Real Men
by digby
One of the blogger types I mentioned in “that speech” were “stay at home Dads” and I was actually surprised by how many of my blogger friends later told me they appreciated the mention. There are many more than you think and they are all great.
Here’s one now, whom you all know, with a lovely essay about being a manly man who stayed home to raise his little girl.
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The Grown-Ups Of the 82nd
by digby
I was just on the Sam Seder Show with Jack Hitt and we talked about this amazing op-ed in today’s NY Times by seven non-coms currently deployed in Iraq. We all wondered if it will get the kind of wall-to-wall coverage that the O’Pollack piece did a week or so ago, at the clear behest of the right wing who were pimping them like hookers to any TV John who would have them. The consensus is no, unfortunately.
My feeling is that they will not get the coverage for a couple of reasons. The first is that, as Hitt pointed out on the show, the Dems don’t seem to have any kind of apparatus to “catapault the propaganda” (or seemingly any desire to have one) and the second is because I think the right will go into overdrive to present these guys as good and decent patriotic non-coms (who-aren’t-all-that-bright-if-you-know-what-I-mean-shhhh.) They aren’t capable of seeing the big picture there with their big clumsy boots on the ground and their heads in the sand. They’re very sweet, but let’s get serious. Very Serious People know a little bit more about these Very Serious issues than these well-meaning boys.
It’s what they did to John Murtha. Up until the time he came out for withdrawing for Iraq everyone in town considered him a go-to person on military affairs. An “expert” if you will. After he took his stand you heard a lot of people saying that he was just a sentimental old man who ghoulishly liked to hang around Walter Reed and blubber.
John Murtha is “a lovable guy,” but “he’s never been a big thinker; he’s an appropriator.” Using language that Bush never could, McCain tells me that Murtha has become too emotional about the human cost of the war. “As we get older, we get more sentimental,” McCain says. “And [Murtha] has been very, very affected by the funerals and the families. But you cannot let that affect the way you decide policy.”
Furthermore, the right and the political media have many things in common, but nothing more than their absolute faith in “grown-ups.” And “grown-ups” are designated as “rock-stars,””experts” and “leaders.” The average soldiers, much less average citizens, do not fit in those categories and should stay in their place when it comes to Very Serious issues.
I would hope that any Democratic spokesman appearing in the media in the next few days will have the names of these seven soldiers memorized and ready to trip from their tongues at every given opportunity. These men deserve to be treated with respect, particularly since they are clearly not Bush hating DFH’s who hate America.
Unfortunately, everyone’s on vacation.
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“The Intent Here Was Pure”
by digby
Jonathan Alter is very shrill:
I hate to sound melodramatic about it, but while everyone was at the beach or “The Simpsons Movie” on the first weekend in August, the U.S. government shredded the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the one requiring court-approved “probable cause” before Americans can be searched or spied upon. This is not the feverish imagination of left-wing bloggers and the ACLU. It’s the plain truth of where we’ve come as a country, at the behest of a president who has betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution and with the acquiescence of Democratic congressional leaders who know better. Historians will likely see this episode as a classic case of fear—both physical and political—trumping principle amid the ancient tension between personal freedom and national security.
[…]
With Congress, the courts and President Bush squabbling over his illegal wiretapping program, the government was actually conducting less surveillance of foreign nationals than before 9/11, which was crazy. We had to do more listening in, especially with scary new intelligence “chatter” suggesting an unspecified attack on the U.S. Capitol this summer. Congressional sources who attended the late-July classified intel briefings, but won’t talk about them for the record, say these threats didn’t sound like spin. After all, we’re not talking here about trumped-up Iraqi WMD, but Al Qaeda terrorists who have already tried to kill us.
So members of Congress are legitimately afraid that they and their families will get blown up this summer. Fair enough. But then they lost their heads and sold out the Constitution to cover their political rears while keeping the rest of us mostly in the dark
There has been a good deal of discussion about why the Democrats really did this, with opinions basically dividing into it being either a desire to allow the Bush administration to do anything it feels it needs to to protect us or a political fear that the Bush administration would call them soft on terrorism if they failed to pass the bill.
Both are despicable reasons for shredding the fourth amendment. The idea of being called soft on terrorism if they failed to pass the bill is predictable Democratic political malpractice. But I actually became convinced that it was the other reason that motivated them: they believe the president should have these extra-constitutional powers. And that reason is the one that really scares me. A majority of our representatives apparently agree that the constitution can be set aside if they are afraid of something.
And nobody has yet explained to me exactly how passing this FISA bill was supposed to stop these impending terrorist attacks that the administration had been “chattering” about in Washington all summer on the q.t. Was there some reason to believe that they had not been able to nail something down because they were so afraid of breaking the law — the law which they’d already been breaking for years? It makes no sense.
