We are fortunate to have a president who is not going to continue the torture and indefinite imprisonment of detainees in the GWOT. But Bush’s cruel legacy will live on in hundreds of decisions coming down from the Roberts court. Jeralyn at Talk Left reports on today’s sad rulings:
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The Supreme Court issued opinions and orders today. Among them:
Ruled that a man wrongly convicted and sent to prison for 24 years cannot sue the former Los Angeles district attorney and his chief deputy for violating his civil rights. The court said unanimously that decisions of supervising prosecutors, like the actions of prosecutors at trial, are shielded from civil lawsuits.
Ruled that police officers have leeway to frisk a passenger in a car stopped for a traffic violation even if nothing indicates the passenger has committed a crime or is about to do so
At the link Jeralyn makes note of several others they have agreed to hear along these lines. This will be going on for some time and will probably take many decades to undo again if they are to be undone at all. The conservative assault on civil liberties is going to continue for a long while. Everyone had better ge used to the idea that if they find themselves on the receiving end of a law enforcement officer they’d better hope he or she doesn’t make a mistake or take a dislike to them. Conservatives believe your rights end at the moment the authorities decide to question you. (Unless you are a gun owner, of course.)
Karl Rove issued a prediction last week that sounded a bit more like a warning:
The “campaign architect,” as he is commonly called, built a case against President Barack Obama’s order to close Guantanamo, an overseas CIA detention center where terrorists and other “enemy combatants” are held. Obama’s order could enable terrorists to be tried in U.S. courts, to be given undeserved rights afforded American citizens and could cause damaging long-term effects, Rove said.
“One year from now, Gitmo won’t be closed,” Rove said. “If it is, there will be an uproar in the U.S. about where to put these people.”
Interrogation tactics used by the CIA during Bush’s term in office were not torturous, Rove said, but he did not deny that the CIA strongly pressed terrorists for vital information.
“You bet we squeeze them for information,” Rove said. “If we hadn’t, those same terrorists could have executed their plans to kill, and [people] would be asking why Bush didn’t protect American soldiers’ lives.”
That’s going to be the strategy going forward. If Obama closes Guantanamo, terrorists will be shopping next to you at the Pic ‘n’ Save. Before long, there will be a TV ad with a revolving door at the gates of a prison, and a closeup on a bearded Muslim face while the voice-over intones “America can’t afford that risk.”
We have, then, the outliines of a political strategy for the next election. President Obama and the librul Congress want terrorists to work in your office while tough daddy Republicans want to keep you safe. Never mind that it’s the height of weakness to think that maximum security prisons aren’t sufficient, or that our security can only be bought with a loss of liberty.
You’ll note that the lie quotient since Republicans have lost power has, if anything, been raised. But these kinds of appeals to emotion, to safety and protection and xenophobia, have a resonance in the lizard brain. I wouldn’t discount them, nor would I combat them solely with an appeal to reason. There has to be an emotional counterpart, perhaps from pointing out how being terrified by the prospect of prisoners in a nearby prison is a triumph of terrorism, and the ultimate weakness.
Every morning, my favorite thing to read is Chuck Todd’s First Read. It makes me laugh, it makes me cry, it makes me wonder what it must be like to live in a world filled with unicorns and rainbows and stand up guys who love God, Mom and apple pie:
Looking For Bipartisanship Down The Road: Why does bipartisanship support for the stimulus matter? Let’s get one thing straight: Obama’s stimulus plan is going to pass Congress, and the vote won’t be that close. But this isn’t the goal this week — or next. For Team Obama, it’s about winning over Republicans. And for some on the left, this doesn’t compute. After all, some might ask, “Who cares? The election just happened and voters overwhelmingly chose Democrats to run the government, both in the White House and in Congress.” But what Obama needs is a Republican Party that isn’t consistently confrontational, because he’s going to be asking for some trickier bills, including more money for the financial industry, potentially support for nationalizing some parts of the banking industry, and a bunch of money to shore up the housing crisis. So while Obama doesn’t need GOP support for stimulus, he wants the opposition to be against him in a way that he can win them over for more favors and — most importantly — prevent potential filibusters.
Right. Because it’s in their best political interest to give Obama “favors.”
