Month: December 2008

Forgiveness For Peace

by digby

Dday has a compelling post up today at the Great Orange Satan about the need for Bush to publicly forgive the shoe thrower or risk having things hurtle out of control. I had thought it was a good idea to help repair America’s image, but dday points out that it is probably necessary to prevent further violence as well.

Well, Bush’s spokesperson said today that he doesn’t hold any grudges, and that’s probably as good as it’s going to get. But he failed to publicly appeal to the Maliki government to pardon the guy or at least make sure he is protected, so it’s pretty meaningless. He reiterated that it’s all up to Iraq, which has by all accounts already beaten the guy severely.

dday appeals directly to Bush:

Do not listen to know-nothings calling this man an “ingrate” for not appreciating American sacrifice. That’s nonsense. We have invaded this country under false pretenses, killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, allowed 70% to live without access to water or electricity, and brought a once-great society to rubble. It is perfectly human to feel frustration and rage. And if you refuse to open your mind enough to think of that, think about Baghdad on fire for the last month of your Presidency. Think about security gains lost. I’d ask you to think about the dead, but you won’t, so think about your legacy. I don’t usually think calling the White House is worth a hill of beans, but give it a shot in this case. 202-456-1111 is the White House switchboars, and the Iraqi Embassy is at 202-742-1600. These things have the tendency to quickly spiral out of control. The safety of perhaps tens of thousands of people is at stake. Please, Mr. President, you have the power to fix this.

Hey, even the Wall Street Journal agrees with us on this. (Sort of.)

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Mayberry Machiavellis: The Book

by dday

T. Christian Miller wrote a definitive work a couple years ago called Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq. Late last week, Miller, who used to work for the LA Times and now writes for the online investigative unit Pro Publica got his eye on an unpublished document detailing the history of the failed reconstruction project in Iraq, and the only thing surprising about it is that the Pentagon allowed the Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, to write it up at all. The blinding incompetence and ignorance, the sustained money funnel into the hands of contractors, and the ideological warfare that led to over $100 billion in waste and fraud, all to simply replicate what we spent even more billions destroying without improving the basic lives of Iraqis, is just astounding. You can pull out anecdote after anecdote that will absolutely floor you.

It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.'” […]

When the Office of Management and Budget balked at the American occupation authority’s abrupt request for about $20 billion in new reconstruction money in August 2003, a veteran Republican lobbyist working for the authority made a bluntly partisan appeal to Joshua B. Bolten, then the O.M.B. director and now the White House chief of staff. “To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President,” wrote the lobbyist, Tom C. Korologos. “His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt.” With administration backing, Congress allocated the money later that year.

In an illustration of the hasty and haphazard planning, a civilian official at the United States Agency for International Development was at one point given four hours to determine how many miles of Iraqi roads would need to be reopened and repaired. The official searched through the agency’s reference library, and his estimate went directly into a master plan. Whatever the quality of the agency’s plan, it eventually began running what amounted to a parallel reconstruction effort in the provinces that had little relation with the rest of the American effort.

Money for many of the local construction projects still under way is divided up by a spoils system controlled by neighborhood politicians and tribal chiefs. “Our district council chairman has become the Tony Soprano of Rasheed, in terms of controlling resources,” said an American Embassy official working in a dangerous Baghdad neighborhood. ” ‘You will use my contractor or the work will not get done.'”

The New York Times, who published this article in conjunction with Pro Publica, has actually put the entire report on its website, with keyword searchable functions. It’s a major achievement that will ensure this history will not be buried, as important as the Pentagon Papers in many respects. The stories contained within tell a sad chapter in American history, where people with no interest and in fact total contempt for government were given the task of remaking a country, to predictable results. It’s not just that they didn’t know what they were doing – they didn’t want to know. Domestic politics trumped competence, appearance trumped reality, and ideology trumped knowledge.

Some of this history has been told elsewhere, but this is a coherent, comprehensive narrative that will keep you awake at night. Hilzoy uncovered maybe the most notorious example:

“Ambassador George Ward, head of ORHA’s humanitarian pillar, asked, “How am I going to protect humanitarian convoys, humanitarian staging areas, humanitarian distribution points?” A flag officer who had flown in from CENTCOM said, “Hire war lords.” “Wait a minute,” Ward thought, “folks don’t understand this. There are warlords in Afghanistan, not in Iraq. There were no warlords to rent.” “At that point,” Ward says, “I thought this was going to fail because no one is paying serious attention to civilian security.””

