Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Psikhushka

by digby

I have written before about this amazing essay, with which many of you are no doubt familiar. It was written in December 2005, by former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who knows a lot about its subject — torture.

Bukovsky was a very brave dissident and was widely touted as a potential leader of the new democratic Russia. (He declined.) He is a fierce critic of Putin today. But he first gained international attention in 1971 for smuggling proof of certain totalitarian practices:

The information galvanized human rights activists worldwide (including inside the country) and was a pretext for his subsequent arrest in January 1972, officially for contacts with foreign journalists and possession and distribution of samizdat (Article 70-1, 7 years of imprisonment plus 5 years in exile).

Which brings me to this sickening story which lays out in even more detail than we saw earlier, the treatment Jose Padilla has received while he’s been in custody:

According to court papers filed by Padilla’s lawyers, for the first two years of his confinement, Padilla was held in total isolation. He heard no voice except his interrogator’s. His 9-by-7 foot cell had nothing in it: no window even to the corridor, no clock or watch to orient him in time.

Padilla’s meals were delivered through a slot in the door. He was either in bright light for days on end or in total darkness. He had no mattress or pillow on his steel pallet; loud noises interrupted his attempts to sleep.

Sometimes it was very cold, sometimes hot. He had nothing to read or to look at. Even a mirror was taken away. When he was transported, he was blindfolded and his ears were covered with headphones to screen out all sound. In short, Padilla experienced total sensory deprivation.

During length interrogations, his lawyers allege, Padilla was forced to sit or stand for long periods in stress positions. They say he was hooded and threatened with death. The isolation was so extreme that, according to court papers, even military personnel at the prison expressed great concern about Padilla’s mental status.

The government maintains that whatever happened to Padilla during his detention is irrelevant, since no information obtained during that time is being used in the criminal case against him.[!!!]

Padilla’s lawyer, Andrew Patel, rejects that premise. The assumption, says Patel, is that the U.S. government can do anything it wants to an American citizen as long as it does not use any information it extracts in a court of law.

[…]

Even at this late stage, after dozens of meetings with his lawyers, Padilla suspects that they are government agents, says Andrew Patel, who is on the legal team. Padilla may believe that the lawyers assigned to represent him are in fact “part of a continuing interrogation program.”

The situation has become impossible, defense lawyers say; they’ve hired two psychiatric experts to examine Padilla. Both have often testified for the prosecution in criminal cases. This time they have sided with the defense.

After spending more than 25 hours with Padilla, both psychiatric experts have concluded that his isolation and interrogation have resulted in so much mental damage that he is incompetent to stand trial.

[…]

Both Hegarty and Zapf administered a variety of objective tests to evaluate Padilla. While they found that he is able to understand the basic charges against him, he is “unable to assist” his attorneys because of his mental condition and the “paranoia” resulting from his treatment during two years of total isolation, followed by an additional year and a half of similar treatment. Zapf also suggested that Padilla may have suffered “brain injury.” Both doctors noted his tics and spasmodic body responses.

The government adamantly denies mistreating Padilla, though it does not dispute the particulars cited in Padilla’s legal papers. Rather, the government says its treatment of Padilla was humane and notes that it provided medical treatment when necessary. The government agreed to the additional psychiatric evaluation that has now been ordered by the judge.

They seem to have tortured the man until he lost his mind. It’s horrible, the stuff of nightmares. Everytime I read about this I can hardly believe that the American government is not only doing it, but is openly defending the practice. It’s chilling.

But this may be the most chilling thing I’ve heard yet:

Indeed, there are even some within the government who think it might be best if Padilla were declared incompetent and sent to a psychiatric prison facility. As one high-ranking official put it, “the objective of the government always has been to incapacitate this person.”

Some of you may have clicked on the title of this post to see what the hell it means by now, (if you didn’t already know.) It is a Russian slang word for “psychiatric hospital.” What Vladimir Bukovsky smuggled out of Russia in those 150 pages was proof that the Soviets had used their psychiatric system to not only break prisoners’ will and minds, but also to warehouse and torture political prisoners.

Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering about why we would need to “incapacitate” this monster Padilla, soviet style:

Even former Justice Department spokesman Corallo concedes that in hindsight, Padilla was a bit player. Corallo says the government faces a problem over its ever-changing claims about what Padilla did and whether he could be prosecuted in a civilian court.

Yes, it would probably be best for everyone if this bit-player were sentenced to a psychiatric prison now that they’ve broken his mind and run out of reasons to keep him on ice.

The article says that Padilla has a case of Stockholm Syndrome, which I don’t doubt. But so do the Republican anti-communist zealots who are willingly becoming the enemy they reviled. But then, we should have known that all their highminded talk about democracy and freedom was crap. What they didn’t like about communism was the economic system. The totalitarian governing philosophy was something they evidently really believed was quite useful.

Update: Michael Froomkin has an interesting LTE published in the New Yorker on the habeas portion of the military commissions bill.

Update II: Mary Ratliff wrote a very interesting post from a couple of weeks ago about the disintigration of personality that applies to what they’ve done to Padilla. It’s stomach churning.

And then there’s this.

.

The New Anger

by digby

A reader tipped me to this fascinating review by Stanley Kurtz of a book called “A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Today.” It’s fascinating because it once again illustrates the degree to which conservatives have absolutely no self-awareness.

