Author: digby

Tory Unrest

If the Tories are starting to falter then there is a faint (very faint) possibility that the Brits will drop out. If that happens, then all bets are off.

Conservative whip John Randall has quit his post because of his concerns over a possible Iraq war.

With the Tory leadership backing Tony Blair’s stance on the Iraq crisis, Mr Randall’s resignation shows divisions are not exclusively confined to the Labour benches.

His move comes after International Development Secretary Clare Short launched a searing attack on Mr Blair’s “reckless” Iraq policy.

One Labour ministerial aide, Andy Reed, has already resigned over his concerns and others have signalled they will follow if war begins without new United Nations backing.

[…]

They’re coming at Bush’s Freedom Poodle now from the right as well as the left. It’s probably just a “Ron Paul” moment, but you never know.

A Good Dad

TBOGG proves that it’s the smart, sensitive people who are the most devastatingly funny.

Here’s my pick for “oh my Gawd, my life just changed” reading:

When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he’s insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it. Otherwise your own opinions block the way… The ghost [Phaedrus] pursued was the ghost that underlies all of technology, all of modern science, all of Western thought. It was the ghost of rationality itself.”

Oooh baby.

I was 17 years old and the world tipped off its axis and sent me flying in a brand new direction.

Orcinus

If those of us on the left read nothing else, we need to read this series from David Neiwert, called Rush, Newspeak and Fascism.

He is writing about something that we really don’t want to hear about. Marshalled with data and first hand experience in the field, he is laying out the scenario — step by step — for how the United States of America can slowly but inexorably move into fascism.

This is not hysterical nonsense nor is it tin-foil hat conspiracy mongering. Those of us who like to think of ourselves as fairly earthbound (polemic blogging notwithstanding) and who have grown up in a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity where nothing really politically catastrophic has happened to us, are hard pressed to believe that something truly bad can happen here.

I have friends who have maintained until just recently that we would not go to war because well.. it didn’t make sense and the wise men who “really run things” wouldn’t let it happen. I know other who have faith that our electoral system could never be compromised in any serious way because well…it’s America. We don’t do that.

And, indeed, we have had an incredible run. We always existed within the context of the time, and as such we perpetrated genocide, institutionalized slavery, pandered to every bigoted and racist proclivity known to man. As a culture we have been no better (and probably no worse) than any other collection of flawed human beings. Rather, it has been the government, while certainly corrupt at times and thoroughly tainted by the necessity for the human species to run it, that has been the fundamental basis of the bold American experiment. A certain committment to that ideal has formed the core of what it means to be an American.

But, there is no guarantee that it remain so. Under stress, whether real or manufactured, the institutions we take for granted are subject to change. We are not immune from the dark side of human ambition or the folly of small men with grand ideas and little know how. It’s impossible to know if we are marching toward fascism but there is no law of nature that says it is impossible.

How Inappropriate

Bob Novak (singing along with the Mighty Wurlitzer) is upset that Jimmy Carter is speaking out of turn and criticizing President Legacy:

NOVAK: There was a time when ex presidents acted like elder statesmen, rarely seen, almost never heard. But on “60 Minutes” this past weekend, there was Bill Clinton, basking in the spotlight of big money and criticizing President Bush’s proposed tax cut. Even that wasn’t as grading (sic) as yesterday’s sanctimonious op-ed column in “The New York Times” by Sunday school teacher and ex-President Jimmy Carter. “As a Christian and as a president who was severely provoked by international crises, I became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war, and it is clear that a substantial unilateral attack on Iraq does not meet these standards.”

He’s right, as always. But, I really think he needs to have a talk with this guy too:

”We need to make clear the new world order is not some code for American imperialism, but making freedom and self-determination widely accepted norms”

It’s highly inappropriate for former presidents to speak out of turn this way.

Ari and Karl Do The Tango

The new NY Times Poll has a roaring headline saying:

Growing Number in U.S. Back War, Survey Finds

Americans are growing impatient with the United Nations and say they would support military action against Iraq even if the Security Council refuses to support an invasion, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

The poll found that 58 percent of Americans said the United Nations was doing a poor job in managing the Iraqi crisis, a jump of 10 points from a month ago. And 55 percent of respondents in the latest poll would support an American invasion of Iraq, even if it was in defiance of a vote of the Security Council.

The problem with this headline is that they didn’t mention that while the public feels the United Nations isn’t “managing” the crisis well, the Bush administration has a bare 51% of Americans who think that he is. And that number hasn’t budged. The same number feel he is doing a good job on foreign policy in general, 51%.

The second question concerning defiance of a Security Council vote has never been asked before, so saying that such sentiment is growing is based upon total conjecture.

