Glenn Greenwald writes one of his throughly satisfying lawyerly exposés of one of the most loathesome DC creatures of recent years, the hysterical anti-muslim, anti-arab racist, Martin Peretz. It’s long overdue.
But Glenn’s focus on Peretz’s anti-arab diatribes unfortunately gives short shrift to his more homegrown bigotry. He has a little problem with yer african americans too. He’s quite clever about it, but it’s very similar to the proudly colorblind wingnuts who extoll the virtues of “good” blacks like Condi and Colin while unleashing standard racist vitriol toward “bad” negroes:
… as Michael Kazin also rightly points out, Obama is an idiosyncratic African American, although Mike doesn’t use the word “idiosyncratic.”
In any case, he is not a four-flusher and hustler like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who also ran for president. But he is more than just not like these men. He is a formidable candidate because he is a formidable person. More than Mark Warner or Tom Vilsack. And why shouldn’t we at last have a black president? Given America’s history, that’s an honorable ambition for a party and for a country.
Why shouldn’t we have a black president, indeed? What a bold and broadminded epiphany. Why, they’re just like everybody else!
Or are they? He uses the word “idiosyncratic” to describe someone who isn’t, you know, unpleasantly “Afro-American” a term he uses unself-consciously in this post:
Does Ned Lamont really want Al Sharpton’s support? The reverend has lost just about all his fans in the Afro-American population, as anyone could tell by how he fared in the 2004 Democratic primary. I think he got fewer votes and fewer delegates than Kucinich, which is a great achievement. In any case, black Americans–having produced solid and achieving and aspiring politicians like Harold Ford Jr., Barack Obama and Deval Patrick (for all my carping at him)–have no reason to stick with Sharpton on anything. He has been a racist hooligan from the beginning of his career to, well, yesterday. What did he do yesterday? He accused Joe Lieberman of “race-baiting.”
Heavens!
Peretz does this over and over again when the issue is race. He cannot discuss the issue without contrasting what he considers to be good african-americans with “four-flushing hustlers” like Jackson and Sharpton. (He missed an opportunity to use the word “pimp”. Somebody send him a wingnut style-guide.)
It’s standard modern racism. They don’t just come out and say it. They don’t even know they are doing it. They really, truly do like some black people. The good ones. You know, the ones who don’t act …. black. And they have convinced themselves that today there is also a large silent majority of these “good” “afro-Americans” who also hate Jesse Jackson and who, in fact, believe exactly as Marty Peretz does. Which is why he isn’t a racist. He and teh African-Americans are brothers under their creamy, not too black, skins.
I’m a fan of young man Ford. He’s religious, he is not embarrassed that he’s for a strong defense, and he’s a friend of Al Gore–which means a lot to me. He is also more in touch with the sentiments of black constituents than either Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, in the new tradition of Barack Obama and Corey Booker, who also are very appealing to whites. This is the fresh black leadership in the Democratic Party, and a blessing they are.
Again with the good negroes and the bad negroes. This time, he also asserts that these “idiosyncratic” african americans are more appealing to whites than the bad negroes. No word on why. And how he knows that they are more appealing to the black constituency than jackson or Sharpton is also a mystery. I guess he found that out by hanging out in black churches and hip-hop clubs with Condi and Mike Bloomberg.
Of course, this “idiosyncracy” of Obama and these others has a down side. The rightwing talk sludge slingers are now saying he isn’t entitled to be considered “black” because he isn’t descended from African slaves. They are calling him a “halfrican” when they aren’t also tagging him as a muslim terrorist. (Don’t tell Peretz, his head will explode.)
I’m reminded of many recent conversations in which I’m lectured about how the Republicans are now the party of equality because Bush put Condi and Colin in the cabinet. (Of course, there have been blacks in the cabinet before, but no matter.) What always comes out is how these fine Republican African Americans don’t look and sound so much like those really black ones.
They all feel very proud of themselves and constantly pat themselves on the back for their new-found color-blindness. The mexicans and the arabs, on the other hand, are just a bunch of animals, but then everybody knows that.
In a bold new advance in technical awardology the annual Kippies were hosted this year on IM, by none other than the “godfather” of instant messages himself: Congressman Mark Foley. If you want to see history as it was made, read the transcript. Foley is very, shall we say….excited to be there.
*And I’m personally thrilled that my favorite columnist of all time, Richard Cohen, won this year’s Purple Teardrop With Clutched Pearls Cluster. Made me all verklempt.
Today’s anti-war rally in Washington brings to mind Ché Pasa’s comment from last week:
The idea that physical protest doesn’t matter or is ineffective is absurd on its face, and yet this idea is nearly endemic to much of high profile lefty blogistan, a matter of faith more than evidence. I’ve been in several set-to’s with blogish proprietors over the issue, most recently over the question of whether Cindy Sheehan’s protests are of any relevance or consequence, and shouldn’t she and her tactics be shunned by the “serious” left? What complete garbage, but she does have a tendency to embarrass the Democratic Powers That Be, and that’s her chief offense these days. But Cindy was down the street protesting last night with hundreds of others who marched and chanted and carried signs and –horrors — disrupted traffic at rush hour, making the tired old point that this war must be brought to an END, yawn. See, nobody likes her, so why doesn’t she just stay home? And all this marching and chanting and carrying signs has no appeal or effect any more, so we should all just stop it, hook in to the New Wired World, and zone out.