You see, this “New Anger” is a cultural phenomenon pretty much confined to the left. Indeed, it was invented on the left (during the 60’s, naturally.) And left wing bloggers are especially angry. Glen Reynolds is characterized as being merely “sardonic” — Atrios is something else, Kutz doesn’t say what, apparently wanting to spare our innocent eyes from the beating the author gives him.

This “New Anger” is compared to an old Gary Cooper style of anger which was constrained and mature — much like the right is today, at least by comparison to the crazed left which is under the influence of Jimmy Hendrix, Jack Nicholson and “Return of the Jedi.”

He admits that the right is angry too, but that’s mostly because we of the angry left goad them into it. And they feel guilty about it while we don’t.

Now, I would have to take just the tiniest exception to some of this. Being an angry liberal blogger, I am probably going to lose my cool at some point because when those Hendrix licks start coursing through my brain I get a little crazy. I haven’t read the book Kurtz is reviewing so perhaps the absurd thesis is more balanced than it appears. I will read the book and then write some more about it. It sounds very intriguing. But I will take the time to address one particular question that Kurtz poses:

I doubt that even Barack Obama can save us from our anger now. That’s because the anger that lately pervades our politics is more than just an after effect of six years of Democratic setbacks (although the strikingly angry Democratic response to their six bad years does call for an explanation).

Six bad years? Set backs?

We could point out that the Republicans seized the presidency in 2000 under extremely dubious circumstances and then acted as if they’d won 49 states. We could protest that we were called traitors for failing to fall to our knees as they did and worship this incompetent they foisted on the country as he proceeded to take this country into a completely unnecessary war for inexplicable reasons. We could go back even further and say that we’ve been quite angry ever since the Republicans impeached a duly elected president just because they could and turned this country into a circus for his entire eight year term.

And then there is the toxic waste dump that is right wing talk radio in which the highest reaches of the Republican party cater to disgusting creeps like Rush Limbaugh who say things like this:

I mean, if there is a party that’s soulless, it’s the Democratic Party. If there are people by definition who are soulless, it is liberals — by definition. You know, souls come from God. You know?

He is the most powerful Republican voice in the country, reaching many millions each day along with his various clones. They have been at this for decades now, talking about liberals and Democrats as if we are animals.

As for the angry blogosphere, one can find examples in any bloggers’ writings that sound intemperate. It’s that kind of medium. But please don’t try to tell us that the right is more civil than the left. It’s absurd.

For instance, one could easily pick this post from the delightfully “sardonic” Instapundit and find that he is just a tad angrier than one might assume from his usual “heh” and “indeed.”

There was a time when the Left opposed fascism and supported democracy, when it wasn’t a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy. That day is long past, and the moral and intellectual decay of the Left is far gone.

I guess the “sardonic humor” in that might be in the eye of the beholder, but lets not pretend that the right wing bloggers are strong silent types. It’s so absurd that I feel as if I’m going back down that Republican rabbit hole we were in two years ago when everyone demanded that we see George W. Bush as Winston Churchill.

The right has an entire industry devoted to liberal bashing. They have conventions where people meet and sell trinkets that say things like“Happiness is Hillary’s face on a milk carton”. Conventions where they simultaneously fete Dick Cheney and Bill Frist and Ann Coulter, who gets rock star applause for her civil statements like this in which she says her worst moral dilemma was when she once had a shot at President Clinton.

None of this developed overnight — certainly not in response to the liberals inexplicable anger at the last six years of “setbacks.” The real history goes back a ways (all the way back to McCarthyism, really) but there is one person who is most responsible for the angry rhetoric in recent politics. He isn’t a liberal. It’s this guy, who knew a thing or two about the “Old Anger”:

Back in the 80’s when he was a young back-bencher he started down the road of take-no-prisoners politics and he consciously set out to popularize angry, divisive, abusive rhetoric:

It is not easy to become the most disliked man in Congress in the space of three terms, but Newt Gingrich was no ordinary congressman. Even before he got to Capitol Hill, when he was making his first run in 1974, he said, “I intend to go up there and kick the system over, not try to change it.” It was not your usual sort of campaign promise, but then, Gingrich did not keep his word on it. When he arrived in Washington, he ignored the traditional course for freshmen congressmen of quietly taking backseat and doing party and committee grunt work while learning the ropes. Instead, he openly cultivated the press and, of course, he developed his romance with C-SPAN.

Nothing was so sweet a piece of happenstance as the arrival of Gingrich and C-SPAN in the House of Representatives at the same moment. They were made for each other. A Washington newsman, Brian Lamb, had had the idea of bringing the proceedings of both houses of Congress to American television viewers as a nonprofit public service. Congressional leaders, accustomed to the clubby seclusion of Congress and frankly skeptical about the television appeal of their work, were doubtful –particularly since Lamb wanted gavel-to-gavel coverage –but House Speaker Tip O’Neill eventually gave the go-ahead.

Gingrich, the new face, quickly recognized an opportunity. The House, which limits the length of debate over legislation, has a rule allowing so-called special orders –permission to give lengthy speeches at the end of each legislative day. These have long been a means by which congressman could read into the Congressional Record various matters of importance to their constituents, usually matters of trivia. But Gingrich, concerned less with the Record than with the potential television audience, began to use special orders regularly as his platform for advancing ideas and, especially, for attacking the Democratic majority.

