BARNICLE: And now you have Speaker Pelosi in Syria. You know, I think if she were Speaker Nancy Pelosi from Birmingham, Alabama, or Pensacola, Florida, or Chicago, Illinois, even, it might play a little better politically in Washington than it has been. But she‘s from San Francisco.
This is Mike “I promise not to plagiarize anymore” Barnicle from Taxachusetts saying this. He goes on to say that it doesn’t matter what Nancy does, but he apparently felt he had to bond with the macho gasbags on Scarborough by gratuitously taking a shot at San Francisco. I wish these people would just stop it. It’s chauvanistic, outdated and stupid.
(I know that I will get a flurry of well meaning readers telling me how it’s ridiculous to complain because liberals are always trashing the south, and I’m sure it must be true, but I don’t see it on television, nor do I ever hear analysts casually saying that an issue is tainted by a southerner’s affiliation with it. Bashing liberal cities as being outside the mainstream is considered a free shot, however, and it’s time to put a stop to it.)
But it does explain one thing — why nobody said a damned word when Denny Hastert was traipsing all over South America telling leaders that they should ignore the Clinton White House and negotiate directly with the Republican congress:
In 1997, Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) led a delegation to Colombia at a time when U.S. officials were trying to attach human rights conditions to U.S. security assistance programs. Hastert specifically encouraged Colombian military officials to “bypass” President Clinton and “communicate directly with Congress.”
…a congressional delegation led by Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) which met with Colombian military officials, promising to “remove conditions on assistance” and complaining about “leftist-dominated” U.S. congresses of years past that “used human rights as an excuse to aid the left in other countries.” Hastert said he would to correct this situation and expedite aid to countries allied in the war on drugs and also encouraged Colombian military officials to “bypass the U.S. executive branch and communicate directly with Congress.”
Subsequently, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette sent a cable complaining that Hastert’s actions had undermined his leverage with the Colombian military leadership. In other instances, Hastert actually guided congressional staff to unilaterally reach deals with Colombian officials:
House Foreign Affairs Committee staff, at the direction of the Hastert group, would fly to Colombia, meet with the nation’s anti-narcotics police and negotiate the levels and terms of assistance, the scope of the program and the kinds of equipment that would be needed. Rarely were the U.S. diplomatic personnel in our embassy in Bogata consulted about the “U.S.” position in these negotiations, and in a number of instances they were excluded from or not even made aware of the meetings.
Before I heard Barnicle I thought it was hypocritical that Republicans said nothing when Denny Hastert did this. Now I know that it’s because Hastert is from Chicago, Illinois (even!) so it “played better politically” in Washington. This must be why Barnicle gets the big bucks and I don’t.
You’ve probably heard about the moronic rightwing tizzy of the day criticizing Nancy Pelosi for wearing a scarf on her head in a mosque, when the internet is filled with pictures of Laura Bush and Condi Rice doing the same thing. You’d think they would have thought of this, but then hypocrisy or just plain idiocy isn’t really a concern for them. Another day another rightwing fool…
But it made me recall some of their truly stomach churning commentary about reporter Jill Carroll when she was held hostage. You’ll remember this, I’m sure:
MCGUIRK: She strikes me as the kind of woman who would wear one of those suicide vests. You know, walk into the — try and sneak into the Green Zone.
IMUS: Oh, no. No, no, no, no.
MCCORD: Just because she always appears in traditional Arab garb and wearing a burka.
MCGUIRK: Yeah, what’s with the head gear? Take it off. Let’s see.
MCCORD: Exactly. She cooked with them, lived with them.
IMUS: This is not helping.
MCGUIRK: She may be carrying Habib’s baby at this point.
IMUS: She could. It’s not like she was representing the insurgents or the terrorists or those people.
MCCORD: Well, there’s no evidence directly of that –
IMUS: Oh, gosh, you better shut up!
MCGUIRK: She’s like the Taliban Johnny or something.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s that horrible cretin Deb Schlussel with one of the most insane rants I’ve ever read, (not that it disqualified her from appearing on television chatting amiably with Jill Carroll’s journalistic colleagues.)And there was much more. All of these disgusting piles of rancid rightwing swill made the reflexive assumption that because she was a reporter, (and a woman) Carroll was sympathetic with terrorists and they wished on her the most horrible of fates.
When Carroll was finally released she explained that she had been forced to do everything she had done and that she was in no way sympathetic to her captors. She was scared to death and tried to do what she could to survive long enough to get out of there. It was a story of amazing bravery and integrity.