They will cooperate if they get what they want and they won’t if they don’t. If Obama comes to them and says “we capitulated on your demands on the stumulus package a year ago, so now you need to fulfill your end of the bargain” they’ll say “what bargain?” And that isn’t something that just applies to Republicans. It’s the way politics works. The idea that the Republicans will eschew a filibuster on, say, health care, because Obama gave them some extra tax cuts in the stimulus package is just absurd.
But then, Chuck Todd is just the political director for NBC News, so he can’t be expected to know that.
A quick return to prominence for the Republican Party would require some vision, some new ideas, or even old ideas bottled in a new package. I’m almost certain that the wrong way to go about this is through a loving tribute to the most hated President in history on the House floor:
George W. Bush is gone from office…but he is not forgotten, at least not by Reps. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Mike Pence (R-IN), and Steve King (R-IA). On Thursday, the three men spent almost 40 minutes delivering their final love letters to Bush. Some highlights:
• FRANKS: “President Bush often had to walk like a knowing lion — like a knowing lion, Mr. Speaker, through the chattering of hyenas. … [I]f those critics do not devour themselves in the meantime, Mr. Speaker, they may face the bared teeth of an enemy that will make us all wish the lion still walked among us.”
• PENCE: “I truly believe that this nation owes a debt of gratitude to George W. Bush.”
• KING: “I’m here to say thank you to President Bush for the things that he has done when he’s had his steady hand on the till of leadership, and especially with our national defense.”
At one point, Franks began to tear up when talking about how Bush made the country “brighter” and “more hopeful” for his children.
Republicans still love George W. Bush because George W. Bush was a through-and-through Republican. There have been times over the last several years when conservatives have tried to throw Bush over, but there’s no denying that he embodied the full spectrum of conservative policies, proving them all to be a hideous failure. And the same arguments that Bush so eloquently made throughout his Presidency are the arguments that conservatives are making as they try to derail the stimulus package.
Next, write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.
Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens […]
These are only some of the fundamentally fraudulent antistimulus arguments out there. Basically, conservatives are throwing any objection they can think of against the Obama plan, hoping that something will stick.
But here’s the thing: Most Americans aren’t listening. The most encouraging thing I’ve heard lately is Mr. Obama’s reported response to Republican objections to a spending-oriented economic plan: “I won.” Indeed he did — and he should disregard the huffing and puffing of those who lost.
As should we all – especially the paeans to their Dear Leader.
Representative Clyburn says he remembers 1994, so there will be no comprehensive health care reform. (The headline says “in 2009,” but the body of the article says that he’s for some kind of incremental reform:
While noting he does not know exactly when President Obama want to move forward with a universal healthcare measure, Clyburn said, “If you take what we’ve done with [the State Children’s Health Insurance Program bill] and then you follow with [more spending] on community health centers, you would have gone a long way to building a foundation upon which to build a universal access healthcare program.
“I would much rather see it done that way, incrementally, than to go out and just bite something you can’t chew. We’ve been down that road. I still remember 1994.”
And I remember 2002 when Democrats insisted on fighting the last war and helped the Republicans destroy the country with a misbegotten second round in Iraq. In fact, they are always fighting the last war instead of learning the proper lessons from them.
This isn’t 1994. The country is very possibly going into a fucking depression. The Republicans are on the decline not the ascent. Democrats were just given the task of saving the country. The health care crisis, which was already awful, is getting worse with every lay-off and every job lost — and the state governments are going broke and can’t take up the slack. How many uninsured to we have to have before they realize that this crisis can’t just be kicked down the road until they get over their trauma of 1994? 75 million? 100?
If these people do not recognize that they have to really do something at a time like this, it’s possible that a wingnut on a white horse might just come riding in with some very unpleasant ideas.
Misplacing The Metrics by digby The Talking Dog has complied the most impressive set of interviews with lawyers and others about the torture regime on the internet. He’s as well versed in the evidence and testimony of those involved in the issue as anyone. What he says here is absolutely right.