At first, his approach gave the impression that he was a brave young crusader, taking on the opposition in heated floor encounters, but, in truth, most of his diatribes were delivered before a virtually empty House. When, in 1984, he escalated his attack on Democrats to the point of questioning their patriotism– accusing them of being “blind to Communism” –Speaker O’Neill lost his cool. In a legendary head-to-head encounter on the floor of the House, the Speaker blasted Gingrich : “You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House, and challenged these people, and challenged their patriotism, and it is the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my thirty-two years in Congress.”

The end of the story, however, was a Gingrich coup: Trent Lott, who was then minority whip, protested O’Neill’s attack on Gingrich as being out of order, and O’Neill’s remarks were stricken from the record. It was the first such rebuke of a Speaker of the House since 1798. Gingrich was famous.

He became famous (with some help from his cohorts) for being a manipulative, vicious asshole and the lesson was well learned. He went on to create a lexicon of derision, used by Republicans everywhere, to describe Democrats and liberals. He called these words “contrast”:

Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

* abuse of power
* anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs
* betray
* bizarre
* bosses
* bureaucracy
* cheat
* coercion
* “compassion” is not enough
* collapse(ing)
* consequences
* corrupt
* corruption
* criminal rights
* crisis
* cynicism
* decay
* deeper
* destroy
* destructive
* devour
* disgrace
* endanger
* excuses
* failure (fail)
* greed
* hypocrisy
* ideological
* impose
* incompetent
* insecure
* insensitive
* intolerant
* liberal
* lie
* limit(s)
* machine
* mandate(s)
* obsolete
* pathetic
* patronage
* permissive attitude
* pessimistic
* punish (poor …)
* radical
* red tape
* self-serving
* selfish
* sensationalists
* shallow
* shame
* sick
* spend(ing)
* stagnation
* status quo
* steal
* taxes
* they/them
* threaten
* traitors
* unionized
* urgent (cy)
* waste

I realize it is churlish of us liberals to attempt to defend ourselves from this kind of bad faith and even worse for us to lose our Gary Cooper cool. But, you know, when you push people far enough and hard enough they start to fight for their survival. The level of vitriol and hate emanating from the right — and encouraged by Republicans leaders of all stripes — has been overwhelming. These past twelve years alone have been characterized by smears, toxic rhetoric, impeachments, abuse of power, stolen elections, power mad governance, corruption and ineptitude. So yes, we’re angry — but more importantly, we are fearful for our country.

Until Republicans admit what they have wrought and recognize that their trash talking and boot-to-the-throat mode of fetid politics are responsible for our state today, then for the good of the country, I hope the left remains angry and battles them back with everything they’ve got.

This is ugly, I admit. But the country just can’t take another couple of decades of Republican politics and Republican rule. We have to stop it — and it won’t be stopped if Democrats play nice. The Republican undead never learn their lesson. We must defeat them at the ballot box until they get tired of being defeated and change their ways.

Update: talk about angry… Via TRex.

Update II: Dear God.

.

The Healing Process

by digby

Following up on my post below, I noticed that the transcript of last night’s Shields and Brooks was available and I think it deserves a little bit more attention:

JIM LEHRER: A divided nation, Mark. Can Nancy Pelosi be a healer, in the context we were talking about earlier, about Gerald Ford and others?

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Probably not. I mean, she can be speaker of the House. She can certainly start a healing process.

You know, I think, if Gerald Ford were the speaker of the House, he probably wouldn’t preside over a House where only he’d bring legislation that had a majority of his own party before he brought it. He would seek across the aisle.

I think that’s the test of healing, in the process and the good faith … I think how well she does perform — I mean, she presided over a Democratic Party, it was the most united — according to Congressional Quarterly, which keeps tracks of these things — of any party in the Congress in the past 25 years, but that was in opposition to George W. Bush.

JIM LEHRER: You’re talking about when she was House minority leader.

MARK SHIELDS: When she was House minority leader.

JIM LEHRER: Right.

MARK SHIELDS: I mean, but it takes great discipline to do that. It’s a lot different when you’re in the majority, I mean, to hold that same kind of discipline in your ranks.

And she’s got to prove in the next two years that the Democratic Party is capable of governing, of moving the country, and of moving legislation that people see is in the benefit of the nation.

[…]

JIM LEHRER: How do you see the prospects?

DAVID BROOKS, Columnist, New York Times: Well, not for healing. That’s not what she is.

JIM LEHRER: Not for healing?

DAVID BROOKS: She’s smart; she’s tough; she’s political effective and certainly energetic. Those are her upsides.

Her downside are she’s a wooden speaker. She’s a poor television performer. When it comes to new policies, I think she’s overshadowed by other people in her own party. That’s sort of not where her emphasis is.

But I think her main drawback is that she is — and her main drawback and success, their flip sides — is that she is a Democrat to the bone. And she is a very partisan figure. She’s grown up with a tremendous loyalty to the Democratic Party and tremendous partisanship.

And so, whatever her talents are, spanning the partisan divide is not one of them. I think she’ll reinforce the partisan divide, which is not to say that Tom DeLay was not a hyper-partisan before her. But she is a hyper-partisan.

And to me, one of the problems with Washington now is loyalty to team takes precedence over loyalty to the truth. And I don’t think that’s going to change with her there.

JIM LEHRER: How liberal is she?

DAVID BROOKS: The rap that she’s sort of a San Francisco extremist, I don’t think that’s fair. I think she is a pretty much mainstream liberal Democrat, but not a “San Francisco progressive,” as her opponent in the Democratic primary said.