It was also a low point among low points for the damaged lizard brains of the right and if they are actually religous (which I seriously doubt) they will burn in hell for what they said about her.
On April 4, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced at a 7:30 a.m. ET news conference in Tehran that the 15 British sailors and marines would be released. While Ahmadinejad maintained that all of the captives had admitted to trespassing in Iranian waters and that Iran had “every right” to put them on trial, he said that it was “a unilateral decision” to release the captives. He added that the decision was, in part, a “gift” to honor both the upcoming Easter holiday and the Muslim commemoration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birth. He said the captives would be taken to the Tehran airport immediately following his remarks.
In his April 3 Post column — headlined “Where’s Winston?” — Peters called the captives “wankers” and asserted that they “wimped out in a matter of days and acquiesced in propaganda broadcasts for their captors,” a reference to videos aired on Iranian television in which several of the captives said that they had entered Iranian territory. Peters continued: “Jingoism aside, I can’t imagine any squad of U.S. Marines behaving in such a shabby, cowardly fashion. Our Marines would have fought to begin with. Taken captive by force, they would’ve resisted collaboration. To the last man and woman.” He went on to write that the “once-proud” British military has “collapsed to a sorry state.”
In an April 3 post on National Review Online’s weblog The Corner titled “Brit Wimps,” Derbyshire linked to Peters’ column and stated, “Once again, it’s me and Ralph Peters on the same wavelength, deploring the cowardice of the British sailors and marines kidnapped by Iran.” Derbyshire further wrote: “When it happened, I said I hoped the ones who’d shamed their country would be court-martialed on return to Blighty, and given dishonorable discharges after a couple years breaking rocks in the Outer Hebrides.” Derbyshire added: “And in any case, there was no evidence of torture or mistreatment in any of the filmed cases I have seen. They look just fine. You can’t fake that. The girl sailor had that headscarf on within hours. From what I’ve heard of torture, even weaker cases can hold out for a few days.”
Don’t you just love these meatheads having the gall to criticize the behavior of the military in circumstances that would make them foul their trousers in the first five seconds? I had expected the criticism’s of Blair,and wrote about it earlier, but he’s a politician and that’s part of the game. To actually blame the sailors for surviving is unbelievable to me.
The rightwing is filled with these flatulent armchair warriors, ready to condemn everyone from intrepid reporters to the professional military for cowardice when they are captured by the enemy and fail to behave in what they consider a properly Rambo-esque manner. They seem to think these people should die rather than be taken alive or some other such puerile nonsense. (I guess it explains their hostility to John McCain — better to be a rich, coke sniffing draft dodger than survive five years in a POW camp.)
These are empty, cruel little boys and girls with serious deficiencies in their characters. They are lost souls, walking this earth without ever learning the meaning of decency, empathy or morality. I suppose this is understandable on some level. The only “lives” they truly value exist only in a womb or a petrie dish. And apparently that’s because these wingnuts relate to them — they are just about as fully human as frozen blastocysts themselves.
Gene Lyons, writing his great column from outside the beltway, sees something that everyone else missed:
Here’s a puzzle: If President Bush really thinks he’s holding all the cards in his impending showdown with congressional Democrats over Iraq funding, why bother with a veto ? On previous occasions when Congress passed laws Bush found irksome, he’s quietly issued “signing statements” declaring in essence that the president is a law unto himself. Statutes Bush doesn’t like, he vows to ignore. He’s done it scores of times.
This issue would seem to be tailor made for such a signing statement, don’t you think? All that stuff about executive power to wage war and commander in chief, blah, blah, blah? As Lyons says:
He did it with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, granting himself the authority to indulge in warrantless wiretaps. He did it again with the 2006 Patriot Act, signing a bill mandating reports to Congress about the FBI’s use of national security letters, but asserting that the president needn’t comply. It’s no coincidence that the Justice Department’s inspector-general later found widespread FBI abuses of privacy rights. So why not just issue another signing statement saying Congress can pass all the resolutions it wants, but U. S. troops won’t be leaving Iraq until the Decider gives the order?
Lyons believes it’s because this is too high profile for him to get away with, but also that some Republicans believe that this is a political winner for them and so are anxious for the “showdown.” They seem to think that the Democrats are on the run. Lyons points out that the data says otherwise:
GOP glee is contradicted not only by 2006 election results, but also by every extant opinion poll. A March 29 Pew survey asked whether “Democratic leaders in Congress are going too far… in challenging George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq.” Exactly 23 percent said “too far,” 30 percent answered “about right” and 40 percent “not far enough.”
