Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Legal Assault

by digby

The rightwing assault on the legal system continues apace. First you have this strange Pentagon lawyer and spokesman Cully Stimson obviously cooking up a rightwing noise machine operation with Monica Crowley and the Wall Street Journal editorial page to run a boycott on law firms that represent prisoners at Guantanamo. The Pentagon eventually “distanced itself” from his remarks but this guy has been out there saying all kinds of crazy stuff for some time. (In fact, all the people involved with Guantanamo often sound like psychos for some reason. Do they look for these creepy types specifically?)

Anyway, Cully Stimson has a history of saying nonsensical things in public. Like this:

O‘DONNELL: Welcome back to HARDBALL. You heard the claims of torture and abuse by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, but what really goes on there? Here to tell us is the official in charge of U.S. policy on interrogation and other matters in the prison is Cully Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs.[Right. He’s going to tell us what “really goes on?” Excellent intro Nora — ed]

Good evening to you, Cully. Let me begin by asking you about this Ruhel Ahmed. He says that he was held for two years in Guantanamo Boy is he a terrorists?

CULLY STIMSON, DEP. ASST. DEFENSE SECRETARY: Yes, he is a terrorist, he is a dangerous person. We had a right to pick him up. He was waging war against America and we were right to take him there.

O‘DONNELL: So why did we let him go?

STIMSON: We transferred him back to his home country, and I can assure you that the Brits are mitigating the threat that he poses.

O‘DONNELL: But many people may ask, if he‘s a terrorist, why is he still not there at Guantanamo Bay?

STIMSON: The president has said that we don‘t want to be the world‘s jailer. That‘s true. This is a world problem here, Norah. I mean what does the world do with hardened Islamic extremists, who are waging the war against basically western culture? And so we don‘t want to be the world‘s jailer, and we want to take responsibility for those that we have at Guantanamo and we‘re going through that process right now.

O‘DONNELL: And as you know Ruhel Ahmed is suing the defense secretary for $10 million. He claims that he was tortured at Guantanamo Bay. He says he was put in stress positions, in temperatures below freezing. Was he tortured?

STIMSON: No, he was not tortured. We have to under the law and for policy investigate every allegation of torture, no matter how ridiculous. We investigated his allegations and they were not found to be true. What is interesting to note, is that the Brits went to Guantanamo and visited him six times, and during each of those six visits, he never mentioned anything to them. And there were no marks, no nothing to support his allegation and lies of being tortured.

O‘DONNELL: Well lets set the record straight here. What is the U.S. policy regarding interrogation methods? In other words are things like isolation and extremely hot confinement areas, stress positions, shackled to the floor for long periods, are all of those legal and commonly used?

STIMSON: The interrogation techniques are open for the world to see. They are found in the army field manual. It‘s number 2452. You can put it in Google and figure it out. No, the techniques authorized by the army field manual are lawful, and they comply with the McCain amendment. They‘re legal and they comply with our obligations, our international obligations.

O‘DONNELL: So stress positions and hot and cold temperatures, those fall under the U.S. army manual?

STIMSON: Yes, I mean you can you read the army field manual and see for yourself. The interrogation techniques that we use at Guantanamo today are laid out for the world to see.

O‘DONNELL: Can you speak, some people, have, of course, accused the United States of torture in Guantanamo Bay. Can you speak to what type of care and feeding are the detainees receiving there at Gitmo?

STIMSON: Be happy to. We‘re proud of the care and treatment we provide detainees at Guantanamo. They get three square meals a day, culturally sensitive meals, blessed by an Imam. They have a menu Norah, that they get to order from every couple weeks. They have freedom of religion. They practice called to prayer five times a day. There are arrows pointing towards Mecca with the distance to Mecca listed everywhere. They get first class medical care, dental care.

O‘DONNELL: Is it true they get McDonald‘s?

STIMSON: During some interrogations, which are no different than you or I sitting across from each other today, some of them ask for McDonald‘s and sure, I‘ve watched some interrogations where they‘re chowing down on a Big Mac.

O‘DONNELL: Because they want to?

STIMSON: Yes, they want to.

O‘DONNELL: Let me ask you specifically about this movie, of course which we just talked about in the last segment, “The Road to Guantanamo,” which is a docudrama. Are you concerned, and are there concerns at the Pentagon, that this could change some public opinion? As you know most Europeans don‘t like the policy. The President of the United States has said that he thinks Guantanamo Bay should be closed down. Are you concerned that this could shift public opinion even further?

