Month: September 2009

“Young Guys, Fresh From The Military”

by digby

As Limbaugh famously said, these guys probably just need a release:

Private security guards at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul were pressured to participate in naked pool parties and perform sex acts to gain promotions or assignment to preferable shifts, according to one of 12 guards who have gone public with their complaints. Click here to see the slideshow. In an interview with ABC News for broadcast tonight on the “World News with Charles Gibson,” the guard, a U.S. military veteran, said top supervisors of the ArmorGroup were not only aware of the “deviant sexual acts” but helped to organize them. “It was mostly the young guys fresh from the military who were told they had to participate,” said the guard, who talked on a phone hook-up arranged by the Project on Government Oversight, which first revealed photographs of the parties. “They were not gay but they knew what it took to get promoted,” said the guard, spoke on condition that ABC News not publish his name. The State Department said it was investigating the allegations and the circumstances surrounding the photographs which show naked and barely clothed men fondling one another. The guard who spoke with ABC News said the drunken parties had been held regularly for at least a year and a half.

What’s with all the homoerotic hazing rituals?

If this is the way men bond in these all male environments, I guess I understand why so many of them are against lifting Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in the military. Once you remove the taboo a whole lot of them will have to deal with their own urges without the cover of coercion and humiliation. I can see why they’d be afraid, but really, these men should just admit that they like this sort of thing and leave those who don’t alone. They’d feel a lot better and so would the men who are forced to participate in order to be accepted into the pack.

Once again we see projection at work. Many of these men obviously have gay feelings and act upon them in this predatory, coercive manner. So they assume that out gay men are doing the same thing. Of course they’re not because they can be with people who consent and wouldn’t need or want to force anyone, as do most sexually healthy people.

I’d feel sorry for these guys if they weren’t such creeps.

Gary Farber has much, much more on our reliance on these wonderful guys in Afghanistan:

Worried about the war in Afghanistan being a quagmire, with more troops being asked for, for a decade-plus committment, to support a corrupt, incompletent, government that few in Afghanistan see as legitimate?

Don’t worry, be happy! The Pentagon has got more private “contractors” there than troops!

read on …

.

Batten Down The Hatches

by digby

…prepare for possible category five Hissy Fit:

ABC’s Teddy Davis reports: An already ugly health-care debate got even uglier on Wednesday evening when a 65-year old opponent of Democratic reform proposals had his finger bitten off at a vigil organized by MoveOn.org in Thousand Oaks, Calif. “My understanding is that it was a supporter of health care reform who got into a confrontation with a non-supporter and the non-supporter got his finger bit off,” Capt. Bruce Norris of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department told ABC News. “My understanding is that the event was organized by MoveOn.org.”

They way they keep referring to Move-On, you’d think they were the Klan. Of course, nobody actually knows who the perpetrator was or what actually happened, but one can be forgiven for assuming based upon the reporting and that police officer that any affiliation with Move-On is considered very, very significant.

Look for Move-On to shortly be characterized as a domestic terrorist group.

Update: Mark Steyn, filling in for Limbaugh says it’s the work of Nazis, which I guess is so much more 2009.

.

If Accountability Is The Standard

by dday

The Dean rides to the rescue of that poor Mr. Cheney in the most predictable way possible. He’s been at this forever. I’m surprised he wasn’t a John Edwards fan, since he clearly believes in Two Americas, one for the Village and one for everyone else. In 1974, Broderella wrote enthusiastically about the prospect of Nixon beating the impeachment rap and Republicans surging in the midterms. While he lies about that in today’s piece, he does admit that he supported Nixon’s pardon. He’s been covering for Republicans for so long he must feel like an umbrella.

But there’s something very interesting, if unintentionally so, in what he says today:

Looming beyond the publicized cases of these relatively low-level operatives is the fundamental accountability question: What about those who approved of their actions? If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?

“If accountability is the standard.” Nice.

