It’s good to see Zbigniew Brzezinski take on the “war on terror” brand in this op-ed in today’s Washington Post. Questioning this trope is long overdue:
The “war on terror” has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration’s elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America’s psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.
The damage these three words have done — a classic self-inflicted wound — is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare — political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.
But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a “war on terror” did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that “a nation at war” does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being “at war.”
Read it all.
I wish I were confident that we could do anything to change this but just as communism was the basis of the right’s critique of the left in the post WWII world, the GWOT will perform that function for the forseeable future. The warhorse is unfortunately out of the barn. But if anyone has any ideas about how to roll this thing back, I’m listening. It’s going to curse this country for a long, long time.
Following up on Poputonian’s post below, let me just say that this is one case where we are in disagreement. I do not think that MoveOn or any of the other anti-war liberals who voted for the appropriations bill were sell-outs, clubby, “daddy party” or anything else. There is a difference of opinion among some in the grassroots as to whether the strategy was correct, but I do not believe that anyone’s motives were impure and I’m not sure it’s constructive to turn this into a battle over insiders vs outsiders.
Legislative sausage making is always somewhat unnerving to watch, but this one actually went quite well by historic standards. The progressives used all of their clout to get as strong a bill as possible and quite a few of the Blue Dogs made the hard choice to vote with the party. The Democratic party is a coalition not a monolith and the fact that they were able to get a bill with virtually everyone on board is a testament to the party’s strength not its weakness.
It’s very, very difficult for the congress to stop a war. The system is designed to allow the president to run them once the people have signed off and abruptly pulling the plug on funding is a very dicey move. Therefore, defunding is a process — members of any coalition that leads on such difficult legislation always tend to come together incrementally through various means. We all wish it could happen quickly, but there is simply no precedent for it and no simple means of making that happen.
There is a precedent, however, for some very wily legislative maneuvering to hasten the end of an unpopular war. Here’s an excerpt from Rick Perlstein’s recent article in Salon on how the congress stepped up in 1970:
Presidents, arrogant men, lie. And yet the media, loath to undermine the authority of the commander in chief, trusts them. Today’s congressional war critics have to be ready for that. They have to do what Congress immediately did next, in 1970: It grasped the nettle, at the president’s moment of maximum vulnerability, and turned public opinion radically against the war, and threw the president far, far back on his heels.
Immediately after the Cambodian invasion Senate doves rolled out three coordinated bills. (Each had bipartisan sponsorship; those were different days.) John Sherman Cooper, R-Ken., and Frank Church, D-Idaho, proposed banning funds for extending the war into Cambodia and Laos. Another bipartisan coalition drafted a repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the congressional authorization for war that had passed 98 to 2 in 1964. George McGovern, D-S.D., and Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., were in charge of the granddaddy of them all: an amendment requiring the president to either go to Congress for a declaration of war or end the war, by Dec. 31, 1970. Walter Shapiro wrote that a “skittish” Congress made sure its antiwar legislation had “loopholes” to permit the president to take action to protect U.S. troops in the field” — which means no genuine congressional exit mandate at all. But McGovern-Hatfield had no such “loopholes.” (Of course, McGovern Hatfield didn’t pass, and thus wasn’t subject to the arduous political negotiating process that might have added them.) It was four sentences long, and said: Without a declaration of war, Congress would appropriate no money for Vietnam other than “to pay costs relating to the withdrawal of all U.S. forces, to the termination of United States military operations … to the arrangement for exchanges of prisoners of war,” and to “food and other non-military supplies and services” for the Vietnamese.
Radical stuff. Far more radical than today’s timid congressional critics are interested in going. But what today’s timid congressmen must understand is that the dare paid off handsomely. With McGovern-Hatfield holding down the left flank, the moderate-seeming Cooper-Church passed out of the Foreign Relations Committee almost immediately. Was the president on the defensive? And how. His people rushed out a substitute “to make clear that the Senate wants us out of Cambodia as soon as possible.” Two of the most hawkish and powerful Southern Democrats, Fritz Hollings and Eugene Talmadge, announced they were sick of handing blank checks to the president. A tide had turned, decisively. By the time Cooper-Church passed the Senate overwhelmingly on June 30, the troops were gone from Cambodia — an experiment in expanding the war that the president didn’t dare repeat. Congress stopped that surge. It did it by striking fast — and hard — when the iron was hottest. In so doing, it moved the ball of public opinion very far down the field. By August, a strong plurality of Americans supported the McGovern-Hatfield “end the war” bill, 44 to 35 percent.
