Month: June 2008

So Much For Unreasonable Search And Seizure

by dday

McCain’s flip-flop on radical executive power and illegal spying actually happened a few days ago, but I’m glad Charlie Savage elevated it by covering it in the New York Times.

A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.

Mr. McCain believes that “neither the administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the A.C.L.U. and trial lawyers, understand were constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin wrote.

Those eeeeevil trial lawyers! And that darn ACLU, trying to protect the Bill of Rights and stand in the way of a President asserting the right to break the law and what-not…

I’m glad Savage got Sen. Obama to comment on McCain’s position, too.

In an interview about his views on the limits of executive power with The Boston Globe six months ago, Mr. McCain strongly suggested that if he became the next commander in chief, he would consider himself obligated to obey a statute restricting what he did in national security matters […]

Mr. McCain’s position, as outlined by Mr. Holtz-Eakin, was criticized by the campaign of his presumptive Democratic opponent in the presidential election, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. Greg Craig, an Obama campaign adviser, said Wednesday that anyone reading Mr. McCain’s answers to The Globe and the more recent statement would be “totally confused” about “what Senator McCain thinks about what the Constitution means and what President Bush did.”

“American voters deserve to know which side of this flip-flop he’s on today, and what he would do as president,” Mr. Craig said in a phone interview.

It’s absolutely a flip-flop and it’s good to see it described as such. Of course, Sen. Obama has the opportunity to do more than criticize his opponent – he can go to the Democratic leadership right now and get them to stop the giveaway of immunity for telecoms for lawbreaking and massive new spying powers for the federal government.

As for McCain, aside from cozying up to conservatives, it’s obvious why he’s changed his position – all that luscious telecom money.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has condemned the influence of “special interest lobbyists,” yet dozens of lobbyists have political and financial ties to his presidential campaign — particularly from telecommunications companies, an industry he helps oversee in the Senate.

Of the 66 current or former lobbyists working for the Arizona senator or raising money for his presidential campaign, 23 have lobbied for telecommunications companies in the past decade, Senate lobbying disclosures show.

And they get what they pay for.

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Old News

by digby

In another example of angry, vitriolic, hate-filled left wing blogging, a number of us were writing and discussing, oh four years ago, about the Pentagon loons and how they were in cahoots with Iranian and Iraqi kooks in making the Greatest Strategic Blunder in Modern Memory. I believe we were mostly called traitors and deluded conspiracy theorists, although there were many colorful epithets hurled our way. Certainly the mainstream press wasn’t interested. They were too busy getting fitted for their Prada safari jackets to pay attention to these stories. (Besides, it just wasn’t sexy, you know? No broads, no spicy gossip.)

I recall one story in particular that made the rounds, in which respected journalists (and bloggers) Laura Rozen and Josh Marshall reported some rather astonishing connections between unsavory characters involved in Iran-Contra, the Office of Special Plans, AEI — the whole shoddy little neocon cabal. I wrote a bunch about it at the time.

The long awaited first installment of the Washington Monthly article by Marshall, Rozen and Glastris is online. It is looking more and more as if we have another rogue element that’s been working out of DOD and I have to assume, some part of the White House. The many interconnecting webs seem to lead to and through the forged Niger documents, Chalabi, “Clean Break” and Valerie Plame. It’s got the earmarks of a John LeCarre novel and if it weren’t so incredibly dangerous it would be amusing.

The article is entitled “Iran Contra II” and that is apt for more reasons than the recurring roles of Mr Ghorbanifar and Mr Ledeen. Once again we see a marked “impatience” with the unfortunately cumbersome working of democratic government. That this may have happened for the second time in twenty years featuring many of the same people is a pretty clear indication that letting bygones be bygones will not do when dealing with this sort of traitorous, undemocratic behavior. The stakes are a hell of a lot higher now that they ae crashing airplanes into NYC skyscrapers. If there is an immediate lesson to be gleaned by the people, perhaps the simplest is that when you have a stupid and easily manipulated man at the head of the government, his minions and courtiers spend all their time jockeying for position and finding shortcuts to get their way. If Kerry happens to win he really must bite the bullet and see that this is investigated and people are brought up on charges. It’s completely unbelievable that these same players came back into government and ran their game all over again. Unbelievable.