Perhaps that’s part of the problem. Back in the Old Days, it wasn’t really possible to hook in to the protest movement unless you were physically there in person. Now you can get a dose of protest vigor just by turning on your computer and visiting a site or two, where you’ll find excellent rants and virtual marches out the wahzoo.
There. Done. Protest complete. Off to work, school or whatever.
Last year I posted an excerpt about Paul Revere’s role in the revolutionary movement, a different ‘old days’ than what Ché Pasa was speaking of. In that piece, I suggested today’s community of blogs are similar to the local associations that comprised part of the revolutionary movement infrastructure. Note the blend of meetings and action in historian Fischer’s words:
The structure of Boston’s revolutionary movement, and Paul Revere’s place within it, were very different from recent secondary accounts. Many historians have suggested that this movement was a tightly organized, hierarchical organization, controlled by Samuel Adams and a few other dominant figures. These same interpretations commonly represent Revere as a minor figure who served his social superiors mainly as a messenger.
A very different pattern emerges from the following comparison of seven groups: the Masonic lodge that met at the Green Dragon Tavern; the Loyal Nine, which was the nucleus of the Sons of Liberty; the North Caucus that met at the Salutation Tavern; the Long Room Club in Dassett Alley; the Boston Committee of Correspondence; the men who are known to have participated in the Boston Tea Party; and Whig leaders on a Tory Enemies List.
A total of 255 men were in one or more of these seven groups. Nobody appeared on all seven lists, or even as many as six. Two men, and only two, were in five groups; they were Joseph Warren and Paul Revere, who were unique in the breadth of their associations.
Other multiple memberships were as follows. Five men (2.0%) appeared in four groups each … Seven men (2.7%) turned up on three lists … Twenty-seven individuals (10.6%) were on two lists … The great majority, 211 of 255 (82.7%), appeared only on a single list. Altogether, 94.1% were in only one or two groups.
This evidence strongly indicates that the revolutionary movement in Boston was more open and pluralist than scholars have believed. It was not a unitary organization, but a loose alliance of many overlapping groups. That structure gave Paul Revere and Joseph Warren a special importance, which came from the multiplicity and range of their alliances.
None of this is meant to deny the preeminence of other men in different roles. Samuel Adams was especially important in managing the Town Meeting, and the machinery of local government, and was much in the public eye. Otis was among its most impassioned orators. John Adams was the penman of the Revolution. John Hancock was its “milch cow,” as a Tory described him. But Revere and Warren moved in more circles than any others. This gave them their special roles as the linchpins of the revolutionary movement — its communicators, coordinators, and organizers of collective effort in the cause of freedom. … In sum, the more we learn about the range and variety of political associations in Boston, the more open, complex and pluralist the revolutionary movement appears, and the more important (and significant) Paul Revere’s role becomes. He was not the dominant or controlling figure. Nobody was in that position. The openness and diversity of the movement were the source of his importance.
So where the Boston radicals were meeting in taverns to plan their Tea Party, today we have virtual tools to enhance our associations. All told, I see more similarities than differences in the social and political structures of past and present. On this latter point, note how Fischer (writing in 1994) describes the opposing systems of intelligence for the British and the Americans, and see how it parallels today’s wingnut organization, where information flows down from the omniscient White House inner circle, and also how it parallels today’s liberal sphere that lives up (unwittingly, no doubt) to its legacy of disorder in the interest of intellectual strength.
Each side recognized the critical importance of intelligence, and both went busily about that vital task. But they did so in different ways. The British system was created and controlled from the top down. It centered very much on General Gage himself. The gathering of information commonly began with questions from the commander in chief. The lines of inquiry reached outward like tentacles from his headquarters in Province House. This structure proved a source of strength in some respects, and weakness in others. The considerable resources of the Royal government could be concentrated on a single problem. But when the commander in chief asked all the questions, he was often told answers that he wished to hear. Worse, the questions that he did not think to ask were never answered at all.
The American system of intelligence was organized in the opposite way, from the bottom up. Self-appointed groups such as Paul Revere’s voluntary association of Boston mechanics gathered information on their own initiative. Other individuals in many towns did the same. These efforts were coordinated through an open, disorderly network of congresses and committees, but no central authority controlled this activity in Massachusetts – not the Provincial Congress or Committee of Safety, not the Boston Committee of Correspondence or any small junto of powerful leaders; not Sam Adams or John Hancock, not even the indefatigable Doctor Warren, and certainly not Paul Revere. The revolutionary movement in New England had many leaders, but no commander. Nobody was truly in charge. This was a source of weakness in some ways. They wrangled incessantly in congresses, conventions, committees and town meetings. But by those clumsy processes, many autonomous New England minds were enlisted in a common effort – a source of energy, initiative, and intellectual strength for this popular movement.
The blogs and the rest of the virtual community are vital, but I agree with Ché Pasa that from time to time we need a tea party of some form to bring it all together, to physically demonstrate the movement and spread awareness of America’s dissent from within. In keeping with that notion, I think the lefty blogistan should up its emphasis on the importance of rallies and protests.
In the meanwhile, here’s to hoping today’s march on Washington makes the news.
Incidentally, Josh, you must have noticed that Bush’s very expansive claims of executive authority are being made by the first President in our history to delegate to his Vice President anything close to the authority over policy and personnel that he has ceded to Cheney. Back in 1980 the GOP Convention audience was kept amused by an effort to establish a “co-Presidency” with Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, who’d have been given extensive authority if elected. Reagan decided then that it was a stupid idea; he wasn’t running to be half a President. And now we have a President weak enough to make the “co-Presidency” a reality.
