Sure
by digby
Does anyone actually believe that this is the real reason Dick Armey had to resign from his lobbying firm?
Isn’t it more likely that he appears to be on a three day bender every time he appears in public and they were just looking for an excuse? Exhibit A:
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Torture For Money
by digby
There was a fascinating article in the New York Times last week about the torture regime, highlighting the architects of the techniques, two psychologists named Mitchell and Jessen, about whom I’ve written before. The story wasn’t all that new, obviously; Jane Mayer had written about them extensively in The Dark Side. But the story about their “consulting business” and the money they made teaching torture techniques was new to me and lent it another layer of moral corruption.
However, it appears it isn’t the whole story by a long shot. In a three part series over at FDL, Jeffrey Kaye delves into who hired Mitchell and Jessen, a question elided in the NY Times article. And naturally the answer is that it was a result of even more corruption.
Part I
Part II
Part III to come today.
One of the things that still remains to be sorted out about the GWOT period is the extent to which corruption drove military policy. The amount of money that was spent, with no accountability is staggering. And how much the profit motive guided policy is a question that should be asked. Whatever happened to the idea of a new Truman Commission? Or would is looking in the rear view mirror and playing the blame game too?
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No Fury Like Vice Scorned
by batocchio
If you’ve missed it, Barton Gellman’s latest Cheney article, “Cheney Uncloaks His Frustration With Bush,” is worth a read:
In his first few months after leaving office, former vice president Richard B. Cheney threw himself into public combat against the “far left” agenda of the new commander in chief. More private reflections, as his memoir takes shape in slashing longhand on legal pads, have opened a second front against Cheney’s White House partner of eight years, George W. Bush.
Cheney’s disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets.
“In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him,” said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney’s reply. “He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice. He’d showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming. It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times — never apologize, never explain — and Bush moved toward the conciliatory.”
A president, showing independence from his vice-president? Dangerous stuff. I’d note, though, that this is perfectly in line with the neocon idea that Bush was an empty vessel and Palin was a “blank page” to fill with their ideas. (Hey, ya gotta know your market – no one bright would buy the neocon ideology, all the more so after its huge disasters.)
Back to Gellman, near the end of the piece:
“If he goes out and writes a memoir that spills beans about what took place behind closed doors, that would be out of character,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as White House spokesman during Bush’s first term.
Yet that appears to be precisely Cheney’s intent. Robert Barnett, who negotiated Cheney’s book contract, passed word to potential publishers that the memoir would be packed with news, and Cheney himself has said, without explanation, that “the statute of limitations has expired” on many of his secrets. “When the president made decisions that I didn’t agree with, I still supported him and didn’t go out and undercut him,” Cheney said, according to Stephen Hayes, his authorized biographer. “Now we’re talking about after we’ve left office. I have strong feelings about what happened. . . . And I don’t have any reason not to forthrightly express those views.”
Liz Cheney, whom friends credit with talking her father into writing the book, described the memoir as a record for posterity. “You have to think about his love of history, and when he thinks about this memoir, he thinks about it as a book his grandchildren will read,” she said.
I’m sure they’ll especially enjoy the torture scenes. Still, amazingly enough, Liz Cheney may have inadvertently done something good (assuming the raw, unvetted-by-criminal-defense-lawyers version can get out).
The Poor Man Institute points out:
…Consider this: By the time Cheney grew disenchanted with his protege, Bush had already started two wars against the dirty Moslem horde, deployed a mercenary army with a twisted religious sadism, authorized widespread torture, sanctioned indefinite detention and kidnapping, implemented a program for illegal wiretaps/surveillance of US citizens, signed-off on illegal settlement expansion in the occupied lands, endorsed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, supported Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia, stoked a bloody (if unsuccessful) coup to topple Hamas in Gaza, and numerous other atrocities to warm the defective heart of Dick Cheney.
So the question is what, exactly, did Bush refuse to do that led to this increasingly messy divorce?