[…]
McGovern-Hatfield did not pass in 1970. But the campaign for it helped make 1971 President Nixon’s worst political year (until, that is, Congress’ bold action starting in 1973 to investigate Watergate). By that January, 73 percent of Americans supported the reintroduced McGovern-Hatfield amendment. John Stennis, D-Miss., Nixon’s most important congressional supporter, now announced he “totally rejected the concept … that the President has certain powers as Commander in Chief which enable him to extensively commit major forces to combat without Congressional consent.” In April the six leading Democratic presidential contenders went on TV and, one by one, called for the president to set a date for withdrawal. (One of them, future neoconservative hero Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, differed only in that he said Nixon should not announce the date publicly.)
This was a marvelous offensive move: It threw the responsibility for the war where the commander in chief claimed it belonged — with himself — and framed subsequent congressional attempts to set a date a reaction to presidential inaction and the carnage it brought. When the second McGovern-Hatfield amendment went down 55-42 in June, it once more established a left flank — allowing Majority Leader Mike Mansfield to pass a softer amendment to require withdrawal nine months after all American prisoners of war were released. Senate doves, having dared the fight, were doing quite well in this game of inches.
This is hideous sausage making, but it’s the way our system works. I would suggest that the proposed Lee Amendment (the bill that was discussed ad nauseum, but never actually presented) performed the same function as the “McGovern-Hatfield” Amendment in this negotiation by holding down the left flank and allowing the “moderate” bill to emerge. That’s the necessary first step.
The polls before the vote showed that the public was losing faith in the Democrats on Iraq. Had the first vote out of the House been a story of Democratic disarray and defeat (the Fox dominated media’s favorite meme), they may never have gotten another chance. The headlines that came out of this vote moves the ball forward and gives the Dems the opportunity to show the general public that they can work together to get this thing done.
Having said all that, let me just emphasize again that a strong left flank is tremendously important to making that happen. Without the grassroots pressure and the “out of Iraq” caucus publicly holding the line on the vote and then offering to free certain members who were willing to vote for the bill at the last moment, it wouldn’t have passed — and the liberals wouldn’t have collected the chits they need for the next round (or received a standing ovation from their caucus.) This is what a functioning political coalition that is working together looks like. It isn’t pretty, but it’s how things get done.
I absolutely believe that the party must have heavy liberal ballast or the right will take us over the cliff — and I know that the grassroots are absolutely necessary to ending this war.
In this fascinating article Scott McLemee discusses the necessity for “bottom-up” participation:
During the first administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (or so goes a story now making the rounds of American progressives), the president met with a group of citizens who urged him to seize the moment. Surely it was time for serious reforms: The Depression made it impossible to continue with business as usual. Just what measures the visitors to the Oval Office proposed — well, that is not clear, at least from the versions I have heard. Perhaps they wanted laws to regulate banking, or to protect the right of labor unions to organize, or to provide income help for the aged. Maybe all of the above.
The president listened with interest and evident sympathy. As the meeting drew to a close, Roosevelt thanked his guests, expressing agreement with all they had suggested. “So now,” he told them on their way out the door, “go out there and make me do it.”
This is less a historical narrative, strictly speaking, than an edifying tale. Its lesson is simple. Even with wise and trustworthy leadership holding power — perhaps especially then — you must be ready to apply pressure from below. (The moral here is not especially partisan, by the way. One can easily imagine conservative activists spurring one another on with more or less the same story, with Ronald Reagan assuming the star role.)
Read the whole thing. He goes on to discuss a recent study about the anti-war movement that illuminates a political space called “the party in the streets”:
The idea that mass movements might constitute a fourth sector of the party – with the Christian Right, for example, being a component of the Republican “party in the street” – might seem self-evident in some ways. But not so for political scientists, it seems. “We met a lot of resistance to the idea of the ‘party in the street,’” Heaney told me … Speaking of the antiwar protests as manifestations of the Democratic “party in the street” will also meet resistance from many activists. (A catchphrase of the hard left is that the Democratic Party is “the graveyard of mass movements.”) And according to their own surveys, Heaney and Rojas find that just over one fifth of demonstrators see themselves as clearly outside its ranks.
But that still leaves the majority of antiwar activists as either identifying themselves as Democrats or at least willing to vote for the party. “Like it or not,” write Heaney and Rojas, “their moral and political struggles are within or against the Democratic Party; it actions and inactions construct opportunities for and barriers to the achievement of their issue-specific policy goals.” (Though Heaney and Rojas don’t quote Richard Hofstadter, their analysis implicitly accepts the historian’s famous aphorism that American third parties “are like bees: they sting once and die.”)