STIMSON: Not at all. You can call it a docudrama. I call it a propaganda film. This is pure fantasy. He would have you believe, I have not seen the film, and I am not going to pay my money because I don‘t know where the money is going to go, quite honestly, if I paid to see this movie.

This is essentially the same dark conspiracy-type charge he made against the lawyers who represent the prisoners. He implied they were being funded by terrorists. Here, he claims that the maker of this film is working for terrorists.

He is quite convinced, as are so many of these wingnut freaks, that anyone who doesn’t sign on to the program, no questions asked, is in bed with terrorists. This man should be nowhere near the government or the Pentagon. He’s paranoid, terrified, stupid or some combination of all three.

O‘DONNELL: You know Ruhel Ahmed, just on this show, called Osama bin Laden a terrorists and then a second later, he called President Bush a terrorist.

STIMSON: I heard that. It sort of shows you the mentality of this guy.

O‘DONNELL: Well except then you have to wonder, what then is he doing out on the lose in England?

STIMSON: Look, here is what he did. It‘s interesting, as I understand the film starts in 2002. They should have gone backwards a little bit and started in 2001, because in 2001, he was visiting Islamic extremist book stores. In September of 2000 he went to Pakistan and trained at terrorist training camps for about 40 days. And then went to the front lines and fought with the Taliban. And then he would have us believe, if I understand the way the movie plays out, he would have us to believe he was going to a wedding.

O‘DONNELL: If these guys are so bad, and terrorists, why not bring them to trial, charge them with murder, terrorism and put them to death?

STIMSON: That‘s a great question. And this is important for the viewers to understand. During a time of war, let‘s say during World War II, that everyone can remember, sort of basic history there. This country is entitled to detain enemies against it. We don‘t have any obligation to give them a quarter so they can call a lawyer. We don‘t have any obligation when we had 400,000 Nazis here in this country at the beginning of World War II, to give them a trial.

When he isn’t ginning up a boycott of law firms who have the temerity to defend prisoners, this man speaks incoherent gibberish. He needs to be fired.

But they aren’t firing him. They are, instead, firing a bunch of other lawyers — US Attorneys some of whom have been doing investigations into Republican malfeasance. A whole bunch of them — seven so far, an unprecedented number. And they are being replaced by GOP dirty tricks operatives. I’m not kidding. From Josh Marshall:

Okay, so we already know that the White House has now taken the unprecedented step of firing at least four and likely seven US Attorneys in the middle of their terms of office — at least some of whom are in the midst of corruption investigations of Bush administration officials and key Republican lawmakers. We also know that they’re taking advantage of a handy provision of the USA Patriot Act that allows the White House to replace these fired USAs with appointees who don’t need to be approved by the senate.

Read on to see what kind of people they are naming to replace these US Attorney’s. You won’t believe it.

Dianne Feinstein made a speech about this on the Senate floor this morning. (You can see the Youtube here.)

This is a scandal. The administration is firing federal prosecutors for no reason and putting their cronies in office without senate confirmation to get them through the next two years. They are working with political operatives to intimidate law firms into not representing terrorist suspects. They are, once again, undermining the spirit of our constitution and our legal system as they have been doing since they took office in 2000. The country voted for oversight last November to put the brakes on just this kind of behavior.

The administration is not acting like people who believe they can prevail if they play by the rules set forth in our legal system. Or maybe it’s just another outright power grab by the executive branch. Either way, it’s the latest in a long line of constitutional outrages and the congress must thoroughly investigate it and expose it to the public. The Republicans are trying to set new precedents with this stuff and it will only work if the Democrats fail to step in and say no.

We need immediate hearings on this issue.

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Family Values

by digby

For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results.

In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.

Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time, the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.

How interesting. But what difference does it make?

In a year with high turnout, unmarried women increased their numbers, and were one of the few demographic groups to increase their share of the electorate. As a percentage of the electorate, they moved from 19 percent in 2000 to 22.4 percent in 2004, an increase of roughly 7 million votes. Unmarried women constituted as large a share of the electorate as African Americans, Latinos and Jews combined.