That is one of several big questions. In late July, after high profile pieces on the Libby pardon and Bush’s consideration of deploying the military domestically broke, Digby made a similar point:
Reading this thing about the Tanks of Lackawanna, something has become clear to me that wasn’t before: the excesses of the Bush administration, the war, the torture, the wiretapping, were the result of compromises between the sociopathic Cheney faction and the merely dull and incompetent remainder of the administration, including the president.
(The “Tanks” link points to DDay’s post on this. If you missed them, I’d also recommend the Glenn Greenwald and Scott Horton posts on the military story, and Emptywheel’s post “The Bush Fairy Tale on the Libby Pardon.” When it comes to the Bush administration, as horrible as they’ve often appeared, subsequent revelations have almost always revealed them to be even worse.)
Commenting on the Gellman story and Cheney’s plans to write a book, Anne Laurie writes:
Apparently omerta has its limits. I know a lot of us DFHs feared that the horrors of the Cheney Regency would never receive a public airing, if only for fear of the War Crimes Tribunal, but perhaps vanity will achieve what mere human decency and the rule of law never could.
Here’s hoping. Still, the rule of law would be nice, if “quaint” in the view of Alberto Gonzales and the rest. I remain a fan of pitching the idea that the only thing that could possibly exonerate Cheney and the gang, and win them the accolades they so clearly deserve, is a full, unfettered investigation into the torture program (and the surveillance program and…).
I keep on plugging it, but Gellman’s book Angler is one of the very best on Cheney and the Bush administration out there. As it is, he’ll have to update it or write a sequel because some of what’s come out since is even more nefarious. But if you’re looking for a Cheney primer, you can read Angler excerpts here and here. Gellman’s piece on “the Cheney Rules” is also a useful overview, and Scott Horton conducted a good interview with Gellman. Work by Jane Mayer, Ron Suskind and others give a much clearer picture of the Bush administration as well. Meanwhile, the Frontline episode “Cheney’s Law” is one of several good pieces they’ve done on Cheney and the Bush administration.
Ah, the sweet smell of vanity and towering hubris. These guys have a warped view of the world, but their self-images are distorted as well. Remember, back during planning for the Gulf War, Cheney was repeatedly pitching crazy military plans to Norman Schwarzkopf. It’s almost impossible to overstate how arrogant Cheney and his gang are (Addington’s one of the worst). Cheney’s approach showed an utter contempt for the American people, the entirety of Congress (including his own party), and even key members of the Bush administration. As I wrote in an earlier post, Cheney felt he was wiser than the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the Geneva Conventions, the Federalist papers, the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Constitution, and the Boy Scout Oath. In the Scott Horton interview, Gellman describes Cheney as “a rare combination: a zealot in principle and a subtle, skillful tactician in practice.” In Cheney’s battle over whether to protect his proud legacy versus his instinct for self-preservation from prosecution, I’m hoping he pulls a Libby and the vain, arrogant zealot wins out.
Cheney thinks he’s Jack Bauer. Part of him must be itching to go Colonel Jessep and yell the ugly truth at us all.
Ain’t Nothing New Under The Sun
by digby
Perlstein points out that right wing lunacy is more like a chronic American disease than an unpredictable, spontaneous eruption. It’s just how they roll:
So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers — these are “either” the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president — too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters’ signs — too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don’t understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can’t understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.
In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as “20 years of treason” and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House “found in the files a blueprint for socializing America.”
Read on, it’s great stuff.
Perlstein is an unparalleled historian of the conservative movement and I expect him to know these juicy details from 40 or 50 years ago. But I would also expect Washington politicians and political media to know that many of the same people are who ginning up the lunacy and acting like hysterical freaks right now are not only acting in the conservative tradition, they are also the very same people who pulled this stuff just a decade ago.
I guess everyone thought that that whole ‘vast right wing conspiracy” thing was something Hillary made up in her head because Tim Russert told them so.
Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak were interviewed yesterday at NN by Susie Madrak and Ari Melber. Specter made some news when he revealed that from the beginning the Republicans had circulated among themselves that they were going to “break Obama” — and it didn’t originate over health care, but even before the stimulus. They never had any intention of acting in good faith. This didn’t surprise me either. But it certainly seems to have surprised the administration, or at least they thought they could win them over anyway. But they can’t.