Broder, of course, takes the wrong lesson from this, arguing that the country couldn’t take such an assault on cherished criminals like Dick Cheney, and as long as everybody promises to never, ever do it again, we need to bind up our wounds and move forward. But he’s giving voice to what many of us have been saying – that low-level interrogators are not ultimately responsible for an illegal policy, and that criminal culpability demands a response from the justice system. That Attorney General Holder has indemnified anyone who got a legal scribbling authorizing torture, in effect privileging the legal memos as legal regardless of what they say, is completely outrageous. Accountability should indeed apply to the policymakers. Hey, Dean Broder, don’t bogart our argument!

That isn’t just wrong, it’s outrageous. It ratifies the most toxic aspect of the whole legal war on terror: that anything becomes permissible if it’s served up with a side of memo. Paper your misconduct with footnotes and justifications—even after the fact—and you can do as you please. Prosecution of those who strayed beyond the new rules, without considering the culpability of those who strayed in creating the new rules, would mean that in America, a law degree amounts to a defense. Rep Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., put it this way earlier this month when he warned that it makes no sense to prosecute the guy who used 8 ounces of water to water-board but not the lawyer who said it was OK to water-board someone with 3 ounces of water. We must either look into both sides of the post-9/11 legal breakdown or neither. The alternative is the same kind of scapegoating that occurred after Abu Ghraib […]

The American legal system isn’t just about crime and punishment. It’s a set of guideposts to direct us in the future and to send a message about our values to the rest of the world. This proposed Holder-Durham regime of semi-accountability—we’re sorry for that whole torture thing but not sorry enough to investigate seriously how it happened in the first place—serves the dangerous dual purpose of allowing us to reinstate the Bush-era torture rationales, should they be necessary again in the future, and advising our allies and enemies that under desperate circumstances, they can plausibly do the same. Opting to be only halfway responsible means that torture is, going forward, only halfway reprehensible. Ta-Nehisi Coates says, “I really have no doubt that we could—indeed would—start torturing again, in the event of another terrorist attack.” If we don’t dismantle the foundations of the torture regime, he’ll be right.

It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that, if Alberto Gonzales supports your torture investigation, it’s not a very good torture investigation.

This would be the reason that the prescription should not be just to “fix” everything and move forward, without providing accountability – full accountability – for those who thought they could get a permission slip to violate federal and international law and get useful idiots like David Broder to hold them harmless. The very real threat to the country lies in the breakdown of the rule of law, not the restoration of it. And it might make the authorizers and the CIA sad and gloomy, and lower their morale, but that’s precisely the point. In general people ought to be deterred from breaking the law; that’s what makes them think twice about doing it. If investigating and prosecuting torture has a chilling effect, that’s probably because it’s supposed to. Kind of the basis of the entire criminal justice system, but if you want to dismantle that for everybody, at least shoplifters and petty thieves would be on a level playing field with those who murdered prisoners in custody.

At least Broder isn’t quite the monster of his “liberal” colleague Richard Cohen, who follows up his “only a fool, or a Frenchman” classic with a robust defense of torture, including a note of how Judith Miller’s imprisonment was “a wee bit of torture” and closing with the image of the smoldering World Trade Center. Pitted against that shamefulness, Dean Broder’s practically a civil liberties absolutist.

…my 1,000-odd words, Tom Tomorrow’s six panels. He wins.

.

If It Screams, It Leads

by dday

I’ve attended a couple town halls out here in Southern California, and I found them all to be teabag-free. They were also invisible in the national debate. I wondered about, in those higher-profile cases of teabaggery, the utility of a random sample of screamers showing up at a meeting on a weeknight in terms of public opinion at large. Now, E.J. Dionne tells us that it was a sample within a sample – that the cable nets were looking for some action, and we all went right along with them.

Health-care reform is said to be in trouble partly because of those raucous August town-hall meetings in which Democratic members of Congress were besieged by shouters opposed to change.

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?

There is an overwhelming case that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television’s point of view “boring”) encounters between elected representatives and their constituents.

