As the list of victims continues to grow and investigators examine how Bernard Madoff allegedly ran his massive scam, some are questioning how Madoff avoided detection for so long. As a registered investment advisor since 2006, he was subject to scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission, yet he managed to maintain a clean record even after complaints from whistleblowers started nine years ago.
“The Securities and Exchange Commission is letting down the American people,” Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said of the SEC. “They failed. This person was registered as a broker dealer, they should have known what he was doing all the time, and particularly if you have whistleblowers.”
Yes, it’s shocking but it shouldn’t surprising. This is from the February 2005 CPAC convention:
Vice President Dick Cheney, a regular CPAC speaker, gave the keynote address. California Rep. Chris Cox had the honor of introducing him, and he took the opportunity to mock the Democrats whose hatred of America led them to get Iraq so horribly wrong.
“America’s Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd,” he crowed. Then he said, “We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq.”
Again, that was 2005. And President Bush rewarded Chris Cox’s serious, sober professional judgment with the SEC chairmanship a mere six months later.
Why would anyone have ever thought that someone who was that delusional and/or dishonest could possibly run Wall Street’s watchdog agency with any integrity or competence?
I was watching Fox News a bit ago and saw Fred Barnes sliming the journalist who threw the shoe at Bush as some kind of quasi terrorist because he’d once worked at a radical Egyptian paper. And now, from Siun at FDL, I see that the fellow is being treated like one: reports are surfacing that he’s being tortured.
I actually thought Bush handled this thing quite well. He was literally quick on his feet and didn’t take it too seriously. (I thought the “I saw into his sole” thing was particularly good.) He could do a great thing right now by making a public appeal to the Iraqis to pardon this man. It would be magnanimous and do his personal reputation a world of good — and it would be good for both countries.
Siun is asking that people call the white house and urge Bush to step in to stop the torture. I would guess that’s not going to sell. But perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to ask Bush to make a Christian gesture of forgiveness at Christmastime and ask them to release this man. Maybe he’ll even do it.
No, not the poor put-upon Wall Street masters of the universe. This time, it’s the unsung heroes of the conservative movement —- their wealthy benefactors:
Newsmax: Why are progressive givers generally lauded, while conservative philanthropists, according to your book “Funding Fathers,” are either ignored or vilified?
Robinson: The imbalance that the general news media have as they deal with issues shows up to an even greater extent in philanthropy because they can get away with it because. Conservatives in a lot of cases don’t get out the story of our supporters, and the great gifts. A lot of the conservatives are humble and they are not looking to toot their own horn, so they will defend their principals but they won’t necessarily defend publically their philanthropy. And so the imbalance that already exists in the media is exacerbated by those cultural differences between the left and the right.
Newsmax: You write, “The left dominates the universities, the media, and most of the philanthropic organizations but it seldom matches the conservative movement’s effectiveness.” Why do you think that the case?
Robinson: Well it is actually somewhat ironic, because conservative institutions comparatively were starved for funds. They tended to spend the money much more carefully like a family struggling through the Great Depression. I think that they will never spend carelessly and will always be very cautious with their resources. Almost every conservative group only receives support through voluntary efforts. There are very few conservative institutions that take taxpayer funds to any extent.
So I think that they are much more careful about how that money is spent. But I also think that there’s another reason for it, and it goes back almost to the Reagan speech. And it’s the same principal as with Sarah Palin, that when someone does come forward and articulates the conservative ideas as we conservatives ourselves would state those ideas, the general public is very responsive to that, because we represent the majority sentiment in American society. So it is easier once someone steps forward. The great challenge is that what makes a person conservative oftentimes is that they want to raise their own family, they want to run their own business, they are not out to decide everything else for everybody else.
So to get individuals to step forward perhaps is a greater challenge on the conservative side than it is on the socialist side, where people are dying to run other people’s lives.
Right. They only want to run the lives of people who disagree with them.