But it doesn’t have to make sense because it isn’t about a particular program, which most members of the congress are all to happy not to know anything about. The problem is that they have bought George W. Bush’s authoritarian paternalistic mantra that the president’s primary job is to “keep us safe.”
Do you ever remember hearing that before 9/11? I don’t. I don’t recall any civics classes or history books saying that the president’s primary responsibility is to protect the American people.” In fact, the oath of office says something very specific about what the president is supposed to “preserve and protect” and it’s the constitution. We were supposed to be a brave nation of hardy yeoman farmers and bourgeois businessmen — individualists who came together when under attack to protect ourselves.I don’t ever remember, in my lifetime anyway, the president constantly saying that we should be “comforted” by the fact that he was doing everything in his power to keep us safe from harm. It’s rubbed me the wrong way from the beginning. It makes us sounds like a nation of infants.
Yet I think that idea has taken hold somehow — that we need to let our Daddy/president do what he has to do to keep the family safe, and if that means beating cousin Tommy senseless because you found a couscou in his backpack and then locking us all in the basement for our own good, well, so be it. And even if it’s clear he’s been watching too much “24” and popping Mom’s prescription diet pills — we have to let him do whatever he thinks is necessary because he’s the only one who can keep us safe. Don’t ask questions, father knows best.
As long as the president, any president, can set off a chain of rumors in Washington that the boogeymen are coming to kill all the congressmen and their families in their beds if they don’t let him (or her) do what he wants, then they are going to be able to pretty much do anything in the name of national security, aren’t they, particularly if they’ve all internalized this nonsense that the president’s main job is to “protect them” by any means necessary. Even if it makes no sense. Even if it won’t work.
Bin laden needn’t have bothered taking down the world trade center. It appears that the DC operation would have sufficed to get the US to turn itself into an mindless bowl of jelly.
Alter explains what happened behind the scenes and it’s so ugly, I can barely read it without feeling nauseous.
Here’s what we do know. We know that the Democratic leadership rightly conceded to Adm. Michael McConnell, the once widely respected director of National Intelligence, to allow eavesdropping on foreigner-to-foreigner communications routed through American phone companies (no biggie; we’ve always spied on foreigners). We know that the Democrats thought they had a deal until McConnell, who is supposed to be nonpartisan, went back to the White House and got fresh marching orders to squelch reasonable judicial oversight by the FISA court. And we know that the administration’s new position was that the attorney general (the disgraced Alberto Gonzales) should have the sole authority to spy without a warrant on any American talking to a foreigner, even if it’s you and the guy from Mumbai fixing your printer.
Then the Democrats said: “Wait a minute! That’s unconstitutional!” Right? Actually, no, they didn’t. Even liberals like Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, argued in two heated, closed-door meetings on Aug. 3 that the Democrats might as well cave. Otherwise, they would be pounded during the August recess for ignoring national security and destroyed as a party if the country were actually attacked. Even though the leadership and 82 percent of House Democrats voted against the bill, they did not block it, delay the recess and hold the Congress in session. The private excuse was that the liberal base wouldn’t be satisfied no matter what they did, and that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid couldn’t make the more conservative Senate go along anyway.
Aside from the disgusting cravenness of that, what does it tell you that Reid couldn’t get the “more conservative” Senate to go along? It means that the more conservative Senate — including a fair number of Democrats — believes that the President should have the right to eavesdrop on you when you call in to argue about your credit card receipt with some customer service clerk (you don’t know is) in Mumbai.
And now we find out that the legislation was actually much worse than we knew before:
Broad new surveillance powers approved by Congress this month could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include — without court approval — certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans’ business records, Democratic Congressional officials and other experts said.
Administration officials acknowledged that they had heard such concerns from Democrats in Congress recently, and that there was a continuing debate over the meaning of the legislative language. But they said the Democrats were simply raising theoretical questions based on a harsh interpretation of the legislation.
[…]
“This may give the administration even more authority than people thought,” said David Kris, a former senior Justice Department lawyer in the Bush and Clinton administrations and a co-author of “National Security Investigation and Prosecutions,” a new book on surveillance law.
Several legal experts said that by redefining the meaning of “electronic surveillance,” the new law narrows the types of communications covered in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, by indirectly giving the government the power to use intelligence collection methods far beyond wiretapping that previously required court approval if conducted inside the United States.
These new powers include the collection of business records, physical searches and so-called “trap and trace” operations, analyzing specific calling patterns.
For instance, the legislation would allow the government, under certain circumstances, to demand the business records of an American in Chicago without a warrant if it asserts that the search concerns its surveillance of a person who is in Paris, experts said.
It is possible that some of the changes were the unintended consequences of the rushed legislative process just before this month’s Congressional recess, rather than a purposeful effort by the administration to enhance its ability to spy on Americans.
