them from ever doing something so profoundly silly again.

As for the Bushism, I think we have a new winner, and it’s about Iraq so it applies:

“I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who were trying to defeat us in Iraq.”

Really, just shoot me in the head.

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Power

by tristero

Absolutely, Power should be fired. Save that crap for Republicans, who deserve it.

And Josh is absolutely right. Obama’s in a bind over this and the Clinton camp is not only within their rights to push, but doing the country a favor. How it plays out will provide a good insight into how Obama – meaning the man himself as well as his closest advisers – might react when the Republicans start turning the screws, which – despite Obama’s sincerest desires for bipartisanship – the Republicans will do with a monstrous viciousness that will make Whitewater look like Walden Pond.

And if Obama can keep Power without firing her and also defuse these remarks, well, that would be some very impressive politicking.

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Note: I’ll say it only once. I don’t have a favorite between Obama and Clinton. They are both excellent candidates (which is not to say I’m necessarily in favor of a joint ticket). Neither are manufactured manly-men-with-their-straight-shooters-shooting-straight-at -you-can-you-take-it. By comparison with St. John – all image to obscure his consistent behavior as a rightwing operative – both Obama and Clinton invite critical examination (please read the first clause of this sentence before ranting about Candidate X’s deviousness and willingness to hide his/her true agenda/earnings/actions). So I think it not surprising, nor terribly important, that I find it easy to support them both while at the same time often disagreeing with the particulars of their platforms. The point is that even when I think they are wrong, I recognize they are both serious people, not clowns who want to inherit the dubious mantle of George W. Bush’s codpiece.

Yes, I know a mantle is worn elsewhere. Usually.

Hijinks

by digby

I don’t know if this is real, but it doesn’t matter. The smug tone and the cruel intention is enough to make you sick. If it’s true, it just shows what violence does to the human soul. If it’s fake, it just shows that there a more than a few people out there who failed to mature past the sixth grade — and would have been sent to a psychiatrist if they were.

This is a very flawed species.

H/t to John Cole

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More on the Bush-Iraq Treaty

by dday

Some have questioned whether or not the locking in of a status of forces agreement (SOFA) would create a situation that would make it difficult for a future President to halt military activities in Iraq. I just got off a conference call with legal scholars Bruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway, and Rep. Barbara Lee, who has introduced a nonbinding resolution expressing the sense of the Congress that the Administration must go to them to get authorization for a bilateral treaty of this type. The issue is that the UN mandate for American troops in Iraq expires at the end of this year, and without anything to supplant it, US troops would be operating in the country illegally, in violation of international law. The two ways to remedy this are to extend the mandate (which will be the subject of an upcoming House bill from the leadership) for a short period of time until the next President sets the policy, or to create this bilateral status of forces agreement, which is binding on the US government. In addition to the standard SOFA arrangements – protection for military personnel, postal and banking services, criminal exemption for military members – this agreement as it is being negotiated by the Bush Administration would include, in a completely unprecedented fashion:

1) an “authority to fight” giving US troops the legal authority to operate inside Iraq beyond the UN mandate;

and

2) legal immunity for private military contractors like Blackwater who are operating in accordance with the US government.

One can easily see why this is problematic. The precedent would be that the President can dictate the terms of military involvement unilaterally and without the expressed consent of the Congress. The authority to fight is completely beyond what has ever been in a SOFA before, and could be used as a precedent for all sorts of additional military actions (for example, would the authority to fight include Iranian troops across the border accused of “meddling”?). So for that reason alone we should never allow this for one second. Even regular strategic framework arrangements like we saw in Japan or Germany received Congressional approval first. These go further and the Administration claims no need to involve Congress.

As far as tying the hands of the next President, there are legal considerations and political considerations. It is a fact that this agreement would If a Democrat wins and seeks a new course in Iraq, he or she would be obliged to break an international commitment, which they can do but not without some difficulty. Dana Perino today pushed back against this idea that this would commit the next President to staying in Iraq, but note the spin:

“It’s important to note what this agreement will not do. It will not tie the hands of the next President. It will not say how many troops should be there. It will not establish permanent bases. What it does is it provides for a secure environment for our troops to work, in a legal framework,” she said […]

Perino sharply criticized Bush’s Democratic critics — some of whom have raised the alarm over the agreement, saying it would commit his successors to an open-ended commitment to a vastly unpopular war.