These poor wingnut welfare moms and dads have been scraping by like it’s the great depression all these years. The fact that they accomplished anything at all is a real up-by-the-bootstraps all American success story.
Jane Hamsher has been questioning the potential Caroline Kennedy appointment for a while. I’ve been sort of lukewarm on the issue, thinking that Jane is certainly right that there should be no automatic deference simply because baby boomers have warm memories of her as the adorable daughter of the martyred young president of their youth. Neither does being a Kennedy automatically confer some sort of political magic, as we’ve seen with the younger generation who’ve had a mixed record of success.
I have been going on the idea that New York, like my state, likes its politicians to be stars, and Caroline, with her pedigree and Garboesque mystique could be expected to have great fundraising prowess and enough celebrity status to win the seat in 2010. But Jane points out that with Kennedy’s “signal” today that she is indeed seeking the seat, it really isn’t too much to ask that she at least let the public know what her positions on the issues are. There is no record anywhere of what she thinks about policy and merely relying on the fact that she is a Kennedy and endorsed Obama shouldn’t be enough. After all, some Kennedys marry GOP cyborgs and there are Republicans who endorsed Obama and have very different ideas on some important issues.
Earlier this year Hillary Clinton was excoriated by certain gasbags for allegedly winning the seat because people felt sorry for her, even by some people who now wax sentimental about the prospect of Senator Caroline. Yet, Clinton was a political figure whose positions on national issues, anyway, were quite well known, and who spent months cultivating New Yorkers and learning about their concerns and developing an agenda for addressing them. By the time of the election, the voters knew exactly where she stood and yet eight years later she was still being belittled for being the recipient of dynastic privilege.
I’m not suggesting that Caroline Kennedy would be subject to Clinton rules by the press, they clearly like her. But the right will make a great deal out of it and it’s bound to haunt her. And that changed my hackish calculation. I think Clinton only survived in New York because of the hard political and campaign work she put in and recent hard scrabble political experience in Washington. Kennedy has not given any indication that she’s the type of person who has those skills and that makes her a weak candidate for 2010.
If Patterson names her, I won’t be surprised. But I also won’t expect that New York will necessarily have two Democratic senators after 2010 and that’s a shame. Helping the Republicans rebuild their party in the northeast shouldn’t be one of the first acts of the new Democratic era.
“Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times has written about how this scandal is an early test for the Obama tream. Jeff, good to see you. Uhm, many people wonder why it would take the president elect these many days to come up with an answer directly, who had contact, if any with Blagojevich. Have they failed this first test?”
Well, of course they have. But then, there was never any way to not fail it. The rules are rigged to keep the story alive. Zeleny, of course, said they hadn’t failed it yet. But nobody wants to say that they passed the test because that would be the end of that.
There’s been a bit of navel gazing among some in the press and I’m glad to see that some are reporting flat out that the Republicans are crudely exploiting this. But there is still something very important missing in all the coverage.
For instance, John Heilman, who is a somewhat eccentric reporter by village standards wrote an odd piece today in which he says that the press failed to adequately investigate Obama’s political history in Chicago (something the right has been hammering the past few days) and that we can expect them to delve into it now. I assumed that the national press had relied on the reporting of the two big Chicago papers to have unearthed any skeletons in his closet, which seems like a pretty reasonable thing to me. But apparently, we are going to be treated to a spate of “investigations” which I’m sure will rely heavily on political enemies and spurned former supporters as sources for ill-informed out of towners. That’s usually how it goes.
But as odd as his comments about Obama’s “problems” are, Heileman also makes the observation that Obama is a lot like Clinton in the fact that he comes out of a somewhat compromised political environment, having been neither a member of the corrupt insiders nor a flamboyant crusader against it. I’ve seen those parallels as well, even though it’s not obvious at first. And I would add that part of what makes these stories so enticing is the exotic nature of the political culture. In Clinton’s case it was southern gothic and in Obama’s it’s sort of gangster kitch, but both are filled with dramatic characters and Shakespearean level intrigue, which are easily exploited by the right and eaten with a spoon by the media.