“We did not cover ourselves in glory,” said one Democratic aide, referring to how the bill was compiled.
But a senior intelligence official who has been involved in the discussions on behalf of the administration said that the legislation was seen solely as a way to speed access to the communications of foreign targets, not to sweep up the communications of Americans by claiming to focus on foreigners.
“I don’t think it’s a fair reading,” the official said. “The intent here was pure: if you’re targeting someone outside the country, the fact that you’re doing the collection inside the country, that shouldn’t matter.”
The intent was pure. Oh my god.
It’s impossible for me to believe that all this is an accident or that it’s just a case of extreme political malpractice. The biggest political story of the summer was the stunning revelation by James Comey that the entire upper echelon of the Department of Justice was prepared to resign in 2004 if the administration continued its illegal wiretapping program. The Attorney General himself is accused of committing perjury in his testimony about that event. Editorial pages throughout the country and senior senators of both parties have said he should resign. There has been a serious dialog about impeaching the president, vice president and the attorney general largely on the basis of this particular case. The political implications, with it’s high drama and resonance with Watergate, are huge.
The degree of imeptitude required to allow this potent political issue to be completely destroyed by passing this legislation and essentially codifying the program in question into law seems a bit much even for the challenged Dems. I actually give them more credit than that. It’s hard for me to believe anyone could be this stupid. They got the bill passed because they wanted to give the president the authority he needs to do “whatever it takes to protect us.”
And anyway,
…the liberal base wouldn’t be satisfied no matter what they did
That’s just not true. If they had passed a bill that allowed some technical changes to the law that already allows foreign-to-foreign wiretapping that did not intrude on American’s fourth amendment rights, as they said they were going to do, I really doubt many of us would have objected. But they went much further than that and what we are left with is a law that blows another hole in the fourth amendment with an assurance by The Bush Administration that their “intent was pure.” And their argument about the warrantless wiretapping has been unceremoniously flushed down the toilet. An accident? Really? ok…
It’s a good thing our Daddy loves us. It hurts him more than it hurts us to have to do this.
Update: Tommy Stevenson of Tuscaloosa News.com has this quote from Democratic congressman, Artur Davis:
“Should the perfect be the enemy of the good?” Davis said. “Now in an ideal world, I would like to see us in a place where if a communication touched someone in the United States you would have go get a warrant, but the problem is that wasn’t one of the options we had before us.
“Sometimes in the process you’ve got to make hard choices in real time.”
In this case, Davis said he thought the most important thing was to close the loophole that had been made public and ripe for exploitation by terrorists.
“We closed the gap involving foreign-to-foreign communication that passes through U.S. portals,” he said. “Everybody knew that needed to be fixed because communication that passes though U.S. ‘wires’ does not attach Fourth Amendment protections.
“if we had not closed that gap, that gap would be real and in existence today and ready to be exploited by, say, terrorists in Islamabad communicating with people in Canada to plan an attack.”
The more cynical of the critics of the changes Congress made to the FISA law say the Democrats who crossed over to vote with the Republicans and gave Bush what he wanted, especially the House members all of whom are up for reelection next year, were afraid of being branded as “soft on terror” in the election.
Davis, Alabama’s only black member of Congress, has a relatively safe seat, at least as far as GOP opposition goes, in his majority black district. In fact, since the former Birmingham lawyers and assistant federal prosecutor did not come up through the ranks of the black political establishment, he will always be most vulnerable in the Democratic primary, where a vote against the FISA changes would not have hurt him one bit.
But the second-term congressman shrugged off that analysis.
“The most important thing we had before us last week was closing that glaring loophole that everybody in the world who would do us harm knew about,” he said.
“Besides, this legislation is good for only six months, when we will come back and revisit the issue,” he said. “I am hopeful we can get some more oversight back into the FISA law then.”
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Poor WATB
by digby
Poor Karl. So misunderstood. In his petulant, whining interview with the NY Times this morning he almost breaks into tears at how terribly he’s been misunderstood. He’s such a nice fellow and everyone thinks he’s so darned mean. It’s the Demooocrats who were the dividers when every now and then a small minority of them would raise a tepid peep against the administration’s policies.
He only has one regret, about the one time when he treated someone he works with unkindly:
“I remember having a conversation with a colleague — I want to say not only a colleague, but a very close friend — and responding out of frustration at the end of a seemingly long, continuing dialogue that turned into an argument, and saying something unkind, and it was the worst I ever felt at the White House. I later apologized to him for it.”
Karl, you see, is normally a very mild mannered fellow who brings ice cream bars to all his colleagues on Friday afternoons. His calm and kind demeanor has been well documented:
Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. “We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!” As a reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events—but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. “Come on in.” And I did. And we had the most amiable chat for a half hour.