I was thinking along similar lines earlier today:
These people are proving that a president can get away with anything (but an illicit blowjob) if he’s willing to push the envelope. And that is exactly what Dick Cheney set out to do when he chose himself to be the defacto president back in 2000.
It truly is amazing that a vice president has not only wielded such power but has also stated openly that his goal in office was to expand executive authority:
In July 1987, then-Representative Dick Cheney, the top Republican on the committee investigating the Iran-contra scandal, turned on his hearing room microphone and delivered, in his characteristically measured tone, a revolutionary claim.
President Reagan and his top aides, he asserted, were free to ignore a 1982 law at the center of the scandal. Known as the Boland Amendment, it banned US assistance to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua.
“I personally do not believe the Boland Amendment applied to the president, nor to his immediate staff,” Cheney said.
Most of Cheney’s colleagues did not share his vision of a presidency empowered to bypass US laws governing foreign policy. The committee issued a scathing, bipartisan report accusing White House officials of “disdain for the law.”
Cheney refused to sign it. Instead, he commissioned his own report declaring that the real lawbreakers were his fellow lawmakers, because the Constitution “does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power.”
The Iran-contra scandal was not the first time the future vice president articulated a philosophy of unfettered executive power — nor would it be the last. The Constitution empowers Congress to pass laws regulating the executive branch, but over the course of his career, Cheney came to believe that the modern world is too dangerous and complex for a president’s hands to be tied. He embraced a belief that presidents have vast “inherent” powers, not spelled out in the Constitution, that allow them to defy Congress.
Cheney bypassed acts of Congress as defense secretary in the first Bush administration. And his office has been the driving force behind the current administration’s hoarding of secrets, its efforts to impose greater political control over career officials, and its defiance of a law requiring the government to obtain warrants when wiretapping Americans. Cheney’s staff has also been behind President Bush’s record number of signing statements asserting his right to disregard laws.
A close look at key moments in Cheney’s career — from his political apprenticeship in the Nixon and Ford administrations to his decade in Congress and his tenure as secretary of defense under the first President Bush — suggests that the newly empowered Democrats in Congress should not expect the White House to cooperate when they demand classified information or attempt to exert oversight in areas such as domestic surveillance or the treatment of terrorism suspects.
That’s a practical problem for the US government and an abstract philosophical point — until you realize that the most powerful vice president in history, who could never have been elected president in his own right, pretty much appointed himself vice president to a man he knew was an imbecile. How very convenient.
This reminds of this essay by Michael Lind* from ’03 that I’ve always found fascinating:
How did the neocon defense intellectuals – a small group at odds with most of the U.S. foreign policy elite, Republican as well as Democratic – manage to capture the Bush administration? Few supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared that the second Bush would be like the first – a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf War and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process – and that his administration, again like his father’s, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. They supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination.
Then they had a stroke of luck – Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hard-line allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney’s right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.
Never forget that John McCain’s BFF in the 2000 election was Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard braintrust. They used to call it “National Greatness” conservatism or “benevolent hagemony” but they’re really just obfuscatory terms for American imperialism or world domination.
These are the people who Dick Cheney, the accidental vice president, brought into the government. They did it during the truncated transition and while Junior was off on a partridge hunt with Brent Scowcroft and Prince Bandar and James Baker was busy in Florida:
Once in Spain, Bush, Knight and the executives were joined by Norman Schwarzkopf and proceeded to a private estate in Pinos Altos, about 60 kilometers from Madrid, to shoot red-legged partridges, the fastest game birds in the world. Bush impressed the hunting party as a fine wing shot and a gentleman — the 76-year-old former president was not above offering to clean mud off the boots of his fellow hunters. Throughout the trip, Bush kept in touch with the election developments via e-mail. By Saturday, Nov. 11, a machine recount had shrunk his son’s lead in Florida to a minuscule 327 votes. “I kind of wish I was in the U.S. so I could help prevent the Democrats from working their mischief,” he told another hunter in his party.
On Tuesday, November 14, Bush and Schwarzkopf arrived in England, where Brent Scowcroft joined them and they continued their game hunting on Bandar’s estate. They kept a close eye on the zigs and zags of the recount battle. As a power play to demonstrate his confidence to the media, the Democratic Party, and the American populace, George W. Bush announced the members of his White House transition team even before the Florida vote-count battle was over.
I’m not sure what it all means except that Cheney is an undemocratic, power-mad freak, which we already knew. But as I watching what’s emerging from the Libby Trail, it’s more and more apparent that his dark influence on the empty codpiece was …. no accident.
*Let us all add Lind to the list of intellectuals who were right about the war and are ignored by the media. He is not only an intellectual, he works at a centrist think tank, he used to be a Republican and he is from Texas. What more do they want? This piece was written in April of 2003, right after the invasion and it was right on.
But no, let’s listen to all the usual suspects be wrong over and over again.
No, No, No. St. John doesn’t get to punt on the McCain Doctrine by asking his “supporters” what they think. Nor does he get to differentiate himself from the most unpopular politician in the country at this late date by calling for “benchmarks” and pretending that it makes him a maverick. It was only two months ago that he was saying that such things would be a “recipe for disaster.”