I figured this to be the case, but confess to not being vocal enough about it. Dionne actually finds the smoking gun here:

Over the past week, I’ve spoken with Democratic House members, most from highly contested districts, about what happened in their town halls. None would deny polls showing that the health-reform cause lost ground last month, but little of the probing civility that characterized so many of their forums was ever seen on television […]

Rep. Frank Kratovil hails from a very conservative district that includes Maryland’s Eastern Shore and says it didn’t bother him that he was hung in effigy in July by a right-wing group. “As a former prosecutor, I consider that to be mild,” he said with a chuckle. The episode, he added, was not at all typical of his town-hall meetings, where “most of the people were there to express legitimate concerns about the bill, wondering about how it was going to impact them” and wanting “to know the truth about some of the things that were being said about the bill.”

The most disturbing account came from Rep. David Price of North Carolina, who spoke with a stringer for one of the television networks at a large town-hall meeting he held in Durham.

The stringer said he was one of 10 people around the country assigned to watch such encounters. Price said he was told flatly: “Your meeting doesn’t get covered unless it blows up.” As it happens, the Durham audience was broadly sympathetic to reform efforts. No “news” there. (emphasis mine)

Dammit, dammit, dammit. And too much of the blogosphere fell for this, by the way.

Covering conflict is basically what cable news does, whether it’s two talking heads in the studio or footage of a car chase. Their job is to sensationalize and titillate and draw eyeballs. In this case, they told a false narrative about a nation rising up against health care, and it led to a general impression that health care reform was becoming unpopular, which led to… polls showing reform becoming less popular. Keep this in mind when you hear the story about the bitten finger today on an endless loop.

The media will of course tell you they’re bystanders, documenters, observers. Dionne’s column puts the lie to that. They wrote a story for the month of August and then found the footage to justify it. And then people not engaged with the process watch a few selected soundbites from town hall meetings and figure something must be wrong with the policy if it inspires so much hatred.

Your liberal media. Watch the health industry ads skyrocket as a token of thanks for their attempt to kill health care reform.

.

The Bush Personality Cult

by tristero

Glenn Greenwald writes that the rightwing is trying to disappear the Bush personailty cult. He gives lots of examples. One more, from Clear Channel, after the 2004 election:

Four Years Ago Today

by digby

Compassionate Conservatives

“It seems to me that the poor should have had the EASIEST time leaving. They don’t need to pay for an extended leave from their home, they could have just packed a few belongings and walked away to start over somewhere else. What did they have to lose?

When the wealthy evacuate, they leave behind nice houses, expensive cars, possibly pets that they treat as members of the family, valuable jewelry, family heirlooms, etc. This makes it emotionally difficult for wealthy people to leave. But by definition, the poor do not have this burden: they either rent their homes, or they are in public housing; their cars are practically junk anyway; and they don’t have any valuable possessions. This is what it means to be poor. These people could just pick up their few belongings, buy a one-way bus ticket to any city and be poor there. Supposing they even had jobs in NO, it’s not like minimum wage jobs are hard to come by.”

More at the link if you can stand it.

I’m going to have one stiff drink. And then another. I don’t recognize that as a fellow human much less a fellow American.

Not A National Disaster

Bill O’Reilly is trying with all his might to make this story about “thugs” and bad Democrats but both Fox news reporters on the ground are having none of it. Shepard Smith and Steve Harrigan are both insisting that the story is about people dying and starving on the streets of New Orleans. Smith is particularly upset that the mayor sent buses to the Hyatt today and took tourists over to the Superdome and let them off at the front of the line.

O’Reilly says “you sound so bitter” and said they need a strong leader like Rudy Giuliani. Smith replies that what they needed “on the first day was food and water and what they needed on the second day was food and water and what they needed on the third day was food and water.”

O’Reilly is practically rolling his eyes with impatience at Smith’s outrage about the plight of a bunch of losers who were asking for it. He really, really wants to talk about scary black boogeymen and steppin-fetchit politicans. It doesn’t work out. He looks relieved to move over to the Natalee Holloway story.