She has spent a lot of her time in San Francisco with enemies on the left, with a primary force of criticism coming from her left. She was a fund-raiser. She was a fund-raiser and a very successful fund-raiser in the Democratic Party; that meant she spent her time with rich Democrats.

Rich Democrats are not on the fringe. They’re not extremists. They’re liberals. And so I think that’s about where she is, and that’s where her record has been.

And her record in Congress has been sometimes policing the liberals, sometimes telling them to shut up for the sake of political electability.

JIM LEHRER: Can she govern just with the Democratic majority?

MARK SHIELDS: No. And that’s where I disagree with David. I think that, yes, she is a partisan. There’s no question. She was California’s State Democratic Party chairman. She tried to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee even before she came to Congress and lost.

But I think she’s smart, and I think she understands that the Congress has become a balkanized institution, where Republicans only talk to Republicans, and that the people are looking to see that…

JIM LEHRER: But is she going to do it differently?

MARK SHIELDS: … a sense of — she has to. She has to.

[…]
JIM LEHRER: Practically, how does she do that, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: She’s got two tests. She’s got product and process, all right? There’s got to be a product that comes out of this, but it has to come, and people will judge her by the product.

JIM LEHRER: You mean a piece of legislation?

MARK SHIELDS: Are there fewer uninsured children two years from today? Has she worked with George W. Bush? She can save George W. Bush’s presidency; she really can.

I mean, if George W. Bush’s only legacy is Iraq, he’s a dead man, politically and historically. If he wants to reach something on Social Security collaboratively or to do something on any number of issues — the environment, on energy — and she could be his most valuable partner.

But there has to be a process that she includes Republicans. Republicans can’t be excluded as Democrats have been under the Republican leadership, from offering amendments, from participating. You can’t have conference committees meeting with never inviting the minority, letting them have votes.

JIM LEHRER: Do you see that happening?

DAVID BROOKS: It’s possible, but so far we don’t see it. So far what we see are stories suggesting the first 100 hours, which is their first burst of legislation, they are not going to be bipartisan. They are going to move quickly, sacrificing any sense of bipartisanship.

And you can understand it legislatively. I think it would have been tremendously effective to say, “We’re not only going to pass different legislation; we’re going to run this place differently,” I mean, does something ostentatious in the first few days that was bipartisan. They elected not to do that.

But the second one is, in the next week, she’s on a publicity tour, which is a bit self-aggrandizing, making her the center of attention rather than her party, rather than the Congress itself. And I think that’s a political mistake.

JIM LEHRER: Do you?

MARK SHIELDS: I think David — I think that there’s a certain over-the-top quality to the inaugural event, the big…

JIM LEHRER: The coming of the speaker of the House.

MARK SHIELDS: … the coming of the speaker of the House. However, I think it makes sense for her, coming from where she comes from and given the enemies, the Newt Gingrichs of the world, who stand up there and say “San Francisco Democrat” with a snarl and a sneer, for her to point out that she’s going to Trinity College, a Catholic school here in Washington, D.C., in which you graduate, go to mass, go back to Baltimore to the neighborhood from which she graduated, that there is somebody here, that she wants to shatter the negative stereotypes before they set in.

I do think that perhaps the third day of the inaugural might be…

JIM LEHRER: Might be different.

MARK SHIELDS: … too far.

[…]

JIM LEHRER: What do you make of Mark’s point that it’s possible that Nancy Pelosi could save George W. Bush’s presidency?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, she could do it in two ways. One is by really messing up.

But the second way is by saying, “We’ve got in the House a working majority, but in the Senate a razor-thin majority. And therefore, we really do need to work with the president. We need to rediscover that Democratic-Republican relationship that existed in the first six months of the Bush administration.”

I think that’s possible, and I think the Bush White House is a more skilled White House than any time before. I think they’ve had talent upgrades in chief of staff, in treasury secretary…

JIM LEHRER: Talking about Josh Bolten particularly?

DAVID BROOKS: … and up and down the line. So it’s more possible now than it was in the past five years.

There are so many things in that little exchange that I find apalling I don’t know where to start.

First of all, the idea that Nancy Pelosi has to reach across the aisle, work with George W. Bush and pass legislation that benefits the American people to prove that the Democrats are capable of governing is balderdash. The Republicans will pull every trick in the book to ensure that doesn’t happen and they will probably succeed. They are very good at being a minority and they have absolutely no intention of ever doing anything that will benefit the democratic party. At this point they don’t even have any intention of doing anything that will benefit George W. Bush.

Pelosi has two things she has to do. She has to keep the Republicans on the deefensive throughout the next two years and set the table for a Democratic win in 08. There is no “working with” George W. Bush. He is poison and his political advisors are doing nothing but trying to keep him from being chased out of iraq before he leaves office. Period. They have no other agenda.

And the idea that everything was peachy during the first six months of the Bush administration is laughable. Jim Jeffords was so outraged by the Republican’s behavior he left the party! The first six months were characterized by the 50/50 Senate and tha bare GOP majority in the House riding rough shod over everything as if they’d had a ’64 style landslide instead of a Supreme Court gift from daddy’s Supreme Court judges. (And the shell shocked red state Democrats gleefully passed those goddamned tax cuts to their party’s and the country’s major, long term detriment.) God help us if Pelosi and Reid go that route. It was a disaster.