The Post’s own poll shows that 56 percent favor pulling U. S. forces out of Iraq “even if that means civil order is not restored there.”
The public’s far ahead of the Beltway opinion elite. This president is no longer trusted. Once people make that fundamental decision, they rarely change their minds. They’ve pretty much had it with Bush, Dick Cheney and their far-fetched World War II analogies. They understand that Iraq’s not a war, it’s a military occupation, and a catastrophically bungled one.
When as relentless a hawk as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger says, as he did recently in Tokyo, that “a ‘military victory’ in the sense of total control over the whole territory, imposed on the entire population, is not possible,” Americans no longer believe that any conceivable Iraqi government is worth the cost in lives and treasure. They recognize the childishness of basing U. S. policy on al-Qa’ida taunts, as Bush and Cheney have done repeatedly.
I understand why the political establishment is convinced it’s incredibly risky for the Democrats to face down the president on this. As they always do, they are fighting the last war (and half a dozen before that.) They remember that the loathesome Newt Gingrich failed when he faced off against Clinton, so the “rule” must be that the congress always loses in a face-off with the president. But as Media Matters illustrated in this article on the subject, they forget that it was the exceedingly unpopular substance of what Gingrich was trying to do (rape medicare) that the public didn’t like:
Regarding the budget issue, The New York Times noted in a November 11, 1995, article:
The most recent NBC News-Wall Street Journal Poll shows a continuing erosion of public support for their [the Republicans’ budget] program. … [I]n October, only 35 percent were supporters and 45 percent were opposed.
Similarly, Newsday noted on November 11, 1995, that a “USA Today/CNN poll released yesterday suggested Americans by wide margins have soured on the Republican agenda, with 60 percent saying he [Clinton] should veto the budget bill and 33 percent saying he should sign it.”
This did not happen in an environment of media friendliness to Bill Clinton, by the way. He was being harrassed and derided at every turn by the Republicans and the press for dozens of disparate small bore, tabloid scandals. The people, for whatever reasons, were able to see through that to the core of the issue, which was that the Republicans were trying to pass a heinous budget and were willing to shut down the government even though they knew the public wasn’t with them. (Gingrich made that mistake over and over again.)
Republicans have the most dangerous habit in the world: they believe their own hype. And it gets them into trouble again and again. Having a president that has been hovering for many, many months at around 30% approval rating is a weakness so huge that it can’t be overcome with a swagger and a sneer. I do not know how this “showdown” will turn out. It’s a very fluid situation and anything can happen. But in this case, as in the earlier case, the Democrats are working on behalf of the majority of Americans and the Republicans are not. That is far more likely to govern the outcome than some miraculous return of the mythic man with the bullhorn.
If Bush really believes what he’s been saying about executive power and the need to fund the troops by the middle of April then he can sign the supplemental and then issue a signing statement that says he can ignore the withdrawal dates. But he won’t. And he won’t issue that signing statement because it would cause a national uproar and possible constitutional crisis, which it would. He’s not doing it because crazy men are telling him that this confrontation is the way to bounce back — the same crazy men that advised him to invade Iraq and told him that he didn’t need to respond to the worst national disaster in American history.
So have at it George. The Democrats will take their chances. Your track record wouldn’t scare a seven year old girl.
Oh my goodness. It looks like our little friend Timothy Griffin, character assassin, dirty trickster and Karl Rove houseboy, may have embellished his resume. In fact, it would appear that Tiny Tim only prosecuted three cases as an assistant before he was installed in Hillary Clinton’s backyard as a Patriot Act midnight appointee to be Arkansas US Attorney.
Little Rock’s interim U.S. Attorney J. Timothy Griffin – already at the center of a firestorm over whether the White House has put politics ahead of prosecutorial integrity – made claims about his experience as an Army lawyer that have been put in doubt by military records. Share this article
The 38-year-old Griffin claims on his official Web site that he prosecuted 40 criminal cases while at Ft. Campbell, where he was stationed from September 2005 to May 2006. But Army authorities say Ft. Campbell’s records show Griffin only serving as assistant trial counsel on three cases, none of which went to trial.
Do read the whole thing. The article outlines the career of a young dirty trickster from his earliest years cutting his teeth on the longest running special counsel investigation ever: the earthshattering Henry Cisneros scandal. You remember that one don’t you?