If anyone is unfamiliar with the braintrust that is at the center of this little scheme, Michael Ledeen, here’s a little taste of the man’s brilliance. I’m sure you’ll agree that he is just the sort of guy you want running a secret back channel foreign policy in the middle of a national security crisis:

From March 10,2003:

Assume, for a moment, that the French and the Germans aren’t thwarting us out of pique, but by design, long-term design. Then look at the world again, and see if there’s evidence of such a design.

Like everyone else, the French and the Germans saw that the defeat of the Soviet Empire projected the United States into the rare, almost unique position of a global hyperpower, a country so strong in every measurable element that no other nation could possibly resist its will. The “new Europe” had been designed to carve out a limited autonomy for the old continent, a balance-point between the Americans and the Soviets. But once the Soviets were gone, and the Red Army melted down, the European Union was reduced to a combination theme park and free-trade zone. Some foolish American professors and doltish politicians might say — and even believe — that henceforth “power” would be defined in economic terms, and that military power would no longer count. But cynical Europeans know better.

They dreaded the establishment of an American empire, and they sought for a way to bring it down.

If you were the French president or the German chancellor, you might well have done the same.

How could it be done? No military operation could possibly defeat the United States, and no direct economic challenge could hope to succeed. That left politics and culture. And here there was a chance to turn America’s vaunted openness at home and toleration abroad against the United States. So the French and the Germans struck a deal with radical Islam and with radical Arabs: You go after the United States, and we’ll do everything we can to protect you, and we will do everything we can to weaken the Americans.

The Franco-German strategy was based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States.

It makes me feel all cozy knowing that a guy like this and his compatriots have been meddling in mid-east policy apparently in concert with a rogue element in the Pentagon for the last three years.

The SSCI reported yesterday:

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have “been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service … to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government,” a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday. A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials’ activities after only a month, and the Defense Department’s top brass never followed up on the investigators’ recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator. Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces.

Golly, who knew?

This is another edition of “when you let Republicans get away with murder, they will do it again.” In this case, it’s literally true. The worst decision Bill Clinton ever made was letting Iran-Contra slide in the name of healing and “getting things done.” He got impeached for his trouble and these people came back and perpetrated the Greatest Strategic Blunder In Modern Memory.

The SSCI waited until nearly the end of Bush’s term to bring this up in order that it be relegated to the “healing” file and nobody ever pays the price. It’s how the establishment protects itself. (See: Libby, Scooter.) Maybe somebody thinks we can just wait for Michael Ledeen to die. But there is a whole new generation weaned on conservative movement tactics and they will keep the zombie alive until they get their next chance unless it’s stopped once and for all.

Update: Richard Clarke agrees:

“Someone should have to pay in some way for the decisions that they made to mislead the American people,” said Clarke. He suggested that “some sort of truth and reconciliation commission” might be appropriate because, he said, we can’t “let these people back into polite society”:

CLARKE: Well, there may be some other kind of remedy. There may be some sort of truth and reconciliation commission process that’s been tried in other countries, South Africa, Salvador and what not, where if you come forward and admit that you were in error or admit that you lied, admit that you did something, then you’re forgiven. Otherwise, you are censured in some way. Now, I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society and give them jobs on university boards and corporate boards and just let them pretend that nothing ever happened when there are 4,000 Americans dead and 25,000 Americans grieviously wounded, and they’ll carry those wounds and suffer all the rest of their lives.

I’m for war crimes trials myself, but I realize that’s another one of those kooky left wing blogger conspiracy theory thingys. You know how those things turn out.

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June 5, 1968

by dday

I’m the wrong age to have personal knowledge of the shock Americans felt 40 years ago today when they awoke to the news that Robert F. Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles (which has now been torn down, because LA has such a great sense of history). But as I was driving in to work today I heard the reminiscences and some of the live audio of RFK’s final speech before campaign supporters after winning the California primary. There’s video of it here, and there’s a section in there that both reads as almost a reaction to Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, and also the kind of words we could imagine coming from another young Senator striving to become the President of the United States.