“The Iraqis want it. Iraq’s Arab neighbors want it. It appears that the only ones who are agitated about it, and in fact demagoging about it, are a subset of Democrats,” she said. “I don’t that their concern is merited.”

This obviously plays into the Dolschstosslegende. Now you have this setup where only these rogue America-hating Democrats want to take Iraqi’s freedom away. Let’s get real. Bush is unilaterally making this deal with Maliki, who was installed by the Americans and in no way speaks for the Iraqi people. Having to break an international commitment to move forward on leaving Iraq will renew calls of stabbing the country – and the Iraqis – in the back.

So on several fronts, we don’t want the President to have the power to negotiate the terms of permanent military deployments all over the world, especially in Iraq, where this occupation remains a disaster. This is absolutely an effort to, in the words of Prof. Ackerman, to “commit the next Administration as explicitly as possible to the policies of this Administration.”

Iraq Insider has more.

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L’Etat, C’est Moi

by dday

Another day, another novel legal imterpretation to evade Congression input:

The Bush administration yesterday advanced a new argument for why it does not require congressional approval to strike a long-term security agreement with Iraq, stating that Congress had already endorsed such an initiative through its 2002 resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein.

The 2002 measure, along with the congressional resolution passed one week after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks authorizing military action “to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States,” permits indefinite combat operations in Iraq, according to a statement by the State Department’s Bureau of Legislative Affairs.

Of course an authorization to use force against Saddam Hussein still applies! Haven’t you ever seen Dawn of the Dead?

They’re really grasping at any straw they can, and considering that Congress has failed to hold them accountable for this whatsoever, they’ll probably get away with it. And by the way, this is not just about Iraq; this is about making sure that any other potential war doesn’t need Congressional oversight or authorization, either. If they need an October surprise to win the election, they don’t want to have to mess with any pesky “laws” in order to make it happen. So the precedent of using the 2002 AUMF is also about a pretext to use the September 20, 2001 AUMF for Afghanistan to strike any “terrorist” anywhere in the world. And we know who comes up with the definition of a terrorist.

(Of course, it’s also a problem to allow a status of forces agreement to pass without Congressional authorization, as it makes it very difficult for the next President to unentangle an Iraq commitment.)

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Democrats In Disarray

by dday

Now that the press beat up on Barack Obama for a few days it’s Hillary Clinton’s turn. The WaPo runs an inside baseball piece about internal hatred among her staff, which is not really germane for A1, but certainly germane to push the narrative that this extended race is dooming the Democrats.

For the bruised and bitter staff around Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Tuesday’s death-defying victories in the Democratic presidential primaries in Ohio and Texas proved sweet indeed. They savored their wins yesterday, plotted their next steps and indulged in a moment of optimism. “She won’t be stopped,” one aide crowed.

And then Clinton’s advisers turned to their other goal: denying Mark Penn credit.

With a flurry of phone calls and e-mail messages that began before polls closed, campaign officials made clear to friends, colleagues and reporters that they did not view the wins as validation for the candidate’s chief strategist. “A lot of people would still like to see him go,” a senior adviser said.

The depth of hostility toward Penn even in a time of triumph illustrates the combustible environment within the Clinton campaign, an operation where internal strife and warring camps have undercut a candidate once seemingly destined for the Democratic nomination. Clinton now faces the challenge of exploiting this moment of opportunity while at the same time deciding whether the squabbling at her Arlington headquarters has become a distraction that requires her intervention.

I dislike Mark Penn as much as the next Clinton staffer, and certainly she has not had the campaign people she deserves in this race, but why does this matter to anyone but the most hardcore political junkie?

The media has also unilaterally decided for us that negative ads won the race (actually, since the ad buy was tiny, the media COVERING the negative ads contributed to the victories, along with in larger part the demographics and the fact that Obama’s voter contact and organizing strategy diminishes in very large states), and that the problem was that Obama didn’t “fight back” even though he put out a competing “It’s 3 AM, you should be afraid but for a different reason” ad within a matter of hours, and sure enough, the next day a story with the headline Lesson of Defeat: Obama Comes Out Punching can be written. So the press gets the knock-down drag-out fight they demand, pushing FURTHER the story that Democrats are fighting, Clinton supporters hate Obama supporters, Obama supporters hate Clinton supporters, and nobody will show up to the polls in November. Note also the beginning of the NY Times story:

Senator Barack Obama woke up on Wednesday talking of his delegate lead and of taking the fight to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. But after defeats in two of the most populous states, he also sounded like a chastened candidate in search of his lost moment.