Heileman breaks the established rules, however, by suggesting that the Clinton scandals were trumped up partisan nonsense that ended up being very costly to the country.
Aside from the wack-job caucus, few regarded Clinton’s lengthy tenure in the Arkansas statehouse as egregiously corrupt. But neither would any history of great reformist governors feature him prominently, if at all. Some of his close friends from Little Rock would wind up in prison: Susan McDougal, Webb Hubbell. And Clinton’s various entanglements in the Razorback State’s quasi-feudal political and business cultures came back to haunt him during his time in office, most glaringly in the case of Whitewater.
That Whitewater was a trumped-up tin-pot scandal in which WJC was never proved to have done anything illegal is beside the point—or, more accurately, is precisely the point. The investigations Whitewater spawned were more intrusive than a thousand colonoscopies. They consumed countless news cycles, drained away political capital, inflicted horrendous legal bills on dozens of innocent bystanders, and energized the Republicans and their allies on the fringes of society and in the mainstream media. And for what? For nada.
The reason that breaks the rules is because he doesn’t do the required journalistic ass covering and claim that Clinton deserved everything he got because he refused to “answer questions.” That was the standard excuse for pursuing these bogus stories at the time — the old “it doesn’t pass the smell test.” And we’re seeing those moldy old tests pulled off the shelf again in this one.
On the other hand, Heileman makes one glaring omission in that otherwise correct recitation of events by failing to properly state the role of the press in that mess. Let’s just say it couldn’t have happened without them.
He goes on to discuss the potential for a similar ongoing witch hunt jumping off of the Blogjevich scandal and fervently hopes it doesn’t happen. But again, that’s an innocent bystander cop-out. The press is already slavering over this scandal like starving hyenas with a dead gazelle. They are following the standard village playbook. No matter how much they know, no matter how many questions are answered, there’s just something “wrong” with the response that requires them ask even more.
Here’s the latest read on this from MSNBC:
Norah O’Donnell: President elect Obama had pledged they would get this information out within a few days, now we hear they’re going to put it out three days before Christmas, but they say there was no inappropriate contact. Will that be enough
Mark Whittaker: Well, you have to wonder, if they have it ready now, why they are waiting so long. I would say that there is such high interest in this story and so much pressure to hear everything they know, that it would really surprise me if it hold all the way until three days before Christmas.
But look, here’s the issue. I met with an adviser to Obama just after the election and I asked them “what position is the president elect going to take on the senate seat in Illinois/” And basically, this adviser said three things. One is “he'[s not going to talk directly to the Governor. Two, we think the governor is going to do what is in his own political interest. I don’t think they had any idea that he was actually going to try to sell the seat. but they also said, this adviser made it clear, that their main interest was that somebody be chosen who could hold the seat, who could win reelection. Uhm so, I think that what we are likely to see is that Rahm Emmanuel and others had some kind of contact with the Governors office about candidates who they thought could win reelection if they were appointed.
O’Donnell: My understanding was that Rahm Emmanuel, the incoming chief of staff provided a list of names that would be acceptable to Barack Obama but that but they are saying that in no way means there was any inappropriate contact or suggesting there was any pay to play . But I would imagine he’ll get some additional quesitons today because, hey, they have promised transparency.
Whittaker: They have promised transparency and look, until we know exactly who talked to whom about when, about what, this story is not going to go away.
Update:Steve Benen reports on a Rasmussen Poll which asks a loaded question “How likely is it that President-elect Obama or one of his top campaign aides was involved in the Blagojevich scandal?” and 45% of the public say it’s likely, 23% very likely.