The marriage gap is one of the most important cleavages in electoral politics. Unmarried women voted for Kerry by a 25-point margin (62 to 37 percent), while married women voted for President Bush by an 11-point margin (55 percent to 44 percent). Indeed, the 25-point margin Kerry posted among unmarried women represented one of the high water marks for the Senator among all demographic groups.

The marriage gap is a defining dynamic in today’s politics, eclipsing the gender gap, with marital status a significant predictor of the vote, independent of the effects of age, race, income, education or gender. Marital status had a significant effect on the way in which these voters performed, whereas a voter’s gender did not. This was true of all age groups. Younger unmarried women supported Kerry while younger married women supported President Bush. Unmarried 18-29 year olds gave Kerry a 25 point margin, while younger married women, like their older counterparts, gave President Bush an 11 point margin.

The 2004 election brought many new unmarried women to the polls. Nineteen percent were voting for the first time, versus only 6 percent of married women….

White voters supported President Bush overall, but Kerry performed well among white unmarried women. White voters generally supported President Bush in the election (58 percent to 41 percent), but Kerry performed strongly among white unmarried women (55 percent to 44 percent).

Unmarried women are social and economic progressives advancing a tolerant set of values. They believe government should play a role in providing affordable health care, a secure retirement, equal pay, and education opportunities for themselves and their children. They support a woman’s right to choose and gay rights, including marriage.

Unmarried women were strongly opposed to the war in Iraq. They believe that the Bush Administration’s pursuit of the war made America less safe, not more secure. This is the opposite conclusion from that drawn by many blue-collar voters.

These women represent the tolerant, liberal base of the Democratic party and there are a huge number of them. I would hope that the Democratic party understands which side it’s bread is buttered on and keeps that in mind as they move forward.

Update: Meanwhile, Sadly No! finds that the Republicans can’t help lovin’ those men of theirs. But we knew that.

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He Has Not Listened

by digby

I got yer plan for ya right here:

BLITZER: Are you in favor of using the power of the purse that Congress has to try to stop this war?

GOV. BILL RICHARDSON (D), NEW MEXICO: Yes. I believe because the president has not listened to the Congress, he hasn’t listened to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and to the American people, that overwhelmingly want a change of course, I believe that’s the function of the Congress, to deal with the appropriations process, find ways to at least this surge, to deny the funds to make it happen, because this is going to add to sectarian violence.

I would support a phased withdrawal, tie it to a political solution. There is no military solution. I would also organize a regional conference to get other states to help with the security and civil administration. I would talk to Iran and Syria to try to get the situation to at least a stable level.

I just believe that this is an ultimate decision by the Congress. But since the president doesn’t listen, he’s off in, I think, his own bubble. Unfortunately, that’s the course I believe the Congress needs to take.

Richardson is not given to shrillness. He’s probably running for president and he’s running as a national security specialist, which he is. This is no joke. If he’s saying this then Bush is in for trouble in the congress.

Not that it will do any good, mind you:

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.

Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor, predicted that Cheney’s long career of consistently pushing against restrictions on presidential power is likely to culminate in a series of uncompromising battles with Congress.

“Cheney has made this a matter of principle,” Shane said. “For that reason, you are likely to hear the words ‘executive privilege’ over and over again during the next two years.”

Cheney declined to comment for this article. But he has repeatedly said his agenda includes restoring the presidency to its fullest powers by rolling back “unwise” limits imposed by Congress after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

“In 34 years, I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job,” Cheney said on ABC in January 2002. “I feel an obligation…to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors.”

He couldn’t make it any clearer. My ongoing crusade to drive a stake through the conservative zombies is based on this very thing. This presidential infallibility doctrine came from the true father of the modern conservative movement, Richard Nixon. (Reagan was a prop.) Cheney’s not that smart and he isn’t that original. In fact he’s a rather simple Nixonian machine.

Despite the historically inept bleatings of journalists like Howard Fineman, who say that support for the war broke down on partisan lines, by 1970 both parties were divided on the war. In June of that year, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. But as the NY Times reported at the time:

The legal effect of the vote which was 81 to 10 is probably minimal since the Nixon administration has stated that it is not relying on the resolution, requested by Lyndon B Johnson, as authority for policies in Indochina.

What do you suppose he was relying upon? Inherent powers, anyone?

