Month: December 2008

Control The Team

by digby

Jane Hamsher sez:

The Illinois legislature had their chance to strip Blago of his appointment power and call a special election, but the Democrats got cute and decided they didn’t want to risk losing the seat (Reid sent a letter opposing a special election). So they made this particular bed. Now the Senate Democratic Caucus have said they will not let Burris join their exclusive little club. Really? As The Christian Progressive Liberal notes over at Jack & Jill Politics, that’s a rich one:

Harry Reid, as well as the President-Elect, needs to explain why Traitor Joe Lieberman was allowed to keep his Senate seat, his committee assignments and his privileges when the man all but joined the Republican Party by publicly dissing PE Obama, and actively campaigning for Obama’s opponent, Sen. John McCain – thereby signing off on all the race-baiting inherently involved in McCain’s campaign, brought with an assist from the Moose Queen Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. Reid needs to explain what the difference is in keeping Lieberman the Weasel vs. seating Roland Burris, the near-squeaky clean former AG from Illinois.

I would add that the little end run by the Attorney General to have Blagojevich removed by the state supreme court and the Senate’s clearly unconstitutional assertion that they can refuse to seat anyone they choose doesn’t exactly reassure me that the Dems are going to be all that much more respectful of the law than the Republicans were. There are proper ways to handle this stuff and these are not among them.

I agree with Will Bunch. They should just seat Burris. It’s not the end of the world, he’s a good Dem who, as the Jack and Jill poster Jane excerpts above says, is far likelier to support Obama’s agenda than the backstabbing Joe Lieberman. They blew it and they shouldn’t make it any worse by refusing to seat someone who mets all the legal requirements of the job. (And anyway, this could be a dangerous precedent. Suppose senators in the future decide that in a time ‘o war, they won’t seat someone who calls himself a socialist — like Bernie Sanders? It could easily happen.)

I have to say that I’m a little bit disappointed in the Obama political team. I have absolutely no problem with their response to the ignoramuses in the press or the way they conducted their internal investigation. But the stupidity about the special election, the AG filing that idiotic suit, letting Reid and the senate Dems run around like a bunch of hysterical Victorian spinsters — it’s not good. They need to get control of the Democratic political professionals in a hurry or they’re going to screw them before they even get started.

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Defining The Argument Down

by digby

A couple of weeks a go I wrote a long piece about “legal scholar” Stuart Taylor’s arguments against prosecutions against the war crimes regime called, Don’t Defend It, Don’t mend It, Just End It and speculated that his thoughts on the matter would be the default position of the villagers. After all, everyone in the village agrees that there should be no pursuit of those who tortured, spied and used the constitution as toilet paper, for essentially the same reasons: the right wing will tear the country apart if anything is done about this and those who perpetrated the crime of torture have already suffered enough by being embarrassed at being found out. They all make the same absurd argument about lawyers’ advice being the determining factor as to whether a law was broken.

But after reading Ruth Marcus’ somnambulant “let’s not play the blame game” piece today in the Washington Post, which validates my thesis in nearly every respect, I realize that I was wrong in one fundamental way: there will actually be two versions of the villager talking points which will define the contours of the “argument:” those who lean right and say that the new president should continue to torture, kidnap, illegally spy on and imprison innocent people and those reasonable “centrists” like Marcus who say he probably shouldn’t unless he absolutely has to. (The left, needless to say, are a bunch of shrieking extremists who insist that these things are so wrong they should be repudiated and punished.)

The frame shifts, the goalposts move, the argument narrows and the conservatives get away with murder. And yet Marcus, like a dewy eyed debutante writes something like this with a straight face:

Second, the looming threat of criminal sanctions did not do much to deter the actions of Bush administration officials. “The Terror Presidency,” former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith’s account of the legal battles within the administration over torture and wiretapping, is replete with accounts of how officials proceeded despite their omnipresent concerns about legal jeopardy. “In my two years in the government, I witnessed top officials and bureaucrats in the White House and throughout the administration openly worrying that investigators acting with the benefit of hindsight in a different political environment would impose criminal penalties on heat-of-battle judgment calls,” Goldsmith writes.

Well, they certainly won’t spend any time worrying about that in the future will they? (And I’m pretty sure that those who had any knowledge of how Washington works understood very well that the likelihood of them ever being held liable for these crimes was nil.)