What I think is quite clear is that we can work together in the last analysis, and what has been going on within the United States over the period of last three years, the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment with our society, the divisions, whether it’s between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups, or on the war in Vietnam, that we can start to work together. We are a great country, an unselfish country, and a compassionate country, and I intend to make that my basis for running over the period of the next few months… what all of these primaries have indicated, and all of the party caucuses have indicated, whether they occurred in Colorado or Idaho or Iowa… is that the people in the Democratic Party, and people in the United States want a change. And that change can come about only if those who are delegates in Chicago recognize the importance of what has happened here in the state of California, what has happened in South Dakota, what happened in New Hampshire, what happened across the rest of this country. The country wants to move in a different direction. We want to deal with our own problems within our own country, and we want peace in Vietnam.

The message of change is nothing new, and Robert Kennedy is a study in change all by himself. A conservative who worked for Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, who signed the orders to wiretap Martin Luther King while Attorney General, Kennedy eventually had his moment where he saw the true face of America, the struggles in the inner cities, the plight of the farm workers whose cause he championed, and he came around to his better self, running a campaign in 1968 based on peace and equality, and a better life for all citizens.

That story is well-known. What I did not know was the story at the rememberance page put up today by the Los Angeles Times.

David Steiner was a Justice Department employee who left his job to work on the campaign for Robert Kennedy in 1968. He was one of the two men who ran to the microphones and starting asking for the doctors in the audience to come to the hotel kitchen. He literally lost his innocence at that moment and spent decades in the wilderness.

He drove around Los Angeles for days, depressed and lost. He saw the photos and TV footage of “Bobby” lying on his back, blood pouring from his head. Steiner thought Kennedy looked like a little boy, alone, as people panicked around him.

Following the assassinations of JFK and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Steiner saw this as the very vision of hope dying. Old, cynical forces had finally trampled a youthful insurgency that sought only justice and peace.

Steiner hooked up with an old girlfriend and went with her one afternoon to a hairstylist on La Cienega Boulevard. While she was getting her hair done, he wandered the street and stepped into a rug shop. The owner — a burly, thick-forearmed man — offered him some tea. They sat and talked about the assassination. The man kept saying how the Kennedys were womanizers. Steiner blurted out: “I think I’m going to Europe.”

The man, perhaps sensing that Steiner had lived a sheltered life, offered some advice: “Jump in every barrel of . . . you can find.” […]

He signed up for film school at UCLA and worked the window at All-American Burger on Melrose Avenue and La Cienega Boulevard. One day, he saw a stylish man coming up to the window.

It was his father.

They eyed each other.

“It was the Kennedy thing, wasn’t it?” his dad asked.

The look in his eye said more: Why is my Boalt grad, Justice Department attorney son working at burger stand?

“Yeah,” Steiner said.

The hope was boiled out of this guy, another casualty of the chaos of the 1960s. For those who were idealistic enough to believe that something different would appear, in our politics and in our culture, only to see those leaders murdered over and over, this is probably a familiar story.

We’re moving into a campaign season where another candidate is using the rhetoric of change to inspire a nation. With the weight of decades of disappointment, a media that is congenitally clueless and the last eight years of near-total heartbreak, there are always going to be those cynics who roll their eyes and expect the absolute worst. A lot of the time, I’m one of them. It’s like David Steiner at the burger stand. That story, however, ended well. Steiner eventually started teaching high school, and through the experience restored some of his confidence that we can, piece by piece, fulfill the vision of the Kennedy campaign in 1968.

I don’t expect my leaders to fully mirror every single one of my views, I know there will be times they’ll disappointment and at those moments I’ll exercise whatever options I can to hold them accountable. But as Digby said earlier today, things do get better. Things can change. And we all are allowed a moment or two to dream.