He’s trying his damnedest to get out of the corner into which he’s painted himself, but he can’t. His entire strategy for 08 was to run against both the hippy Dems who wanted to cut-n-run and Bush who failed to follow his advice to send in more troops. He took that tack for good reasons. The conventional wisdom for years was that Bush would not escalate the war.
Just before the election last fall, it was all over the papers that the Army said it was on the verge of collapse:
In fact, there are no more troops to send to Iraq.
That is the unmistakable message of an Army briefing making the rounds in Washington. According to in-house assessments, fully two-thirds of the Army’s operating force, both active and reserve, is now reporting in as “unready”—that is, they lack the equipment, people, or training they need to execute their assigned missions. Not a single one of the Army’s Brigade Combat Teams—its core fighting units—currently in the United States is ready to deploy. In short, the Army has no strategic reserve to speak of. The other key U.S. fighting force in Iraq, the Marine Corps, is also hurting, with much of its equipment badly in need of repair or replacement.
It seemed like a free shot and a good way for a cynical opportunist with a maverick reputation to position himself. But on October 27th, 2006 he made a fatal mistake — he got specific:
Reporters asked him to elaborate on his statement last week in Iowa that more combat troops are needed in Iraq to quell a “classic insurgency.”
“Another 20,000 troops in Iraq, but that means expanding the Army and the Marine Corps,” he said
Bush called his bluff and John Edwards very astutely immediately began calling it The McCain Escalation Doctrine.
He’s since tried to distance himself from Bush by saying that he really meant 30,000 or that Bush wasn’t honest about the situation on the ground or that we need benchmarks.
But Bush got this plan from him, not the other way around. It’s his baby.
I hope that we can keep the press focused on this. They love them some St. John and are always willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. No.
And speaking of focus, this doesn’t help allay all that talk about him being in ill health.
President George W. Bush met privately with House Republicans on Friday and agreed to an alternative resolution to set “benchmarks” for progress in his plan to send more troops to Iraq, party officials said.
I’ve always thought that Bush was the classic “Dad who is always mad” guy, the O’Reilly know-it-all, ordering everyone around, expecting his underlings to do what they’re told, no questions asked even though they know he’s completely full of shit. I expect that he’s not the first president to have this attitude — it is the refuge of slightly stupid privileged middle aged white guys the world over — but I think he’s the first to use this line with the American people and the congress.
James Wolcott nailed it years ago in his piece for Vanity Fair called “The Bush Bunch” :
Over Christmas in 2000, on the eve of W’s joining his father and brother Jeb in Florida for a fishing trip (a bit of R&R after the protracted recount battle), Jenna suffered stomach troubles and was rushed to the hospital. She required an emergency appendectomy. Her mother slept at the hospital; her father wasn’t present for the surgery and, never one to miss a vacation, didn’t let it delay his exit. Gerhart picks up the rest of the story in THE PERFECT WIFE:
“The next day, he went on vacation to Florida just as he had planned. As he boarded the plane, reporters inquired about Jenna’s condition. ‘Maybe she’ll be able to join us in Florida,’ the president-elect said. ‘If not, she can clean her room.’ The reporters stared at him, stunned. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ one of those present later said. ‘First of all, I’m a father, and I cannot imagine a scenario in which my daughter would have major surgery and I would just leave on vacation. And then he just seemed so snarly about it, like he was pissed at her.'”
Why would a father be “pissed” at his daughter for falling ill? An emergency appendectomy isn’t some little sniffle. Notice how, despite his reputed ease with strong women, Bush can’t resist the domestic stereotype when the safely catch comes off his mouth. When the usually punctual Karen Hughes is late for a meeting after being stuck in traffic (she recounts in TEN MINUTES FROM NORMAL), Bush, “a man who hates to wait,” greets her by asking, “Did you have fun shopping?” Laura he has sweeping the porch back in Crawford like some pioneer woman. And Jenna he sentences to stay home during the family vacation and clean her room, as if she were being punished.
The American people must understand when I said that we need to be patient, that I meant it. And we’re going to be there for a while. I don’t know the exact moment when we leave, David, but it’s not until the mission is complete. The world must know that this administration will not blink in the face of danger and will not tire when it comes to completing the missions that we said we would do. The world will learn that when the United States is harmed, we will follow through. The world will see that when we put a coalition together that says “Join us,” I mean it. And when I ask others to participate, I mean it.
That sounds remarkably like that pissed Dad who’s telling his sick daughter to clean her room, doesn’t it? Except he’s talking to the American people and all of her allies around the world.
The latest creepy angry Dad routine is today’s quote:
President Bush has challenged Congress not to prematurely condemn his plan for adding more troops to Iraq, telling them that he is “the decision-maker.”
Mad Dad doesn’t like to be questioned. And he expects results:
In an interview, Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered the president’s minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of 21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new “way forward” for U.S. forces in Iraq.
“He’s tried this two times — it’s failed twice,” the California Democrat said. “I asked him at the White House, ‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it’s going to work?’ And he said, ‘Because I told them it had to.’ “
Asked if the president had elaborated, she added that he simply said, ” ‘I told them that they had to.’ That was the end of it. That’s the way it is.”
Now go sweep the porch, Nancy. And then make me a peanut butter sandwich. Or else.
So, the big news emerging from the Libby trial so far is that Dick Cheney was so obsessively Queeglike about Joseph Wilson that he was even writing out talking points for his little dog Scooter to yap at reporters.