It’s an illness that health care reform can’t cure. You just have to find a way to live with the problem and not let it kill you.
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I Get Emails
by digby
“While the TV networks gave us wall-to-wall coverage on Bernie Madoff`s
alleged Ponzi scheme, I didn`t see any reporting on the birthday of the
real Ponzi scheme run by the federal government, aka, Socialist
Insecurity.”
I guess he’s assuming we’re going to be facing some future fertility crisis which will render the species unable to reproduce. Seems to me if that happens we’ll have bigger problems to worry about, but that’s just me.
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Rope-A-Dope
by digby
… or just a dope?
I’ve been out of the loop so maybe I don’t understand the nuance of this. Could someone explain to me how this can possibly be?
Appearing at a town hall in his home state of Iowa, Sen. Chuck Grassley told a crowd of more than 300 that they were correct to fear that the government would “pull the plug on grandma.”
“There is some fear because in the House bill, there is counseling for end-of-life,” Grassley said. “And from that standpoint, you have every right to fear. You shouldn’t have counseling at the end of life. You ought to have counseling 20 years before you’re going to die. You ought to plan these things out. And I don’t have any problem with things like living wills. But they ought to be done within the family. We should not have a government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.”
Ok.
Press secretary Robert Gibbs chose his words carefully on Thursday when asked to respond to comments made by Grassley, who is one of three key Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee tasked with crafting compromise legislation. Despite being heavily wooed by the White House, Grassley took up the fundamentally dishonest “death panels” line of attack at a town hall meeting on Tuesday.
Gibbs suggested the Iowa Republican talk to his Republican colleague, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who deemed the death panel rumor an offensive myth designed to “gin up fear in the American public.”
But Gibbs wouldn’t go any further, telling reporters during Thursday’s briefing that the White House remained committed to working with Republicans to get health care reform passed.
It’s an unusual strategy. I’ve rarely found it to be very effective to try to negotiate in good faith with lunatic demagogues, but maybe it can work.
I certainly hope so, because if it doesn’t somebody is going to have a reputation for being a weak little chump. And it isn’t going to be Grassley.
Update: Did I mention lunatic demagogues?
On Wednesday, during Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) town hall in Winterset, Iowa, an attendee proudly noted that the Senator brought his personal copy of Glenn Beck’s book “Common Sense.” Grassley responded stating that he has read the book and that he intended to “pass it on”:
TOWN HALL ATTENDEE: I noticed that you have the book “Common Sense” with you today, I hope you share it with a lot more of those 535 people.
GRASSLEY: Well the reason I brought it is you’re supposed to pass it on to other people when you’re not reading it.
At the end of the town hall, Grassley gave an autographed copy of “Common Sense” to ThinkProgress and said “it’s something you gotta read a couple times.”
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Bloggered
by digby
Sorry for the lack of posts. Blogger has been uncooperative today. Hopefully things are back to normal.
Meanwhile read this and weep.
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No Protesters At This Health Care Forum
by dday
This week, Remote Area Medical, an organization that got its start providing health care services to the impoverished in the Third World, descended on Inglewood to provide those same services to the most disenfranchised group, from a medical care standpoint, in the industrialized world – the uninsured and underinsured in America.
They came for new teeth mostly, but also for blood pressure checks, mammograms, immunizations and acupuncture for pain. Neighboring South Los Angeles is a place where health care is scarce, and so when it was offered nearby, word got around.
For the second day in a row, thousands of people lined up on Wednesday — starting after midnight and snaking into the early hours — for free dental, medical and vision services, courtesy of a nonprofit group that more typically provides mobile health care for the rural poor.
Like a giant MASH unit, the floor of the Forum, the arena where Madonna once played four sold-out shows, housed aisle upon aisle of dental chairs, where drilling, cleaning and extracting took place in the open. A few cushions were duct-taped to a folding table in a coat closet, an examining room where Dr. Eugene Taw, a volunteer, saw patients.