It was more important to put “the adults” in charge, who simply knew that we would be greeted as liberators and that the oil money would pay for the reconstruction and that Sunnis and Shiites have no history of ethnic strife, than to find anyone with the slightest understanding of the country we were blowing to bits. It’s absolutely astounding. And let me take a moment, in the midst of all this cheerleading that we “won the war” in Iraq, to second Matt Yglesias:

The harsh reality is that this was not a noble undertaking done for good reasons. It was a criminal enterprise launched by madmen cheered on by a chorus of fools and cowards. And it’s seen as such by virtually everyone all around the world — including but by no means limited to the Arab world. But it’s impolitic to point this out in the United States, and it’s clear that even a president-elect who had the wisdom not to be suckered in by the War Fever of 2002 has no intention of really acting to marginalize the bad actors. Which, I think, makes sense for his political objectives. But if Americans want to play a constructive role in world affairs, it’s vitally important for us to get in touch with the reality of what the past eight years of US foreign policy have been and how they’re seen and understood by people who aren’t stirred by the shibboleths of American patriotism.

This report might go a long way to such an understanding. But it just makes me sick.

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Benign Weaponry

by digby

Interesting. The French authorities charged a man with to assassinate the president. He was armed with a taser and a knife.

It’s a good thing tasers aren’t dangerous, eh?

h/t to sleon

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Confessions

by digby

In ABC’s exit interview, Dick Cheney makes it pretty clear that he doesn’t think he needs to fear war crimes trials. He proudly admits to them.

The vice president was unapologetic in his defense of the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies, including the use of waterboarding, and said the prison at Guantanamo Bay should remain open as long as there’s a war on terror.

Cheney said waterboarding was an appropriate means of getting information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

He was also asked whether he authorized the tactics used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
“I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn’t do,” Cheney said. “And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it.

“There was a period of time there, three or four years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al Qaeda came from that one source,” he added, referring to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “So, it’s been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves.”

Cheney said the prison at Guantanamo Bay could be responsibly shut down only when the war on terror has ended. Asked when that might be, he added, “Well, nobody knows. Nobody can specify that.”

Cheney warned that prisoners released from Guantanamo could prove dangerous to the United States, adding that the problem of what to do with released prisoners had not yet been solved.

“If you’re going to close Guantanamo, what are you going to do with those prisoners?” he asked. “One suggestion is, well, we bring them to the United States. Well, I don’t know very many congressmen, for example, who are eager to have 200 al Qaeda terrorists deposited in their district.”

Meantime, Cheney said the Guantanamo detainees have been “well treated.”
“I don’t know any other nation in the world that would do what we’ve done in terms of taking care of people who are avowed enemies, and many of whom still swear up and down that their only objective is to kill more Americans,” he said.

You’ve probably also read that he believes we would have invaded Iraq no matter what, ostensibly because Saddam could have decided to build the bomb someday and we just couldn’t take the chance. (Of course, he’s still lying — he didn’t care about Saddam at all.)

And the landmine about al Qaeda terrorists shopping at the neighborhood WalMart is very clever. They obviously hope to tie this mess around Barack Obama’s neck and destroy any hope he has of forging a clean break with Cheney’s psycho foreign policy.

He clearly believes he is in no danger of prosecutions for his crimes here in the US, but I wouldn’t leave the country any time soon if I were him. War criminals find themselves in unusual situations these days when foreign nations decide they have to take justice into their own hands when the home country refuses to do it. And it’s not like the US could exactly complain about it.

Cheney is a sick piece of work. But we knew that.

Update: Vanity Fair is reporting that the analysts who prepared the intel weren’t told that the sources had been tortured:

Two Bush administration intelligence analysts who wrote reports on the C.I.A.’s interrogation of a “high value” al-Qaeda detainee were never told he had been subject to waterboarding and other coercive methods, Vanity Fair contributing editor David Rose reports.

The analysts’ reports on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002, were used to make the case within the administration for invading Iraq, Rose reports, and selectively leaked to journalists.

Yet the reports’ authors had no idea that Abu Zubaydah had been questioned using methods that the International Committee of the Red Cross has categorized as torture.

Jane Mayer’s recent book The Dark Side (Doubleday) cites a Red Cross investigation report as evidence that Abu Zubaydah was locked into a box the size of a “tiny coffin,” beaten, and waterboarded. Because this was torture, the Red Cross said, it exposed those responsible to possible prosecution.