In March 1995, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno secured the appointment of an Independent Counsel, David Barrett to investigate allegations that Cisneros had lied to FBI investigators during background checks prior to being named Secretary of HUD. He had been asked about payments that he had made to former mistress Linda Medlar, also known as Linda Jones. The affair had been ‘public knowledge’ for a number of years – during the 1992 presidential campaign, U.S. Treasurer Catalina Vasquez Villalpando publicly referred to Cisneros and candidate Clinton as “two skirt-chasers” – but Cisneros lied about the amount of money he had paid to Medlar.
[…]
In September, 1999, Cisneros negotiated a plea agreement, under which he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of lying to the FBI, and was fined $10,000. He did not receive jail-time or probation. He was pardoned by President Bill Clinton in January 2001 ( See: List of people pardoned by Bill Clinton). The independent counsel investigation continued after the pardon focusing on alleged obstruction of justice. In May 2005, Senator Dorgan (D-ND) proposed ending funding for the investigation; negotiators refused to include the provision in a bill funding military operations in Afghanistan. The funding at that point for the investigation totaled $21 million.
When they finally closed up shop, the prosecutors were very upset that the judge overseeing the case would not allow them to air all the dirty suspicions to the public — suspicions they spent 21 million dollars and over ten years investigating and were never able to get an indictment beyond Cisneros’s misdemeanor and his mistress’s unrelated scam. (Compare and contrast that with Patrick Fitzgerald’s ethical position.)
This was the culture of the Clinton scandals, and it’s what we will go back to if the democrat win the presidency and once GOP crooks like Tiny Tim have gotten tanned and rested and finish counting up all the money they looted from the taxpayers during their reign of error.
On a related note: Griffin pretty much embellishes everything, apparently, (which is really rich considering he was one of the prime movers behind the “Gore exaggerates” smear.) He was caught by local Arkansas media saying in one of those e-mails that his high school girlfriend worked in Senator Blanche Lincoln’s office. The woman evidently didn’t remember it that way at all.
Can you hear all the heads exploding on the right this evening? How hard it must be for them to reconcile their knee-jerk assumptions in a world more complicated than their little games of Risk and super-hero comics prepared them for.
You’ll all recall, I’m sure, that the wingnuts have been whining for days about CNN correspondent Michael Ware’s comments about John McCain being in Neverland when he implied that Bagdad was as safe as a summer’s day at Epcot center. And you also know by now that subsequently Drudge got punk’d by somebody who said that Ware heckled McCain at the press conference following his little Bagdad shopping trip with Huckelberry Graham (and 100 soldiers and 5 or six helicopters) over the week-end. The wingnuts went wild:
Here’s an example of the outrage from our friends at Powerline:
Maybe Ware was drunk; that would be consistent with his own description of how he spends his time in Baghdad. But he is an extreme manifestation of an all too common phenomenon–the journalist as advocate rather than neutral observer. One of the many problems with a reporter who becomes an activist, agitating for a particular side of a public issue, is that he loses any hope of objectivity. Having publicly committed himself to the proposition that everything that happens in Iraq is a disaster, having publicly ridiculed those who pointed to optimistic developments, how can anyone trust that Ware’s future reporting is giving us anything like the straight story from Iraq? And what does his conduct say about his employer, CNN? How much confidence can we have in their reporting from Baghdad, or anywhere else?
It’s just terrible that such a cut ‘n run liberal pants wetter is even employed, isn’t it?
After it was revealed that Drudge’s story was a fiction, Powerline posted this:
As Scott notes in his post below, CNN’s Michael Ware has denied heckling Sen. McCain during a press conference (he doesn’t say whether or not he laughed at McCain). However, Ware’s appearance with Soledad O’Brien, as quoted by Scott, is enough to condemn him as unfit to cover the war….
Unfit. One wonders how can the wingnut brigade can account for what he said today?
Malveaux: And as we look at what impact this war funds battle might have on the troops, what effect might it have on the efforts to calm Iraq’s cauldron of violence?
Moments ago, I spoke with CNN’s Michael Ware.
He’s in Baghdad.
He’s covered this war since the very beginning.
Thanks for joining us, Michael.
Now, obviously Congress, as well as the administration, they’re at loggerheads over whether or not the troops should withdraw, whether or not they should withdraw funds, as well.
And we’ve heard from — from the vice president, Cheney, and President Bush, saying look, this emboldens the insurgents here.
Do they pay any attention to this at all? Is that even true?
MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, what I can tell you from the outset, Suzanne, is that, say, for example, by some bizarre political miracle, Congress was able to impose a real time line, a real deadline on the U.S. presence here or on the funding for the war here. Now that absolutely would play completely into the hands of America’s identified enemies, al Qaeda in Iran. That would be handing the entire advantage to them. That’s why that can never really happen.