As predicted, this trial has also been fascinating for its insight into the relationship between the White House and the press corps. Cathie Martin, the VP press liason who testified yesterday said some things that had Dana Milbank at the WaPoall a twitter:
Flashed on the courtroom computer screens were her notes from 2004 about how Cheney could respond to allegations that the Bush administration had played fast and loose with evidence of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions. Option 1: “MTP-VP,” she wrote, then listed the pros and cons of a vice presidential appearance on the Sunday show. Under “pro,” she wrote: “control message.”
“I suggested we put the vice president on ‘Meet the Press,’ which was a tactic we often used,” Martin testified. “It’s our best format.”
No kidding.
And let’s not forget that Russert was up to his neck in the story and failed over and over again to tell his viewers that and repeatedly put on a little acting performance, pretending surprise and sometimes even referring to himself in the third person. No wonder Cheney was thrilled to use him as his favorite propaganda outlet.
Here’s a fun little trip down MTP memory lane from September of 2003, where Cheney engages in his usual lies and delusions, but also pretends that he doesn’t really know anything about Wilson.
We now know, of course, that by the time he gave this interview, he had been neurotically pre-occupied with Wilson for months and knew every detail of how the Niger trip went down.
MR. RUSSERT: Now, Ambassador Joe Wilson, a year before that, was sent over by the CIA because you raised the question about uranium from Africa. He says he came back from Niger and said that, in fact, he could not find any documentation that, in fact, Niger had sent uranium to Iraq or engaged in that activity and reported it back to the proper channels. Were you briefed on his findings in February, March of 2002?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I don’t know Joe Wilson. I’ve never met Joe Wilson. A question had arisen. I’d heard a report that the Iraqis had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa, Niger in particular. I get a daily brief on my own each day before I meet with the president to go through the intel. And I ask lots of question. One of the questions I asked at that particular time about this, I said, “What do we know about this?” They take the question. He came back within a day or two and said, “This is all we know. There’s a lot we don’t know,” end of statement. And Joe Wilson—I don’t who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back.
Uhm … Lie.
I guess the intriguing thing, Tim, on the whole thing, this question of whether or not the Iraqis were trying to acquire uranium in Africa. In the British report, this week, the Committee of the British Parliament, which just spent 90 days investigating all of this, revalidated their British claim that Saddam was, in fact, trying to acquire uranium in Africa. What was in the State of the Union speech and what was in the original British White papers. So there may be difference of opinion there. I don’t know what the truth is on the ground with respect to that, but I guess—like I say, I don’t know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn’t judge him. I have no idea who hired him and it never came…
MR. RUSSERT: The CIA did.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Who in the CIA, I don’t know.
Liar.
And here comes some world class bullshit:
MR. RUSSERT: If they were wrong, Mr. Vice President, shouldn’t we have a wholesale investigation into the intelligence failure that they predicted…
VICE PRES. CHENEY: What failure?
MR. RUSSERT: That Saddam had biological, chemical and is developing a nuclear program.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: My guess is in the end, they’ll be proven right, Tim. On the intelligence business, first of all, it’s intelligence. There are judgments involved in all of this. But we’ve got, I think, some very able people in the intelligence business that review the material here. This was a crucial subject. It was extensively covered for years. We’re very good at it. As I say, the British just revalidated their claim. So I’m not sure what the argument is about here. I think in the final analysis, we will find that the Iraqis did have a robust program.
How do you explain why Saddam Hussein, if he had no program, wouldn’t come clean and say, “I haven’t got a program. Come look”? Then he would have sanctions lifted. He’d earned $100 billion more in oil revenue over the last several years. He’d still be in power. The reason he didn’t was because obviously he couldn’t comply and wouldn’t comply with the U.N. resolutions demanding that he give up his WMD. The Security Council by a 15-to-nothing vote a year ago found him still in violation of those U.N. Security Council resolutions. A lot of the reporting isn’t U.S. reporting. It’s U.N. reporting on the supplies and stocks of VX and nerve agent and anthrax and so forth that he’s never accounted for.
So I say I’m not willing at all at this point to buy the proposition that somehow Saddam Hussein was innocent and he had no WMD and some guy out at the CIA, because I called him, cooked up a report saying he did.
That’s crazy. That makes no sense. It bears no resemblance to reality whatsoever. And in terms of asking questions, you bet I do. I’ve seen in times past when there’s been faulty intelligence, because they don’t always get it right; I think, for example, of having missed the downfall of the Soviet Union. And so I ask a lot of questions based on my years of experience in this business, but that’s what I get paid to do.
They got away with this nonsense for years. He said in the same breath that the intelligence services are “very good” at what they do, implying that it was ridiculous to question the intelligence,then says they don’t always get it right. He claims that Saddam wouldn’t say “come look” — except he did, they found nothing, and the US invaded anyway. Nobody mentions that in April 2001, it was reported that Cheney’s energy task force had been in favor of lifting the sanctions and that Halliburton had done business in Iraq when he was president of the company.
I can sort of understand it. The lies were so spectacularly dense and overwhelming, building one upon the other, that I’m not sure even a skeptical and courageous press corps could have unraveled them in real time. So total was the mendacity, spin and fantasy that it had a sort of paralyzing effect — in our soundbite world they seemed impossible to effectively rebut, particularly when the Republicans lashed out like rabid dogs against anyone who even tried. They had done an excellent job of co-opting a large number of the opinion makers who could have made a difference before they invaded, (many of whom are still making excuses.) It was a very thorough snow job.