Some of what Abu Zubaydah said after this treatment was leaked to the media by the administration before the Iraq invasion: for example, the claim that Osama bin Laden and his ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were working directly with Saddam Hussein in order to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

There was much more, says the first analyst, who worked at the Pentagon: “There was a lot of stuff about the nuts and bolts of al-Qaeda’s supposed relationship with the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.”

Within the administration, Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation was “an important chapter,” the second analyst says. Neither analyst had any idea that he had been tortured.

The claim that there was an operational relationship between al-Qaeda and Saddam has since been authoritatively dismissed, in reports by bodies including the 9/11 commission and the Senate intelligence committee. Rose quotes the former F.B.I. counterterrorism expert Dan Coleman, who worked on the Abu Zubaydah case, and says that his true position in the terrorist hierarchy means that he would not have known whether such a relationship existed or not. But under torture, Coleman says, “you can lead people down a course and make them say anything.”

“As soon as I learned that the reports had come from torture, once my anger had subsided I understood the damage it had done,” a Pentagon analyst says. “I was so angry, knowing that the higher-ups in the administration knew he was tortured, and that the information he was giving up was tainted by the torture, and that it became one reason to attack Iraq.

“We didn’t know he’d been waterboarded and tortured when we did that analysis, and the reports were marked as credible as they could be.” However, approval for Abu Zubaydah’s treatment had been given at the highest level.

“The White House knew he’d been tortured. I didn’t, though I was supposed to be evaluating that intelligence,” the analyst says. “It seems to me they were using torture to achieve a political objective. I cannot believe that the president and vice president did not know who was being waterboarded and what was being given up.”

Rose’s article includes an interview with Peter Clarke, the head of Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch from the spring of 2002 until May 2008. As the U.K.’s chief counterterrorist official, he succeeded in stopping several jihadist attacks that were far advanced.

Asked to comment on claims made by President Bush in 2006 that waterboarding and other “enhanced” techniques had “thwarted a plot to hijack passenger planes and fly them into Heathrow [airport] or the Canary Wharf in London,” Clarke, who has not discussed this issue in public before, says that if al-Qaeda had really discussed a plot of this kind it was nowhere near fruition. “It wasn’t at an advanced stage in the sense that there were people here in the U.K. doing it. If they had been, I’d have arrested them.”

Rose also interviewed F.B.I. director Robert Mueller. The article states that Rose reminded him of some of the attacks planned against targets on American soil since 9/11 that his agents were said to have disrupted—for example, a plot to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and another to wreak mayhem at army recruiting centers in Torrance, California.

Rose asks Mueller whether, so far as he is aware, any attacks on America have been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques.”

“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate, “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

Battering Rahm

by dday

I’ll believe this when I see it…

In talks with Emanuel and others, sources say, Pelosi has “set parameters” for what she wants from Barack Obama and his White House staff — no surprises, and no backdoor efforts to go around her and other Democratic leaders by cutting deals with moderate New Democrats or conservative Blue Dogs.

Specifically, Pelosi has told Emanuel that she wants to know when representatives of the incoming administration have any contact with her rank-and-file Democrats — and why, sources say […]

Pelosi “is not going to allow Obama to triangulate her,” said a Democratic source close to the leadership. “It’s not going to happen to her.”

Pelosi’s mantra, in a way, is “no surprises.” The speaker wants to be told when Reid is communicating with the Blue Dogs or other factions with her caucus, and she expects the same from Obama when he arrives in the Oval Office, said Democratic sources.

I think the story here is that Pelosi felt the need to tell this to Rahm Emanuel. Because this is what he did throughout his tenure on Pelosi’s leadership team. If you read Down With Tyranny at any point in the last few years you’d already know this. Here’s an example:

Right after Emanuel demanded Democratic congressional candidates “move to the right on immigration,” one of his lackeys, North Carolina freshman Heath Shuler, introduced some Tancredo-esque enforcement-only legislation that has caused a serious split inside the House Democratic caucus. Republicans love it and this morning’s CongressDaily reports they are petitioning to get Shuler’s bill onto the floor for a vote. If enough treacherous Blue Dogs join with the Republicans and their petition tactic works (they need 170 signatures and their presidential candidate’s blessing) “it would set up a platform for political attacks in the November elections, highlighting the GOP view that Congress should get tough on the border before addressing guest-worker visas or illegal immigrants.”

And this has been a consistent pattern, reaching the point that Emanuel probably doesn’t have to talk to anyone in her caucus for them to “go rogue.” The conservative power center has already been propped up.