On the other hand the answers to many of the questions are so contradictory and incoherent that you really have to wonder what the hell people are thinking.

My personal favorite is:

From what you have seen or heard so far, how much progress have the U.N. weapons inspectors made in finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — a lot, some, not much, or none at all?

9% say “a lot”, 47% say “some”, 33% say “not much”, 8% say “none at all”, and 3% say “don’t know.”

56% of the public believe that the inspectors have made some or a lot of progress finding weapons of mass destruction. I suppose they could mean since 1991, but surely a fair number think that Blix and his boys have found them in this last round.

oh…

Are We Better Off Now Than We Were Six Months Ago?

Vote Quimby points out that the very hegemony and military dominance so prized by the neoconservative warmongers, and on which they base their starry-eyed plans for a Pax Americana, is being seriously diminished by the incompetence of this administration.

Let’s just look at this last few months and ask this simple question: Is America more powerful than it was last summer, or less?

I thought that perhaps the answer was ‘more’ after seeing the 15-0 Security Council vote that got inspectors back on the ground. Achieving unanimity on a security council that included Syria was no mean feat.

But since then, America’s ability to influence events has receded dramatically. We’ve seen a coalition of the unwilling form between France, Germany, Russia and China; and we’ve been blown off by Turkey(!). It’s unclear how many of these diplomatic failures were caused by massive disagreement over matters of substance vs. team G-Dub’s ultra-manly approach to getting what it wants. But it seems pretty clear to me that the most powerful nation in the world gets less powerful every time another country publicly refuses to go along with its positions.

Be careful what you wish for, boys…

Judy Garland Bush

Uppers and Downers:

One of the leaders described Bush as “cocky and relaxed” and said he conveyed the clear impression that he had concluded that attacking Iraq was inevitable. Another lawmaker described Bush as being “in high spirits.” This leader said that at the congressional breakfast a month earlier, Bush had “seemed to have the weight of the world on his shoulders.”

The lawmakers’ accounts were echoed by Bush’s aides, who said he is still an optimist in settings unrelated to the war. People close to Bush said he has kept to his usual schedule of sleeping from roughly 10 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. And they said he continues to work out for at least half an hour, at least five or six days a week, alternating between weight-lifting and running — sometimes on a treadmill and sometimes on an outdoor track.

“I do work out daily. And I’m sleeping well at night,” Bush told a roundtable for regional newspaper reporters Monday.

How Low Can We Go?

This is just wonderful, just peachy. It makes me proud to be an American.

Now, let’s suppose the (suspected) terrorist (supposedly) knows that there is going to be a terrorist attack somewhere at sometime in the future. In order to protect the innocent people who might be harmed, isn’t it incumbent upon us to torture his children to find out that information?

Because, if torture is called for because of the number of innocent lives that could possibly be saved, then there really is no limit on who is eligible for the torture, is there? Since the moral argument rests on “we have to do it to save lives” then the calculus is pretty straightforward.

Boys “Quizzed” About Their Terrorist Boss Father

Yousef al-Khalid, nine, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, seven, were taken into custody in Pakistan in September when intelligence officers raided a flat in Karachi which their father had fled hours earlier. They were found cowering behind a wardrobe with a senior al-Qaeda member.

The boys have been held in Pakistan, but this weekend they were flown to America to be questioned about their father.

CIA interrogators confirmed on Saturday that the boys were staying at a secret address.

“We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children,” said an official. “But we need to know as much about their father’s recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care.”

Yeah, I’m sure that these kids have a lot of important information to impart.

(Hey, aren’t 7 year old’s eligible for the death penalty in Virginia? If they aren’t, they should be, little terrorist bastards…)

Of course there is that pesky little problem of whether torture actually works.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden posts a spot-on comment from one of his readers, James D. Macdonald, that really should give pause to even the most bloodthirsty proponents of the “torture for the sake of the greater good” school of cruelty:

Oliver, lad, let me explain something to you.

Give me a pair of pliers, a soldering iron, and two hours alone with you, and you will confess to being a member of Al Qaeda. Another half hour or so, and I’ll have a list of all the terrible things you did, and most of the details of the things you plan to do. Then I’ll get a list of the other secret members of Al Qaeda you know. Give me a little time with them, and they’ll confess too, confirming that you’re a terrorist.

Are we so fucking deluded that this is not completely and totally obvious?

I give up.

General Dynamic

I hope that the Democrats face up to the reality that national security is going to be the foremost issue in the coming Presidential campaign and find a way to deal with the fact that we are considered to be complete losers on the issue. This is a HUGE problem and it’s not going to magically disappear no matter how badly they manage to fuck up the economy. They are going to keep asserting that the economy is in the ditch because of the “war” on evil and there is nothing to be done but to keep cutting taxes and invading countries that might threaten us someday. They are committed to this and they aren’t going to budge.