Luckily, they’ve got it straight over on The Corner:

NOT A NATIONAL DISGRACE [Rich Lowry]
A dissent from this column I wrote yesterday:

It is not. It is – or ought to be – a disgrace and an embarrassment to Louisiana and New Orleans. I see the way Florida prepares for and responds to hurricanes; I see the way Mississippi and Alabama are dealing with this one; I’ve seen the Carolinas and Virginia deal with hurricanes, too. I’ve been in Miami and Norfolk when hurricanes hit, though not as severe as this one, and seen folks come together to support each other in the crisis. I see the outpouring of support from surrounding states and from the federal government heading to Louisiana as fast as it can.

And then I see citizens of New Orleans shooting, raping, burning, and plundering while their government officials stand by helplessly…

Fox News reporters have played this story pretty straight (for them) and it’s making the stars extremely uncomfortable. Somebody’s going to have to have a talk with the supporting cast. They are going off script.

Update: Sean’s up now and he’s equally uncomfortable with Shep’s story about the thousands still stuck on freeways and bridges with no food and water — who have been ignored for days now. He’s been covering one single bridge for days and nobody knows why they haven’t been helped yet. He’s almost shrill.

Now Geraldo comes on and he freaks out, begging the authorities to let people still stuck at the convention center walk out of town. Shep comes back and he says they have checkpoints set up turning people back to the city if they try. (wtf?) They are both on the verge of tears.

Sean says they need to get some perspective and Shep screams at him “this is the perspective!”

This was some amazing TV. Kudos to Shep Smith and Geraldo for not letting O’Reilly and Hannity spin their GOP “resolve” apologia bullshit. I’m fairly shocked.

.

Blitzkrieg

by tristero

Now we know the rightwing’s fall strategy. If Obama so much as breathes, Republicans plan on screaming bloody murder. Think I’m kidding?

Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer today released the following statement condemning President Obama’s use of taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s children to his socialist agenda.

“As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology. The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power.

Ever since 9/11, I have been saying that if Gore had been president and the US was attacked like that, Republicans would be demanding his immediate resignation for failing to protect the country. “Ridiculous!” my friends exclaimed. “In a moment of crisis like 9/11, Republicans would certainly have supported anyone who was president.”

I thought my friends were hopelessly naive (the few times I’ve mentioned my theory in blogposts, I’ve received similar reactions). But not even I ever imagined that a major political party would object to an address to schoolchildren from the president of the United States.

These people are seriously crazy. And seriously dangerous.

A Little Slice Of Turkey

by dday

I don’t want war! All I want is peace…peace…peace…!
A little piece of Poland,
A little piece of France,
A little piece of Austria
And Hungary, perchance!
A little slice of Turkey
And all that that entails,
And then a bit of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales!”

-Mel Brooks, To Be Or Not To Be

I guess the news peg for this is the anniversary of the start of WWII in September 1939, but Pat Buchanan has gone ahead and apologized for Hitler, claiming he sought no empire or wider war with Europe, and had merely benign interests of German unification at heart:

Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.

As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?

Matt Yglesias does quick work of the historical inaccuracies – Hitler invaded Russia as soon as he achieved a border with them by conquering Poland. And this is a decent riposte as well – Buchanan seems to expect a crazy person to also be a rational military strategist, and when he’s not, searches for alternative explanation (“Hitler couldn’t have wanted war because he didn’t have enough planes! So it’s Britain’s fault!”).

But I’ll take the less dainty approach. In 1939, in a small town named Averduct on the German-Polish border, practically every member of my family was rounded up by Nazi authorities, herded into a local synagogue, and burned alive inside. This would fall in Buchanan’s revisionism as part of the supposedly honest and forthright effort by Hitler to annex Danzig and restore the German homeland (hey, Hitler just wanted some Lebensraum – why not let him annex whatever he decided was part of Germany, right? Don’t you want to save lives?). But my dead ancestors didn’t live in Danzig (now Gdansk). They had nothing to do with such a conflict. Maybe that was the work of a few bad apple Nazis acting alone. That and the other 6 million incidents.