Pelosi has a fractious caucus that she was able to whip into decent party discipline only through restricting what would come up for vote. She wasn’t able to handle Emanuel’s influence when he was sitting right next to her in the House leadership; I can’t imagine she’ll have much more luck when he’s up the street.

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Inmates Running The Asylum

by digby

Apparently, the Madoff ponzi scheme is making even some Republicans question whether the SEC might not be doing its job:

As the list of victims continues to grow and investigators examine how Bernard Madoff allegedly ran his massive scam, some are questioning how Madoff avoided detection for so long. As a registered investment advisor since 2006, he was subject to scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission, yet he managed to maintain a clean record even after complaints from whistleblowers started nine years ago.

“The Securities and Exchange Commission is letting down the American people,” Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said of the SEC. “They failed. This person was registered as a broker dealer, they should have known what he was doing all the time, and particularly if you have whistleblowers.”

Yes, it’s shocking but it shouldn’t surprising. This is from the February 2005 CPAC convention:

Vice President Dick Cheney, a regular CPAC speaker, gave the keynote address. California Rep. Chris Cox had the honor of introducing him, and he took the opportunity to mock the Democrats whose hatred of America led them to get Iraq so horribly wrong.

“America’s Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd,” he crowed. Then he said, “We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq.”

Again, that was 2005. And President Bush rewarded Chris Cox’s serious, sober professional judgment with the SEC chairmanship a mere six months later.

Why would anyone have ever thought that someone who was that delusional and/or dishonest could possibly run Wall Street’s watchdog agency with any integrity or competence?

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Clemency For The Shoeman

by digby

I was watching Fox News a bit ago and saw Fred Barnes sliming the journalist who threw the shoe at Bush as some kind of quasi terrorist because he’d once worked at a radical Egyptian paper. And now, from Siun at FDL, I see that the fellow is being treated like one: reports are surfacing that he’s being tortured.

I actually thought Bush handled this thing quite well. He was literally quick on his feet and didn’t take it too seriously. (I thought the “I saw into his sole” thing was particularly good.) He could do a great thing right now by making a public appeal to the Iraqis to pardon this man. It would be magnanimous and do his personal reputation a world of good — and it would be good for both countries.

Siun is asking that people call the white house and urge Bush to step in to stop the torture. I would guess that’s not going to sell. But perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to ask Bush to make a Christian gesture of forgiveness at Christmastime and ask them to release this man. Maybe he’ll even do it.

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More Victimized Billionaires

by digby

No, not the poor put-upon Wall Street masters of the universe. This time, it’s the unsung heroes of the conservative movement —- their wealthy benefactors:

Newsmax: Why are progressive givers generally lauded, while conservative philanthropists, according to your book “Funding Fathers,” are either ignored or vilified?

Robinson: The imbalance that the general news media have as they deal with issues shows up to an even greater extent in philanthropy because they can get away with it because. Conservatives in a lot of cases don’t get out the story of our supporters, and the great gifts. A lot of the conservatives are humble and they are not looking to toot their own horn, so they will defend their principals but they won’t necessarily defend publically their philanthropy. And so the imbalance that already exists in the media is exacerbated by those cultural differences between the left and the right.

Newsmax: You write, “The left dominates the universities, the media, and most of the philanthropic organizations but it seldom matches the conservative movement’s effectiveness.” Why do you think that the case?

Robinson: Well it is actually somewhat ironic, because conservative institutions comparatively were starved for funds. They tended to spend the money much more carefully like a family struggling through the Great Depression. I think that they will never spend carelessly and will always be very cautious with their resources. Almost every conservative group only receives support through voluntary efforts. There are very few conservative institutions that take taxpayer funds to any extent.

So I think that they are much more careful about how that money is spent. But I also think that there’s another reason for it, and it goes back almost to the Reagan speech. And it’s the same principal as with Sarah Palin, that when someone does come forward and articulates the conservative ideas as we conservatives ourselves would state those ideas, the general public is very responsive to that, because we represent the majority sentiment in American society. So it is easier once someone steps forward. The great challenge is that what makes a person conservative oftentimes is that they want to raise their own family, they want to run their own business, they are not out to decide everything else for everybody else.

So to get individuals to step forward perhaps is a greater challenge on the conservative side than it is on the socialist side, where people are dying to run other people’s lives.

Right. They only want to run the lives of people who disagree with them.

These poor wingnut welfare moms and dads have been scraping by like it’s the great depression all these years. The fact that they accomplished anything at all is a real up-by-the-bootstraps all American success story.