Then there is Brooks’ new designation of the “good, rich, mainstream, liberal Democrats” which he contrasts to some unnamed extremists. At first I thought he was contrasting these “good” liberals with the WTO protestors or PETA or something until he went on to say that Pelosi had successfully reined in these “extremists” in in congress. There are no WTO anarchists or “eco-terrorists” in the congress so he was obviously talking about some other liberal extremists. Who do you suppose he was talking about? (Pssst. Don’t worry everybody, she’s not gonna let the schvartzes or the Mexicans take over. Whew!)

But that’s not all. Shields and Brooks both feel that the first female speaker of the house is being a little bit “over-the-top” by having a celebration. It’s unseemly, you know. (I don’t know how many of you recall when Newtie took over the congress in 1994, but his ascension was considered so historic they metaphrically had him riding through the streets of DC atop an elephant being fanned by Nubian slaves.)

This is a straight-up GOP talking point:

Mike Murphy, a Republican political consultant and former adviser to Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the four-day extravaganza is excessive.

“What? No fireworks?” he said. “I’m glad they canceled the tickertape parade. They probably couldn’t find biodegradable tickertape and a hybrid convertible.”

(One wonders what kind of howl would be raised if Trent Lott or George Bush’s regional culture were similarly mocked by a Democratic strategist — “they probably couldn’t find enough confederate flags or rusted out pick-up trucks.” Yuk yuk.)

For fifty percent of the population it is very meaningful that Mrs Pelosi is the most powerful elected woman in American history. These bestpectacled boyz can demean it all they want, but it’s a major milestone that many millions of American citizens are very proud to finally see. It’s a big deal.

I know I am rather ridiculously obsessing on this short, and ultimately meaningless, interview, but I believe it’s emblematic of the problems we are going to face in the punditocrisy in these next two years. George W. Bush is a very lame duck and all the righties just want to forget he ever existed. So they seem to be setting the clock back to 2000 — the Democrats are out of control liebrals who are screwing up the country. We desperately need the grown-ups back in charge!

Too bad Jerry Ford is dead — from what they’ve been saying for the last interminable week he is the only man who can save us from the evil partisanship that seems to have sprung up since the Democrats won in November. Then again, GOP zombies always come home to roost, so I fully expect that the 2008 election will be all about who can heal the nation. And just as only Nixon could go to China, it’s going to take another Republican Jerry Ford to silence the dirty hippies once again.

Update: I should say that I think the best thing for the Dems to do is be quite ruthless out of the box. They can do it with a smile on their faces, but they should do it. The Republicans created these prison rules and the Dems will either survive and be respected or they will continue to be the Republicans’ and the media’s prison bitches. I’m encouraged so far. The pundits are already heading for the fainting couch.

.

Let The Healing Begin Part VII

by digby

Watching tonight’s Newshour I was struck by how important both Shields and Brooks believe it is that Nancy Pelosi puts a stop to all the insane partisanship. The rancor in Washington really has gotten out of hand and people are sick of it — especially, it would appear, the Republicans who just can’t take another minute of this horrible lack of collegiality. (Those nasty Dems must be the problem, because I don’t recall all this handwringing punditude over Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert.)

Brooks said that Nancy will be judged by how much she gets done in the next two years — if there are fewer uninsured children or we are still toiling away in Iraq, she will have a lot to answer for. He doesn’t hold out much hope, of course, because she is super-partisan. And Shields offered that Nancy could save Bush’s presidency.

It seems that the DC courtiers have been so moved by all the blather they’ve been dribbling about Jerry Ford’s magnificently brave decision to pardon the man who put him office that they are convinced the biggest problem the country faces is the possibility that the Democrats might not let the Republicans date-rape them again.

But then, isn’t that always the way with privileged frat cats?

.

When Time Stood Still

by digby

I’ve noticed something interesting among the family rightwingers lately: they have simply disappeared Bush and the Republican congress from their minds. It’s the weirdest thing. You talk politics with them and they are already going on about how the Democrats are ruining the country with their big spending and high taxes. You ask about Bush and they look at you blankly and start talking about the Clintons.

They are fully back in minority victimhood mode without missing a beat. And there is a sense of gleeful excitement about the whole thing — “heh, heh, I just hope I live long enough to see what that horrible woman is going to do to this country.”* If you mention Iraq, they shrug their shoulders and start babbling about John Kerry and the draft dodging Clinton. Some lament that the Democrats wouldn’t let us win it (we should have “glassed ’em.”) For the most part, they seem absolutely thrilled to be in the minority and they are already doing the only thing they have ever really been good at — carping about Democrats from the sidelines.

Apparently, it isn’t just my family and their bizarro word friends. Take a look at this for sheer, unadulterated chutzpah from TPM Muckraker:

Republicans aren’t yet an official minority in the House, but they’re already beginning a campaign to portray themselves as victims of a heartless Democratic majority.

In a “Dear Colleague” letter circulated to fellow Republicans, three House GOPers are trying to push a “Minority Bill of Rights” — based on a two-year-old proposal by then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

Here’s the prime quote:

“Unfortunately, as you are well aware, the Democrats’ forty-year reign over the House was plagued by consistent, systematic efforts to usurp the rights and privileges of the Republican minority,” write Reps. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Tom Price (R-GA).

TPM references this WaPo article in 2004 when Pelosi introduced the bill:

Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A23

House Democrats’ anger at heavy-handed Republican tactics reached a new level yesterday, with the chamber’s top Democrat asking the House speaker to embrace a “Bill of Rights” for the minority, regardless which party it is.