Benen and Yglesias speculate that this is because of the press coverage relentless speculating all of the television for the past few days, which I’m sure has contributed. But it is also likely to be mostly Republicans who answer that way — they have been pounded with propaganda through their noise machine that Obama is a muslim, terrorist, socialist, “Chicago school” politician. Many of them go in with the assumption that he’s the devil. The rest may just be cynics who think that all politicians are dirty. There are plenty of them out there.
These numbers are meaningless in terms of how the scandal plays out, anyway. Recall that Clinton’s numbers went up the day he was impeached. The press doesn’t care what the public thinks about this, they operate on their own logic and they will not be moved one way or the other by public opinion. If anything, if the public disagrees with their behavior, they blame the public for being insufficiently “outraged” and redouble their efforts to trap the president.
The problem for Obama in this is the distraction, of course, and a gradual erosion of respect and the presumption of good faith among the American people, even if they approve of the job he’s doing. Even if they see through all the media braying, people eventually get tired of this stuff and the psychological response among a good many of them, in my observation, is to begin to blame the victim. Over time, it weakens the president and makes even his supporters tire of having to defend him. And in the long term, many people subconsciously internalize the derisive criticism and without even realizing it become reflexively hostile. It can ruin a presidency without the president’s approval numbers ever going much below 50%. I’ve seen it happen before my very eyes.
After shrugging off Republican caterwauling about the Holder nomination, the only one the right seems to have any interest in making a stink over, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy is pushing back the hearing date a week, a kind of compromise.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will delay confirmation hearings for Attorney General nominee Eric Holder after all — accommodating Republican concerns that the appointment was being rushed and more vetting of Holder’s resume was needed.
In an announcement from his Senate office on Monday afternoon, committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said the hearings would be moved back from January 9 to January 15, giving Republicans more than “30 days from today” to consider Holder’s qualifications.
I sincerely hope that Leahy doesn’t think this will calm anybody on the other side of the aisle. In fact, there will be some talk that this “proves” the “bipartisan concern” with the nomination, and the perception that it’s in trouble, and that Holder will have to endure even more scrutiny, perhaps a request for multiple confirmation hearings, etc. This is not necessarily about blocking Holder from becoming the Attorney General but elongating the process and throwing up doubt. They’ve de-mothballed Karl Rove to lead the effort:
On Dec. 1, just one day after Holder’s nomination, Karl Rove told the Today Show that Holder’s record “will be examined” because he was the “one controversial nominee“:
ROVE: He was deeply involved as the Deputy Attorney General in the controversial pardon of Marc Rich. … I think it’s going to be clearly examined, if for no other reason that people want to lay down markers that that kind of behavior is inappropriate. … But again, there will be some attention paid to this […]
Today on MSNBC’s Chris Matthews Show, Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly revealed that Rove is indeed “helping lead” the effort against Holder:
CONNOLLY: Word on the street is that Karl Rove is going to be helping lead the fight against Eric Holder when his nomination for Attorney General heads up to the Senate.
This is a textbook partisan ploy, designed to engender anger throughout the base and a whiff of illegitimacy to the Justice Department. Of course, that agency is already hopelessly compromised, so any effort to improve it or, ye gods, fire those burrowed deep inside the Department who are responsible for the politicization of the past few years, will then have a counterpoint in the figure of Holder, no matter how ridiculous it may appear.
It shouldn’t be any surprise that the one cabinet post Rove is being tapped to sully and turn into a partisan brawl is the one that happens to be investigating him. There may or may not be merit to the idea that Rove wants to provide cover for Bush’s pardons, but the Siegelman case threatens Rove where he lives, and he desperately needs to paint it as the rantings of a partisan liberal Justice Department. In fact, painting justice itself as partisan, putting it into the political arena, serves Republican needs in a variety of ways, devaluing the rule of law as just another he-said/she-said situation.
I think Leahy did the wrong thing by listening to these jackals. They have no interest in being mollified.