But in terms of the broader debate, in terms of, you know, taking the temperature of the American mood, of the American public, adhering to what’s going on in Congress, looking at the Congressional elections, absolutely do the insurgents, do al Qaeda and does Iran and its proxy organizations in Iraq pay attention?
Yes, for sure. I mean they know that the most certain way to strike at their enemy is to strike at his support back home. And, indeed, they monitor these things. They know that, you know, what’s happening in D.C. doesn’t really relate to the ground. This is just political artifice.
Nonetheless, it does tell them about the pressure points to apply. And we saw from 2003 the Baathist insurgents saying from the beginning this war will not be won on the battlefield, it will be won on that — pointing to a TV screen.
That’s where this war will be won — Suzanne.
MALVEAUX: Do you think the president, as well as the vice president, then, are actually correct — they’re accurate — when they describe to the American people, saying, look, all of this infighting is weakening our position overseas, specifically in Baghdad?
WARE: Oh, absolutely. I mean it’s very clear — it’s been evident since the mid-term elections that America is in a period of strategic malaise. Essentially, America does not have one rock solid strategy. There’s no one clear way forward to U.S. victory.
There is a lot of infighting. There’s a lot of debate. Now in a pluralist democracy, that’s seen as a healthy thing.
But when you’re fighting a war, you want a clear and concise direction. You want everyone on the same page and you want your enemy to know that you shalt not falter.
Now, that’s precisely the opposite message that America is sending to its opponents here in the region. And, quite frankly, that’s why America’s rivals in the Middle East are becoming so much stronger and the concept of American empire or American presence is becoming so much weaker.
MALVEAUX: Thank you very much, Michael Ware, from Baghdad.
If the wingnuts watched something other than Fox they would know that Michael Ware is not their enemy. In fact, he’s been saying this for months. He even said it in the same report in which he said that McCain is in Neverland, (which I pointed out in my post that very day. )
So, what to make of this? My assumption is that Ware personally buys into the rightwing strategic view of the occupation, but that he reports the facts on the ground straight. Is that fair enough?
I don’t require that reporters hold my political opinions. I just require that they report the facts as best they can without imposing their political spin on the story. Ware seems to be a reporter who does that. I have no complaints about him even though I think his views on strategy are cracked.
The wingnuts, on the other hand, who don’t even like John McCain and mostly want to see him lose, just can’t deal with the idea that any reporter would contradict GOP spin, no matter how thoroughly ridiculous it is. In fact, they go so far as to just make stuff up to counter him.
The wingnuts are confused, I’m sure, if they saw today’s exchange. Here you have a reporter who says (as he’s always said) that the Democratic proposals to withdraw from Iraq will play into the hands of al Qaeda and yet he is the number one enemy of the rightwing that felt the need to jump to the defense of an addled, factually challenged candidate they don’t even like, simply out of reflexive tribal loyalty. It’s quite an illustration of why these people can’t properly govern.
Following up on the Fox All Stars little taunting session of yesterday, Instaputz finds that they are not the only ones. Various wingnuts of all stripes are having quite a hissy fit that the British haven’t declared war on the Iranian navy and all its ships at sea. Why they’re stomping their tiny feet and holding their breath til’ they turn blue, by god!
Atrios flags this nice Grover Norquist quote from Garance Franke-Ruta and, correctly I think, notes that it doesn’t mean the base wants to leave Iraq. It just means they will go along with whatever Bush wants to do. In other words, Bush isn’t being obstinate about Iraq because he’s afraid that his base will desert him. He’s not running, neither is Cheney, and neither one of them appear to particularly care about the fortunes of the Republican party. He’s obstinate about Iraq for purely personal, philosophical reasons that have little to do with politics at this point.
So he is not subject to normal political pressure. As Norquist says, the base will stick with him come hell or high water. (I believe it’s a mistake, however, to think it has anything to do with him personally — the base of the Republican party are authoritarians who will blindly follow their leader no matter who he is, which is why they need to be kept away from the brown shirt section of Macy’s.) This is now a mind game between the Democrats and Bush/Cheney. The Republicans in congress are nearly irrelevant except to the extent a couple of them can help get legislation passed and feed the GOP disarray. All negotiations going forward will necessarily be strategized with that in mind.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Monday that he was backing legislation to cut off almost all money for the war in Iraq by next March, further escalating the Democratic confrontation with President Bush over the 4-year-old conflict.
The move comes after the Senate and House narrowly passed emergency war spending bills last month that set timelines for withdrawing U.S. troops. Neither measure proposed to cut funding for the war.