Unfortunately, it’s about to take a turn for the worse.

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Waiting For Guinevere

by digby

Jane Hamsher has been questioning the potential Caroline Kennedy appointment for a while. I’ve been sort of lukewarm on the issue, thinking that Jane is certainly right that there should be no automatic deference simply because baby boomers have warm memories of her as the adorable daughter of the martyred young president of their youth. Neither does being a Kennedy automatically confer some sort of political magic, as we’ve seen with the younger generation who’ve had a mixed record of success.

I have been going on the idea that New York, like my state, likes its politicians to be stars, and Caroline, with her pedigree and Garboesque mystique could be expected to have great fundraising prowess and enough celebrity status to win the seat in 2010. But Jane points out that with Kennedy’s “signal” today that she is indeed seeking the seat, it really isn’t too much to ask that she at least let the public know what her positions on the issues are. There is no record anywhere of what she thinks about policy and merely relying on the fact that she is a Kennedy and endorsed Obama shouldn’t be enough. After all, some Kennedys marry GOP cyborgs and there are Republicans who endorsed Obama and have very different ideas on some important issues.

Earlier this year Hillary Clinton was excoriated by certain gasbags for allegedly winning the seat because people felt sorry for her, even by some people who now wax sentimental about the prospect of Senator Caroline. Yet, Clinton was a political figure whose positions on national issues, anyway, were quite well known, and who spent months cultivating New Yorkers and learning about their concerns and developing an agenda for addressing them. By the time of the election, the voters knew exactly where she stood and yet eight years later she was still being belittled for being the recipient of dynastic privilege.

I’m not suggesting that Caroline Kennedy would be subject to Clinton rules by the press, they clearly like her. But the right will make a great deal out of it and it’s bound to haunt her. And that changed my hackish calculation. I think Clinton only survived in New York because of the hard political and campaign work she put in and recent hard scrabble political experience in Washington. Kennedy has not given any indication that she’s the type of person who has those skills and that makes her a weak candidate for 2010.

If Patterson names her, I won’t be surprised. But I also won’t expect that New York will necessarily have two Democratic senators after 2010 and that’s a shame. Helping the Republicans rebuild their party in the northeast shouldn’t be one of the first acts of the new Democratic era.

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Questions And More Questions

by digby

MSNBC anchor sez:

“Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times has written about how this scandal is an early test for the Obama tream. Jeff, good to see you. Uhm, many people wonder why it would take the president elect these many days to come up with an answer directly, who had contact, if any with Blagojevich. Have they failed this first test?”

Well, of course they have. But then, there was never any way to not fail it. The rules are rigged to keep the story alive. Zeleny, of course, said they hadn’t failed it yet. But nobody wants to say that they passed the test because that would be the end of that.

There’s been a bit of navel gazing among some in the press and I’m glad to see that some are reporting flat out that the Republicans are crudely exploiting this. But there is still something very important missing in all the coverage.

For instance, John Heilman, who is a somewhat eccentric reporter by village standards wrote an odd piece today in which he says that the press failed to adequately investigate Obama’s political history in Chicago (something the right has been hammering the past few days) and that we can expect them to delve into it now. I assumed that the national press had relied on the reporting of the two big Chicago papers to have unearthed any skeletons in his closet, which seems like a pretty reasonable thing to me. But apparently, we are going to be treated to a spate of “investigations” which I’m sure will rely heavily on political enemies and spurned former supporters as sources for ill-informed out of towners. That’s usually how it goes.

But as odd as his comments about Obama’s “problems” are, Heileman also makes the observation that Obama is a lot like Clinton in the fact that he comes out of a somewhat compromised political environment, having been neither a member of the corrupt insiders nor a flamboyant crusader against it. I’ve seen those parallels as well, even though it’s not obvious at first. And I would add that part of what makes these stories so enticing is the exotic nature of the political culture. In Clinton’s case it was southern gothic and in Obama’s it’s sort of gangster kitch, but both are filled with dramatic characters and Shakespearean level intrigue, which are easily exploited by the right and eaten with a spoon by the media.

Heileman breaks the established rules, however, by suggesting that the Clinton scandals were trumped up partisan nonsense that ended up being very costly to the country.

Aside from the wack-job caucus, few regarded Clinton’s lengthy tenure in the Arkansas statehouse as egregiously corrupt. But neither would any history of great reformist governors feature him prominently, if at all. Some of his close friends from Little Rock would wind up in prison: Susan McDougal, Webb Hubbell. And Clinton’s various entanglements in the Razorback State’s quasi-feudal political and business cultures came back to haunt him during his time in office, most glaringly in the case of Whitewater.