With Friends Like These

by digby

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the press swooners and how their ongoing absurdity is going to end up hurting Barack Obama and the Democrats in the long run. I highlighted the Daily Howler‘s take on one particular fellow, Kurt Anderson. You remember him. He’s the guy who said this:

ROSE (5/21/08): I am pleased to have Kurt Andersen back at this table. Welcome.

ANDERSEN: Great to be back.

ROSE: Here we have The Imperial City—all right? Look here: “About That Crush on Obama.” You—like Michael Kinsley is saying—“I’m swooning.”

ANDERSEN: Oh, and I’ve said it from the get-go. I have never—because this is a column, because I don’t have to pretend like real journalists to be objective—

ROSE: It’s opinion. Right.

ANDERSEN: —I’ve been unabashed about my fondness and, yes, my swooning for Obama.

ROSE: OK. Does it grow? And what is it that causes you to be so swoony? Obviously, for you to say this means that you’ve thought about this, and what is it about him?

ANDERSEN: Yes.

Fine. If we’re going to have media people swooning, I’m glad it’s a Democrat for once. But as I wrote in that piece, these people are not trustworthy. Even when they are “on your side” you end up getting screwed.

Well, within virtual minutes of Obama’s victory, here comes our liberal hero, writing about his “second thoughts.” It is a collection of pretentious navel gazing and tiresome “concerns” that should be left to private listservs and cocktail chatter instead of appearing in magazines.

Here’s an example:

6. Is he “elitist,” too condescending and glib and remote and full of himself? I don’t find him so—but then again, I myself am an elitist who can seem condescending and glib and remote and full of himself, so who am I to judge? I worry that more moments like his passive-aggressive put-down of Hillary at her cutesy-wounded debate moment—“You’re likable enough”—will continue to lose friends and alienate people. I also worry that his impolitic cosmopolitan shorthand—frustrated small-towners who cling to guns and religion and blame immigrants for their economic distress, energy-glutton Americans who expect developing countries to reduce their carbon emissions—will recur. True humility is a disqualifier for winning the nomination and certainly the presidency, but the appearance of humility, at least as a tactical posture, can be essential. It certainly worked for George W. Bush. Obama’s surpassing self-confidence can come across as preening self-regard. Thus, perhaps, his bungled outreach to Elizabeth Edwards, as reported by my colleague John Heilemann. Will he make the uncool, insecure middle-American majority feel even more so?

7. His instincts that attract me amount to weaknesses as a candidate. Too often, instead of deflecting inconvenient questions, Obama answers them directly and fully. And while the U.S. should, of course, be confident enough to have conversations with foreign enemies, any Democratic nominee carries the baggage of several decades of national-security wimpiness. Voters implicitly understand that any Democrat will be more reasonable and prudent and diplomatically engaged than Bush or McCain; it’s an impression of convincing toughness Obama has to sell, and I’m not sure he can do it.

Yes, this fellow is a certified, dyed in the wool liberal from way back who admits in this piece that he has been wrong about just about everything. He actually seems to be proud of it. I guess that’s why everyone likes and respects him so much.

This doesn’t help us folks. Do we really want Tim Russert and David Broder and Chris Matthews peddling this nonsense all over the gasbag shows? Do we want this dialog on the pages of the NY Times and the Washington Post? That’s where this type of destructive, free-association MSM musing winds up. Stupid media narratives created by people like this, who seem to need to utter or publish every stray thought that passes through their beautiful minds, are bad for us. Jon Stewart said it then and it’s true now, “they’re hurting America.”

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Who Us?

by digby

Can I tell you how incredibly annoying it is when Republicans go on TV and sanctimoniously lecture us about how the American people want all the Democrats to stop being so partisan and sit down and compromise for the good of the nation? Apparently, Dems are feeding into an environment of incivility and it’s very unseemly. The good news is that John McCain, who has always been a model of bipartisanship, is the man to lead us all in a rousing round of kumbaaya.

You have to love their chutzpah. They created a deadly, poisonous political swamp for more than two decades and now that people have finally decided they are sick of it, they have the nerve to try to use the public’s disgust as a weapon against the Democrats. Shameless.