Reid, who will co-sponsor the bill with outspoken war critic Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.), has never backed legislation that would use congressional control of the budget to stop paying for the war.
He almost certainly will have a difficult time rounding up a majority of votes for a bill that could leave Democrats open to charges of abandoning the troops.
But it means that Reid, who has endorsed increasingly bold steps to end the war, will be able to steer the Senate into another debate that highlights Republican support for the president’s unpopular war.
President Bush, calling Democratic congressional leaders “irresponsible” for debating a war-spending bill containing timelines for withdrawal from Iraq that he is certain to veto, suggested today that they should stop their “political dance” and “get down to business” in the funding of frontline troops.
If the standoff over a $100-billion-plus supplemental budget for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan goes into May, the president said, the Army will have to consider extending the deployments of soldiers already at war while training of new forces and repair of military equipment is jeopardized by a lack of funding.
Counting the 57th day since he delivered his bid for additional war-spending to Congress, the president said during an impromptu Rose Garden press conference that congressional leaders should rush their bill to his desk so that he can promptly veto it and get on with a new spending bill.
“In a time of war, it’s irresponsible for the Democrat leadership in… Congress to delay for months on end while our troops in combat are waiting for the funds,” Bush said.
Washington, DC—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, released the following statement today after comments made by President Bush at the White House:
The President today asked the American people to trust him as he continues to follow the same failed strategy that has drawn our troops further into an intractable civil war. The President’s policies have failed and his escalation endangers our troops and hurts our national security. Neither our troops nor the American people can afford this strategy any longer.
Democrats will send President Bush a bill that gives our troops the resources they need and a strategy in Iraq worthy of their sacrifices. If the President vetoes this bill he will have delayed funding for troops and kept in place his strategy for failure.
Meanwhile, we find out that the “57 day delay” that Junior was squealing about is actually happening at warp speed compared to the last congress which was so busy counting its ill gotten gains, covering up for child predators and trying to stay out of jail that they could hardly take the time to pass a supplemental at all:
During the reign of the Do-Nothing 109th Congress, Bush submitted two major supplemental spending requests. Each request experienced a delay far more than 57 days with hardly a peep of anger from the Commander-In-Chief. Details below:
February 14, 2005: Bush submits $82 billion supplemental bill May 11, 2005: Bush signs the supplemental Total time elapsed: 86 daysFebruary 16, 2006: Bush submits $72 billion supplemental bill June 15, 2006: Bush signs the supplemental Total time elapsed: 119 days
After the 119 day delay, Bush did not say an “irresponsible” Congress had “undercut the troops” or that military families had “paid the price of failure.” Instead, Bush told the conservative-led Congress, “I applaud those Members of Congress who came together in a fiscally responsible way to provide much-needed funds for the War on Terror.”
Many of the June Cleaver Dems are quaking because they see this as a reprise of the government shutdown in 2005 which marked the end of the “Republican Revolution.” But I would submit that Harry Reid is nothing like that arrogant jerk Newt Gingrich, whom the country had come to viscerally loathe by that time. And George W. Bush is definitely no Bill Clinton.
In February, Vice President Cheney traveled to Australia to visit with his close ally Prime Minister John Howard. At the top of Howard’s agenda was a plea to release Australian Gitmo detainee David Hicks. Last Friday, Hicks became the first person to be sentenced by a military commission convened under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, accepting nine months of imprisonment and a gag order that will not allow him to discuss the case for 12 months. Howard lobbied Cheney during the February visit for the trial to “be brought on as soon as humanly possible and with no further delay.” The plea bargain itself was brokered by Susan Crawford, the top military commission official and a former Department of Defense inspector general under then-Secretary of Defense Cheney, without the knowledge or input of the lawyers prosecuting Hicks. The lead prosecutor expressed shock over the light sentence. Given the nature of the deal, suspicions are being raised that the plea agreement may have been an orchestrated gesture by Cheney to benefit Howard in his re-election fight. Howard, who is lagging behind Labor Party rival Kevin Rudd in the polls, faces a tough election contest in less than nine months. Now, legal experts on both continents are sounding alarms.
The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear urgent appeals from two groups of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. The 45 men sought to challenge the constitutionality of a new law stripping federal judges of the authority to hear challenges to the open-ended confinement of foreign citizens held at the American naval base in Cuba and designated as enemy combatants.