In keeping with the general atmosphere of the House these days, aides to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said he will not respond to the two-page proposal from Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

For decades, the party in power has used House parliamentary rules to limit the minority party’s ability to amend bills and shape debates. But Democrats — in the minority for 10 years after four decades of control — say Republicans have gone to unreasonable lengths in recent years. GOP leaders dispute this, but congressional scholars and even some rank-and-file Republicans agree in whole or in part.

[…]

Pelosi and Reps. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) and John M. Spratt Jr. (D-S.C.) cited several examples of what they consider abusive treatment by Republicans, who control the House 228 to 206 (there is one independent). A proposed $9.6 billion tobacco buyout program went not to the Agriculture Committee but to the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, they noted, where Democrats’ questions and proposed amendments were ruled out of order because they did not deal directly with taxes.

“It’s the all-time Catch-22,” said Spratt, the assistant minority leader.

[…]

Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) said in an interview that Democrats are crying about the process because they are losing policy debates over job creation and progress in Iraq. His mission as chairman, he said, is “to move our [Republican] agenda, and to do it in the fairest and most responsible way possible. And I do it in that order.”

Dreier, who spent 14 years in the minority before his party’s 1995 House takeover, said: “Yes, we have done, as we have had the responsibility of governing, some of the things we criticized when we were in the minority.” But he said he feels the Hastert leadership team has struck a fair balance.

Hastert dismissed the Democrats’ complaints in an interview yesterday. “I have looked at our record over the years,” he said, and compared it with Republicans’ ability to offer meaningful amendments during the 40 years of Democratic House rule. “I will hold up our record any day.”

Some independent analysts say Democrats’ complaints have merit.

Republicans “have taken every one of the techniques that Democrats employed when they were in the majority, and ratcheted them up to another level,” said Norman J. Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the moderate-to-conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Republicans are now at a point where, reveling in the power they have, they are using techniques to jam bills through even when they don’t have to . . . simply because they can.”

Pelosi had vowed to uphold the minority bill of rights even if the Democrats became a majority so it is poarticularly churlish of these Republican fucks to be whining already about how terrible the Dems are.

The Republicans are where they love to be — pissing and moaning, even after what they’ve done and before the Democrats have even taken office. Shame or humility is not in their vocabulary. Now that the mantle of governance has been removed from their shoulders (after they proved without doubt that they are completely inept) they can revert to backbench caviling and complaining.

Snivelling Republican whiners, happy at last.

*That is a real quote.

Sacrificing For Junior

by digby

If I didn’t know better, I’d have to think that Bush is trying to tank John McCain’s campaign before it even gets started. First he adopts the wildly unpopular McCain Doctrine of escalation and now he’s going to use McCain’s favorite empty stump line to try to sell it:

The BBC was told by a senior administration source that the speech setting out changes in Mr Bush’s Iraq policy is likely to come in the middle of next week.

Its central theme will be sacrifice.

St. John loooves to talk about sacrifice. Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice. He’s been saying stuff like this for years:

The costs of this war have been high, especially for the over 2000 Americans, and their families, who have paid the ultimate price. But liberating Iraq was in our strategic and moral interests, and we must honor their sacrifice by seeing this mission through to victory.

and this:

We all have an obligation to play our part in defending our ideals. Not all of us will be soldiers. Not all of us will find the courage to race into the burning tower as others flee. But God grants us all the privilege of having our character and patriotism tested. All of us have the duty and occasion to sacrifice something of ourselves so that the civilization we are so blessed to be a part of, that so many have sacrificed so much for, will prevail against all challenges and threats, and endure long beyond our brief time on this earth…The sacrifices entailed in our defense will not be borne equally. They never are. But we all have a moral obligation to do what we can to ensure our country remains worthy of the greater sacrifices that will be made by others.

and this:

War means sacrifice, and this war is no different. As our brave soldiers battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, they leave their families behind, risking their lives each day in our name. We ask them to fight for us, to imperil life and limb, to serve our nation with honor. Our fighting men and women endure great sacrifices for America, and so it is reasonable to ask what sacrifices other Americans are making.

The answer does not always satisfy. Our wars are national conflicts; we are all Americans and we are all in this together. But why then is it so easy for the rest of us – those who aren’t soldiers or their family members – to go about our lives as normal?

It is not for lack of opportunity to do otherwise. While our soldiers are fighting and dying, every American on the homefront can do something, however big or small, to support our national effort.

At this time of sacrifice it is more important than ever to join as fellow Americans in a national cause greater than the sum of our everyday routines.

It’s his mantra, and during the time when everyone felt they were doing their patriotic duty by flying as many flags on their cars as possible, it probably would have been inspirational. Sadly, that time passed some time ago, when Iraq was revealed as a strategic and moral cock-up of epic proportions. Now calls to sacrifice for this useless, meaningless meat-grinder are going to sound like somebody’s been sneaking into Laura’s prescription tranquilizers.

As much as I’m horrified to see Junior adopt the Mccain Doctrine of escalation, I’m very pleased to see him adopt his rhetoric of sacrifice. Everything Junior touches turns to garbage and he’s going to pull McCain into the rancid compost heap right along with him. I think it’s quite obvious that Americans have decided they’ve sacrificed quite enough for the honor of the neocon codpiece.

.

Most Overlooked ’06 Highlight

by digby

Atrios links to a thought provoking post at Whiskey Fire about the identity politics of the conservative movement which I recommend you read. I feel a new meme coming on.