Here’s a revealing look at how Republicans see the new post partisan environment:
During the final closed-door negotiations Thursday night, union officials were in one room while management officials were in an adjacent room.
Republicans complained that the union officials had more access to the senatorial negotiators than did management. Democrats denied that, saying that Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., shuttled between the two rooms.
And, the Democrats said, more union input was needed because of the insistence from Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., that American carmakers bring labor costs in line with overseas-based manufacturers that operate in the U.S. Chattanooga, Tenn., where Corker was mayor before his election to the Senate, secured a new Volkswagen plant in July. Tennessee also is home to GM and Nissan vehicle assembly plants.
Democrats charged that Republicans was out to hurt the union. Corker denied such motivation, saying that the agreement imploded over three words — the date by which the unionized workers would have to achieve parity with those at foreign-owned U.S. plants.
Republicans wanted parity next year; Democrats sought a delay until 2011. Asked why he wouldn’t move off the 2009 date, Corker said, “Then I’d be negotiating with myself.”
Bush always said that, of course, which is an indication of what a super smart statement it is. Republicans think compromise is negotiating with themselves. And what’s interesting about it is that they were also “negotiating” with Republican white house. Somehow, I suspect they will have even less desire to compromise with a Democrat.
The article goes on to explain that Republicans needed to do something that would make them feel good about themselves. It’s been a couple of months since they screwed anything up, after all, and they were afraid they were losing their touch. It’s also clear their constituents were all amped up (presumably from the talk radio gasbags speaking in tongues and putting curses on the auto workers.) Some of the politicians got so excited they forgot their conservative talking points and blamed the wrong people:
“People don’t like rich people, and these guys are not only rich, but they screwed up,” said Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., speaking of the Big Three executives who came to Capitol Hill on private jets with cups in hand.
Noooo. Guys with private jets are great producers of wealth and deserve every penny they can lay their grubby hands on. It’s the UAW workers who are the rich exploiters. I think this says it best:
ROMANS: Peter Morici the Senate was right to bail out on this bailout?
Peter Morici,University of Maryland School of Business: They didn’t bail out. Gettlefinger bailed out. Toyota workers are paid very well, they have outstanding benefits, but that is not good enough for Ron Gettlefinger in the UAW. Instead they want a gold plated package as if they’re the British aristocracy.I don’t think a waitress making $30,000 a year in Indiana ought to send her tax dollars to Washington to subsidize that nonsense.
See, the unions are the nobility who are keeping workers down in this country and the conservatives are stepping up to fight with pitchforks on their behalf. To accuse the executives of wrongdoing, or say that Americans don’t like rich people, is waging class warfare and that is unacceptable.
LaHood just made a mistake. He was obviously giddy with excitement that he’d just helped make the economic lives of millions of Americans far worse than they would have been and he was undoubtedly thinking ahead to future thrilling successes with long term unemployment, denial of health care and homelessness. For Republicans, happy days are here again.
This is going to be a very interesting couple of years — if we can survive the Republican guillotine.
The conservatives are all very excited about the mission being accomplished. But, there’s a fly in the ointment:
NRO‘s Andy McCarthy: “All praise to Mitch McConnell for leading the charge that beat back this lunacy. Can someone explain why the White House thought this was a good idea?”
Michelle Malkin, however, like most Republicans, believes there are more important things than throwing the country into a depression:
“The Bush administration apparently didn’t understand the message last night. […] Senate Republicans drew a line in the sand on bailout mania. And now the White House is scrambling to erase it and expand the crap sandwich once more to rescue the UAW. No means no.“
The Republicans are giving the majority of the country tough love.