“We do not claim,” they take care to note, “that the party in the street has equal standing with the party in government, the party in the electorate, or the party as organization. We are not asserting that the formal party organization is coordinating these activities. The party in the street lacks the stability possessed by other parts of the party because it is not supported by enduring institutions. Furthermore, it is small relative to other parts of the party and at times may be virtually nonexistent.”
As Heaney elaborated when we met, a great deal of the organizing work of the antiwar “party” is conducted by e-mail – a situation that makes it much easier for groups with a small staff to reach a large audience. But that also makes for somewhat shallow or episodic involvement in the movement on the part of many participants. An important area for study by political scientists might be the relationship between the emerging zone of activist organizations and the informal networks of campaign consultants, lobbyists, financial contributors, and activists” shaping the agenda of other sectors of political parties. “If they remain well organized and attract enthusiastic young activists,” write Rojas and Heaney, “then the mainstream political party is unable to ignore them for long.”
Yes indeed. I am not one to discount the idealism and energy of the party in the street. People need to feel that social connection to their politics and sometimes that’s what it takes to affect big change. I have always believed that the Code-Pink, Cindy Sheehan, ANSWER folks are an important part of the equation. Indeed, as the study points out, most of them are either members in good standing of the Democratic coalition or are willing to throw in their lot with them, just as the Christian Coalition does on the right. They deserve respect.
But so do the legislators and the “insiders” of various stripes who are laboring toward the same goal. Everyone has their job to do and in the case of this very difficult vote, I feel that the party in government, the party in the electorate, the party in organization and the party in the streets performed admirably. I don’t know when this war will end, but I do know that Democrats of all the “parties”, working together (as difficult as that may be) are the only ones who will do it.
…but just who the hell does Joan Vennochi think she is?
But as a political observer, I also find it hard to read “Saving Graces” without noticing the frenetic new life she and her husband invented after their son’s death.
John Edwards ran for the US Senate, then for president, and then for vice president as John Kerry’s running mate in 2004.
Elizabeth Edwards had two more children, a daughter and son, who are now 8 and 6. She took on the daunting task of new motherhood in her 50s; they also have a daughter, Cate, 24.
Elizabeth Edwards also immersed herself in every aspect of her husband’s political campaigns, all the time thinking how much Wade would have relished the adventure. The Edwardses are building an extravagant 28,200-square-foot dream house, west of Chapel Hill, N.C.
This is not a judgment on the way this family chose to deal with their loss. Still, the memoir reveals a desperate effort, especially on Elizabeth Edwards’s part, to fill her life with anything — speeches, travel, lofty goals for America — that will fill the void left by her son’s death. She never will; no mother could. But she will keep on running until someone makes her slow down.
That is where John Edwards could step in, or should. But, for whatever the reason — her strong will, his strong ambition — the two keep racing forward.
This is one of the characteristics I viscerally loathe in certain members the human species — sanctimonious, busy-body, judgmentalism coming from people who have neither the insight, the perspective or the sensitivity to render any kind of opinion about other people’s personal lives and marriages. And yet they do it, with great confidence in their own ability to see inside other people’s most personal relationships.
In this case a smug, hostile columnist has written an uninformed and hurtful psychological profile of John and Elizabeth Edwards personalities, allegedly based upon the book “Saving Graces” — which I read and saw in a completely different light. I thought it illustrated an admirable courage and willingness to embrace life after tragedy. (Which just goes to show you that the “lessons” in such a book are in the eye of the beholder, doesn’t it?) This awful woman read it and came away believing there is something neurotic and troubled in Mrs Edwards’ behavior and has decided to throw that out into the public discourse via her syndicated column in a major newspaper as if her judgment about their marriage and psychological makeup is useful for something other than juicy fodder for a boozy lunch at Chez Bitchée.
Now, I’m sure she will immediately tell us all that we should care about her shallow “diagnosis” because it illuminates some aspect of the Edwards’ characters. That’s always the first refuge of the scandalmonger caught in flagrante and trying to spin her way out of being seen as a voyeur. But nobody can know what really goes on inside somebody else’s marriage. Even counsellors and psychologists who spend huge amounts of time delving into it with the partners have a hard time correctly diagnosing the problems. Marriage is the most complicated relationship in human experience and to think you can correctly analyze one from afar is a convenient delusion. Let’s face it, analyzing other people’s realtionships inevitably reveals more about you than them.