The court’s action leaves standing a ruling six weeks ago by the federal appeals court here that upheld the jurisdiction-stripping provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The justices’ refusal to hear the case at this point, before any of the detainees have availed themselves of alternative appeal procedures that their lawyers argue are unconstitutionally truncated, does not foreclose eventual consideration by the court after those appeals have run their course.
The men have all been held at Guantánamo Bay for more than five years, and none has been charged with a crime. They filed petitions for habeas corpus, challenging their continued confinement, before Congress ordered in the 2006 law that all such petitions must be dismissed and no new ones could be accepted for filing.
And you are reminded that the US government has gone stark raving mad. How our diplomats and businessmen and military can hold their heads up when they’re overseas, much less to make a case for American leadership, is beyond me. It must be very painful to have to try to explain just what in God’s name is going on here.
Update: And then there’s this. It seems the US has screwed up another bit of spook work, and this time it’s led to the taking of British sailors as hostages. I have to admit that I was one who thought this speech was one of his all time wierdest, and that’s saying something:
US officials in Washington subsequently claimed that the five Iranian officials they did seize, who have not been seen since, were “suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraq and coalition forces”. This explanation never made much sense. No member of the US-led coalition has been killed in Arbil and there were no Sunni-Arab insurgents or Shia militiamen there.
The raid on Arbil took place within hours of President George Bush making an address to the nation on 10 January in which he claimed: “Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops.” He identified Iran and Syria as America’s main enemies in Iraq though the four-year-old guerrilla war against US-led forces is being conducted by the strongly anti-Iranian Sunni-Arab community. Mr Jafari himself later complained about US allegations. “So far has there been a single Iranian among suicide bombers in the war-battered country?” he asked. “Almost all who involved in the suicide attacks are from Arab countries.”
It seemed strange at the time that the US would so openly flout the authority of the Iraqi President and the head of the KRG simply to raid an Iranian liaison office that was being upgraded to a consulate, though this had not yet happened on 11 January. US officials, who must have been privy to the White House’s new anti-Iranian stance, may have thought that bruised Kurdish pride was a small price to pay if the US could grab such senior Iranian officials.
What an excellent idea. I wonder which secret prison they’ve stashed them in?
Has there ever been a president in history that you so wished didn’t have access to military power? Not only is his every policy exceedingly stupid, he seems to mess them up in ways that make that bad idea seem good by comparison to what he actually does. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Sources tell ABC News that the missing American was a former FBI agent, although they stressed that he was now a private citizen and that his trip to Iran was on “private business” and not associated with official U.S. matters.
State spokesman Sean McCormack said that the United States had been monitoring this case for several weeks and today had sent a message to Iran through diplomatic channels for more information on his whereabouts.
State Department officials say that Iran has yet to respond with any information. Because the United States does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, the message was passed on by the Swiss Embassy in Tehran.
McCormack said the United States had been in touch with the man’s family and employer, who were the first ones to report him missing. A senior State Department official tells ABC News the man was last seen in early March in Iran.
The official says that right now nobody seems to know where he is, but that the United States is asking Iran for any information because that’s where he was last seen. According to one official, there is “no reliable information” that the American is being detained by Iran.
McCormack denied any connection between this case and that of the 15 British sailors and marines being held by Iran for allegedly straying into Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf.
“There is no linkage with this or any ongoing cases that may have been in the news recently,” he told reporters.
Well that’s a relief.
I doubt that certain influential people in the right wing noise machine will agree, however. I suspect they will be screaming to high heaven by the end of the week. They were already up in arms about the British sailors and Tony Blair’s “wimpy” response.
Here’s a little excerpt from the Fox All Stars from last week:
Kondracke: I’ve got to say , Tony Blair is not exactly acting like Margaret Thatcher would act under these circumstances. He’s acting like Jimmy Carter would act. It’s “tip-toe” you know. one idea that I heard today was that britain might threaten to close an Iranian port and if the Iranians said, well, you don’t have any ships around to do that — oh yes, we do, we have submarines and they wouldn’t know where the submarines are and close down a port and ratchet up the problem.
Hume: Does that come from someonw who knew that the Brits might do this?
Kondracke: Uhm. No.
Barnes: Hey they could use American ships. There are two carrier groups in the gulf. And I would think that the thing President Bush would have done would have been to call Tony Blair and say, “Look, these are your people and we’ll back you on whatever your policy is, including a military option if that is what has to take place.”
Hume: Our correspondent James Rosen is reporting that this is a series of steps, that you sort of walk through the UN to try to get this to something that might matter…
Barnes … that’s a strategy of “strong letter to follow.” It’s really not much.
Hume: Is it worth going to the UN at all?