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The Secret Agreement Is Only A Secret Here

by dday

Two big news stories out today regarding Iraq, one about the past and one about the future. The long-awaited release of the Phase II report showing that the Administration intentionally lied and deceived and misused intelligence in the run-up to the war comes off as kind of obvious, but I suppose it’s nice to see in print.

The other report, from Patrick Cockburn in The Independent, discusses the negotiations for a new status of forces agreement that would keep Iraq under indefinite occupation by the United States military.

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq’s position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country […]

America currently has 151,000 troops in Iraq and, even after projected withdrawals next month, troop levels will stand at more than 142,000 – 10 000 more than when the military “surge” began in January 2007. Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government.

The precise nature of the American demands has been kept secret until now. The leaks are certain to generate an angry backlash in Iraq. “It is a terrible breach of our sovereignty,” said one Iraqi politician, adding that if the security deal was signed it would delegitimise the government in Baghdad which will be seen as an American pawn.

I respect Cockburn’s journalism here, but I think he’s a little bit behind the story. In fact, this is the American side of the story and their demands for what they want out of a security agreement, which as I mentioned a couple days ago is already well-known inside Iraq. In fact, in a fascinating session yesterday in front of a House Foreign Relations Subcommitte, two members of the Iraqi Parliament, one Sunni and one Shiite (a member of the Al-Fadhila Party (unaffiliated with Prime Minister Maliki or Muqtada al-Sadr) rejected the US-Iraqi arrangement, demanded a referendum on it from the Iraqi Parliament or the people, and explained to Congress that a timetable for withdrawal would end the violence plaguing the country. They rejected that the surge was in any way responsible for the drop in violence and attributed it to local control, and they insisted that an end to the occupation is the only way for reconciliation to take place.

This is completely in line with the majority of the Iraqi Parliament and the Iraqi people. In fact, Reuters is reporting that they are essentially demanding that we leave.

A majority of the Iraqi parliament has written to Congress rejecting a long-term security deal with Washington if it is not linked to a requirement that U.S. forces leave, a U.S. lawmaker said on Wednesday.

Rep. William Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat and Iraq war opponent, released excerpts from a letter he was handed by Iraqi parliamentarians laying down conditions for the security pact that the Bush administration seeks with Iraq.

The proposed pact has become increasingly controversial in Iraq, where there have been protests against it. It has also drawn criticism from Democrats on the presidential election campaign trail in the United States, who say President George W. Bush is trying to dictate war policy after he leaves office.

“The majority of Iraqi representatives strongly reject any military-security, economic, commercial, agricultural, investment or political agreement with the United States that is not linked to clear mechanisms that obligate the occupying American military forces to fully withdraw from Iraq,” the letter to the leaders of Congress said.

There is nothing “secret” about this “secret deal” from the standpoint of the Iraqis. They are well aware of it and committed to stopping its progress, protesting it and demanding it be put to a popular vote. Where the Independent article is valuable is if it can bring attention to this issue in the United States (God forbid it winds up in the American media – it’s only the confirmation of the 100-year presence John McCain seeks). Members of Congress have already demanded that they be given the opportunity to ratify any agreement made between the US and Iraq. What they can do in addition is stand with the Iraqi people as the Bush Administration tries to bully the deal into place in Baghdad. The only ones doing the heavy lifting on ending the occupation right now are the Iraqis. And they’re actually mobilizing almost all factions against this agreement. We can do the same here at home, and it’s not enough to wait for a “referendum” on the war in November.

UPDATE: Middle East expert Juan Cole has some more on this, including a historical context.

Former Iraqi finance minister Ali Allawi weighs in on the security agreement. He sets the current negotiations in the historical context of the humiliation Iraqis felt over the 1930 treaty imposed on them by the British Empire as it prepared to give Iraq nominal independence but retained bases and continued to intervene in Iraqi politics. Allawi is a voice of reason and wise US officials would pay special attention to what he has to say here.