Back when the Clinton marriage was under the microscope for years on end, we were told by every tattler with a microphone that it was terribly important that we know all the dirty details of their lives because it allowed us to assess the president’s ability to do his job. That was nonsense. Our current president has what appears to be a very stable, traditional marriage (which everyone treated as if it meant they’d been ordained by god himself) and it said absolutely nothing about his ability to run this country. The awful results of using that political “metric” are clear for all of us to see.
I love to gossip as much as the next person. It’s part of being human to want to feel superior to others and experience all kinds of delicious schaudenfreude. But when it comes to politics and policy this gossipy “character” nonsense is a destructive distraction that has become a useless proxy for figuring out what citizens want their government to do and whether they think certain people are capable of doing it. Dissecting politicians’ marriages will not get them there and it’s time for the chattering classes to get off their well-fed behinds and start writing interesting stories that might actually educate and inform the citizens of this country. People can get plenty of nasty gossip elsewhere to fulfill their need to feel superior and virtuous. National political opinion columns should have a slightly higher calling.
*And can I just say how dreadfully inappropriate and cruel it is for Venocchi to write this column just days after Edwards announced she is fighting for her life with stage four cancer? What possibly made her think this was necessary?
Looks like Eli’s been stealing from the Daddy Party playbook, practicing message control to influence perceptions and reach desired outcomes:
The Congress that was elected to end the war just voted to fund the war. Congresswoman Barbara Lee was not permitted to offer for a vote her amendment, which would have funded a withdrawal instead of the war. Groups that supported Lee’s plan and opposed Pelosi’s included United for Peace and Justice, Progressive Democrats of America, US Labor Against the War, After Downing Street, Democrats.com, Peace Action, Code Pink, Democracy Rising, True Majority, Gold Star Families for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Backbone Campaign, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Voters for Peace, Veterans for Peace, the Green Party, and disgruntled former members of MoveOn.org. … MoveOn polled its membership without including the Lee alternative, offering a choice of only Pelosi’s plan or nothing. Amazingly, Eli Pariser of MoveOn has admitted that the reason MoveOn did this was because they knew that their members would favor the Lee amendment. The following is from a report on Salon.com:
“Pariser defends his e-mail. He says that the group already knew that its members would have supported Barbara Lee’s plan, but whatever MoveOn did, it would never have passed. What MoveOn didn’t know was what its members thought about the Pelosi plan. ‘The choice that we needed to make as an organization was, Do we support this thing or not?’ Pariser says. ‘And so I think the e-mail was a very fair presentation of the choice that was actually in front of the organization.'”
Pariser is simultaneously admitting that he knew his members favored the Lee amendment to quickly end the war by defunding it, and claiming that he did not know whether his members preferred Pelosi’s weak anti-war gestures to nothing at all. This makes no sense. Are we supposed to imagine that Pariser honestly believed there was some chance that his membership would read his praise for Pelosi’s bill and then vote for nothing at all instead of supporting it? Of course not. The point of the poll was to allow MoveOn to announce that its membership supported Pelosi rather than Lee. Yet Pariser admits that he did not offer MoveOn’s membership a choice of Lee’s plan because he knew they would vote for it.
Actually, he doesn’t say that he knows Lee’s plan would have won out over Pelosi’s. But he certainly does not know that it wouldn’t have, and making that baseless and to my mind very unlikely claim was the only possible point of having done the poll. The rationale that Pariser offers is absurd. The poll could only have had one result. It served to give cover to progressive Democrats in Congress who gave their support to Pelosi after having intended to vote no on Pelosi’s bill unless it included Lee’s amendment. … Building a serious Out of Iraq caucus is key to getting us to another position that I suspect the majority of MoveOn members favor: the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. Of course, MoveOn has not polled its members on impeachment, but it won’t do so apparently until impeachment proceedings are well underway and a successful vote for impeachment can be safely predicted. (Though at that point, what will be the point?)
But, how can we be sure that Pariser viewed his poll of MoveOn members on Pelosi’s bill not as a contest between Pelosi and nothing, but as a contest between Pelosi and Lee? Well, because Pariser told the news journal the Politico just that:
“In the poll, MoveOn.org gave its members a choice of supporting, opposing or being ‘not sure’ of the plan proposed by the Democratic leadership, according to an e-mail sent to members Sunday by MoveOn.org official Eli Pariser. It did not mention a more aggressive withdrawal proposal backed by Woolsey, Waters and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). Pariser said MoveOn.org had held out as long as possible before backing the leadership proposal. ‘We were basically declining to take a position as long as we could to strengthen the hand of the progressives. We did the poll at the last time we felt we could have an impact on the final vote.’ He said he would support the progressive proposal if it came to a vote. ‘We’ll encourage people to vote for that and for the supplemental,’ he said. ‘We are trying to end the war. That’s the mandate.’