So here we have a story where Obama is winning but really losing, matched by a story where Clinton is winning but really losing. Message: Democrats are losers. The entire campaign is colored with this theme: it’s not about how Democrats have two talented and resilient candidates, it’s that they both suck, the party is weak and about to explode. Never mind the facts.

Then there’s the NAFTA/Canada boomerang, with a Canadian story suggesting that Clinton’s team also gave assurances to their neighbors to the north that the strident rhetoric on the trade deal was talk. Apparently phone lines from the nation’s largest newspapers don’t reach all the way to Ottawa, because this story, which could have been cleared up in 20 minutes, played out over the course of a week, damaging Obama and now potentially damaging Clinton. It’s also contextless, since media types don’t know a goddamn thing about trade policy and don’t understand the difference between cancellation and renegotiation. If they did, they’d have understood that both candidates’ position on trade was actually logically consistent with what they told Canadian officials, and WOULD HAVE NEVER REPORTED THE STORY.

Expect bullshit like this for the next seven weeks. And read critically.

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Yes We Can!

by digby

Over on his home turf, d-day links to this clever post:

Supporters of both candidates, please listen closely. For the good of the Party — no, for the good of the Nation! — the time has come for you to leave this race. read on

And d-day has a wonderful idea for bloggers too. Smell the fresh air!

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Ruh Roh

by digby

Bush May Fire CENTCOM Chief Adm. Fallon, Replace With Commander More ‘Pliable’ To War With Iran Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon “one of the best strategic thinkers in uniform today.” Fallon opposed the “surge” in Iraq and has consistently battled the Bush administration to avoid a confrontation with Iran, calling officials’ war-mongering “not helpful.” Privately, he has vowed that an attack on Iran “will not happen on my watch.” Unfortunately, this level-headed thinking and willingness to stand up to President Bush may cost him his job. According to a new article by Thomas P.M. Barnett in the April issue of Esquire magazine (on newsstands March 12), Fallon may be prematurely “relieved of his command” as soon as this summer

If the Republicans want to shoot the moon to win in November, this is the likliest course. Start a new war and rely on the “rally round the flag” effect. It’s hard to imagine they could go to that well again, but never underestimate paranoia and the lure of patriotic grandeur and big ratings to push the country into temporary insanity.

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There Won’t Be Blood

by digby

For those of you who would like a little historical perspective on hard fought primaries, this article in Slate might help everyone relax a little bit as we face more trench warfare:

Like the calls for Al Gore to concede the presidency to George Bush in November 2000, this anxiety about the imagined consequences of a protracted fight misreads both history and the calendar. In 2000, pundits seemed not to know that contested elections in previous years—notably the 1960 race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon—remained officially unresolved until barely a month before Inauguration Day, and so they talked as if each hour of uncertainty brought the republic nearer to doom.The calls to wrap up the Democratic primary race show a similar amnesia. To suggest that March 5 marks a late date in the calendar ignores the duration of primary seasons past. Indeed, were Hillary Clinton to have pulled out of the race this week, Obama would have actually clinched a contested race for the party’s nomination earlier than almost any other Democrat since the current primary system took shape—the sole exception being John Kerry four years ago. Fighting all the way through the primaries, in other words, is perfectly normal. read on

I was going to bring this up earlier, but decided to wait and see what happened yesterday. One of the most pernicious things the media did in 2000 was constantly evoke the hysterical notion that if the election wasn’t decided immediately that the streets would run with blood and the nation would fall into chaos. It ended up creating the illusion that deadlines were more important than the principle of counting all the votes and influenced the legal cases that eventually decided the outcome. There is no reason to panic about elections.

Humans are still voting and the party as an institution hasn’t made up its mind. There is no shortage of money, both candidates provide some fascination to the media and until the party decides, they will remain moving targets for the Republicans. After all, they can’t settle on a narrative until one of the candidates is chosen. One of the upsides of the two candidates we have is that while they are very similar on policy, traditional GOP attacks will have to be tailored differently. If McCain is forced to campaign against them on the issues, which is what they have in common, he loses. On the issues, Democrats win.

It remains my opinion that the Democrats will win this election handily. National security is no longer the most salient political issue (the Cry Wolf syndrome may have finally kicked in) and the economy is going into crisis mode. Bush and the social conservatives went too far and have been (temporarily) discredited. I do not feel that we are in any great danger of losing. (My biggest concerns are what is going to happen once we win it, not whether we will win it.)