Nixon said, “when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” Bush and Cheney obviously agree with that. (Cheney said it outright with respect to the Boland Amendment.) If he persists in being completely impervious to public criticism or congressional pressure, the only thing the congress can do to stop him is withhold funds or impeach him. That’s it. It remains to be seen if they have the stomach for it. Bill Richardson coming out for using the power of the purse is a good sign.

Also: One interesting thing to note here is that a “young Turk” Republican (as the NY Times referred to him) named Bob Dole seized control of that vote and pushed it through with another bill for complicated political reasons, royally irking the Democrats who accused them of rank partisanship. There was a lot of legislative jockeying going on during that period, as both parties prepared for the 1972 campaign. I would hope the Democrats would study this period to remind themselves how wily minority Republicans can politically work the war issue from the opposition as a Republican president does exactly what he wants to do under a theory of imperial presidency. This is deja-vu all over again and this time the Democrats have the benefit of hindsight.

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What The Hell?

by digby

Iraq hanged two aides to Saddam Hussein before dawn on Monday but government efforts to avoid a repeat of uproar over the ousted leader’s rowdy execution were thwarted when his half-brother’s head was severed by the noose.

Many of the government’s Shi’ite Muslim supporters rejoiced at the death of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam’s once feared intelligence chief who was accused of sending people to death in a meat grinder. But voices in Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority saw the decapitation as a deliberate sectarian act of revenge.

Government spokesmen said the severing of Barzan’s head was a rare hangman’s blunder. Critics said it may have been partly a result of Barzan’s illness with cancer.

Officials showed journalists film of Barzan and former judge Awad Hamed al-Bander standing side by side in orange jumpsuits on the scaffold, appearing pale and trembling with fear as the hangmen placed black hoods over their heads.

As the two trap doors swung open, the force of the rope jerked Bander’s head off. The head fell to the floor next to his body in a pool of blood as Bander’s corpse swung above it.

Not that I really need to know the details, but I can’t help but wonder how in the hell something like this happens? (And how convenient that he is “accidentally” beheaded, the preferred method of jihadist psychopaths.)

Needless to say, this isn’t going over well among the Sunni (and even some Shi’ites):

One official, Bassam al-Husseini, called the decapitation “an act of God.”

Barzan’s son-in-law hurled a sectarian insult at the government on Al Jazeera television. “As for ripping off his head, this is the grudge of the Safavids,” he said — a historical term referring to Shi’ite ties to non-Arab Iran.

Poor Shi’ites celebrated in Baghdad’s Sadr City slum. Moussa Jabor said: “(Barzan) should have been handed over to the people. Execution is a blessing for him.”

In Awja, where Barzan and Bander were buried close to Saddam, provincial governor Abdullah al-Juabra said: “People resent the way that Barzan has been executed.”

In Cairo, the Arab Organization for Human Rights called for an international medical investigation. The Moroccan Human Rights Association said the hangings were a “criminal political assassination masterminded by American imperialism.”

Some Shi’ites were appalled too. Ali Abbas Ridha, a 27-year-old in the northern city of Mosul, said: “What they’ve done incites people to sectarianism even more. Whether they were executed or not, what’s the use?”

Meanwhile:

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, told reporters the hanging of the two men was “an Iraqi decision, an Iraqi execution.”

Right. And who believes that?

What a travesty.

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Terrified Bean Counters

by digby

One of the things I think liberals find most irritating about the right (and they do it for that purpose as much as anything) is when they appropriate liberal icons and language and then disingenuously hit us over the heads with them. Most offensive is when they say we are racists, considering their revolting history in such matters.

Rick Perlstein wrote a piece for TNR last week that reminds us just how much they loved Martin Luther King in his time and why their current paeans to his greatness ring so hollow:

When Martin Luther King was buried in Atlanta, the live television coverage lasted seven and a half hours. President Johnson announced a national day of mourning: “Together, a nation united and a nation caring and a nation concerned and a nation that thinks more of the nation’s interests than we do of any individual self-interest or political interest–that nation can and shall and will overcome.” Richard Nixon called King “a great leader–a man determined that the American Negro should win his rightful place alongside all others in our nation.” Even one of King’s most beastly political enemies, Mississippi Representative William Colmer, chairman of the House rules committee, honored the president’s call to unity by terming the murder “a dastardly act.”

Others demurred. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond wrote his constituents, “[W]e are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case.” Another, even more prominent conservative said it was just the sort of “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.”