So, Pariser held off as long as possible to run a rigged poll and announce support for Pelosi’s bill, in order not to actively work against the Lee Amendment. But working to support the Lee Amendment never crossed his mind, and he avoided asking his members about it because he knew they would favor it. But the progressives were not at that point pushing for a pretentious and meaningless vote on Lee followed by backing for Pelosi. They were pushing for a Yes vote on Lee and a No vote on Pelosi unless it included Lee.
If Pariser thought he knew so much about what was possible and what was not, why didn’t he lay that case out to MoveOn’s membership? Why didn’t he offer the choice of backing Lee’s position but make his argument that it would be futile? Did he not trust MoveOn members to make the right decision? That seems strange given the lines that can be found at the bottom of a MoveOn Email:
“Support our member-driven organization: MoveOn.org Political Action is entirely funded by our 3.2 million members. We have no corporate contributors, no foundation grants, no money from unions. Our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. If you’d like to support our work, you can give now at….”
Clearly MoveOn needs to work on distinguishing “member driven” from “member funded.”
Shame on Eli, who it appears is still trying to defend the maneuver.
Pelosi’s plan, as I see it, extends America’s submit or die foreign policy for another year, until the eve of the 2008 elections. At that point, election fears will drive whatever sucky compromise happens next.
Meanwhile, at the Democratic party level, even though Bush admits to criminal conduct (bypassing the FISA court), and has committed, but not admitted to, other crimes, fidelity to the Constitution takes a back seat to sublimation. Tolerance in this case is equivalent to criminal empowerment and forever mucks up the political process. This is seen every day with the bluster and bravado of a President who, despite the devastation in his wake, feels absolutely no weakness whatsoever. Worse yet, with an empowered criminal in the top spot, it is impossible to correctly adjudicate the complex mess in Iraq. Impossible.
Likewise, the tactic of compromising with a criminal President risks serious fracture in the Democratic party. The separation is between the rational wing that refuses to sit by quietly while a criminal runs the country, and the club wing, who goes easy with one of its own.America: still an insider’s game.
I have a confession to make: I started watching “24” this season (after ignoring the first five years, I caved in to the hype)-and I’m hooked (against my better instincts). Let me qualify that. I’m “hooked” on a purely visceral level (There’s always a car chase and stuff usually blows up real good-it’s a Guy Thing, I have no defense). In spite of the cartoonish right-wing histrionics exploiting the public’s fears about domestic terrorism, and the silly Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker dynamic with Jack Bauer and his father, I’m finding the show quite diverting (Just don’t ask me any questions about it five minutes later-all I can usually recall is Kiefer Sutherland barking urgently into his cell phone while everybody back at HQ stares purposefully into their PC monitors. Oh yeah, and then someone usually gets tortured and the odd L.A. suburb disappears in a mushroom cloud.)
When it comes to “ticking timebomb” wingnut nightmare scenarios, however, “24” cannot hold a candle to John Frankenheimer’s 1963 political potboiler, Seven Days in May The director was on a roll at the time; he had delivered The Manchurian Candidatejust one year prior. “Seven Days in May” eschewed the far-fetched plot of the former film for a more frighteningly believable speculation on how an American coup d’etat might occur.
Kirk Douglas stars as Colonel “Jiggs” Casey, an aide to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Scott (Burt Lancaster). The hawkish, right wing Scott is an outspoken critic of the President (Fredric March), who has created a polarized national climate after facilitating a nuclear treaty with the Russians. General Scott has become a bit of a rock star on the Right. He delivers politicized speeches at public rallies while methodically building the support of fellow joint chiefs and conservative congressmen.
Colonel Casey admires the General, but believes a dedicated military man should remain politically neutral; he is intuitively unsettled by Scott’s increasingly brazen public stance. When the stalwart Casey begins to suspect that an upcoming military “exercise” could be something more much more sinister, he feels duty-bound to inform the President. What follows makes for a nail-biting political thriller of the highest order.