So, it has already been agreed upon by all sides (except those annoying DFH’s) that these poor torturers have suffered enough what with all their fretting about being punished for their misdeeds and embarrassment at having been publicly revealed to be sadists and all. And everyone knows that the wingnuts are holding a gun to the country’s collective head threatening to go postal if anyone is held liable for these crimes, so we’d better not rock that boat or all hell will break loose. The only argument left is whether or not the new president will commit the same crimes.

The danger in this, aside from the implications for a future lawless administration, is that the “compromise” position in such an argument is to do exactly what Stuart Taylor suggests be done with the torture and spying regime: mend it don’t end it. And this is one issue where there is absolutely no room for compromise — the world is watching and our national security depends upon Obama completely and without reservations ending these programs, closing Guantanamo, following the Geneva conventions and standing firm against any kind of lawless and unproductive anti-terrorism measures. Investigating and exposing the full extent of what went on is also, in my view, a necessity if we are to restore any kind of credibility around the world. If he doesn’t do these things, this moment will be as squandered as the world’s sympathy was squandered by Bush after 9/11. The world will be unlikely to give us a third chance at getting this right.

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Casualties Of War

by dday

Alberto Gonzales, a guy who wrote memos calling the Geneva Conventions quaint, who barged into John Ashcroft’s hospital bed to sign off on illegal wiretapping of Americans, who aided in the authorization and direction of torture, who watched as the Justice Department under his tenure became a politicized mess, just can’t seem to figure out what made him the bad guy.

WASHINGTON — Alberto Gonzales, who has kept a low profile since resigning as attorney general nearly 16 months ago, said he is writing a book to set the record straight about his controversial tenure as a senior official in the Bush administration […]

“What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?” he said during an interview Tuesday, offering his most extensive comments since leaving government.

During a lunch meeting two blocks from the White House, where he served under his longtime friend, President George W. Bush, Mr. Gonzales said that “for some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror.”

If Gonzales was just a dupe, an unwilling functionary in the Bush regime, that statement ALONE would be enough to justify all the scorn heaped on him. I think there are several thousand American families, and several hundred thousand worldwide, that know a little something about being casualties in the war on terror. Being forced out of your cushy job as Attorney General and getting ready to write a book doesn’t qualify.

Republicans sure do love their own personal martyrdom, don’t they?

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Ask The Question

by digby

There’s been a lot of speculation about how responsive the Obama administration is going to be toward their supporters and a lot of work is going toward the “change.gov” mechanism to facilitate it. Ari Melber at The Nation has a good suggestion:

The Obama transition team is taking questions again at Change.gov, throwing open the site this week for citizen input. The first run of this experiment was a mixed bag. The platform was open and transparent, but the official answers felt more like old boilerplate than new responses. When the submitted questions parrot toics in the traditional media, of course, the exchange can feel like a dated press conference. But here’s a vital question that few reporters have ever presented to Obama: Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor (ideally Patrick Fitzgerald) to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping? That question ranked sixth in voting last time — out of over 10,000 submissions — but the transition team only answered the top five questions. Now that Vice President Cheney confessed his support for waterboarding on national television, flouting the rule of law, the issue is even more urgent. Activist Bob Fertik, who has submitted the question twice, explains how you can vote to press this issue on the transition team:

Sign in at http://change.gov/openforquestions Search for “Fitzgerald” […and] find our question Look right for the checkbox, mouseover it so it goes from white to dark, then click to cast your vote

While the press has fixated on the criminal allegations against Gov. Blagojevich, for some reason, the (even more serious) allegations of torture by officials in the current administration receive scant attention. I have not heard one question about this during Obama’s transition press conferences, and the traveling press corps almost never pressed Obama on the issue during the general election campaign.

(Melber does give a shout out to Will Bunch for being the only reporter who’s actually done their job on this issue.)

This is really worth doing. If Obama wants to do the right thing here, he needs some political support and according to the polls he doesn’t have much. It could be really helpful for liberals to apply their awesome powers to choose CIA chiefs to this issue as well.

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Badda Bing!

by digby

This should be the standard response to all revisionist wingnuts:

“You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it’s almost embarrassing to listen to you.”