So, I see that Victoria Toensing is back in the Patrick Fitzgerald bashing business, reprising her complaint that he goes way too far in his public characterizations of criminal wrongdoing prior to trial. Coming from her, that’s pretty rich, considering that she was Ken Starr’s most ardent supporter and throughly supported the outrageously over-the-top bad Romance novel he presented to the pubic and the congress prior to impeachment and trial:
Whereas the President testified that “what began as a friendship came to include [intimate contact],” Ms. Lewinsky explained that the relationship moved in the opposite direction: “[T]he emotional and friendship aspects . . . developed after the beginning of our sexual relationship.” As the relationship developed over time, Ms. Lewinsky grew emotionally attached to President Clinton. She testified: “I never expected to fall in love with the President. I was surprised that I did.” Ms. Lewinsky told him of her feelings.At times, she believed that he loved her too. They were physically affectionate: “A lot of hugging, holding hands sometimes. He always used to push the hair out of my face.” She called him “Handsome”; on occasion, he called her “Sweetie,” “Baby,” or sometimes “Dear.”He told her that he enjoyed talking to her — she recalled his saying that the two of them were “emotive and full of fire,” and she made him feel young. He said he wished he could spend more time with her.
All the gasbags and right wing screamers thought that was perfectly legitimate prosecutorial conduct. But then, we are about to see some very interesting gyrations among the wingnut legal beagles as power shifts again in Washington. I think the one that interests me most is the case of Uber villager Stuart Taylor, one of the chief cable inquisitors in the Lewinsky scandal, who insisted that Clinton was a major criminal for lying about the “crime” discussed above and should be impeached and prosecuted for it.
Howie Kurtz wrote a typical insider piece about his ubiquitous presence on TV back in the day, revealing more about the guy than he probably realized:
Friends worry that Taylor, by so constantly and unambiguously assailing Clinton as a liar, may be tarnishing his hard-won reputation as a dispassionate legal analyst. The “NewsHour,” concerned about the appearance of bias, has stopped using him to talk about Clinton and Lewinsky. Says Taylor: “There’s hardly anyone in the city of Washington who believes him. I don’t see much point in pretending the evidence is in equipoise when it isn’t.”[…] The case that boosted Taylor into the media stratosphere involved not Monica Lewinsky but Paula Jones. When the former Arkansas clerk first accused Clinton in 1994 of having dropped his trousers and propositioned her in a Little Rock hotel room, Taylor was skeptical: “I thought Clinton was not owning up to what happened but I couldn’t believe he did the whole thing. That would be too crude. She was not the most believable person in the world.” But in the summer of 1996, Taylor began work on what would become a 15,000-word manifesto about the case for American Lawyer. Brill says they both believed that “this would be the quintessential frivolous-litigation story.” Instead, Taylor concluded that Jones had a far stronger case against Clinton than journalists had let on, in part because of “class bias” and “the mainstream media’s manifest disdain for Paula Jones.” It also took aim at what Taylor now calls “the really flamboyant hypocrisy of many liberal feminists.” The contrarian piece instantly transformed the conventional media wisdom about Jones’s sexual harassment suit, which Taylor believes had been colored by liberal bias. “There was a huge, pent-up, Clinton-is-getting-away-with-too-much feeling in the press that was suppressed during the election, partly because they didn’t want to elect Dole,” he says.
Your political establishment in all its glory, laid out before you, unadorned and shameless.
Taylor remains one of the most respected establishment legal journalists in the country, commonly called upon by gasbags of all stripes to comment in an “unbiased” fashion, particularly on the crossroads of politics and the legal system. I’m sure you’ll be fascinated to hear about his latest crusade, which I think, once again, accurately describes the establishment mindset:
…. it would be a terrible mistake, in my view, to launch anything like the big, public criminal investigation that almost 60 House liberals, human rights groups, and others are seeking into allegations that John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, President Bush, and other top officials reportedly approved harsh interrogation methods including water-boarding (subject to limitations that have not yet been publicly identified). I suspect, without benefit of inside information, that Obama attorney general pick Eric Holder and other top officials of the incoming administration would agree with me.First, such investigations and prosecutions would tear apart the country and blow up Obama’s hopes of lifting us out of our multiple crises.