I cannot emphasize that strongly enough: we MUST hold The President’s feet to the fire with respect to what he has made one of the signal aims of his Administration, to wit, the closure of Guantanamo Bay and related illegal facilities. So, although it comes as no surprise to anyone that, as WaPo reports, the Government’s files re the allegations against Guantanamo detainees are in disarray (hat tip to Candace), we simply cannot stand by and allow one of the possible permutations raised in the article, that the Obama Administration may attempt to blame its precedessor for delays in doing what it said it would, i.e. closing Guantanamo, and its companion and (far) more important promise, restoring the rule of law. Let me make this easy, based on my extrapolating from Candace’s representations and from the dozens more I am familiar with from the interviews conducted on this blog: there’s simply no there there. The reason that the Government’s “evidence” is “in disarray” is because if it were well-organized, it would be obvious to all that it is, as the courageous Col. Stephen Abraham called it, “garbage”. Nothing more than a bunch of guilt-by-association accusations, often derived from torture, or from other sources that the Government itself believes unreliable. Look people: why should we believe the Bush Administration ON ANYTHING? Of the decisions that have gone that far, in actual “on the merits” hearings, detainees are winning 90% of them, even in courts that have demonstrated their predisposition to be hostile to the detainees at every turn heretofore. Now why might that be? Might it be because there is no there there… that the Bush Administration held men not because they were or are dangerous, but because it would be embarrassing to release them? The President has directed a stay of prosecutions for 120 days, and ordered a shut-down within a year. Both of those are way, way too long periods, given what everyone knows (i.e., there is simply no reason to believe anything the Bush Administration did is reliable, so why should this be different). But, notwithstanding my unwavering support for my college classmate The President, we cannot allow any slippage on this: it’s too important. To quote The President himself, we cannot compromise our principles in the interests of expedience. The Bush Administration has, indeed, left a mess. But the default has got to be that if, after more than seven years, we cannot quickly ascertain a legal basis to hold someone… we probably don’t have one. We must all be mature enough to know that there is a difference you can sail the Queen Mary through between someone being a terrorist because they are an actual terrorist and someone being a terrorist because the Bush Administration said they were. There is evidence, or there isn’t. It doesn’t matter how bad the acts of the accused are: what matters is whether we have reliable evidence of their guilt. Nothing short thereof, whether it be KSM or anyone else, will be acceptable.
The administration wanted to “send a message” by creating a myth that they were omnipotent gods who were capturing all the “bad guys,” giving them drugs and forced enemas and putting them in a concentration camp. But it was, like most Mayberry Machiavelli marketing, not reality. There is very little “evidence” and a whole lot of hype. They did use a flurry of useless paperwork as their “metric” in the early years, but it was all derived from torture, threats and lies.The politics of this were never going to be easy for the president. The right is prepared to call him a terrorist sympathizer no matter what he does, short of keeping Guantanamo open indefinitely and going back on his promise to end torture. He might as well rip off the band-aid on this stuff. It isn’t going to get any easier — and there are actual human beings’ lives hanging in the balance. It would appear that people like Geoffrey Miller, Barbara Fast, Dick Cheney, Stephen Cambone, Paul Wolfowitz and others are all going to sail into history unpunished for their records on torture. They are walking around free. The least we can do is give their former prisoners a trial as soon as possible or let them go. .
The Sunday talk shows were filled with conservatives (it really is a new era on Sunday mornings, isn’t it?) trashing the Obama recovery plan and demanding more concessions in exchange for their votes, despite the fact that they have almost no leverage in the Congress. This is mostly a head game, using Obama’s supposed commitment to bipartisanship to force the types of unwise policies Americans roundly rejected at the polls into the final bill.
“Right now, given the concerns that we have over the size of this package and all of the spending in this package, we don’t think it’s going to work,” the House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And so if it’s the plan that I see today, put me down in the no column.”
While the plan can potentially pass the Democrat-dominated House without Republican support, it will continue to face opposition when it comes before the Senate, said Senator John McCain of Arizona, speaking on “Fox News Sunday.” At least two Republicans will need to approve the bill for a filibuster-proof majority vote of 60.
Senator McCain, who lost the presidential election to Mr. Obama in November, said that he planned to vote no unless the bill were changed.
“We need to make tax cuts permanent, and we need to make a commitment that there’ll be no new taxes,” Mr. McCain said. “We need to cut payroll taxes. We need to cut business taxes.”
After all, McCain did win the election, so you’d have to concede these points.