Frankenheimer infuses his film with a sense of dread and suspense without firing one shot in anger (the creators of “24” should be so lucky). The cast includes Martin Balsam, Ava Gardner and Edmond O’Brien. Rod Serling’s taut, intelligent screenplay (remember those?) is adapted from the book by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II.
When I re-screened for this review, I was floored by the prescience of one particular piece of dialogue. In a pivotal scene toward the end of the film, the President confronts General Scott with the evidence of his sedition. After the general tells the President he deserves to be removed from office without due process, the President responds: “You want to defend the United States of America-then defend it with the tools it supplies you with…its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General-from a ballot box. You don’t steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned.” Remind you of anyone?
The Baghdad Security Plan is going so well that Iraqis displaced by sectarian violence are flocking back to their homes in Baghdad, so a number of officials are telling us. The only problem with that: it’s probably not true. General David Petraeus, in an interview with the BBC on March 18, said hundreds and even up to a thousand Iraqis had already returned, although he warned the plan is still in its early stages–a hopeful sign. On March 20, a Pentagon official, Major General Michael Barbero, gave a briefing in Washington during which that statistic morphed into hundreds of Iraqi families, which at a conservative multiplier of six to a family, bumps that number well above a thousand people. Meanwhile, Brig. General Qassim Atta al-Moussawi, the Iraqi spokesman for the Baghdad Security Plan, confidently asserted that 2,000 families had returned.
Good luck finding them all. Tufan Abdu-Wahab, head of the Baghdad section in the Ministry of Migration and Displaced People, said in an interview that only a handful of Iraqi families had returned, and most of those were Shias returning to Shia districts, rather than to formerly mixed communities. Officials have a pretty good handle on this, he said, because the government is offering a bounty of 250,000 dinars (about $192) to each family that returns to its home, and they also pay a small benefit to families who are displaced, so people both fleeing and returning have a big incentive to register. So as of the end of February, 35,000 families–210,000 people approximately–had registered as displaced, he said. Of those, Abdu-Wahab says that only about 1 percent have come back–which would be 350 families in the first month of the security plan–but many of those have only returned to check on their belongings and leave again. Meanwhile, families continue to flee at the rate of 25 a day, according to the ministry’s registration statistics, easily outstripping any returns.
I guess they figure nobody can check, which proves how out of touch they really are. Just because the American reconstruction effort couldn’t keep track of the billions it was handing out doesn’t mean the Iraqis can’t.
In doing some research on the US Attorney scandal this morning I came across this interesting diary from DKos that sparked my interest. It’s about a guy named Ron Nehring, the new head of the California Republican Party:
The architect of the plan to fire Carol Lam is Ron Nehring.
“Ron Nehring …is an important piece on Norquist’s chessboard,” states a report titled Target San Diego: The Right Wing Assault on Urban Democracy and Smart Government. Prepared for the Center on Policy Initiatives, a progressive think tank, the report reveals how the National GOP has targeted San Diego as a “battleground” and model for an alleged agenda of radically cutting government funding, permanently weakening organized labor, and aggressively moving to privatize public services.
[…]
Nehring once served as director of development and public affairs for Ridenour’s Scaife and Bradley funded National Center for Public Policy,[Abramoff used the center to channel money to Delay] and worked for its Project 21, an initiative to find right-wing African American voices to criticize the leadership of civil rights organizations. According to Ridenour, Nehring was “the guy who put the African-American leadership group Project 21 on the map.
One of Project 21’s leading voices is the controversial Ohio Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, under whose election oversight many allege the African American community was largely disenfranchised and unable to cast their vote in the 2004 election cycle.
Nehring, as a past president of the College Republicans is in a very special club of GOP operators who specialize in corruption, election stealing and dirty tricks.
Nehring was a staunch supporter of Randy “Duke” Cunningham right up to the Duke’s guilty plea…It is interesting that not a single local reporter is questioning Nehring’s connections with Norquist, ATR and, ultimately, Jack Abramoff. Maybe it is time to connect one more dot in the mess that is the Republican congress of corruption.
No kidding.
The report by CPI indicates that San Diego was a petri dish for the next generation of crooked GOP political dominance and that it was of special interest to Rove and other DC strategists. I don’t know that “localizing” in and of itself is particularly wrong — the Dems have their 50 state strategy, after all — but if there was a concerted federal prosecutorial effort to target local Democrats to that end then there is a big problem. And it’s hard to read those prosecution statistics any other way. (The Kos diarist says, by the way, that Carol Lam played ball on the prosecution of Democrats front but was ousted because she failed to prove her bonafides with Cunningham.)