And who would be the people doing that? Why, the right, of course. This is their standard blackmail — either do it our way or we’ll tear this place apart. And because they’ve gotten away with such silly things as the General Betrayus hissy fit, we know that we’ll be seeing Democrats rolling on their backs in total submission the minute the right starts keening and rending their garments over keeping the babies safe. Taylor goes on to explain that people can’t be held responsible for committing crimes if a lawyer told them it was legal and you can’t hold lawyers responsible for telling them it was legal if they used a crackpot, untested legal theory to support it. So, heck — all any president needs is a creative lawyer like Yoo and it’s get out of jail free. (It’s an interesting concept not fully anticipated by our naive founders, although Shakespeare might have seen the possibilities there.) Besides, Taylor says waterboarding isn’t necessarily torture and the congress later legalized the whole thing anyway, so what’s the problem? It was really just an honest mistake rather than an evil crime. Taylor, like Toensing, originally supported the idea of the president issuing a blanket pardon and then instituting a truth commission, but that would tear apart the country too, so that’s out. In fact, since the report about a potential WMD killing us all in a couple of years came out a couple of weeks ago, Taylor is convinced that Obama’s going to have to keep those gloves off.
The man who believed that Paula Jones being allegedly sexually harrassed by the president years before he even took office demanded that the government come to a complete halt to investigate, is very impatient with the damned civil libertarians for their hysterical insistence on not torturing and illegally wiretapping:
But the civil libertarians’ outrage does not stop there. Indeed, the prospect of anyone in the U.S. being inappropriately wiretapped, surveilled, or data-mined seems to stir the viscera of many Bush critics more than the prospect of thousands of people being murdered by terrorists. This despite the paucity of evidence that any innocent person anywhere has been seriously harmed in recent decades by governmental abuse of wiretapping, surveillance, or data mining. On these and similar issues, Obama will have a choice: He can give the Left what it wants and weaken our defenses. Or he can follow the advice of his more prudent advisers, recognize that Congress, the courts, and officials including Attorney General Michael Mukasey have already moved to end the worst Bush administration abuses — and kick the hard Left gently in the teeth. I’m betting that Obama is smart and tough enough to do the latter. This is not to suggest that the president-elect will or should condone torture, bypass Congress, disregard international law and opinion, or adopt other Bush excesses that Obama and Attorney General-designate Eric Holder have assailed. But Obama does need to claim and use far more muscular powers to avert catastrophic loss of life and protect our security than most human-rights activists (and most Europeans) would allow.[…]And the only way … is through aggressive use of wiretaps, data mining, searches, seizures, other forms of surveillance, detention, interrogation, subpoenas, informants, and, sometimes, group-based profiling. Many of these powers and techniques are still tightly restricted by the web of legal restraints and media-driven cultural norms that were developed in sunnier times to protect civil liberties — and would be even more tightly restricted if civil libertarians had their way.
So, he not only shouldn’t follow up on past abuses, he should work to loosen the restrictions even more. He goes on to advise that the way to do this is by making phony compromises, creating yet another hybrid court system that will not work and basically keeping everything the same, just in slightly different form.
Meanwhile, Newsweek is reporting that the “secret program” Jack Goldsmith and James Comey objected to was, as many suspected, a data mining program gathering and storing massive amounts of Americans’ communication. They weren’t upset by the intent so much as the fact that it violated the FISA requirement for warrants. (Hey, they’re conservatives, so it’s the best you can hope for and a good reason to have those laws there in the first place. If it hadn’t been, they apparently wouldn’t have objected to those activities on either constitutional or ethical grounds..)