Stop The Presses

by digby

Bush is an idiot:

Former administration underlings depict President Bush as a “Sarah Palin-like” leader with a short attention span who deferred on big decisions.Larry Wilkerson, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld promoted the notion they were a national security “dream team” to guide the foreign-policy amateur Bush. “It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin-like President – because, let’s face it, that’s what he was – was going to be protected by this national security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire,” said Wilkerson.

Yeah well, some of us repeatedly pointed this out from the get-go and we were endlessly lectured by the breathless media that the American people wanted a moronic “regular guy” rather than some boring egghead for president and that his election meant the “grown-ups” were back in charge, even though he clearly had the emotional maturity and judgment of a testosterone overdosing teenager.

And then, for years after 9/11 they actually tried to make us believe that he was some kind of Churchillian savant, whose “gut” was so brilliant that brains were irrelevant. I’m sorry, but from the moment the Republicans trotted out that brainless brand name in a suit and passed him off as a leader (“I’m a leader cuz ah’ve led!”) I’ve been agog with wonder at the sheer audacity of their scam. It makes Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme look like a small time grift.

(And frankly, the demonization of Palin after their deification of Bush struck me from the beginning as nothing more than class and gender snobbery. There really is no substantial difference between them except that Palin actually had more government experience than Bush did. She was his natural successor.)
I have to admit that this is really rich, though:

Former Bush media adviser Mark McKinnon said the administration was in trouble even before taking office in the aftermath of the 2000 recount in which the Supreme Court effectively ruled that Bush had won Florida. “The recount poisoned the well from the beginning,” McKinnon said.”A good number of people in this country didn’t believe Bush was a legitimate President. And you can’t change the tone under those circumstances.”

Oh please. It’s not like Bush ever tried to change the tone. He swaggered into DC and behaved like he’d won a landslide. This is from February 2001, right after he took office:

When President Bush was asked recently by a reporter about his judicial selection process, he responded that his election was a mandate for putting conservative judges on the bench. Stumping for his $1.6 trillion tax cut, Bush declares that voters endorsed it when they chose him to be President. And why stop there? Bush has claimed a mandate for everything from changing the tone in Washington to building an antimissile shield in outer space.

Mandate? This from the first President in more than 100 years to win the office without garnering the most votes? But heck, Bush isn’t about to let the election results get in the way of a good mandate. True, he lost the popular vote to Al Gore — and in the eyes of many Democrats lost the electoral vote, too. The Pundit Elite was quick to portray the Texas governor as a “permanently scarred” leader after December’s Supreme Court decision that made him the 43rd President.

But it’s easy to forget how ephemeral things can be in the world of politics. Today, Bush’s personal approval rating hovers around 70%. A majority of Americans supports his tax cut. And the new President is out to prove that a mandate is what you make it. “Essentially, a ‘mandate’ is what you can get away with,” says Princeton University political scientist Fred Greenstein. “Bush is very good at claiming victory. He has a ‘Marlboro Man’ approach to communication. His idea of having a mandate is to say ‘I have a mandate.'”

And the press went into paroxysms of delight over his assertion of manly dominance, while the Democrats seemed to be so shell shocked and paralyzed by his outrageous chutzpah they just stood there while he bulldozed over them. It took Jeffords actually leaving the Republican party for them to even blink. (And then 9/11 happened…) Meanwhile, those of us out here in the hinterlands, aghast at the way the Republicans seized power, were snidely admonished by the villagers to just “get over it.”

I’m sorry, these insiders dishing on Bush is fun and all, but I will always have a sour taste in my mouth from the years of being forced to listen to so many elites try to sell me on the absurd idea that George W. Bush was capable of being president in the first place and then force me to listen while they absurdly extolled him as one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known.

It was obvious from the first time I saw him slumped in his chair like a surly delinquent at a Republican primary debate that the man had no more business being president than my cat (who is far more dignified and has better table manners.) It was an insult that they even recruited him for the job and and even worse insult that the press destroyed Al Gore on his behalf and managed to help him eke out a victory by presenting him as the rightful winner from election night on. Why I’m supposed to be impressed by these belated observations now I can’t imagine.

h/t to Bill

Fortified For War

by dday

In other not-yet-decided Senate news, the Minnesota Canvassing Board, which is not really a body I ever wanted to hear a lot about, basically certified the victory of Al Franken today, putting him ahead by 50 votes with only a handful of wrongly disqualified absentee ballots left to count. The working rule from the state Supreme Court is that both the Franken and Coleman campaigns have to agree on allowing a ballot to be counted, and that is predictably going unwell. Of the 1,360 ballots that local election officials have cited as eligible for counting, Coleman is asking for just a portion to be counted, and most of them come from areas that voted for him in big numbers. They also want to look at ballots that officials did not put on the list. So Coleman is re-litigating the election, while Franken is perfectly content to have those 1,360 ballots counted and to leave it at that, which considering that he’s only 50 votes ahead is something of a risk, although the absentees in general are thought to favor him.