And we are going to lose if we don’t find a way to answer the charge that Democrats are pussies.

I like Dean’s feisty iconoclasm and I’ve always thought that Kerry is a good man. Hart is one of the smartest politicians, ever. But, all of these guys are going to be going up against a guy whose hagiography has turned him into a cross between Winston Churchill and Stonewall Jackson. It’s bullshit, but you have to picture the flagwaving, near hysterical cheering crowds that will be seen every single day on the whore media for the next two years as President AWOL begins his re-election campign in earnest. And they will consistently portray him as resolute, strong, manly, etc., etc., etc., while Kerry will be seen as a creature of the Senate debating society and Dean as an obscure northern Governor with no foreign policy experience. Hart = Monkey Business.

And, to ignore the importance of the southern constituency at a time when the public is very evenly divided is folly. As Michael Lind pointed out in his fascinating article called “America’s Tribes”, the martial tradition in the south is a fundamental, defining issue in american politics and we Democrats ignore it at our peril.

I have held off really looking closely at this guy until now because I had no idea of his domestic positions and I wasn’t sure if he was going to be a reliable Democrat. This article , called “Mr Credibility” by Michael Tomasky went a long way toward allaying those concerns, at least in the short term. (I also noticed that he has quite a bit of education and some political experience (’75-’76 White House Fellow OMB) in economics.)

Think Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) looks good because he fought in a war? Well, check Clark out. Clark, now 58, fought in Vietnam, too, of course, but that was just his stretching routine. He won a war. He was NATO commander during the Kosovo operation. Granted, this may not be the military equivalent of beating back Adolf Hitler. But it arguably is something of a moral equivalent in that it led to the downfall of a Hitler manqué in the person of Slobodan Milosevic. It was, however sliced, a successful, multilateral mission that largely achieved its objectives, both military and political. And the Kosovo campaign was merely the most recent in a long line of Clark’s feats. After graduating from high school in Little Rock, Ark., in 1962, he went to West Point, where he finished first in his class; after that, to Oxford University, where he earned a master’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics as a Rhodes Scholar (an Arkansas Rhodes Scholar, eh?); to Vietnam in the late 1960s; thence up the ladder, all the way to NATO command, which Bill Clinton bestowed on him in 1997. Although both from Arkansas, Clinton and Clark first met, Clark says, at a 1965 student leadership conference while both were in college. Since then, Clark has won the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, and more accolades and decorations than Secretariat.

So there’s all that. And there’s this: He votes Democratic. In Arkansas most voters enroll with no party affiliation; you show up on primary day and select the ballot of whichever party you want to support. Clark told me he voted in the Democratic primary in last year’s state elections. He seriously considered seeking the Democratic nomination for governor of Arkansas in 2002, challenging Republican incumbent Mike Huckabee. He told me in an interview that he favors both abortion rights and affirmative action. We spoke just after the Bush administration filed its brief against the University of Michigan’s admissions policy, and Clark said he was “surprised and dismayed” by the president’s decision. He has “tremendous regard” for the Clintons. And, just as a little sweetener for the culture department, he quotes Bob Dylan toward the end of his book, Waging Modern War, and writes affectionately about the protest folk music that he used to love to listen to as a young man.

A lot of this is still sketchy, but I am gravely concerned that we are going to be in a campaign framed as if it is between John Wayne and Michael Jackson and if that is so, we are going to be in deep shit.

I think he could be the one — and I mean at the top of the ticket, not the bottom.

Oh, That Explains It

I had long wondered why the very influential Richard Perle, who often acts as spokesman for the administration position both here and abroad, wasn’t brought on in any official capacity. They hired Elliot Abrams, John Negropont, John Poindexter and Otto Reich, so they are certainly not constrained by matters of reputation or even criminality when bringing zealots and crazed ideologues in to the administration. So why not Perle?

Well, it would appear to be the oldest reason in the book. Greed. According to that well known terrorist Sy Hersh, he stands to make a great deal of money with his new company (coincidentally, I’m sure) formed in November 2001 that sells homeland security and defense products.

Of course, the good news is that he still maintains all the influece he could possibly want with Rummy and Wolfie, but he doesn’t have to give up making huge sums of money to do it. In fact, his crazy-assed scheme to remake the world in his own image is finally being implemented and he can make a boatload of money from it at the same time.

Is this a great country or what?

(But, I still don’t think we have the full story on what Bill Clinton knew about that 1985 check they found in the trunk of that rusted out Chevy. Corruption in high places is intolerable.)