He told the NY Times he wasn’t even involved in that legendary smear campaign against Max Clelend:
Mr. Rove was asked whether harsh Republican attacks on the national security credentials of various Democrats in 2002, orchestrated by him, had added to the climate. Among the advertisements that year was one from the Georgia Senate race in which the Republican, Saxby Chambliss, called the Democratic incumbent, Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran soft on defense and flashed the menacing image of Osama Bin Laden.
“President Bush and the White House don’t write the ads for Senate candidates,” Mr. Rove said, calling himself “a convenient scapegoat,” and blaming Democrats for their losse
Gee, I wonder where people got the idea that he was intimately involved in that smear?
Karl Rove’s legacy in Georgia includes a 2002 U.S. Senate race remembered as one of the most negative in the country.
Republicans needed to take control of the Senate to help move President Bush’s agenda. They wanted to take out U.S. Sen. Max Cleland, a Georgia Democrat. That’s where Rove came in.
First, the White House crushed the campaign of another Georgia Republican, Bob Irvin, a former leader of the state House, by announcing Bush’s support for then-U.S. Rep. Saxby Chambliss in the primary —- a race in which the White House rarely intervenes.
“This is one of those rare instances where, with all due deference to other Republicans involved, control of the Senate is so important to the president’s agenda that he will back one of the candidates,” Rove said at the time.
Chambliss easily won the nomination and set his sights on Cleland, a disabled veteran of the Vietnam war.
With the backing of the White House, Chambliss was running competitively, and late in the campaign, he dropped an advertising bomb.
In the now-famous ad, pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein appeared on the screen followed by a picture of Cleland.
A protégé of White House political guru Karl Rove produced the controversial Republican National Committee ad targeting Tennessee Democratic Senate candidate Rep. Harold Ford Jr., that some have called racist, CBS News has learned.
The ad, in which a white woman with blonde hair and bare shoulders looks into the camera and whispers, “Harold, call me,” and then winks, was produced by Scott Howell, the former political director for Rove’s consulting firm in Texas.
[…]
Howell is no stranger to controversy. He was media consultant for Sen. Saxby Chambliss when his campaign ran an ad showing a picture of then-Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, who lost his legs in the Vietnam War, alongside Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
Coincidence, I’m sure.
With all the unfair and unfounded battering he takes, at least he hasn’t lost his puckish sense of humor:
As Mr. Rove left the IHOP for his hotel here in Waco — some 20 miles from the president’s vacation ranch — it was evident the degree to which he had become a public figure. He was twice stopped by well-wishers who said they admired him.
Later, Mr. Rove sent a note: “I didn’t plant the guy at the IHOP or the woman at the hotel but it would be the subtle personal touch that the Evil Genius would do to throw you off the scent, don’t you think?”
Actually, this is vintage Rove. there’s nobody in the whole wide world who has promoted the idea of Rove-the-mastermind more than Karl Rove. In fact, his legendary jujitsu skill is pretty much all in his self-serving myth making, as he shows here. He knows there are people all over the country who are saying right now, “I’ll bet he did plant them.”
In this pouty interview he defends everything he ever did, blames the Democrats for everything that’s gone wrong and then puts down the one decent, pure and good thing about the Bush white house, the only member of the admnistration I truly admire: Barney. What an ass.
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Saturday Night At The Movies
Thursday’s child is Sunday’s clown
By Dennis Hartley
(Please note: This week’s review is based solely on the “extended” director’s cut of the film that appears on the DVD; I have not screened the original theatrical version.)
One of the more fascinating trends to emerge in simpatico with the ever-narrowing window between the moment a first-run film leaves the multiplex and its appearance on DVD is what I like to refer to as the “auto repair cut” of box-office flops (“Okay, I think I’ve found the problem -try starting it now…”)
One recent example is George Hickenlooper’s extended cut of “Factory Girl
Edie Sedgwick was the Paris Hilton of the 1960s; a trust fund babe imbued with no real discernible native talent aside from the ability to attract the paparazzi by associating with just the right people in just the right places at just the right juncture of the pop culture zeitgeist. Despite growing up as a child of privilege, Sedgwick’s childhood was less than idyllic (two of her brothers committed suicide and her mother was institutionalized). She arrived in New York City in the mid 60s and was drawn to the downtown art scene, where she was subsequently spotted by Andy Warhol, who immediately became platonically smitten with her wide-eyed, waif-like beauty and vowed to make her a “superstar”. Warhol featured her in a number of his experimental films, and she became the iconic symbol of the “Factory”, a warehouse space where Warhol worked on his multi-media projects and played host to a revolving door co-op of avant-garde artists, musicians, actors and hangers-on. Sedgwick fell from grace with Warhol when she became strung out on various substances and was cut off financially by her family. She eventually sought treatment and cleaned up, only to tragically die of a drug overdose at the age of 28.