These were not only uninsured patients, over 1,500 in the first day alone, but underinsured patients who cannot get the services they need with their coverage.
No cable news outlet discussing health care reform and the town halls around it ever get around to mentioning this reality. In the poorest areas of this country, health care access is so nonexistent that people will wait around for days in their cars, driving for sometimes hundreds of miles, to find a volunteer clinic that they now use as their primary care physician. South Los Angeles lost one of its only health care providers when King-Drew Medical Center shut down a couple years back, and really nobody, outside of Remote Area Medical, has filled the breach. This is an absolute tragedy, and at the end of the day, it costs our medical system far more than it would to cover everyone, because nagging problems only served by free clinics every couple years eventually find their way into the emergency room. And the disconnect between this circumstance and those right-wingers yelling and shrieking across the country is striking.
The enormous response to the free care was a stark corollary to the hundreds of Americans who have filled town-hall-style meetings throughout the country, angrily expressing their fear of the Obama administration’s proposed changes to the nation’s health care system. The bleachers of patients also reflected the state’s high unemployment, recent reduction in its Medicaid services for the poor and high deductibles and co-payments that have come to define many employer-sponsored insurance programs.
Somebody should leak to one of the astroturf groups activating the right about these town halls that there will be a major Congressional event over at the Forum in Inglewood, and then sit back and watch their face sink when they show up to protest and instead encounter the horrors of this broken system.
…from Fred, in the comments:
“Obama should be at this event, talking to people and forcing the media to cover it. He should even invite/dare the three health care CEOs who told Congress they would still use recission to cut costs.”
This is something Digby and I just said to each other about a minute ago. He’s already out west this weekend. There’s no sharper way to bring forward the case for changing the system. And sure, the Malkinites will start looking up the addresses of those being helped, and if they have cell phones or TVs or granite countertops, but I think the witness of this giant line of thousands of people with no outlet but to practically beg for health care would swamp the nonsense.
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Public Safety
by digby
“Don’t do this in front of my kids”:
In January, an Onondaga County sheriff’s deputy pulled over Audra Harmon, who had two of her kids with her in her minivan. A routine traffic stop escalated quickly.
The deputy, Sean Andrews, accused her of talking on her cell phone. She said she could prove him wrong.
He said she was speeding. She denied it and got out of the van. He told her to get back in. She did, then he ordered her back out.
He yanked her out by the arm, knocked her down with two Taser shots and charged her with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. His rationale on the disorderly conduct charge: She obstructed traffic when she got out of the van. The speeding accusation: going 50 mph in a 45-mph zone.
The scene along Hopkins Road in Salina on the afternoon of Jan. 31 was captured by a camera on the dashboard of Andrews’ patrol car. Harmon, 38, says the video is proof of police brutality.
She plans to sue the sheriff’s office today, claiming Andrews was improperly trained in the use of his Taser. It’s not supposed to be used to take down people who pose no threat, she said.
Harmon was charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and going 50 in a 45 mph zone. The district attorney’s office dismissed the charges a month later — after watching the videotape, said her lawyer, Terrance Hoffmann. The prosecutor could not be reached for comment.
| Deputy Tasers Mom In Minivan |
If this is what they do when they have a video camera rolling in their own car, what do you suppose happens when one isn’t?
I guess the taser saved the officer the physical effort of hitting her over the head with his baton or shooting her to gain compliance, so that’s good.
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Life is Short
by digby
Batocchio wrote last night about the idea of having some sane people attend the town halls, which I think is a really good idea. however, I think it’s just possible that more than a few who people who might normally go are somewhat put off by the idea that there are screaming hysterics there, many of whom believe that everyone in the country should be packing heat at all times. It tends to be a bit intimidating. And that, of course, is the point.
I have had the opportunity to speak with a couple of congressman who are here at Netroots Nation about this, both of whom were really concerned that the pro-reform side wasn’t turning out for these events and speaking out if they do. They believe that this is essential.
I think it’s also essential that liberals stop allowing a bunch of hysterical, misinformed cranks to dominate the political discourse in this country by acting like some psycho dad every time they don’t get their own way..
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