It reminded me of one of the best moments of 2006 which I don’t think has been properly commemorated:

Ben Domenech Resigns

In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting with him to write a blog that launched Tuesday.

An investigation into these allegations was ongoing, and in the interim, Domenech has resigned, effective immediately.

When we hired Domenech, we were not aware of any allegations that he had plagiarized any of his past writings. In any cases where allegations such as these are made, we will continue to investigate those charges thoroughly in order to maintain our journalistic integrity.

Plagiarism is perhaps the most serious offense that a writer can commit or be accused of. Washingtonpost.com will do everything in its power to verify that its news and opinion content is sourced completely and accurately at all times.

We appreciate the speed and thoroughness with which our readers and media outlets surfaced these allegations. Despite the turn this has taken, we believe this event, among other things, testifies to the positive and powerful role that the Internet can play in the the practice of journalism.

It was a low point for the Washington Post and should have taught them one simple lesson: don’t ever listen to Hugh Hewitt. Hiring a callow wingnut as the counterpoint to the awesome Dan Froomkin was a bad idea in the first place and publishing crap like this is even more embarrassing today than it was then:

Since the election of 1992, the extreme political left has fought a losing battle. Their views on the economy, marriage, abortion, guns, the death penalty, health care, welfare, taxes, and a dozen other major domestic policy issues have been exposed as unpopular, unmarketable and unquestioned losers at the ballot box.

Democrats who have won major elections since 1992 have, with very few exceptions, been the ones who distanced themselves from the shrieking denizens of their increasingly extreme base, soft-pedaled their positions on divisive issues and adopted the rhetoric and positions of the right — pro-free market, pro-business, pro-faith, tough on crime and strongly in favor of family values.

Yet even in a climate where Republicans hold command of every branch of government, and advocate views shared by a majority of voters, the mainstream media continues to treat red state Americans as pachyderms in the mist – an alien and off-kilter group of suburbanite churchgoers about which little is known, and whose natural habitat is a discomforting place for even the most hardened reporter from the New York Times.

Yeah, he was a brilliant political observer. Prescient too. How sad that the Washington Post’s readers have missed out on further trenchant analysis like that.

And now Red State, the home of the little Domenech, has gone the whole way and signed up for Wingnut Welfare. How predictable.

.

Shaken Not Stirred

by digby

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this.

There are a bunch of really good year-end round-ups out there and Crooks and Liars made a handy year-end list of them. I particularly liked Dahlia Lithwick’s 10 most Outrageous Civil Liberties Violations.

But the best year-end list, hands down, goes to Brilliant At Breakfast for her Brilliant 20 of 2006.

.

Bush’s Law: if it’s possible to make things worse, he will.

by digby

When I wrote about the Saddam execution the other day, I said I was struck by how much it reminded me of other disgusting snuff videos that had circulated earlier in the war. I had not, at that time, seen the worst of it. The underground video of his actual hanging, allegedly taken without permission, is everywhere now and its implications are devastating:

At the funeral in Al Auja and across the Arab world, Hussein’s fellow Sunni Muslims expressed outrage at his chaotic final moments, revealed in grainy footage circulated widely on the Internet and on television showing his execution at dawn Saturday in Baghdad.

The video, which appears to have been recorded with a cellphone, showed onlookers taunting Hussein with chants of “Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!” a reference to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr, whose Al Mahdi militia is accused of hunting down Sunni Arabs and killing them. As the trapdoor snapped open beneath Hussein, some in attendance cheered, “The tyrant has fallen!”

The shocking spectacle appeared to deepen the deadly sectarian divide between Sunnis and the Shiite majority that now leads Iraq’s government.

“Today they proved themselves that the trial and the execution were mere retaliation and not justice,” said a mourner from Tikrit, near Al Auja, who gave his name only as Abu Mohammed, a customary nickname. “It is clear now against whom we should retaliate.”

As the images ricocheted across the Arab world, they drew angry comment in newspapers, on television and on Internet blogs in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and other heavily Sunni Muslim countries that are allies of the United States.

In an interview on CNN, Hisham Melhem, the pro-American spokesman for the Arabic satellite news station Al Arabiya, called the execution a total disaster and described the future for Iraq as “descending into a black hole.”

Saddam Hussein is the the man I would have thought was least likely to be turned into a martyr, but damned if they didn’t manage to do it. Bush’s Law. And here’s the great thing about it — the US, which claims rather unconvincingly that it had no say in this because Iraq is a sovereign country, gets blamed for this right along with the Shi’a government and Moqtada al Sadr. Terrific. Lose, lose for us — as usual. Heckuva job, Bushie.

But then, as Glenn Greenwald points out, the Maliki government is really just emulating their US mentors as they do not let obstuctions like the rule of law stand in their way when they wish to do something; they just seek a “workaround.”

That is a sublime phrase — “legal workarounds”. Our polite media here at home refers to deliberate and knowing government lawbreaking as “bypassing” the law, or sometimes they will even pretend that the law being violated just does not exist. But “workaround” is a nice phrase, too.

The article details the “frantic quest” by the Iraqi government to concoct legal contrivances — any at all — to “justify” the immediate hanging despite the court’s order. They finally compiled enough pretty, signed “decrees” to secure the Bush administration’s approval to carry out the hanging. But the rush to snap Saddam’s neck did not allow enough time for all laws to be “workedaround.” Some laws standing in the way of the hanging had to be deliberately disregarded:

Mr. Maliki had one major obstacle: the Hussein-era law proscribing executions during the Id holiday. This remained unresolved until late Friday, the Iraqi official said. He said he attended a late-night dinner at the prime minister’s office at which American officers and Mr. Maliki’s officials debated the issue.