That was Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, arguing that King had it coming. King was the man who taught people they could choose which laws they’d break–in his soaring exegesis on St. Thomas Aquinas from that Birmingham jail in 1963: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. … Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.”

That’s not what you hear from conservatives today, of course. What you get now are convoluted and fantastical tributes arguing that, properly understood, Martin Luther King was actually one of them–or would have been, had he lived. But, if we are going to have a holiday to honor history, we might as well honor history. We might as well recover the true story. Conservatives–both Democrats and Republicans–hated King’s doctrines. Hating them was one of the litmus tests of conservatism.

The idea was expounded most systematically in a 567-page book that came out shortly after King’s assassination, House Divided: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther King, by one of the right’s better writers, Lionel Lokos, and from the conservative movement’s flagship publisher, Arlington House. “He left his country a legacy of lawlessness,” Lokos concluded. “The civil disobedience glorified by Martin Luther King [meant] that each man had the right to put a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on laws that met with his favor.” Lokos laid the rise of black power, with its preachments of violence, at King’s feet. This logic followed William F. Buckley, who, in a July 20, 1967 column titled “King-Sized Riot In Newark,” imagined the dialogue between a rioter and a magistrate:

“You do realize that there are laws against burning down delicatessen stores? Especially when the manager and his wife are still inside the store?”

“Laws Schmaws. Have you never heard of civil disobedience? Have you never heard of Martin Luther King?”

That thinking led inexorably to the Republican southern strategy code words “law and order” (cribbed from George Wallace) which had a powerful effect on frightened conservatives of all stripes. They turned the man who followed Gandhi’s precepts of peaceful civil disobedience into an inciter of violence. Neat trick.

The conservative argument, consistent and ubiquitous, was that King, claiming the mantle of moral transcendence, was actually the vector for moral relativism. They made it by reducing the greatest moral epic of the age to a churlish exercise in bean-counting. Shortly after the 1965 Selma voting-rights demonstrations, Klansmen shot dead one of the marchers, a Detroit housewife named Viola Liuzza, for the sin of riding in a car with a black man. Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended her funeral. No fair! Buckley cried, noting that a white cop had been shot by a black man in Hattiesburg shortly thereafter; “Humphrey did not appear at his funeral or even offer condolences.” He complained, too, of the news coverage: “The television cameras showed police nightsticks descending upon the bodies of the demonstrators, but they did not show the defiance … of those who provoked them beyond the endurance that we tend to think of as human.” (In actual fact, sheriff’s officers charged into the crowd on horseback swinging rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire.)

By now you may be asking: What is the point of this unpleasant exercise? Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on ideological sins? Well, not every conservative wrong has been righted. It’s true that conservatives today don’t sound much like Buckley in the ’60s, but they still haven’t figured King out: Andrew Busch of the Ashbrook Center for Public Policy, writing about King’s exegesis on just and unjust laws, said, “In these few sentences, King demolishes much of the philosophical foundation of contemporary liberalism” (liberals are moral relativists, you see, and King was appealing to transcendent moral authority); Busch (speaking for reams of similar banality you can find by searching National Review Online) also said that “he rallied his followers with an explicitly religious message” and thus “stands as a stinging rebuke to those today who argue that religion and politics should never mix”; and Matthew Spalding of the Heritage Foundation wrote in National Review Online that “[a]n agenda that advocates quotas, counting by race and set-asides takes us away from King’s vision” (not true, as historians have demonstrated). Still, why not honor their conversion on its own terms?

The answer is, if you don’t mind, a question of moral relativism versus transcendence. When it comes to Martin Luther King, conservatives are still mere bean-counters. We must honor King because there wasn’t a day in his life after 1955 when he didn’t risk being cut down in cold blood and still stood steadfast. Conservatives break down what should be irreducible in this lesson into discrete terms–King believed in points X, Y, and Z–but now they chalk up the final sum on the positive side of the ledger. But this misses the point: King alone among contemporary heroes is worthy of a national holy day not because he mixed faith and politics, nor because he enunciated a sentimental dream. It was because he represented something truly terrifying.