Meanwhile, Coleman’s strategy is to bash election officials and claim that the election is tainted as he moves into what will certainly be a contested election and a series of lawsuits. Funny, I don’t hear anyone, inside or outside of Minnesota, saying that the election is over and the state needs time to heal, and for the sake of comity and bipartisanship Coleman needs to step aside. In fact, Senate Republicans are making every effort to block Franken from being seated, and using zombie lies to do it.

It now looks like the Senate GOP could end up trying to block the seating of Al Franken, assuming he is declared the winner next week in the Minnesota recount. NRSC chairman John Cornyn put out a statement accusing the Franken campaign of falsely declaring victory, and denouncing the idea of provisionally seating him while the expected legal dispute of the election is resolved:

“Al Franken is falsely declaring victory based on an artificial lead created on the back of the double counting of ballots. His campaign’s actions in the last several days on the issues of rejected absentee ballots are creating additional chaos and disorder in the Minnesota recount. Those actions, coupled with the recent comments by Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who suggests seating someone even if there is an election contest, are unprecedented. Minnesotans will not accept a recount in which some votes are counted twice, and I expect the Senate would have a problem seating a candidate who has not duly won an election.”

The double-counting issue, dubious to begin with, was shot down by the state Supreme Court. The Coleman campaign has been the one cherry-picking the ballots. And the Congress can ultimately do what it wants regarding seating members after elections, and indeed they have on a number of occasions, most recently to Vern Buchanan in FL-13 in 2007, when thousands of electronic votes just went missing in an extremely close race against Christine Jennings.

But consistency is the hobgoblin of those in the reality-based community. Those unwritten “rules” just don’t apply when you’re a Republican. Washington is actually the best example of asymmetric warfare, in that one side practices it, and the other worries that elites will be mad at them if they do the same.

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Political Circus

by digby

You have to give Blagojevich credit — he knows how to make politics interesting. This latest gambit is a real pip. But there is some method to his madness, I think. He’s trying to divide the Democrats both in Illinois and Washington and he did it using a powerful tool.

Michael Tomasky lays it out:

Then Bobby Rush showed up. The south side congressman — the only man ever to defeat Barack Obama in an election — introduced the racial angle and dramatically raised the stakes.It must be said that Rush made an entirely fair point. In 2004, when they elected Obama, the voters of Illinois chose an African American senator. And so, in determining who should fill out his term, it’s reasonable that race count as a factor. He pointed to Illinois’ recent history as the only state that’s elected two black senators (Obama and Carol Moseley Braun), arguing that the state has a history on this score that’s unique. That’s all fair.But Rush wasn’t pleading. He was warning. He was daring Reid and the other senators to deny this black man the seat. I couldn’t quite believe my ears when he used the word “lynch,” but sure enough he did: he urged the members of the media “not to hang or lynch the appointee as you castigate the appointor.” He went on to say that he and his congressional allies would push Reid to reverse his position and said of the prospect of a bunch of white senators denying Burris the seat: “I don’t think they wanna go on record doing that.”I covered lots of racial-politics conflagrations in New York in the very racially heated 1980s and 1990s, and I’ve heard rhetoric like Rush’s before, and I’ve seen its effects. When a black figure issues a public challenge like this, including one of the most heavily freighted dog-whistle words in American political history, to a white politician, sides start to line up. Tempers start to inflame. Whether the white pol stands firm or assents, somebody is going to be really, really unhappy. Reid is in a spot. There’s a chance that is is going to be on black radio all over the country tomorrow morning, and if it is, it’s going to have nothing to do with Blago on those stations. It’ll have to do with whether the white Democratic leaders of the Senate, “who take our vote for granted in November,” etc., will spurn this obviously qualified black man.