Republicans already have $275 billion in tax cuts in this bill, pre-negotiated into the mix by the Obama Administration, and it’s not enough. They don’t want to be associated with anything passed succesfully by Democrats because they fundamentally don’t want Obama to succeed. Further, the media is swallowing whole these Republican criticisms, based on conjecture and misreading and sometimes total fantasy. That’s not only true of Obama’s dinner partners.
Charles Krauthammer: “Look, this is one of the worst bills in galactic history. … FDR left behind the Hoover dam and Eisenhower left behind the interstate highway system. We will leave behind, after spending $1 trillion, a dog run in East Potomac Park.” [Fox News, 1/24/09]
David Brooks: “It is an unholy marriage that manages to combine the worst of each approach — rushed short-term planning with expensive long-term fiscal impact.” [New York Times, 1/23/09]
Bill Kristol: “The stimulus has so much bad stuff in it. … They let the House Democrats get out of control in sort of writing a pork-laden bill. Politically, I think the Republicans have more room too argue for changes and ultimately vote against it.” [Fox News Sunday, 1/25/09]
Worse is that the chattering classes have decided to become armchair economists, misinterpreting data along the way. Fortunately the Shrill One was on hand on ABC to set things straight, but he’s not given space in every cable news discussion and “analysis” article.
DONALDSON: The new head of the president’s council of economic advisers, a few years ago, studied recessions, including our big depression, and wrote a paper saying that she couldn’t find that stimulus programs had really worked in any major sense, now, but I think it’s right…
KRUGMAN: That’s not quite right, actually.
DONALDSON: Am I close enough for government work?
[laughs]
KRUGMAN: No, actually. What she found was monetary policy works better than fiscal policy. Problem is we don’t have any monetary policy because interest rates are already at zero. So it’s actually a paper which is very relevant to experience since the Great Depression but not where we are right now.
Clearly the bipartisan fetishists in the media, as well as those who are trying to re-learn Econ 101 overnight, are signaling that only the midpoint of the pre-compromised baseline bill and Republican “destroy all taxes” philosophy would be the most wise and just. Stephanopoulos today couldn’t get over the fact that Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t accept GOP ideas, with Pelosi insisting that those ideas have to actually make sense:
STEPHANOPOULOS: The president’s made it pretty clear that he wants this to be a real bipartisan effort, yet House Republicans have said they’ve been shut out of this process. There were no Republican votes in the Appropriations Committee, no Republican votes in the Ways and Means Committee. Is this the bipartisan effort President Obama has called for?
PELOSI: Well, because the Republicans don’t vote for it doesn’t mean they didn’t have an opportunity to. We — the Republicans asked for a couple of things, one, that related to process that you described, that there would be an open process where they could present their amendments. They didn’t vote for the final bill, but we voted for some of their amendments in the committees that had the markups the day before yesterday and this week.
Secondly, the — some of the ideas that they had put forth in earlier meetings, President-elect Obama at the time on January 5th had our first bipartisan meeting, House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans, and some ideas that were put on the table by the Republicans at that time were contained in the bills that we wrote.
And now, this morning, they had some more suggestions, which we will review and see if they create jobs, turn the economy around, and do so in a cost-effective way.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Some of their suggestions that they’ve put forward are permanently cutting the two lowest tax brackets from 15 percent to 10 percent and from 10 percent to 5 percent, also new help for small businesses. Can you include those in your package?
PELOSI: When — when we had the recovery package last year, we brought the tax credit all the way down, regarding using payroll tax as a — as a tax and therefore you get a credit. Against using that precedent, which was established with President Bush, we built upon that in this legislation, and we prefer that route.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And they’re saying that’s giving a check to people who don’t pay taxes rather than cutting taxes for people who do.
PELOSI: But they do pay taxes, payroll taxes. And President Bush agreed with that last year. And using that precedent, we have built upon that.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re not going to take these new Republican ideas?
PELOSI: Well, we will take some. We will judge them by their ability to create jobs, to — to help turn the economy around, to stabilize the economy, and to see how much they cost. But we’re open to them, and we’ll review them, and it all has to be done right away because our bill has to come to the floor this week […]
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, then tell us what’s in the package, then. I know you don’t agree with — completely with the Congressional Budget Office, this estimate, assessment of what’s in the package.