This is a pretty rich vein from which to mine a juicy biopic. The director is no stranger to this territory; his outstanding 2003 documentary about L.A. DJ/rock impresario Rodney Bingenheimer, “The Mayor of the Sunset Strip” basically deals with the same theme (see my review here from 5/5/07). So, is Hickenlooper up to the task? Well, yes and no.
Hickenlooper’s affection for the subject at hand is evidenced in his canny visual replication of the 1960s underground art scene; he alternates grainy, b&w film footage with highly saturated 16mm color stock and utilizes a lot of hand-held cinema verite style shots, cleverly aping the look of Warhol’s own experimental films. The fashion, the music, and the overall vibe of the era is pretty much captured in a bottle here.
Okay, so the film has a great look, but what about the narrative? Ay, there’s the rub. The director’s pastiche approach plays like the Cliff’s Notes version of Warhol and Sedgwick’s partnership. A lot of things are left unexplained; peripheral characters come and go without much exposition (it wasn’t until the credits rolled that I learned tidbits like “Oh. THAT character was supposed to be Moe Tucker from the Velvet Underground. Coulda fooled me…”). In a fictional story, you can get away with creating bit parts like “Man #2 with suitcase” or “Crazy bag lady in subway”, but when you are dramatizing a true story…well, I think you see my point. (Ironically, the 30 minute documentary extra on the DVD, featuring recollections from friends and family. serves up much more insight into what made Sedgwick tick than the full length feature does).
One cannot fault the actors. Sienna Miller gives her all in the lead role and does an admirable job portraying the full arc of Edie’s transition from an innocent pixie, fresh from her parent’s pastoral country estate, to a haggard junkie, encamped in a dingy room at the Chelsea Hotel (eerily, the very same place where, a scant decade later, a strung-out Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen would write their final chapters). The always excellent Guy Pearce completely disappears into a spooky evocation of Warhol. It’s not as easy as one might think to inhabit Warhol’s deadpan persona; several actors have made valiant efforts (David Bowie, Jared Harris and Crispin Glover) but generally end up doing little more than donning a white wig, affecting a blank stare and tossing out the rote catch phrases (“Umm, yeah. That’s great.” “Yeah, hi.”). If you’ve seen footage of the real McCoy, Warhol was, in actuality, quite the wiseacre (in his own slyly ironic fashion). Pearce perfectly captures Warhol’s calculatingly detached, bemused demeanor. Even the usually wooden Hayden Christensen registers a pulse and gets with the program, doing a passable impression of Bob Dylan. Oh, I’m sorry-did I say ‘Bob Dylan’? I meant to say, ‘Billy Quinn’ (as in “The Mighty Quinn”-get it?), referred to in the film only as a “folk singer” (even on the DVD commentary track, Hickenlooper goes to great pains to avoid invoking Dylan by name- Bob’s lawyers must be some scary motherfuckers.)
All in all, “Factory Girl” is perhaps not quite as dismal as many have led you to believe, but it is still not as good as one might have hoped (I guess we can call this a ‘mixed review’, no?) Worth a peek on a slow night; it actually might be a more enhanced experience if you pair it up with one of my recommendations below. Ciao!
Andy’s Chest: Ciao Manhattan
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Tripping On Crazy
by digby
Atrios has posted a YouTube of Tom Friedman from 2003 saying we needed to unleash hell on the first convenient middle eastern country to teach those bastards a lesson. It’s a perfect display of the rampant lunacy that overtook most of the punditocrisy after 9/11, and Friedman in particular. I recall talking to liberals at the time who were persuaded that if Friedman thought we needed to kick arab ass, maybe that’s what we needed to do. He was a Very Serious Expert on the middle east. He speaks arabic!
Atrios posted this vid in response to another post from Democracy Arsenal attempting to mitigate such — let’s say it, fascistic — comments by saying that Tom Friedman isn’t a bad person for saying such things. I might buy it if he just made a comment like that once or twice in passing in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. But he didn’t just say this in conversation. He wrote it in his column in the most influential paper in the country. And he wrote it as “even the liberal Tom Friedman says” perspective, which gave it the veneer of bi-partisanship that helped to paralyze the Democratic party (and the country.).
He wrote this one three months after 9/11, long after it was acceptable for anyone sane to rant like this:
Reading Europe’s press, it is really reassuring to see how warmly Europeans have embraced President Bush’s formulation that an ”axis of evil” threatens world peace. There’s only one small problem. President Bush thinks the axis of evil is Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and the Europeans think it’s Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condi Rice.
I’m not kidding. Chris Patten, the European Union’s foreign policy czar, told The Guardian that the Bush axis-of-evil idea was dangerously ”absolutist and simplistic,” not ”thought through” and ”unhelpful,” and that the Europeans needed to stop Washington before it went into ”unilateralist overdrive.”