One participant described the meeting this way: “The Iraqis seemed quite frustrated, saying, ‘Who is going to execute him, anyway, you or us?’ The Americans replied by saying that obviously, it was the Iraqis who would carry out the hanging. So the Iraqis said, ‘This is our problem and we will handle the consequences. If there is any damage done, it is we who will be damaged, not you.’ ”

Or, put another way, the Iraqi Government — revealingly “frustrated” by the need to pretend to operate within the law — knew that hanging Saddam in this manner was illegal, but they did it anyway because they know there will be no consequences. No wonder the President praised their adherence to “due process” and the “rule of law” — the President’s followers and the Shiite militias ruling Iraq appear to share a similar understanding of those terms.

That Iraqi government sure was made in Dick Cheney’s image, wasn’t it?

What a horrible, stupid cock-up on top of all the other horrible stupid cock-ups. The United States simply cannot do anything right in Iraq. Nada.

There remains one question that is probably quite important: what was the rush?

None of the Iraqi officials were able to explain why Mr. Maliki had been unwilling to allow the execution to wait. Nor would any explain why those who conducted it had allowed it to deteriorate into a sectarian free-for-all that had the effect, on the video recordings, of making Mr. Hussein, a mass murderer, appear dignified and restrained, and his executioners, representing Shiites who were his principal victims, seem like bullying street thugs.

But the explanation may have lain in something that Bassam al-Husseini, a Maliki aide closely involved in arrangements for the hanging, said to the BBC later. Mr. Husseini, who has American citizenship, described the hanging as “an Id gift to the Iraqi people.”

I dunno. They woke up ministers at 1:30 in the morning to rush to the hanging. Seeing as a Sadr Army death squad carried out the executution, one might think they had an interest in making this as provocative as possible. And perhaps Maliki had personal reason for wanting to offer this “gift” to certain Iraqis — a gift that would ensure his own continued power. From Juan Cole’s must read article in Salon:

By the time of Saddam’s trial, sectarian strife was widespread, and the trial simply made it worse. It was not just the inherent bias of a judicial system dominated by his political enemies. Even the crimes for which he was tried were a source of ethnic friction. Saddam Hussein had had many Sunni Arabs killed, and a trial on such a charge could have been politically savvy. Instead, he was accused of the execution of scores of Shiites in Dujail in 1982. This Shiite town had been a hotbed of activism by the Shiite fundamentalist Dawa (Islamic Call) Party, which was founded in the late 1950s and modeled on the Communist Party. In the wake of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini’s 1979 Islamic Revolution in neighboring Iran, Saddam conceived a profound fear of Dawa and similar parties, banning them and making membership a capital crime. Young Dawa leaders such as al-Maliki fled to Tehran, Iran, or Damascus, Syria.

When Saddam visited Dujail, Dawa agents attempted to assassinate him. In turn, he wrought a terrible revenge on the town’s young men. Current Prime Minister al-Maliki is the leader of the Dawa Party and served for years in exile in its Damascus bureau. For a Dawa-led government to try Saddam, especially for this crackdown on a Dawa stronghold, makes it look to Sunni Arabs more like a sectarian reprisal than a dispassionate trial for crimes against humanity.

Perhaps it was. It looks to me as if the “government” of Iraq has finally been exposed as a simple factional tool of the Shi’a. Good to know. Too bad for us that we are backing such a government since it gives the vast majority of Muslims around the world another reason to hate our guts.

In case anyone’s wondering what the implications of the US taking sides might be:

To the Muslims in the light green portion of the map we seem to be siding with the Muslims in the dark green portion — while at the same time making them hate us too. Excellent plan. Winning those hearts and minds one snuff film at a time.

Update: Perhaps the Americans laid out as part of a deal. Bumbling fools who are in over their heads often have no idea when they are being played.

Update II: Leave it to an atheist to see the glaring religious symbolism:

You know, foreign occupying power, powerful religious group agitating for the execution of a hated, charismatic competitor, promises of who will bear the guilt for the deed, metaphorical washing of the hands…jebus, if I know what a counterproductive PR disaster that was for the Pharisees and the Romans, what’s the matter with the American leadership in Iraq? Don’t they read the bibles they thump? Add to that that they’ve apparently done the execution at a time when it is “religiously unacceptable”, and we’ve got a situation that makes Pontius Pilate look good.

.

Professional Courtesy: Pardoning The Pardoner

by poputonian

Richard Ben-Veniste wrote in Thursday’s Washington Post:

At bottom, the decision to pardon Nixon was a political judgment properly within the bounds of Ford’s constitutional authority. The specter of a former president in the criminal dock as our country moved into its bicentennial year was profoundly disturbing. I believe Jerry Ford acted in accord with what he sincerely felt were the best interests of the country; that there was no secret quid pro quo with Nixon for a pardon in return for resignation; and that Ford, a compassionate man, was moved by the palpable suffering of a man who had lost so much.

Oh, puke. Instead of recognizing the damage done to the country, or to the lingering political disease wrought by Ford’s pardon, Ben-Veniste draws it back to the “palpable suffering” of Richard Nixon. I guess we know for sure that Ben-Veniste’s basic affinity lies not with the people, but with the Washington establishment where one of its own had ‘suffered palpably.’

How about this for a New Year’s resolution?