Taylor contends that no American was harmed by civil liberties intrusions over the past few decades. Apparently, he doesn’t think there’s any harm in those NSA operators listening in on intimate phone conversations between soldiers in Iraq and their wives back home — and passing around the “good parts.” And despite what Taylor says, we know that the government spied on political protesters during the period after 9/11 and the history of the country suggests that it has done this many times in the past. Perhaps he thinks there’s no harm in that — he’s so afraid of terrorism he’s nearly fouling his trousers, after all. But less hysterical types think that the country can keep itself safe and adhere to the constitution at the same time. In spite of Taylor’s history of being a right wing hit man (or perhaps because of it) he’s considered to one of those vaunted moderate, centrist, bipartisan straight shooting ‘serious’ people to whom respect must be paid. I suspect that his advice is fairly typical of that coming to Obama from the establishment. They all pay lip service to ending torture and Guantanamo and torture and illegal surveillance. But then they issue a dozen different reasons why all those things must be continued, perhaps with a little tweaking around the edges so it isn’t quite so obviously crude and unpleasant. (Different colored jumpsuits or something …)
I have thought that Gitmo and torture might be Obama’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” moment, in which the political establishment and national security apparatus lets the new Democrat know who’s boss. This one’s far more complicated than that and I think I may have reached for the wrong bumper sticker slogan. What the village is proposing on all these issues is not Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, it’s “Mend It Don’t End it,” and with the news that people like Feinstein and Wyden are starting to hedge on language and perhaps open the door for some other ways of looking at this, along with House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes essentially agreeing with Stuart Taylor, I suspect the pressure is becoming quite intense to do it.
This is one of those issues, however, where Obama could kick “the left” in the teeth repeatedly, but it wouldn’t shut them up no matter how much it hurt. I suspect it won’t shut up the Europeans either or anyone else on the planet who thinks that torture and indefinite imprisonment under a kangaroo court is acceptable behavior for a global leader. And that’s a problem. Obama’s whole foreign policy at risk if this becomes a hugely contentious issue under his presidency.
This isn’t the 90’s when shills like Taylor held the only public platform, so it’s not so simple anymore. Obama has to contend with civil liberties defenders who will publicly expose and fight against any “tweaking” that doesn’t result in a return to the rule of law and respect for constitutional principles. I’m sorry to put it that starkly, but it’s the truth. A fight over civil liberties is the last thing Obama needs, but he’ll have one on his hands if he listens to people like Stuart Taylor.
Those with a well documented history of bad faith and partisan hostility, no matter how “respected” by the villagers, should be disregarded by the new administration, period. They have proven over and over again that they cannot be trusted and yet, because they’ve thrown a few bipartisan bones out there from time to time to create the illusion that they are fair ‘n balanced, they draw even well intentioned Democrats into their web over and over gain with disastrous results — often at the ballot box. (Bad intentioned Democrats just go along because they agree with them — I’d put Reyes in that category.)
For all his obsequiousness toward Obama, Taylor’s trap is that he has laid out a plan which must be adhered to in every detail or risk being seen as a capitulation to the allegedly hysterical lefties. Taylor will see Obama’s deviation from the one true path as a personal rejection and an abandonment of his responsibilities (as Taylor’s defined them) and turn on him viciously. As always, you must be avowedly with them.
There is no splitting the baby on this. You either respect the rule of the law and the constitution or you don’t. Don’t defend it, don’t mend it, just end it.
(And some prosecutions would really hammer the point home in a way that nobody would misuderstand for a long time to come.)
An Iraqi reporter called visiting U.S. President George W. Bush a “dog” in Arabic on Sunday and threw his shoes at him during a news conference in Baghdad. Iraqi security officers and U.S. secret service agents leapt at the man and dragged him struggling and screaming out of the room where Bush was giving a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The shoes missed their target about 15 feet (4.5 metres) away. One sailed over Bush’s head as he stood next to Maliki and smacked into the wall behind him. Bush smiled uncomfortably and Maliki looked strained.
According to CNN, this is the worst insult in Iraqi culture.
If you haven’t seen the footage, make a point of seeing it. Bush had to duck. It’s priceless.