So what do I think? I think these critics are right that the countries Mr. Bush identified as an axis of evil are not really an ”axis,” and we shouldn’t drive them together. And the critics are right that each of these countries poses a different kind of threat and requires a different, nuanced response. And the critics are right that America can’t fight everywhere alone. And the critics are right that America needs to launch a serious effort to end Israeli-Palestinian violence, because it’s undermining any hope of U.S.-Arab cooperation.
The critics are right on all these counts — but I’m still glad President Bush said what he said.
Because the critics are missing the larger point, which is this: Sept. 11 happened because America had lost its deterrent capability. We lost it because for 20 years we never retaliated against, or brought to justice, those who murdered Americans. From the first suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983, to the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut airport a few months later, to the T.W.A. hijacking, to the attack on U.S. troops at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, to the suicide bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, to the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, innocent Americans were killed and we did nothing.
So our enemies took us less and less seriously and became more and more emboldened. Indeed, they became so emboldened that a group of individuals — think about that for a second: not a state but a group of individuals — attacked America in its own backyard. Why not? The terrorists and the states that harbor them thought we were soft, and they were right. They thought that they could always ”out-crazy” us, and they were right. They thought we would always listen to the Europeans and opt for ”constructive engagement” with rogues, not a fist in the face, and they were right.
America’s enemies smelled weakness all over us, and we paid a huge price for that. There is an old bedouin legend that goes like this: An elderly Bedouin leader thought that by eating turkey he could restore his virility. So he bought a turkey, kept it by his tent and stuffed it with food every day. One day someone stole his turkey. The Bedouin elder called his sons together and told them: ”Boys, we are in great danger. Someone has stolen my turkey.” ”Father,” the sons answered, ”what do you need a turkey for?”
”Never mind,” he answered, ”just get me back my turkey.” But the sons ignored him and a month later someone stole the old man’s camel. ”What should we do?” the sons asked. ”Find my turkey,” said the father. But the sons did nothing, and a few weeks later the man’s daughter was raped. The father said to his sons: ”It is all because of the turkey. When they saw that they could take my turkey, we lost everything.”
America is that Bedouin elder, and for 20 years people have been taking our turkey. The Europeans don’t favor any military action against Iraq, Iran or North Korea. Neither do I. But what is their alternative? To wait until Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday, who’s even a bigger psychopath than his father, has bio-weapons and missiles that can hit Paris?
No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through — but that’s what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: ”We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld — he’s even crazier than you are.”
There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right. It is the only way we’re going to get our turkey back.
That attitude showed bad judgment all right. The whole thing screams facile neoconservative cant that makes even Norman Podhoretz’s ravings about WWIV look tame. But it showed something more —- a sick kind of bloodlust that I think really calls Friedman’s morals into question. This was the kind of hysterical crap you would expect dittoheads to spout, not hugely influential liberal intellectuals. It was bizarre and freakish and it lent crediblity to the kind of cowboy hero-worship that gave Bush the support he needed to make the greatest strategic blunder in American history.
He was a 9/11 junkie, addled by war porn and sentimental nationalism:
I have a confession to make. Right after 9/11, I was given a CD by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which included its rendition of ”The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I put it in my car’s CD player and played that song over and over, often singing along as I drove. It wasn’t only the patriotism it evoked that stirred me, but the sense of national unity. That song was what the choir sang at the close of the memorial service at the National Cathedral right after 9/11. Even though that was such a wrenching moment for our nation, I look back on it now with a certain longing and nostalgia. For it was such a moment of American solidarity, with people rallying to people and everyone rallying to the president.
They say you don’t find out what you’re made of until you come under pressure. I would say that for an intellectual like Friedman, the test came when he was called upon by vast numbers of influential politicians and ordinary people to make sense of what was happening in the Middle East and he responded like a simpleton.
I’m sure he is very nice to people he knows and I’m sure he’s a great friend and all that. But he called for this country’s leadership to be “crazy” and he cheered the idea that we should invade a country, any country — necessarily killing vast numbers of innocent people as wars always do and behaving like invading Mongol hordes — to show that we can’t be trifled with.
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?”
You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow?
Well, Suck. On. This.
Okay.
That Charlie was what this war was about. We could’ve hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We couldn’t hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.
Oh sure, he twisted his white hankie about whether the Bush administration was going to follow through on all its grand proclamations about creating a full service democracy mall once we’d “pacified” the barbarians. But his main theme through that whole period was that the US needed to kill a bunch of Arabs to show that we weren’t a bunch of wimps. Just listen to the passion in his voice when he says this horrible thing. It’s chilling.