That’s not to say that the Republicans aren’t going to wage a fight. They are likely to wage a truly nasty one, since they know they aren’t likely to win and so have nothing to lose. John McCain will never run for president again — he might as well go out in a blaze of glory doing as much damage to the new Democratic president as he can. (It’s how they win by losing — create so much noise and dissonance that the Democrat can’t govern.)

Meanwhile, the Democratic primary goes on for a while and the two candidates are going to find themselves in deeper waters. That’s the way it often works. It’s almost never fatal to the party’s chances in November, particularly when it’s in the strong position the Dems are in today. Don’t buy the media hype. They have a vested interest in making this seem more dramatic than it is — ratings.

Update: I know there’s little point in again trying to convince people that this primary has not been particularly brutal (although it’s probably going to get worse before it’s over) perhaps Governor Dean could soothe everyone a little bit:

MATTHEWS: OK, you‘re on offense, but you don‘t believe that the Republicans are picking up useful material in these weeks of combat between Clinton and Obama.DEAN: I can‘t imagine that what we‘re seeing now between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, yes, is anything but a—a tea party compared to what the general election‘s going to be like in the fall.MATTHEWS: Well, since you hesitate to call this quits, here the ABC poll and “The Washington Post” poll that‘s come out, and it shows that that two thirds of the voters, basically, believe that the race should continue on. So I guess you‘re with the voters. I thought you wanted this thing to end. I was misinformed.DEAN: It‘s always better to be with the voters. And I…MATTHEWS: I‘m being sarcastic, Governor.(CROSSTALK)MATTHEWS: When I get sarcastic is I smile because I do think you want this thing to end and clean it up and have a nominee and move on to attack McCain, which is what you‘re already doing.DEAN: If we get—well, we‘re certainly going to do that. But if we could, have a nominee before the convention, that would be helpful. But we‘ve got a long way to go between now and the convention.MATTHEWS: Are there any rules that are being broken? The Republicans have this “11th Commandment” that Reagan sort of codified. Is there anything that‘s improper in the way you‘ve watched this campaign? Is either side, Clinton or Obama, getting a little too dirty for you?DEAN: Chris, four years ago, my opponents got together and had a political action committee, all four of which contributors contributed to the thing, which morphed me into Osama bin Laden. So this is pattycake. This is a tough campaign between two well—well-spoken, smart people, either of whom is capable of being president of the United States. But this is not, by and large, out of bounds.

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The Warrior King

by digby

Bush just endorsed McCain and sounded like he’s on a meth bender. He couldn’t let McCain have the spotlight.

If I were McCain I’d be hoping that’s the last time I have to appear with Junior during this campaign. He’s a reminder of everything people loathe about Republicans. St. John didn’t look too comfortable, I must say. (But then he never does…)

Naturally, the gasbags are doing backflips over John W:

Brian Williams: You know what I thought was unsaid —they took their position Chris, we’re seeing the replay — they end up in this spot and the sun is coming is just from the side and there in the shadow is John McCain’s buckled, concave shoulder. It’s a part of his body the suit doesn’t fill out because of his war injuries. Again you wouldn’t spot it unless you knew to look for it. He doesn’t give the same full chested profile as the president standing next to him. Talk about a warrior…

Chris Matthews: You know, when he was a prisoner all those years, as you know, in isolation from his fellows, I do believe, uhm, and machiavelli had this right — it’s not sentimental, it’s factual — the more you give to something, the more you become committed to it. That’s true of marriage and children and everything we’ve committed to in our lives. He committed to his country over there. He made an investment in America, alone in that cell, when he was being tortured and afraid of being put to death at any moment — and turning down a chance to come home.

Those are non-political facts which I think do work for him. When it gets close this November, which I do believe, and you likely agree, will be a very close contest between him and whoever wins the Democratic fight. And I think people will look at that fact, that here’s a man who has invested deeply, and physically and personally in his country.

Williams: Absolutely, Couldn’t agree more. Of course the son of a Navy Admiral, a product of Annapolis who couldn’t wait to become a Navy aviator…

In case you think that isn’t emphatic enough, John Amato reported this last night:

After McCain won Ohio and Texas—Tweety said this a few minutes ago:

Matthews: If you look at the box this year it came in, which is marked “change.” It is ironic that the man who represents the least change is in the solidest position to be the next president right now.

In case anyone wonders why the press has been so gleefully building up and then tearing down Democratic candidates this season, this might just be a hint. McCain media manlove knows no bounds.

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