PELOSI: Well, they’re going to reassess it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: They’re going to look at it. But what they’ve shown so far is that only about 40 percent of the discretionary spending, including the highway spending in the bill, is going to be spent right away in the next year-and-a-half.
PELOSI: First of all, the Congressional Budget Office only looked at 40 percent of the investments in the bill, by their own admission. They didn’t even take a complete look at the bill. We have a letter from the administration that says 75 percent of the — of the investments will be paid out in the first 18 months.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And you’re committed to that?
PELOSI: We’re committed to that […]
STEPHANOPOULOS: We also heard from Congressman Boehner coming out of the meeting today that, again, a lot of that spending doesn’t even meet the same test you just talked about right now […] Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family-planning services, how is that stimulus?
PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crisis now, and part of it, what we do for children’s health, education, and some of those elements, are to help the states meet their financial needs.
One of those — one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, is — will reduce cost to the state and to the federal government.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?
PELOSI: No apologies. No. We have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.
Food stamps, unemployment insurance, some of the initiatives you just mentioned, what the economists have told us, from right to left, there is more bang for the buck, is the term they use, by investing in food stamps and in unemployment insurance than in any tax cuts.
Nonetheless, we are committed to the tax cuts because they do have a positive impact on the economy, even though not as big as the investments.
I can quibble with Pelosi on some of the details, but you can see what she’s up against here.
So far, Obama has treated the pre-compromised initial package as his final offer instead of a negotiating point. The same with Pelosi, and Congressional Dems even dailed some of the tax cuts back (though not enough – business tax breaks should still be sacrificed in exchange for more infrastructure improvements). Meanwhile, the media is enabling the right wing by running with any unsubstantiated press release to undermine the bill, and next week I’d expect this to run at a fever pitch. We don’t have a lot of history of being able to count on Democrats to hold the line, so their performance on this bill will be a key indicator on what to expect. Will the attitude be “I won” or “What can I get you?”
Last night I had the TV on in the background and I heard a promo for one of the Access Hollywood type shows about Caroline Kennedy. I didn’t know what they were referring to and so I asked Mr Google and what came up first? This unctuous, dishonest piece of rotting compost from Bill O’Reilly.
I knew nothing of this rumor and I don’t care about it. The reason that I’m noting this transcript is because of O’Reilly’s amazing intellectual gyrations. His inconsistency, sometimes in the same sentence, is so astonishing that you have to wonder why his head doesn’t explode. No wonder he’s so angry. The dissonance must be very painful.
Here he is, alone in discussing a scurrilous rumor on national TV (I honestly had heard nothing of this until I read this transcript and I watch a lot of cable news, including a fair amount of FOX.) He announced it, made a bunch of assumptions about what it meant, twisted the story into all kinds of knots that had no bearing on reality and then blamed “smear web sites” for doing exactly what he had just done. Brilliant.
But why would any credible journalist ever appear with him?
I just got this from Adam Green and I thought I would pass it on to any of you who are in the DC area, or who would like to “virtually” attend by donating to Geoghegan’s campaign:
Hi, I’m co-hosting an event this coming Monday evening at Local 16 in support of a really inspiring progressive who is running in a special election to replace Rahm Emanuel in the House. Can you make it?
Tom Geoghegan is a famed labor lawyer who wrote pro-worker books like “Which Side Are You On?” David Sirota calls Tom “one of the greatest living progressives in America” and a writer at The Nation wrote “Tom could be the next Paul Wellstone.”
There will be happy hour drink specials, and a raffle at the event will include autographed books by Rick Perlstein, David Sirota, Jerome Armstrong, and the January 21st Obama Inauguration issue of the New York Times.
Tom has already raised over $100,000 in mostly small-dollar contributions, but he’ll need $500,000 to win. Tickets are $30. Raffle tickets are $20 each in advance, $25 at the door. Every dollar really goes a long way, so the more you can give, the better.
Would be great if you could make it, and help support this progressive candidate. Just click here to sign up (oh, and if you can’t make it, you can still donate at the link
Thanks so much. I hope to see you Monday!