Barnes: Well, you know, they’re “low keying” it …
Hume: Well, that’s a first step
Barnes: I know, but the last step is some resolution sanctioning the Iranians and they’re already defying another one in the nuclear…
Easton: …the British…you’ve gotta be careful with this regime. This reveals a regime that wants to be considered a government. It’s already been marginalized with the sanctions that the UN passed by the security counsel this Saturday. They’re acting like a rogue terrorist outfit. Trotting this woman out. The letter. They’re acting like a terrorist organization. They’re a terrorist organization with a lot of economic power. Already we saw oil prices spike up. There’s analysts saying it could go up as high as 80,90,100 dollars a barrel…
Barnes: … the point she’s making is that they’re making money on this. The longer they keep it going. Look, there’s one thing you could do and it doesn’t mean shooting at anybody and that’s we could block the ships from leaving port with oil. Just block then in the gulf. We could do it. We certainly have the naval power there to do it.
Easton: You have to weigh the cost of doing that. Obviously that would be a huge economic shock.
Barnes: That would be up to the British.
Kondracke: You would think this would offer an opportunity to those in the west — the president, by the way, has not said a word about it, he’s letting Tony Blair handle it — but this would be an opportunity to rally everybody involved as to the nature of this regime. This is totally blackmail. They are behaving utterly irresponsibly on the nuclear front and on this front and this is the time to put the whammy on them.
Hume: How?
Kondracke: By going to the Europeans and saying now is the time for real sanctions. the Russians don’t want to go along but the Europeans, the allies of Tony Blair, could certainly do it.
Hume: You think for the sake of 15 British sailors you could get places like France…?
Kondracke: Right now it’s 15 British soldiers, it could be anybody’s soldiers, it could be anybody’s civilians. This is hostage taking. And it’s illegal by every rule of international law. This is an outlaw rogue regime and it ought to be treated like one.
Barnes: It’s up to the British to decide. Look, you know President Bush would be glad to be condemning the Iranians every day if Tony Blair said it would help. But remember the British, in the first place, when the Iranians snatched the 15 in Iraqi waters, not Iranian waters, there was a British ship that could have fired on the Iranians. They could have stopped it. And they didn’t. And they’ve followed pretty much a wimpy policy since then. And they haven’t gotten anybody back either.
It’s hard to believe that any of those people are over the age of 17, but there you have it. Even if Tony Blair has managed to retain enough sanity not to fall for such sophomoric foreign policy “advice” it is quite worrisome that the spoiled miscreant in the White House might not be able to resist responding to such taunts. He certainly won’t want to face again the harsh reaction he faced from the right over this. The empty codpiece is all he’s got left.
For the second straight year, reports the Washington Post, President Bush has turned down an invitation to participate in a Washington baseball tradition started by President William Howard Taft in 1910.
Mr. Bush was there in 2005, to help celebrate the return of the nation’s pastime to the nation’s capital after a 33-year absence, but last year he left the first-pitch duties to Vice President Cheney. This year, neither man will be there.
The Post says that except for during World Wars I and II, only two other presidents have missed two opening days in a row – Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon.
So why can’t Mr. Bush, an ardent baseball fan and former part owner of the Texas Rangers, make it out to the ballpark this year? A White House spokeswoman says Mr. Bush will be in Washington today, but “it’s not possible with his schedule. … It just wasn’t going to work out.”
With the president’s approval ratings stuck below 40 percent, was Mr. Bush concerned that he might get booed? “No,” the spokeswoman said. “Certainly not.”
Going back to 9/11, Matthews found himself blown away not by Bush’s political or military response but by his ability to throw a baseball. He compared the man to–I kid you not–Ernest Hemingway. “There are some things you can’t fake,” he explained breathlessly. “Either you can throw a strike from sixty feet or you can’t. Either you can rise to the occasion on the mound at Yankee Stadium with 56,000 people watching or you can’t. On Tuesday night, George W. Bush hit the strike zone in the House that Ruth Built…. This is about knowing what to do at the moment you have to do it–and then doing it. It’s about that ‘grace under pressure’ that Hemingway gave as his very definition of courage.”
Oooh baby.
Actually Bush made quite clear his definition of courage many years ago:
“I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes.”
What a man, what a man, what a mighty dumb man.
Be sure to read the whole Alterman piece on Tweety’s man crushes. I’ve been sayin’ it for years. Why just last week he drooled all over Tom Delay and Fred Thompson and even gushed about how much he loved Dick Armey because he was a “Knights of Columbus”(?) kind of guy. This is a very confused fellow.