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The Big Carnival
by digby
Jane flagged this post by Arianna yesterday, in which she calls out the media for giving that glory hound wingnut Bob Murray a stage for the past week and a half instead of doing their jobs and reporting the story objectively:
Here’s a question for the media: Since when do the owners of mines — especially owners who have been fined millions of dollars for numerous safety violations — set the news agenda? So here we are, 12 days after the first collapse, with three heroic rescuers dead, six others injured, and the original six trapped miners almost certainly lost forever. And, finally, we have Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman suggesting we “focus like never before on workplace safety” (the Governor had better be prepared for the wrath of Murray: when Hillary Clinton made a similar statement months ago about the importance of workplace safety, Murray attacked her as “anti-American.”) So why wasn’t the focus on workplace safety the focus of the media from Day One?
What a good question. But we know the answer. As Jane points out:
All along, Murray called the shots and he wrote the media’s script for them.
Script is exactly right. Ever since I saw Murray doing his manic Wilfred Brimley impression on that first day, I’ve been struck by how much the whole media approach to this mine accident was eerily like the cynical Billy Wilder flick from 1951 called “Ace In The Hole” (also known as “The Big Carnival.”) As it happens, I just watched it for the first time in decades on Turner Classic Movies after Dennis Hartley recommended it here in one of his reviews a few months back. Let’s just say that Wilder didn’t have a high opinion of the media: Dennis wrote:
[I]t is arguably the most cynical noir ever made, and IMHO Wilder’s best film.
Kirk Douglas is brilliant as Charles Tatum, a washed up, alcoholic former big-city newspaperman yearning for a comeback (not unlike the Robert Downey Jr. character in “Zodiac”). He swears off the booze and sweet-talks his way into a job at a small-town newspaper in New Mexico, hoping that the Big Story will somehow fall into his lap.
He gets his wish when he happens across a “man trapped in a cave-in” incident. What begins as a “human interest story” turns into a major media circus, with the opportunistic Tatum pulling the strings as its ringmaster. Prescient, hard-hitting, and required viewing.
Drilling through the top of the cave to reach the trapped miner as opposed to rescuing him through the mine even features heavily in the plot. Certainly, pimping out a showy clown like Murray for days on end to boost ratings, would have fit perfectly with the theme. Like I said, it’s eery.
Tragically, a whole bunch of people have died and others are injured but so far, we’ve heard almost nothing about this “star’s” background in pushing unsafe mining techniques and anti-union policies and neither have we heard anything about the fact that the man Bush named to be the “mine safety czar” was such a bad choice for the job that he had to give him a recess appointment with a Republican congress. It’s difficult to know if that being public knowledge would have led to a more prudent rescue attempt. But it certainly would have spared the miners’ families having to put up with the “face of the rescue” being the same man whose anti-regulatory, anti-labor policies may very well have led to their loved ones’ deaths.
Here’s another mining movie recommendation: Harlan County USA. It’s a film conservative exploiters like Murray don’t want anybody to see. It might make working men and women in this country realize that voting for Republican jackasses who answer to pricks like him, might not be the best idea in the world.
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Hatching The Plot
by digby
When Karl resigned earlier this week, I mused that if he was about to go down, I thought it might be because of the most prosaic crime of all: violation of the Hatch act.
Here’s more from McClatchy tonight on just what a slick political operation they had:
Top Commerce and Treasury Departments officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.
Political appointees in the Treasury Department received at least 10 political briefings from July 2001 to August 2006, officials familiar with the meetings said. Their counterparts at the Commerce Department received at least four briefings — all in the election years of 2002, 2004 and 2006.
The House Oversight Committee is investigating whether the White House’s political briefings to at least 15 agencies, including to the Justice Department, the General Services Administration and the State Department, violated a ban on the use of government resources for campaign activities.
Under the Hatch Act, Cabinet members are permitted to attend political briefings and appear with members of Congress. But Cabinet members and other political appointees aren’t permitted to spend taxpayer money with the aim of benefiting candidates.
[…]
As part of the probe, committee investigators found that White House drug czar John Walters took 20 trips at taxpayers’ expense in 2006 to appear with Republican congressional candidates.
In a separate investigation, the independent Office of Special Counsel concluded that GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan violated the Hatch Act, which limits the political activities of government employees. Witnesses told investigators that Doan asked at the end of one political briefing in January 2007 what her agency could do to help GOP candidates. Doan has said she doesn’t recall that remark.
[…]
In the months leading up to the 2002 election, then-Commerce Secretary Don Evans, Bush’s former campaign finance chairman, made eight appearances or announcements with Republican incumbents in districts deemed by White House aides either as competitive districts or battleground presidential states.
During the stops, he doled out millions of dollars in grants, including in two public announcements with Rep. Heather Wilson, a New Mexico Republican in a competitive district.
Republicans ultimately regained control of the Senate and expanded their majority in the House of Representatives in the 2002 elections.