Adam
Howie Klein has another great Geoghegan fundraiser going for those of you who might be ready to part with your precious music collection:
I hope everyone who wants strong proponents of America’s working families will contribute to Tom’s campaign. You can do it through ActBlue here. As an incentive for some I spoke with an old friend, Scott McLean, who has made a very generous offer to Geoghegan donors. Scott buys large collections of records and CDs. He’s especially interested in rock, soul, vintage country, personality and original shows. He pays high prices and has been in business for 30 years. He’s agreed to donate between 10 and 20% (20% for collections he pays over $1,000 for) to Tom’s campaign. In other words, sell him your record collection and wind up with, say $2,000– and he will donate another $400 to Tom’s campaign. Contact Scott at jaideeone@yahoo.com and tell him DownWithTyranny sent you. If you don’t have a record collection to sell, please consider even a $5 or $10 contribution to Tom’s campaign.
And by the way, Kathy G has been following Geoghegen’s campaign with some great writing and enthusiasm. She’s also been contributing to his website and compiling some of the new items about Tom and the campaign. For instance, she notes this story about Geoghegan’s “day job” which explains why Geoghegan has so many people in the progressive world gaga over the prospect of having him in the congress:
[T]he Chicago Tribune is reporting that Tom is edging closer to victory in a lawsuit he filed on behalf of over 1,000 city workers cheated out of back pay by the Daley administration. Says Tom in the story, “[The Daley administration] ought to pay people the money they worked for. That is especially important at this time, as the value of people’s homes and investments has declined. They should not be trying to nickel-and-dime these retirees.”
This isn’t just political rhetoric for this guy. He actually does this stuff.
Woodward: No. In other words he’s not going to, he doesn’t want investigations. I mean if, first of all in some of these things, it’s so ambiguous and uh, he has got to get beyond the past. He does not want to create the feeling, which in a sense this week he did create by saying he’s going to close Guantanamo, that the war on terror is over. It is not over. What he said is some of the tactics, namely torture and harsh interrogation tactics are gone but the war continues and if there is a, some sort of perpetual investigation of these things the message will be we’re going soft and I tell you those in the intelligence world and the military and I think Obama himself doesn’t want to send that message.
Matthews: Well let’s talk about the Republicans on the Hill. What are they worried, aren’t they trying to hold Eric Holder’s feet to the fire and say “Promise you won’t launch an investigation as our new Attorney General”.
O’Donnell: Well one of the problems is if they do dig back into all of these things you do lose some of the Republicans support and President Obama’s trying to reach out. You also reinforce what detractors of the Bush/Cheney years already think. So there’s very little political upside. And so Eric Holder has been certainly tested and they definitely, Republicans definitely want to be able to feel like they can stick with their strong principle of defense without having to worry about digging back into some of those things.
Matthews: Yeah. Anne obviously the people on the left, the netroots people, John Conyers up on the Hill, they want action. They want some kind of at least an extra-legal kind of truth and reconciliation commission like you had in South Africa that doesn’t prosecute but does investigate.
Kornblut: And yet we haven’t heard any signal from Obama or the White House itself that they would authorize that, encourage it. Even something that would be as sort of as benign as a truth and reconciliation commission, every indication is they want to leave that to reporters, historians. They want to move on, you know the Hill can do what the Hill can do, but they’re not behind it.
Matthews: Well why did we prosecute people at Abu Ghraib for abusing prisoners if we’re not going to prosecute people who may have authorized that kind of treatment?
Fineman: It is an issue. But Obama has to run the country and he and the leaders of the Democratic Party on the Hill have said “It’s not worth the cost”. I mean I know that Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate wants no parts of this. Whatever John Conyers is going to do on the House side, he’s going to do and you’ll hear a lot of noise from him and maybe some investigations. But it’s not going to be backed up by the Democratic leadership in Congress. It just isn’t.
(crosstalk)
Woodward: Well who would you investigate and prosecute? I mean the people who did these interrogations and so forth believed with good reason they had authority from the President.
Matthews: They had orders.
Woodward: Now you know it’s too late to impeach Bush. It’s over.