San Diego does seem to be the nexus of a lot of very high level GOP interest and influence. It is the home of massive defense spending and the corruption that goes with it. Very important GOP appropriations poohbahs hail from there and close environs. And it turns out that a member of the college Republican mafia led by Rove, Norquist, Reed and Abramoff, was running the party down there — and he’s just been elevated to an extremely important party post prior to a presidential election.
There are dots lying around all over the place looking for connection. If the state were run by something other than a cartoon robot, it might even be possible to go at this from that direction, but I doubt we’ll see it.
For those of you who are interested in getting into the weeds on this one, thesetwo diaries may be good places to start.
*On an interesting sidenote, one of Nehring’s first moves (read: Rove’s) was to refuse to open the California GOP primary to independents which is something that McCain was lobbying for intensively.
Supporting Dan Froomkin’s Rovian Theory, we have this:
In a Dec. 3, 2006, e-mail released Friday night, Scott Jennings, one of presidential adviser Karl Rove’s aides, asked Sampson if he had a list of “all vacant, or about-to-be vacant, US Attorney slots.” Jennings’ request came on a Sunday, so Sampson offered to send it to him the next day.
Jennings, a political operative, had earlier passed along complaints from Republican Party activists about U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, who was fired from his job in New Mexico. Some Republicans were angry that Iglesias hadn’t been more aggressive in investigating Democrats.
So, the question is, “who’s on Rove’s replacement list?”
Remember the exploding Firestone tires? This is worse (from Lambert via Drum), in the sense that the cancellation of health insurance policies of pregnant women and the chronically ill was done illegally and intentionally through an organized program. There are no spectacular car crashes, but as Lambert points out, you can be sure that people have died. Babies too. Who it is that gets extinguished is random, because (as with the exploding tires) it’s difficult to predict when the fatal blows will occur.
But they will happen.
The state report said the legal standard for cancellation was high because it put plan members at great risk — financially and medically — and because it left physicians and hospitals holding the bag for services rendered in good faith and often with prior authorization from the insurer.
“Rescission is the harshest possible punishment,” Department of Managed Health Care Director Cindy Ehnes said. “It leaves providers unpaid and it leaves the enrollee uninsurable.”
As Lambert notes, Blue Cross of California’s corporate charter should be rescinded … permanently.
Wish I knew who sat on the Board of the company that owns them.
McClatchy finally gets to Rove’s speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association that I’ve been writing about for some time:
The administration’s interest in replacing some U.S. attorneys, in voter fraud and in voting rights has sometimes had a political tinge, however.
Bush has acknowledged hearing complaints from Republicans about some U.S. attorneys’ “lack of vigorous prosecution of election fraud cases,” and administration e-mails have shown that Rove and other White House officials were involved in the dismissals and in the choice of an aide to Rove to replace one of them. Nonetheless, Bush has refused to permit congressional investigators to question Rove and others under oath.
Last April, while the Justice Department and the White House were planning the firings, Rove gave a speech in Washington to the Republican National Lawyers Association. He ticked off 11 states that he said could be pivotal in 2008. Bush has appointed new U.S. attorneys in nine of them since 2005: Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico. U.S. attorneys in the latter four were among those fired.
Rove thanked the audience for “all that you are doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the integrity of the ballot is protected.” He added, “A lot in American politics is up for grabs.”
Taken together, legal experts and other critics say, the replacement of the U.S. attorneys and the changes in Justice Department voting rights policies suggest that the Bush administration may have been using its law enforcement powers for partisan political purposes.
[…]
Rove talked about the Northwest in his speech last spring to the Republican lawyers, and voiced concern about the trend toward mail-in ballots and online voting. He also questioned the legitimacy of voter rolls in Philadelphia and Milwaukee.
One audience member asked Rove whether he’d “thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive.”
“Yes, it’s an interesting idea,” Rove responded.
(There’s much more to this very interesting story at the link.)
I speculated last fall that Rove quite cannily planned to use the electoral integrity meme that had grown up in liberal circles since the 2000 elections and turn it back on the Democrats. He’d certainly had experience with similar strategies.
Newspaper coverage on November 9, the morning after the election, focused on the Republican Fob James’s upset of the Democratic Governor Jim Folsom. But another drama was rapidly unfolding. In the race for chief justice, which had been neck and neck the evening before, Hooper awoke to discover himself trailing by 698 votes. Throughout the day ballots trickled in from remote corners of the state, until at last an unofficial tally showed that Rove’s client had lost—by 304 votes. Hornsby’s campaign declared victory.
Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. “Karl called the next morning,” says a former Rove staffer. “He said, ‘We came real close. You guys did a great job. But now we really need to rally around Perry Hooper. We’ve got a real good shot at this, but we need to win over the people of Alabama.'” Rove explained how this was to be done. “Our role was to try to keep people motivated about Perry Hooper’s election,” the staffer continued, “and then to undermine the other side’s support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral—all of that.” (Rove did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.)
The campaign quickly obtained a restraining order to preserve the ballots. Then the tactical battle began. Rather than focus on a handful of Republican counties that might yield extra votes, Rove dispatched campaign staffers and hired investigators to every county to observe the counting and turn up evidence of fraud. In one county a probate judge was discovered to have erroneously excluded 100 votes for Hooper. Voting machines in two others had failed to count all the returns. Mindful of public opinion, according to staffers, the campaign spread tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking themselves in their offices and refusing to admit campaign workers; votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots.
As the recount progressed, the margin continued to narrow. Three days after the election Hooper held a press conference to drive home the idea that the election was being stolen. He declared, “We have endured lies in this campaign, but I’ll be damned if I will accept outright thievery.” The recount stretched on, and Hooper’s campaign continued to chip away at Hornsby’s lead. By November 21 one tally had it at nine votes.
The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby’s campaign fought to include approximately 2,000 late-arriving ballots that had been excluded because they weren’t notarized or witnessed, as required by law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign brought forward a man who claimed that the absentee ballot of his son, overseas in the military, was in danger of being disallowed. The matter wound up in court. “The last marching order we had from Karl,” says a former employee, “was ‘Make sure you continue to talk this up. The only way we’re going to be successful is if the Alabama public continues to care about it.'”
Initially, things looked grim for Hooper. A circuit-court judge ruled that the absentee ballots should be counted, reasoning that voters’ intent was the issue, and that by merely signing them, those who had cast them had “substantially complied” with the law. Hooper’s lawyers appealed to a federal court. By Thanksgiving his campaign believed he was ahead—but also believed that the disputed absentee ballots, from heavily Democratic counties, would cost him the election. The campaign went so far as to sue every probate judge, circuit clerk, and sheriff in the state, alleging discrimination. Hooper continued to hold rallies throughout it all. On his behalf the business community bought ads in newspapers across the state that said, “They steal elections they don’t like.” Public opinion began tilting toward him.
The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day both candidates appeared for the ceremonies. By March the all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered that the absentee ballots be counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal Circuit Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering continued for months. In mid-October a federal appeals-court judge finally ruled that the ballots could not be counted, and ordered the secretary of state to certify Hooper as the winner—only to have Hornsby’s legal team appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed the case. By now the recount had dragged on for almost a year.
When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of his Montgomery home as he described the denouement of Karl Rove’s closest race. “On the afternoon of October the nineteenth,” Hooper recalled, “I was in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet Williams in my wife’s garden, and she hollered out the back door, ‘Your secretary just called—the Supreme Court just made a ruling that you’re the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court!'” In the final tally he had prevailed by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. “That Karl Rove was a very impressive fellow,” he said.
I don’t know why people can’t wrap their minds around the fact that one of Karl Rove’s specialties is stealing elections, but there are piles and piles of evidence that it is. (You’d think 2000 would have been enough to seal his reputation…)
I do not make this argument to suggest that Rove wasn’t trying to employ the Justice Department for voter suppression efforts. That’s been going on for decades. But I believe that Rove was also taking it to the next level, preparing to use the electoral mistrust caused by the stolen election in 2000 and the shennanigans in Ohio in 2004 to gin up a national GOP campaign to complain of Democratic voter fraud — and bring into question all close elections in which Democrats prevailed.
Rove understands that these issues are as much about politics and public perception as anything else. That example from Alabama tells you how he subtly influences the legal system through public pressure and ultimately brings it down to sheer political muscle. He either uses the public’s existing predjudices or creates new ones to make the people see elections as not a matter of accepted law and practices but rather a function of the political strength of the political machine — much like the old Big City machines, but on a national level.
Karl Rove meddling with any kind of voter integrity project, pro or con, should set off deafening alarms. Cheating and stealing and dirty tricks are what he does. The minute his name was brought into this scandal, a full and thorough investigation was required.
The director was on a roll at the time; he had delivered 
just one year prior. “Seven Days in May” eschewed the far-fetched plot of the former film for a more frighteningly believable speculation on how an American coup d’etat might occur.