[…]
In 2006, Evans’ successor, Carlos Gutierrez, and his aides also made public announcements with several Republican congressional incumbents, including in the battleground states of Missouri, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. Weeks before the 2006 election, Gutierrez and Congresswoman Wilson announced $3.45 million in grants for Albuquerque organizations. Also in the weeks before the election, a deputy secretary and Republican Sen. Rick Santorum announced that the department would be investing $2.25 million in Philadelphia.
The same year, then-Treasury Secretary John Snow and Santorum announced an award of millions in tax credits to Pennsylvania organizations. Santorum later lost his seat.
Snow and his aides also made appearances in 2006 with Republican incumbents or doled out grants in Virginia, Iowa and Ohio, states seen as crucial to the GOP retaining control of Congress.
Bush’s first treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, stuck mainly to giving speeches praising President Bush’s economic policies rather than appearing with candidates. O’Neill was unceremoniously dumped after disagreeing repeatedly with the White House.
[…]
Commerce Department spokesman Dan Nelson described the meetings as merely “informational.”
“They were not a call to action,” he said.
From the LA Times article I quoted in my earlier Rove post:
Interior Department employees describe regular visits from Rove’s staff during Bush’s first term. On one occasion, Rove visited a retreat for the 50 top Interior Department managers. The lights dimmed in an agency conference room as Rove went through a PowerPoint presentation showing battleground races in the 2002 midterm election, and occasionally made oblique but clearly understood references to Interior Department decisions that could affect these races. By stopping short of explicitly calling on the Interior Department officials to take action, Rove stayed within the rules against exerting improper political influence.
[…]
“These visits are a reminder of what’s important,” said one agency manager who attended one of the sessions. “They didn’t need to say anything explicitly. We already knew what to do.”
But, you know, it isn’t just the power point parades or the pep rallies or the largesse being doled out to GOP candidates in trouble that’s being investigated for Hatch Act violations. There’s this, and if it has traction, it could open up a very interesting avenue into the big crimes:
…fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias revealed key new details about the Office of Special Counsel’s (OSC) probe into Karl Rove and other White House officials reported today by the Los Angeles Times.
Iglesias said that on April 3, he filed a Hatch Act complaint with the OSC, charging that Karl Rove and others may have violated the law by firing him over his failure to initiate partisan-motivated prosecutions.
These Hatch act investigations may end up being more potent than anybody realizes. Remember, Watergate started out as a third rate burglary.
Ranch Dressing
by digby
When I read that Bush was upset about a fashion article about him, I was actually prepared to defend him. I mean if it suggested that he had calculated that wearing pants really tight in the crotch would show what a manly man he was or something, or even if they said he’d taken up earth tones to make himself more “accessible,” I would have stood up for his right to bitch. These fashion articles are very annoying.
But I read it and I can’t figure out what his beef was. It’s an extremely dull article discussing what he wears at the ranch, like anybody gives a damn. There’s one silly quote from a consultant who says he’s being more statesmanlike (by dressing like Walker Texas Ranger!) than he was early in the term, and implies that it’s because he’s unpopular. I can’t even figure out what that means. But that’s not even close to the ridiculous stuff they said about Gore or the nasty innuendos out there about Edwards and his haircuts right now. (The piece even took a gratuitous knock on Bill Clinton, fergawdsake, what does he want?)
It ends by saying, “In his Western duds, Bush easily could model for Ralph Lauren. But if his popularity is still low through the end of his presidency, he could always try Wrangler.” Is that supposed to be a low blow? A few weeks ago the whole town was accusing Hillary Clinton of flashing her ta-tas on the floor of the senate to “humanize” herself. Saying he could be a Ralph Lauren model is hardly a slam. (Unless, of course, Mr “Prance-around-in-a-skin-tight-jumpsuit-like-a-Chippendale’s-dancer” thought that made him sound effeminate.)
Typical Bush. He actually went out of his way to complain about an article that isn’t even critical. And it may be the only article in the last six months that isn’t. Weird.
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Throwing The Brick
by digby
A friend recently told me that his daughter had given him a “bad call brick” — a sponge that looks like a brick that you throw at the TV when an umpire makes a bad call. (This was done, I assume, to stop more dangerous projectiles from being hurled, like a shoe — or the family dog.) I really need one of those, especially when I hear John McCain appearing before a liberal audience and getting cacophonous applause for saying:
JM: Well, let me just tell you. I’d close Guantanamo Bay and I’d declare we never torture another person in American custody.
Uh uh. You’d think he would feel that way because he’d been tortured and understood what an immoral and counterproductive way it is to get intelligence or create propaganda. He’s been there. But sadly, John McCain sold his soul last year when he helped the Bush administration pass that legislative abortion known as the Military Commissions act which actually legalized torture and withdrew habeas corpus protections from anyone that the president decides doesn’t deserve them.
So, no. He gets no credit for being against torture. If he were against torture he wouldn’t have allowed himself to be used like Dick Cheney’s blow up doll in passing that piece of garbage.
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