When King was shuttling back and forth to Memphis in support of striking garbage workers, Tennessee Governor Buford Ellington typified the conservative establishment’s understanding of him: He was “training 3,000 people to start riots.” What looks today obviously like transcendent justice looked to conservatives then like anarchy. The conservative response to King–to demonize him in the ’60s and to domesticate him today–has always been essentially the same: It has been about coping with the fear that seekers of justice may overturn what we see as the natural order and still be lionized. But if we manage to forget that, sometimes, doing things that terrify people is the only recourse to injustice, there is no point in having a Martin Luther King Day at all.

I have come to realize that conservatism’s single most identifiable characteristic is its fear (of progress, the other — everything.) And nothing scared conservatives more than the great progressive Martin Luther King, who faced them down peacefully with grim determination and awesome courage. Why, if African Americans could overcome, then what was to stop anybody from believing that “liberty and justice for all” applied to them too. Thanks, Reverend King for making it so.

And thanks to Perlstein for the elegant reminder.

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Learning Too Much

by digby

Jonathan Chait misses the point with this article today in TNR:

I don’t want to accuse American doves of rooting for the United States to lose in Iraq, because I know they love their country and understand the dire consequences of defeat. But the urge to gloat is powerful, and some of them do seem to be having a grand time in the wake of being vindicated.

Radar magazine recently published an article bemoaning the fact that pro-war liberal pundits have not been drummed out of the profession for their error. In it, lefty foreign policy guru Jonathan Schell sniffs, “There doesn’t seem to be a rush to find the people who were right about Iraq and install them in the mainstream media.”

Being right about something is a fairly novel experience for Schell, and he’s obviously enjoying it immensely. But before we genuflect to Schell’s wisdom, it’s worth recalling that his own record of prognostication is not exactly perfect.

He goes on to discuss how many times he thinks Schell has been wrong, which is supposed to somehow prove his point. But the Radar article shows something else. It’s not just that war war hawks have been richly rewarded for being wrong — war critics have in many cases been punished. Chait himself is a good example of one who benefitted at the expense of someone who was right — he’s taken the op-ed slot at the LA Times that was held for years by Robert Sheer, who was a fierce critic of the administration and the war.

Chait uses the example of the Democrats in 1992 to further make his point:

Or go back to the last war we fought with Iraq. Schell insisted that we could force Iraq to leave Kuwait with sanctions alone, rather than by using military force. But the years that followed that war made it clear just how impotent that tool was. Saddam Hussein endured more than a decade of sanctions rather than give up a weapons of mass destruction program that turned out to be nonexistent. If sanctions weren’t enough to make him surrender his imaginary weapons, I think we can safely say they wouldn’t have been enough to make him surrender a prized, oil-rich conquest.

Most liberals made the same argument as Schell in 1990, and as subsequent years exposed the silliness of the claim, many of them were humbled. Indeed, most Democrats in the Senate voted against the Persian Gulf War, and that vote disqualified many of them from running for president in 1992. The presidential nomination went to a governor, Bill Clinton, who didn’t have to vote on the war, and he selected as his running mate then-Senator Al Gore, one of a handful of Democrats who supported it.

This was why so many of the presidential aspirants (and pundits?) voted for the Iraq war. They were fighting the last one and that most certainly was a mistake. And it will continue to be a mistake if reflexively supporting a war is considered the smart move. Despite Chait’s glib description of Saddam’s imaginary nucelar arsenal, it’s impossible to prove a negative. We will never know if sanctions might have worked in 1991, all we know is that the limited war we opted for instead was successful. (Unfortunately it also resulted in a bunch of Iraq obsessives who finally got their chance to “finish the job” — and here we are.) Which is where Chait’s argument really breaks down. He entitles his piece “Were you right about the last war? Who cares.”

Who cares indeed? But we aren’t talking about the last war, are we? We are talking about the current war, the one which these war hawks supported and for which they continue to set forth absurd solutions to the mess its become (like reinstalling Saddam Hussein.) As much as these guys want to say that it doesn’t matter how we got here — it does. In his opening sentence, Chait cutely suggests that people who were against the war are rooting for defeat, but doesn’t seem to see the corollary — those who supported the war refuse to admit that it’s hopeless.

Certainly nobody expects someone to be right all the time and nobody says that someone who was wrong about the war cannot ever speak in public again. But why they should be rewarded with big book contracts about foreign policy and op-ed columns where they continue, day after day, to kick the ball down the field, give it a surge or one more Friedman Unit is the question. Iraq is the biggest issue of our time. It’s happening right this minute. At what point does credibility become an issue in the here and now?