But the bigger point here to be made is that Pat Buchanan is paid by the allegedly liberal cable news network MSNBC, he has been on it for years, if you add up all his appearances throughout the day he probably spends as much time on the air as anyone outside of the Morning Joe crowd, and that’s… OK. Calling Hitler misunderstood is not a firing offense at the liberal cable news network MSNBC.

Good to know.

My favorite comment in the Buchanan thread, by the way:

summarex
Great Article Pat.
But what’s your beef with general Pinochet?

Must be a follower of Milton Friedman.

.

Government Stinks vs. “I Agree Government Stinks But We Can Do Better”

by dday

Conservatives very smartly conflated the bailout and the stimulus in people’s minds, and traded off public anger with one to demonize the other. They’re still doing it, too, with Eric Cantor today suggesting to cancel the rest of the stimulus and “pay off the debt.” Most of the continuing debt comes from Bush-era policies, so this is nonsense. It’s also wrong to state that the stimulus should be cancelled because it’s not working. In fact, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal tells us the opposite today:

The U.S. economy is beginning to show signs of improvement, with many economists asserting the worst is past and data pointing to stronger-than-expected growth. On Tuesday, data showed manufacturing grew in August for the first time in more than a year. “There’s a method to the madness. We’re getting out of this,” said Brian Bethune, chief U.S. financial economist at IHS Global Insight.

Much of the stimulus spending is just beginning to trickle through the economy, with spending expected to peak sometime later this year or in early 2010. The government has funneled about $60 billion of the $288 billion in promised tax cuts to U.S. households, while about $84 billion of the $499 billion in spending has been paid. About $200 billion has been promised to certain projects, such as infrastructure and energy projects.

Economists say the money out the door — combined with the expectation of additional funds flowing soon — is fueling growth above where it would have been without any government action.

Many forecasters say stimulus spending is adding two to three percentage points to economic growth in the second and third quarters, when measured at an annual rate. The impact in the second quarter, calculated by analyzing how the extra funds flowing into the economy boost consumption, investment and spending, helped slow the rate of decline and will lay the groundwork for positive growth in the third quarter — something that seemed almost implausible just a few months ago. Some economists say the 1% contraction in the second quarter would have been far worse, possibly as much as 3.2%, if not for the stimulus.

The recovery is still jobless thus far, which means it’s not a real recovery yet. And the White House made two mistakes – one, they soft-pedaled the recession, claiming that unemployment would not go above 9% or so, leaving them susceptible to the charge that the stimulus isn’t working; and two, they put far too much of the stimulus into tax cuts instead of the public investment that would have made it even more successful, particularly on the jobs front.

But without the public investment the stimulus has thus far provided and will continue to provide, we’d be mired in more negative growth and a near-depression.

The President has actually tried to talk up the benefits of the stimulus, but not in a forceful way. As a result, the conservative conflation has led to a souring on government, directly attributable to a lack of leadership and messaging.

Paul Krugman argued recently that Obama hadn’t effectively used the bully pulpit to slay “government-is-bad fundamentalism.” This is only one poll, but it’s fair to ask whether these numbers bear that out.

Obama’s poll slide has prompted some to ask whether his presidency might fall short of the transformative moment many expected. I think it’s too early to reach a conclusion on this. If Obama pulls out a health care victory, everything will shift again.

But for a time it seemed like shattering the government-is-bad paradigm was distinctly within Obama’s reach. General confidence in the government’s ability to secure the public’s well being seems like pretty good number to keep an eye on when gaming out the potential for transformation of this moment, and of this presidency.

This has mostly resonated in the health care debate, with insurance companies inexplicably getting somewhat higher marks now than government as a health care provider, despite the fact that the groups with the highest satisfaction with their health care are seniors (government-provided single-payer system), and veterans (government-run NHS-style system).

Politics is about storytelling. Obama during his campaign actually started to tell a pretty decent story about government as a guarantor of basic rights, which can equalize opportunity and give everyone a shot. He told a story of community, where we take care of each other and use government as a means to do so. Then he stopped. He thought it was much better to tell everyone that “95% of you will see a tax cut”.

And as a result, the public investment program that averted a depression is considered a failure.

Very dangerous.

.