This is the real problem. It’s been demonstrated that if an executive is willing to operate without integrity or adherence to democratic norms, he truly can get away with anything. And as we are seeing today with this escalation in Iraq and provocation of Iran, he doesn’t even have to be demagogic or popular. He’s the decider, he can do whatever he wants. He only answers to “history” (when he’ll conveniently be dead) not the people.
These people are proving that a president can get away with anything (but an illicit blowjob) if he’s willing to push the envelope. And that is exactly what Dick Cheney set out to do when he chose himself to be the defacto president back in 2000.
The Libby trial may be the only chance we have to see any of this aired in a controlled environment where both sides operate by the same rules, time is not determined by the need to advertise erection cures and people are bound to tell the truth. I’m looking forward to seeing what unfolds over the next few weeks.
And here’s hoping that Libby really does call Vice President Queeg to the stand.
Update:Jane Hamsher is back blogging and getting ready to see Dick Cheney on the witness stand rolling those ball bearings between his sweaty little palms. Welcome back!
I’m sure that most of you have read about the dust-up between the blogger Spocko and ABC/Disney wherein Disney shut down his blog for posting pieces of air pollution they call talk radio at ABC’s KSFO and alerting advertisers. It caused quite a stir. Disney was very angry that someone would use their clips without obtaining permission despite the fact that it was non-commercial and fell easily under fair use doctrine.
In a move that could rekindle a heated political debate, Fox News said Thursday that it planned to broadcast footage from ABC’s controversial miniseries “The Path to 9/11” that was edited out of the docudrama amid criticism that it inaccurately portrayed the Clinton administration’s response to the terrorism threat.
The outtakes, scheduled to air Sunday, depict then-national security advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger refusing to approve a CIA request to attack Osama bin Laden, an event that Berger and the Sept. 11 commission say did not occur.
The final version of the movie that aired on ABC in early September still included the scene, but it had been toned down after protests from top Democrats.
Several minutes were culled, including an exchange in which Berger is depicted hanging up on then-CIA Director George J. Tenet, according to a Fox News producer who has seen both versions.
The previously unaired footage is scheduled to be broadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday on “Hannity’s America,” a new show with Sean Hannity, one of the cable news network’s most popular hosts.
Fox News obtained the outtakes by taping a public talk that Cyrus Nowrasteh, writer and producer of “The Path to 9/11,” gave to a World Affairs Council chapter last Friday at Cal State Channel Islands. Nowrasteh discussed making the docudrama and played several minutes edited out of the movie.
Is Disney really going to allow its rival Fox to make money from their mini-series without properly licensing that footage? Really?
I would hate to think their lawyers believe it’s in the company’s best interest to send cease and desist letters to internet critics of their far right radio hosts for violating copyright and will do nothing when rightwing conservative Sean Hannity does exactly the same thing for commercial purposes on a rival network.
That might make somebody think that Disney has an ongoing, demonstrable bias toward right wing conservative politics, even to its shareholders’ detriment. That can’t be right.
Ezra and others have noticed that Barack Obama’s soaring rhetoric about health care is not backed up by any kind of bold proposal:
“In possibly the most telling section,” I wrote, “he gives a great riff on health care, which manages to totally inspire while not actually saying anything sweeping or controversial. Watching it, you’d swear he just promised the stars, the sky, and universal insurance, when he really just committed to electronic records.”
[..]
Viewed more cynically, this is consensus-driven rhetoric. As folks involved in health policy well know, universal health care as an abstraction polls through the roof. Actual plans, policies, and specifics tend to meet with more resistance. Mirroring that relationship, Obama is advocating universal health care the idea while mentioning nothing but high-polling, broadly-agreed miscellanea. That’s not to say that he couldn’t step forward tomorrow morning with a brilliant, bold idea for moving this debate forward. But he’s not there yet, and he is, contrary to what some protest, offering policy ideas. His specifics are electronic records, health care for kids, and more discussion. No one will disagree with those policies, but then, there’s a reason for that.
I have no idea what Obama’s intentions are, but I disagree that there is no utility in engaging in sweeping, inspirational rhetoric on this without a lot of specific proposals to back it up.
I agree that as an abstraction health care is easy. Why not? But it’s also important to understand that the issue has not yet reached one of those transcendent places that makes massive change seem imperative and that’s where some soaring Obama rhetoric is very useful.
On this January morning of two thousand and seven, more than sixty years after President Truman first issued the call for national health insurance, we find ourselves in the midst of an historic moment on health care. From Maine to California, from business to labor, from Democrats to Republicans, the emergence of new and bold proposals from across the spectrum has effectively ended the debate over whether or not we should have universal health care in this country.
This is important. Universal Health Care, the concept, is far from settled, but Obama is just seizing the issue and saying that it is. And he’s doing it with inspirational rhetoric that makes you feel as if it’s an inexorable tide of progress, daring those who would try to stop it.
We are a long way from any plans and frankly I don’t particularly want to hear about them yet in detail. I just want to know if the Democrats are prepared to say that they believe in universal health care. If they don’t believe that then I want to hear why. That’s the bright line that Obama is drawing and I think it’s pretty smart.