Nobody’s perfect, but in the perverse incentive structure that exists in the punditocrisy, it’s clear you are always better off being a war hawk and being wrong than being a war critic and being right. That’s a problem and it’s one of the reasons why we are in this mess today.

Chait ends his piece saying that he hopes we’ll learn lessons from Iraq but he’s afraid we’ll learn too much. That seems unlikely.

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The Decider Decides

by digby

President Bush, facing opposition from both parties over his plan to send more troops to Iraq, said he has the authority to act no matter what Congress wants.

“I fully understand they could try to stop me from doing it. But I’ve made my decision. And we’re going forward,” Bush told CBS'”60 Minutes” in an interview to air Sunday night.

Vice President Dick Cheney asserted that lawmakers’ criticism will not influence Bush’s plans and he dismissed any effort to “run a war by committee.”

“The president is the commander in chief. He’s the one who has to make these tough decisions,” Cheney said.

[…]

“This is an existential conflict,” Cheney said. “It is the kind of conflict that’s going to drive our policy and our government for the next 20 or 30 or 40 years. We have to prevail and we have to have the stomach for the fight long term.”

The White House also said Sunday that Iranians are aiding the insurgency in Iraq and the U.S. has the authority to pursue them because they “put our people at risk.”

“We are going to need to deal with what Iran is doing inside Iraq,” national security adviser Stephen Hadley said.

Added Cheney: “Iran is fishing in troubled waters inside Iraq.”

The U.S. military in Baghdad said five Iranians arrested in northern Iraq last week were connected to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard faction that funds and arms insurgents in Iraq.

“We do not want them doing what they can to destabilize the situation inside Iraq,” Cheney said.

Bush’s revised war strategy seeks to isolate Iran and Syria, which the U.S. has accused of fueling attacks in Iraq. The president also says Iran and Syria have not done enough to block terrorists from entering Iraq over their borders.

“We know there are jihadists moving from Syria into Iraq. … We know also that Iran is supplying elements in Iraq that are attacking Iraqis and attacking our forces,” Hadley said.

“What the president made very clear is these are activities that are going on in Iraq that are unacceptable. They put our people at risk. He said very clearly that we will take action against those. We will interdict their operations, we will disrupt their supply lines, we will disrupt these attacks,” Hadley said.

“We are going to need to deal with what Iran is doing inside Iraq.”

Iran’s government denied the five detainees were involved in financing and arming insurgents and said they should be released.

Hadley asserted that if Iranians in Iraq “are doing things that are putting are people at risk, of course we have the authority to go after them and protect our people.”

So the Iranians are after our troops. Condi said so last week. Cheney and Hadley are saying it today. Sounds like CB (cassus belli) talk to me. We can’t wait for the Iranians to shoot the American troops with smoking mushrooms. Or something.

I have long said that the Republicans are undemocratic, but now they’re just coming right out and saying it: democracy is all well and good until the people and their representatives object to what the president is doing at which point the people and their representatives become a superfluous “committee.” They have interpreted the words “commander in chief” to mean that the constitution gives the president dictatorial powers during “wartime” (which the president defines.)

These are two dangerous and selfish men who aren’t running for office and so have no political constraints. Not even a 30% approval rating or 12% support for this decision has made them think twice. They are completely confident that history will vindicate them.

They are what impeachment was designed for, I’m afraid, although I doubt there’s time to build a case, what with the endless executive privilege claims and stonewalling. (I don’t rule it out, naturally — let a thousand oversight hearings bloom and follow the evidence where it leads.) But whether they are ultimately impeached or not, it’s clear that they are rogue executives who are impervious to the normal limits that inhibit decent men and political animals. This can’t just be swept under the rug.

Bush made it clear a long time ago when he said to a citizen on a rope line: “Who cares what you think?” And when he quipped “A dictatorship would be a lot easier, as long as I’m the dictator,” he wasn’t really joking.

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No Progress

And now for some even better news:

Intel director John Negroponte gave Congress a sobering assessment last week of the continued threats from groups like Al Qaeda and Hizbullah. But even gloomier comments came from Henry Crumpton, the outgoing State Department terror coordinator. An ex-CIA operative, Crumpton told NEWSWEEK that a worldwide surge in Islamic radicalism has worsened recently, increasing the number of potential terrorists and setting back U.S. efforts in the terror war. “Certainly, we haven’t made any progress,” said Crumpton. “In fact, we’ve lost ground.” He cites Iraq as a factor; the war has fueled resentment against the United States.