Al-Hayat writing in Arabic reports that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (the leading bloc in parliament and keystone of the government of Nuri al-Maliki) is saying he spoke to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani about the security agreement with Washington. He says that Sistani laid out four points to which any such agreement must adhere:

National sovereignty
Transparency
National consensus
Parliamentary approval of it

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The End Of The Backlash

by digby

For all of you who cynics out there who think that nothing ever changes and that they’re all alike and that there’s no point in trying to make things better because it’s all rigged, read this amazing post, from Rick Perlstein.

We have a long way to go. But it does get better. We’re seeing it happen.

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Little Too Little

by digby

Wow. Stop the presses. Jay Rockefeller finally released the official SSIC’s report on whether the Bush administration lied.

A long-awaited Senate Select Intelligence Committee report made public Thursday concludes that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made public statements to promote an invasion of Iraq that they knew at the time were not supported by available intelligence.

A companion report found that a special office set up by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld undertook “sensitive intelligence activities” that were inappropriate “without the knowledge of the Intelligence Community or the State Department.”

“Before taking the country to war, this administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” said committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, D- W. Va.

It’s long been known that the administration’s claims in the runup to the Iraq war, from Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to al Qaida to whether Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program, were incorrect. But the Senate report is the first official examination of whether the president and vice president knew that their claims were incorrect at the time that they made them.

“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate,” Rockefeller said in a statement.

Impressively bold of them to finally release it six months before Bush is out of office.

This information is already well documented, of course. But it would have been very helpful if they’d released it earlier. The press, you see, doesn’t believe anything that doesn’t come from a Republican or an official government document. It’s a little late now.

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Coda

by digby

Apologies for the dearth of postings. I’ve been having some technical problems. Hopefully comments will stay up, too.

First of all, congratulations to Senator Obama. This is a truly historic moment for the Democratic party and for America. When I was a kid (yes, back in the stone age) and when he was born, Barack Obama wouldn’t have been allowed to stay in the same hotels or get a drink in a bar or buy a house next to a large number of white Americans. Last night, America took another huge and necessary step in putting that awful history behind us. It was long overdue, and was made possible through the tremendous sacrifices and courage of many people who didn’t live to see this day. I am grateful that I did live to see it. I will do everything in my meager power to help Obama win this campaign. The election of the first African American president will signal the end of the era of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. And nothing could be more fitting.

Also, congratulations to Senator Clinton, who in my view showed Democrats what a fighter looks like. This is the closest primary in history and despite what the bloviators and the gasbags have been saying for months, she had not only a right, but a duty, to fight on until the end for the half of the Democratic party that supported her. Clinton too was an historic candidate who inspired millions of people and she has my admiration.

If I might digress a bit and say one word about the Clintons, who to many are personas non grata in the Democratic Party now. Whatever happens, Bill Clinton will still be the 42nd president of the United States and the first two term Democrat since Roosevelt. That’s never going to change. Democrats should ask themselves, once the smoke has cleared, if it’s really a good idea to discredit his accomplishments. However you personally may feel about him, there is value in a popular ex-president remaining popular. Political value. (See: Reagan legacy project.) The question is what they are valued for.

I see the Clintons as warrior chiefs against the hardcore conservative movement machine that nearly crippled this country (but which may have just run its course after drifting into decadence and hubris.) But, at the time of the movement’s greatest power and influence, no one took more crap or was more deft at beating them back. I, for one, am grateful to both of them for taking a nearly unbelievable amount of heat from both the media and the Republicans during that era — and surviving.

Bill Clinton is in the pantheon of popular ex-presidents who continues to do important work on global initiatives. Hillary Clinton is a Senator and historic breakthrough presidential candidate who won more primary votes than any candidate in history aside from Barack Obama. Al Gore is a global leader and Nobel prize winner. On the other side of that epic battle, Newt Gingrich is a Fox News commentator, writing reviews of mystery thrillers on Amazon. Tom Delay is a private citizen facing indictment. Half of the social conservatives who unctuously criticized Clinton’s behavior have been run out of town on morals charges. Fox News is sinking in the ratings faster than George W. Bush.

The Clintons didn’t single handedly defeat the conservatives, but they fought them off valiantly when the movement was at its pinnacle and they deserve some credit for that. It’s hard to believe that we could have been worse off if they hadn’t, but believe me, we would have.