Blago pointed to the press on his way out of the room and said “don’t lynch this appointee.” What a piece of work.
Obama just made a statement condemning the appointment, so it will be interesting to see how this works out. Unfortunately, Ed Henry on CNN characterized this as a “rupture” in the Democratic Party.
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Stimulate This

by digby

I’m watching stupid spokesmodels on MSNBC chortle and giggle and express shock and disgust at the idea of all the “pork” that the governors have put into their stimulus requests, openly siding with the Republicans who say that the only fiscal stimulus that’s allowed will be in the form of tax cuts. The idea of projects to create jobs are simply not acceptable because they are now all labeled “pork.” Meanwhile, I read over at Talk Left that the Politico is making up poll numbers suggesting that Americans are against the “unprecedented use of federal dollars to jolt the economy.” (Of course if they, like the talking robots on MSNBC, are brainwashed into believing that any spending that isn’t a tax cut or fixing a pot hole is considered “pork” then they may be right.)

What with Mitch deciding to obstruct everything in sight and the media lining up to call all government spending for stimulus “pork” we may have a little problem on our hands. As Krugman says, the problem isn’t that the government might spend too much — it’s that it will spend too little. And it looks like the media and the Republicans are going to join forces to make sure that the government is hobbled in this regard before they even start.

I hate to be a broken record, but this is another example of how the conservative movement work on rhetoric and propaganda over the past 30 years will continue to pay dividends even as they are out of power. Since people have not heard anything different during that period, as Democrats embraced the idea that government was the problem not the solution and that liberal ideology was “divisive” and wrong, they pretty much left the playing field to the conservatives. Now that the right wing ideologues have destroyed the economy, people don’t have any idea how a government is supposed to work and will be susceptible to tired, useless Hooveresque solutions because they simply don’t know anything else.

Ideology actually matters at times like this. The idea of massive government spending to stimulate the economy is not intuitive when individuals are being told to tighten their personal belts and pay off their debts. (When people hear for decades that the government should run like a household budget or a business, that’s to be expected.) If they had a simple faith that government is a solid, dependable actor, or were given a short primer in liberal economics as part of the political debate, they would know that this emergency requires serious government intervention. But they have been told for a quarter century that government is an irresponsible, spendthrift institution that stands in the way of individual prosperity and nobody has been saying otherwise, least of all Democrats who’ve also been fetishizing markets and praising tax cuts like a bunch of Ayn Rand groupies.

Obama will likely get some kind of large stimulus through the congress, but it’s probably going to take a huge amount of his political capital to get it done, which it shouldn’t, and will leave him with less than he needs to deal with the rest of this pile of compost the Republicans have left on his plate. And every incident of “pork” that is subsequently revealed will be exploited by the Republicans and gleefully reported by the press, thereby chipping away at the notion that the stimulus was the reason for any upturn, instead reinforcing the old saw about Democrats as feckless tax and spend liberals.

This is a dangerous development. This so-called pork is stimulus and it doesn’t matter if the states spend it on courthouses or if they spend it on a snow making machine for a ski resort. It’s about getting money into the economy, preferably by building and making investments in things that will provide jobs in the long run. But the most important purpose is to give the economy a quick, strong jolt that only the government is capable of giving. Obsessing about pork is entirely beside the point.

Someday Democrats will learn that they need to make their own case to the people instead of repackaging warmed over Republican rhetoric. It puts them 20 points behind at beginning of every play. There may be enough good will toward Obama that they can get a serious stimulus through, but it shouldn’t take this scope of economic devastation for that to happen.

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A Rational Party No More

by dday

I think that you can find a fair amount of consensus across parties and ideologies that the country is in a mess. There are two wars, an economic crisis, rapid climate change, rising ranks of the unemployed and uninsured, etc. So to see one of the two major national political parties grappling with the question of whether it’s OK to send out a parody song called “Barack the Magic Negro” isn’t just a sad commentary on racial sensitivities. It suggests that conservative Republican “leaders” are simply living in an alternate universe, without any recognition of reality whatsoever.

Given this, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter who is elected as Chairman of the RNC. Hopefully they’ll move on to more pressing issues like the impact of clowns on children and whether or not cousins of illegal aliens should be allowed in national parks.

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