Rick Perlstein has two very important articles running right now that everyone should read. I would really love it if our Democratic representatives, especially, would read them, so if any of you have some extra time on your hands and would like to forward the articles to your Democratic congressperson and Senators, you would be doing a public service.
Democrats do not understand their own history and because of that they are allowing certain GOP myths to govern their decisions about Iraq. Perlstein’s articles vividly describe how the history of Vietnam has been distorted, how it was done, who did it and why the Democrats find themselves battling fake ghosts instead of riding on the backs of real ones.
First Perlstein writes in Salon about how the congress brought the Vietnam war to an end and exactly how they did it. He outlines several important lessons:
1: “Forthright questioning of a mistaken war by prominent legislators can utterly transform the public debate, pushing it in directions no one thought it was prepared to go.”
2: “Congress horning in on war powers scares the bejesus out of presidents.”
3: “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 heel.”
And perhaps the most important lesson in this moment:
Grass-roots activism works. The Democratic presidential front-runner back then, Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, afraid of being branded a radical, had originally proposed instead a nonbinding sense-of-the-Senate resolution recommending “effort” toward the withdrawal of American forces within 18 months. He found himself caught up in a swarm: the greatest popular lobbying campaign ever. Haverford College, which was not atypical, saw 90 percent of its student body and 57 percent of its faculty come to Washington to demonstrate for McGovern-Hatfield. A half-hour TV special in which congressmen argued for the bill was underwritten by 60,000 separate 50-cent contributions. The proposal received the largest volume of mail in Senate history. Muskie withdrew his own bill, and became the 19th cosponsor of McGovern-Hatfield.
Muskie’s sense-of-the-Senate resolution was the wrong thing to do — just as Democratic Sens. Carl Levin and Joe Biden’s sense-of-the-Senate resolution, cosponsored with Republican Chuck Hagel, is the wrong thing to do. Congressional doves, by uniting around a strong offensive — eschewing triangulation — weakened the president. 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.
They also, incidentally, did extremely well in the 1972 election.
The current presidential hopeful club is afraid because they think they are going to be “McGovern’s.” But they also forget that the reason Nixon resigned was because his massive game of dirty tricks in the 1972 election were exposed in Watergate. His 1972 landslide was hardly won on the merits — a fact that was proven by the fact that the Democrats even gained a Senate seat in that election. McGovern was the wrong presidential candidate (and let’s not forget, Nixon’s personal choice, which is why he destroyed Muskie) but the anti-war agenda was a winner — practically, morally and politically.
Perlstein continues:
We can likewise expect a similarly nasty presidential campaign against whomever the Democrats nominate in 2008. But we can also assume that he or she won’t be as naive and unqualified to win as McGovern; one hopes the days in which liberals fantasized that the electorate would react to the meanness of Republicans by reflexively embracing the nicest Democrat are well and truly past. What we also should anticipate, as well, is the possibility that the Republicans will run as Nixon did in 1968 and 1972: as the more trustworthy guarantor of peace. Ten days before the 1972 election, Henry Kissinger went on TV to announce, “It is obvious that a war that has been raging for 10 years is drawing to a conclusion … We believe peace is at hand.” McGovern-Hatfield having ultimately failed twice, its supporters were never able to claim credit for ending the war. That ceded the ground to Nixon, who was able to claim the credit for himself instead. He never would have been able to do that if he had been forced to veto legislation to end the war
.
I highlighted that line above because it’s the single thing I fear the most. I don’t believe that after all these years of vicious conservatism that most liberal activists are that naive. But I do believe that all this beltway babble about bipartisanship is designed to make the media and then the electorate believe that the only way a Democrat can win is by being the most passionless bowl of lukewarm water. (Listen to our very good friend Frank Luntz’s advice — he’s always got our best interests at heart, right?)
And I worry greatly that as a result the man people will look to to lead us out of the quagmire will be the war hero John McCain. He can be McGovern without the hippies, Nixon without the slush fund, a hawk who supported the war but by 2008 will have reluctantly decided that he needs to step in to end it. With a secret plan, no doubt.
One has to wonder how we got to the point where even anti-war politicians who were around at the time don’t know about their own successes, or if they do, cannot acknowledge them. That’s where Perlstein’s other article comes comes in.
It seems that the myth of the congress “abandoning the troops” and thus leading to American defeat came from our bestest bipartisan hero, Gerry Ford:
There is a popular fantasy that liberals in Congress, somehow, at least metaphorically, abandoned American troops in Vietnam–and that, if liberals had their way, they’d do it again in Iraq. This notion was nurtured in the bosom of popular culture–as when Sylvester Stallone, in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), sent back to the jungles of Vietnam by his old commander, plaintively asks, “Sir, do we get to win this time?” But it survives even in elite discourse–as when Nixon’s former defense secretary, Melvin Laird, wrote–in a Foreign Affairs article called “Iraq: learning the lessons of vietnam”–that “the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973.”