As to what happens next, you all know that I believe this is the Democrats’ year and I think that as soon as everyone licks their wounds and takes a little rest and, more importantly, sees what the Republicans are going to unleash on Obama and the Democratic party, we will all make our way back together. As I wrote the other night, I think both of the leaders need to do their part to make that happen, and I expect they will, for both personal and political reasons.

Finally, whoever you supported in this race and however your feel about the candidates, there still remains the problem of our sick, sick political media and that’s something that the blogosphere — as alternative media — need to sort through. I know that many of you have felt that this campaign’s coverage wasn’t as bad as I have painted it. But I think that when we look back on this we will see that it was yet another disgraceful performance on the part of our mainstream media (and, alas, our “liberal” media as well.) There is a lot to be written about that and I’m hopeful we can all look at this with clear eyes once we take a breather.

Clinton will officially end suspend the campaign on Friday, (which is perfectly in keeping with the usual timing of these things contrary to the gasbags’ ahistorical and overwrought blathering of last night.) We will see what the Republicans have in store for us. And maybe we can start behaving like ourselves again. Family fights are always painful, but they are usually easily healed as well. Here’s to the end of the Long March of 2008. It’s been real.

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Pathetic, Corrupt, Spineless Democratic Leadership

by dday

I congratulate Barack Obama on his primary win and think he has the opportunity to bring forward meaningful change in America. In fact, he can start today. He can go to the well of the Senate and demand that the party he now leads not authorize new powers to spy on Americans and immunize corporations who broke the law with their illegal spying in the first place.

The House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat disclosed late Tuesday that he is ready to accept a Republican-brokered deal to rewrite the nation’s electronic surveillance laws, signaling that a long-running congressional impasse could soon be coming to an end.

House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes told CongressDaily that he is “fine” with language offered by Senate Intelligence ranking member Christopher (Kit) Bond and other Republicans to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Notably, the GOP language, which was offered a day before the recent congressional recess, would leave it up to the secret FISA court to grant retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have helped the Bush administration conduct electronic surveillance on the communications of U.S. citizens without warrants […]

“It’s about finding middle ground and we have middle ground,” Reyes said of the compromise offered by Republicans. “It’s not going to please everyone but let’s get on with it.”

Reyes said he believes enough Democrats will support the proposal to pass it in the House.

Barack Obama could put an end to this today if he wanted. He could tell his colleagues in the House and the Senate that they should not work so hard to codify into law what his opponent is calling for – the ability for an executive to secretly spy on Americans.

If elected president, Senator John McCain would reserve the right to run his own warrantless wiretapping program against Americans, based on the theory that the president’s wartime powers trump federal criminal statutes and court oversight, according to a statement released by his campaign Monday.

Monday, McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin, speaking for the campaign, disavowed those statements, and for the first time cast McCain’s views on warrantless wiretapping as identical to Bush’s.

“[N]either the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. […]

We do not know what lies ahead in our nation’s fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.”

The Article II citation is key, since it refers to President Bush’s longstanding arguments that the president has nearly unlimited powers during a time of war. The administration’s analysis went so far as to say the Fourth Amendment did not apply inside the United States in the fight against terrorism, in one legal opinion from 2001.

This really is identical to George Bush’s position and now the Democrats in the House are signaling their willingness to go along with it. Obama positions himself as a new kind of Democrat who wants to change Washington and has a background as a Constitutional scholar. There is no other issue which both shows the rot of the Democratic leadership and their disinclination to enforce or even recognize the Constitution than this one.

Senator Obama has the power to end this. I’m sorry to not give him a honeymoon after the primary victory but events on the ground are moving quickly. There are a few decent elements in the compromise bill, like exclusivity for the FISA Court and an IG report on the legality of the current surveillance program, but it’s not nearly good enough. This is another in a long series of caves, and an excellent opportunity for Obama to show his leadership skills and where he stands on civil liberties and Constitutional issues. We know that McCain is a mirror of Bush on that score.

Senator Obama, you are the party’s leader. Do something about this. Today.

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