According to Bob Woodward, Obama “implied” the War On Terror is over, which he didn’t. And also according to Woodward, since Bush is out of office “it’s over” which is isn’t. The disaster he created will be with us for a very long time, but the official record of the Bush years of war and torture and economic disaster will apparently be left to “reporters and historians” which means that, in the near term at least, the villagers will clean everything up.
Maybe this will be where the internet makes a difference. As frustrating as it is to watch current story lines being written by liars and con artists and taken up by the press as if they are received wisdom, the past is documented in thousands and thousands of pages that were written in real time. They can no longer rework the past the way they used to, at least not unchallenged.
You can certainly understand why they would want to. Bob Woodward has a vested interest in letting the past go and telling everyone to “get over it.” So does Howard Fineman — and Chris Matthews, for that matter, although in this case he is at least playing Devil’s Advocate. They were cheerleaders for Bush’s torture regime and his manly, muscular, macho leadership style which nearly drove them insane with yearning and admiration. They enthusiastically enabled what happened and in some cases strongly endorsed it.
I went back and looked at Bush At War, Woodwards’ first book about the “war president.” I recalled being appalled at the time by this interview he did for the book, printed in the Washington Post. But in retrospect the giddy reaction in the press to his cartoonish, Buck Turgidson style is downright scary:
On Wednesday, Sept. 26, just two weeks after the terrorist attacks, Bush surprised his war cabinet, which had been debating when to begin the bombing of targets in Afghanistan, by declaring: “Anybody doubt that we should start this Monday or Tuesday?”
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld eventually convinced Bush that planning was incomplete and the bombing should not begin for another week. Bush said he was intentionally prodding his aides.
“One of my jobs is to be provocative,” he said. “Seriously, to provoke people into — to force decisions, and to make sure it’s clear in everybody’s mind where we’re headed. There was a certain rhythm and flow to this, and I was beginning to get a little frustrated. . . . It was just not coming together as quickly as we had hoped. And I was trying to force the issue without compromising safety.”
Did he ever explain what he was doing?
“Of course not,” he said. “I’m the commander — see, I don’t need to explain — I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”
In a normal world, the media would have reported that we had a childish, maniac running the country in a time of national crisis. (Did anyone seriously believe that Bush was playing some psychological game with his staff when he wanted to rush ahead with that bombing campaign before it was ready? Please…) Instead, the press chered his puerile chest thumping and begged him to take the gloves off. And now that it’s been shown to be both immoral and counterproductive, now that the country is in serious crisis, they want to avoid their part of the responsibility as well by sweeping everything that happened under the rug.
They are telling us to “get over it.” Again.
They backed Bush’s regime from the beginning and with everythi8ng they had, from draining the treasury to war in Iraq to deregulation to torture to Guantanamo. And they did it consciously:
Although Donahue didn’t know it at the time, his fate was sealed a number of weeks ago after NBC News executives received the results of a study commissioned to provide guidance on the future of the news channel.
That report–shared with me by an NBC news insider–gives an excruciatingly painful assessment of the channel and its programming. Some of recommendations, such as dropping the “America’s News Channel,” have already been implemented. But the harshest criticism was leveled at Donahue, whom the authors of the study described as “a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace.”
The study went on to claim that Donahue presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war……He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
Donohue was the highest rated show on the network and its numbers were growing, so that decision was never about ratings or “competitors.” It was about conforming to a perceived public fervor that was being created by the networks themselves with conservative propaganda. It was quite the clever, self reinforcing circle jerk. (Greenwald ran down a number of similar examples in this post.)
This was just the latest in a series of epic institutional media failures that contributed to the hellish situation in which we find ourselves today. It goes back many, many years but their behavior during the past 16 has been catastrophic.
It appears that the preliminary, incomplete numbers put together by the CBO were distributed to a small handful of lawmakers in both parties earlier in the week. Someone (Republican congressional offices) then passed the misleading data onto the AP, which predictably ran with the incomplete numbers, telling the public that it “will take years before an infrastructure spending program proposed by President-elect Barack Obama will boost the economy.”
Other major media outlets quickly followed, and voila, Republicans had a talking point: “Boehner and other Republican aides roamed the Capitol press galleries, flogging the CBO numbers.”
Of course they did. And within a few days, this incorrect information has become conventional wisdom. According to Cokie’s Law, at this point the facts don’t matter. It’s out there.