[…]
Early in 1974, Nixon requested a support package for the South Vietnamese that included $474 million in emergency military aid. The Senate Armed Services Committee balked and approved about half. A liberal coup? Hardly. One of the critics was Senator Barry Goldwater. “We can scratch South Vietnam,” he said. “It is imminent that South Vietnam is going to fall into the hands of North Vietnam.” The House turned down the president’s emergency aid request 177 to 154; the majority included 50 Republicans. They were only, as I wrote in The New Republic (“The Unrealist,” November 6, 2006), honoring what Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger privately believed. They had gladly negotiated their peace deal under the assumption that South Vietnam would fall when the United States left. What would it have cost to keep South Vietnam in existence without an American military presence? The Pentagon, in 1973, estimated $1.4 billion even for an “austere program.” Nixon and Kissinger were glad for the $700 million South Vietnam eventually got (including a couple hundred million for military aid), because their intention was merely to prop up Saigon for a “decent interval” until the American public forgot about the problem. By 1974, Kissinger pointed out, “no one will give a damn.”
Apparently, they didn’t tell Gerald Ford. He addressed the nation in April of 1975, eight months after becoming president, and implored Congress for $722 million in military aid. The speech was overwhelmingly and universally unpopular–the kind of thing that made Ford seem such a joke to the nation at the time. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak called it “blundering.” Seventy-eight percent of the public was against any further military aid; Republicans like James McClure of Idaho and Harry Bellmon of Oklahoma opposed the appropriation. Republican dove Mark Hatfield said, “I am appalled that a man would continue in such a bankrupt policy”–and Democratic hawk Scoop Jackson said, “I oppose it. I don’t know of any on the Democratic side who will support it.” The Senate vote against it was 61 to 32.
Leading up to the vote, however, Saint Gerald made extraordinary claims–saying that “just a relatively small additional commitment” to Vietnam (compared with the $150 billion already spent there) could “have met any military challenges.” With it, “this whole tragedy”–the imminent fall of Saigon–“could have been eliminated.”
So much for the Pentagon’s claim that $1.4 billion would be an “austere program.” So much for Nixon and Kissinger’s belief that “South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway.” Ford’s miraculous $722 million somehow became enshrined in public memory as the margin that assured American dishonor. As Laird put it in that Foreign Affairs essay, “[W]e grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory. … We saved a mere $297 million a year and in the process doomed South Vietnam, which had been ably fighting the war without our troops since 1973.”
It is that little piece of mythic propaganda that has our current politicans turning themselves into pretzels over using the power of the purse to stop this war. It’s a testament to the ongoing success of the conservative movement’s potent disinformation machine.
But Democrats need to stop battling these ghosts at least long enough to look at how the anti-war movement actually operated and how the congress used wily legislative positioning to both reflect the popular will and move the president toward it.
The public memory of congressional votes on Vietnam from 1970 through 1975 is almost hallucinogenically jumbled. Republican propagandists rely on the confusion. This slender reed of a myth–that congressional liberals are responsible for the fall of South Vietnam–conflates the failed 1970-1971 votes to end the war in South Vietnam, and the overwhelmingly popular (and, on Nixon and Kissinger’s terms, strategically irrelevant) vote to limit military aid to South Vietnam. It is but a short leap for a public less informed than Laird to reach the Rambo conclusion: that this was just the last in a comprehensive train of abuses–exclusively Democratic and liberal–that kept us from “winning” in Vietnam. And that, adding in the mythology about prisoners of war in Vietnam, American troops were, roughly speaking, “abandoned” there.”
It requires some filthy lies to sustain. But the fact that a sad old man is allowed to propound some of them in the foreign policy establishment’s journal of record shows how successful it remains. And the fact that the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination seems to take it as second nature that she has to defend herself against them shows it, too. Stop it now. No responsible American politician has ever cut funding an American troop needed to fight while he or she was in the field. No responsible American politician ever would. Limiting the number of troops in the theater of operations is not cutting funding for American troops. Neither, of course, is withdrawing them “over the horizon.” Nothing’s getting stabbed in the back here except reason.
Word. But that would be the standard conservative M.O. for the last decade or so.
I’m loathe to ever agree with David Brooks about anything but I’m very afraid that he may have been right when he said (about another issue):
DAVID BROOKS: Right. Legislating is a terribly difficult skill, and I don’t think too many people in Congress have it right now. Lyndon Johnson obviously had it. It is incredibly difficult, incredibly complicated…And that will involve the sort of gamesmanship and insider playing and a set of skills of how to negotiate a deal that — I think a lot of those skills have been lost in the last 20 years. I’m not sure many people have them on Capitol Hill of either party.
The only good news in that is that the president is no Johnson or Nixon so maybe it evens out.
One other thing I think is worth mentioning. As Perlstein points out in both articles, the country had turned against the war in huge numbers by the early 70’s. The funding votes were bipartisan with even stalwarts like Goldwater signing on. But there were other things happening that continued to roil the country — the counter-culture and leftist extremism. The Republicans managed to mix all that social angst into one big anti-Democratic stew that rebounded very badly on McGovern (who, as Perlstein points out, was a very bad candidate) and confused the political history of the era to this day.
But today there are no Weathermen or SLA’s out there talking revolution. The main fronts in the culture war are located on the right, not on the left. It is a different day, even if those who lived through Vietnam are as muddled by the myths that sprang up later as anyone who came behind.
Whether any of us like it or not, that era is defining the present one. So, it behooves our Democratic representatives to at least decontruct this stuff for themselves so they can deal effectively with the war and wield their power as a congressional majority most effectively. To do that they need to read these two articles by the historian who has spent the last few years immersed in the politics of the period — a man who wasn’t even born until the late 60’s and has no axe to grind. He has something important to tell them.
Project Vote Smart has all the contact information you need, including staff members. if you are so inclined to send these articles along, please do.