That Whitewater was a trumped-up tin-pot scandal in which WJC was never proved to have done anything illegal is beside the point—or, more accurately, is precisely the point. The investigations Whitewater spawned were more intrusive than a thousand colonoscopies. They consumed countless news cycles, drained away political capital, inflicted horrendous legal bills on dozens of innocent bystanders, and energized the Republicans and their allies on the fringes of society and in the mainstream media. And for what? For nada.

The reason that breaks the rules is because he doesn’t do the required journalistic ass covering and claim that Clinton deserved everything he got because he refused to “answer questions.” That was the standard excuse for pursuing these bogus stories at the time — the old “it doesn’t pass the smell test.” And we’re seeing those moldy old tests pulled off the shelf again in this one.

On the other hand, Heileman makes one glaring omission in that otherwise correct recitation of events by failing to properly state the role of the press in that mess. Let’s just say it couldn’t have happened without them.

He goes on to discuss the potential for a similar ongoing witch hunt jumping off of the Blogjevich scandal and fervently hopes it doesn’t happen. But again, that’s an innocent bystander cop-out. The press is already slavering over this scandal like starving hyenas with a dead gazelle. They are following the standard village playbook. No matter how much they know, no matter how many questions are answered, there’s just something “wrong” with the response that requires them ask even more.

Here’s the latest read on this from MSNBC:

Norah O’Donnell: President elect Obama had pledged they would get this information out within a few days, now we hear they’re going to put it out three days before Christmas, but they say there was no inappropriate contact. Will that be enough

Mark Whittaker: Well, you have to wonder, if they have it ready now, why they are waiting so long. I would say that there is such high interest in this story and so much pressure to hear everything they know, that it would really surprise me if it hold all the way until three days before Christmas.

But look, here’s the issue. I met with an adviser to Obama just after the election and I asked them “what position is the president elect going to take on the senate seat in Illinois/” And basically, this adviser said three things. One is “he'[s not going to talk directly to the Governor. Two, we think the governor is going to do what is in his own political interest. I don’t think they had any idea that he was actually going to try to sell the seat. but they also said, this adviser made it clear, that their main interest was that somebody be chosen who could hold the seat, who could win reelection. Uhm so, I think that what we are likely to see is that Rahm Emmanuel and others had some kind of contact with the Governors office about candidates who they thought could win reelection if they were appointed.

O’Donnell: My understanding was that Rahm Emmanuel, the incoming chief of staff provided a list of names that would be acceptable to Barack Obama but that but they are saying that in no way means there was any inappropriate contact or suggesting there was any pay to play . But I would imagine he’ll get some additional quesitons today because, hey, they have promised transparency.

Whittaker: They have promised transparency and look, until we know exactly who talked to whom about when, about what, this story is not going to go away.

Update: Steve Benen reports on a Rasmussen Poll which asks a loaded question “How likely is it that President-elect Obama or one of his top campaign aides was involved in the Blagojevich scandal?” and 45% of the public say it’s likely, 23% very likely.

Benen and Yglesias speculate that this is because of the press coverage relentless speculating all of the television for the past few days, which I’m sure has contributed. But it is also likely to be mostly Republicans who answer that way — they have been pounded with propaganda through their noise machine that Obama is a muslim, terrorist, socialist, “Chicago school” politician. Many of them go in with the assumption that he’s the devil. The rest may just be cynics who think that all politicians are dirty. There are plenty of them out there.

These numbers are meaningless in terms of how the scandal plays out, anyway. Recall that Clinton’s numbers went up the day he was impeached. The press doesn’t care what the public thinks about this, they operate on their own logic and they will not be moved one way or the other by public opinion. If anything, if the public disagrees with their behavior, they blame the public for being insufficiently “outraged” and redouble their efforts to trap the president.

The problem for Obama in this is the distraction, of course, and a gradual erosion of respect and the presumption of good faith among the American people, even if they approve of the job he’s doing. Even if they see through all the media braying, people eventually get tired of this stuff and the psychological response among a good many of them, in my observation, is to begin to blame the victim. Over time, it weakens the president and makes even his supporters tire of having to defend him. And in the long term, many people subconsciously internalize the derisive criticism and without even realizing it become reflexively hostile. It can ruin a presidency without the president’s approval numbers ever going much below 50%. I’ve seen it happen before my very eyes.

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