Wow. Who could have seen that one coming?

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Pick Up A Paper, Bozo

by digby

President Bush on Saturday challenged lawmakers skeptical of his new Iraq plan to propose their own strategy for stopping the violence in Baghdad.

“To oppose everything while proposing nothing is irresponsible,” Bush said.

Oh George, shove it. Really.

There’s the Murtha plan, the Biden plan, the Baker-Hamilton plan, the Levin-Reed plan — and that’s just off the top of my head.

There are plenty of plans, all of which Bush thinks are “flaming turds” because they don’t allow him to pretend he is Winston Churchill now that he’s completely screwed everything up — as he always does.

Bush is only listening to Dick Cheney, nutball radio talk show hosts and neocon fantasists at this point because they continue to tell him that he is a glorious leader who is saving the world from the evil ones. He thinks he’s Truman, which is really funny since Truman is known for his saying “the buck stops here” and Junior Codpiece has never taken responsibility for anything in his life.

There are plenty of plans, any of which are better than this completely absurd escalation that nobody in America or Iraq (except John McCain and the Last Honest Man) wants.

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Mistakenly Aggressive

by digby

In fact, administration officials (anonymous due to diplomatic sensitivities) concede that Bush’s Iran language may have been overly aggressive, raising unwarranted fears about military strikes on Tehran. Instead, they say, Bush was trying to warn Iran to keep its operatives out of Iraq, and to reassure Gulf allies—including Saudi Arabia—that the United States would protect them against Iranian aggression. A senior administration official, not authorized to speak on the record, says the policy is part of the new Iraq offensive.

Please. I know these people are dumb, but even they aren’t this dumb.

It is obvious that they are trying to provoke Iran into some kind of Gulf of Tonkin incident. After all, Bush is known to think along these lines. You’ll recall that after the invasion the memo outlining the details of the January 31, 2003 meeting between Bush and Blair was leaked:

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

And yet everyone is supposed to believe that they didn’t mean to “raise unwarranted fears” about this new war, even with their inexplicable mention of patriot missiles and the fact that carrier groups are on their way to the region. Uh huh.

Normally, I would say that I hope the Iranians don’t take the bait. But that’s foolish. If they don’t take the bait, the administration will just make something up and say “you can believe your president or you can believe your eyes.” That’s what they do.

Update: Commenter Noen points to this article by Robert Parry at Consortium News who reminds us that Bush seemed to freak out Brian Williams and Tim Russert in his pre-speech briefing at the white house:

Commenting about the briefing on MSNBC after Bush’s nationwide address, NBC’s Washington bureau chief Tim Russert said “there’s a strong sense in the upper echelons of the White House that Iran is going to surface relatively quickly as a major issue – in the country and the world – in a very acute way.”

Russert and NBC anchor Brian Williams depicted this White House emphasis on Iran as the biggest surprise from the briefing as Bush stepped into the meeting to speak passionately about why he is determined to prevail in the Middle East.

“The President’s inference was this: that an entire region would blow up from the inside, the core being Iraq, from the inside out,” Williams said, paraphrasing Bush.

Despite the already high cost of the Iraq War, Bush also defended his decision to invade Iraq and to eliminate Saddam Hussein by arguing that otherwise “he and Iran would be in a race to acquire a nuclear bomb and if we didn’t stop him, Iran would be going to Pakistan or to China and things would be much worse,” Russert said.

If Russert’s account is correct, there could be questions raised about whether Bush has lost touch with reality and may be slipping back into the false pre-invasion intelligence claims about Hussein threatening the United States with “a mushroom cloud.”

[…]

While avoiding any overt criticism of Bush’s comments about an imaginary Iraqi-Iranian arms race, Russert suggested that the news executives found the remarks perplexing.

“That’s the way he sees the world,” Russert explained. “His rationale, he believes, for going into Iraq still was one that was sound.”

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews then interjected, “And it could be the rationale for going into Iran at some point.”

Russert paused for a few seconds before responding, “It’s going to be very interesting to watch that issue and we have to cover it very, very carefully and very exhaustively.”

Well, that would be a first.

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