Tony Snow had a bad morning. He was very upset at the suggestion that the white house might have some influence on the page predator scandal because the congress is a co-equal branch of government and operates completely independently. That’s a first. For the last six years the House has been nothing more than a Bush rubber stamp and corrupt money machine. Suddenly the Bush administration has no juice, huh?
Joe Scarborough just asked one of the most important questions about this scandal. Why was Tom Reynolds involved in this issue in the first place? Tom Reynolds’ only job in all this was getting Republican congressmen elected. The mere fact that he’s in the middle of this indicates that they were covering this up.
Here’s what Hastert said in his ill-fated CNN interview earlier this week:
REPORTER: Congressman Reynolds put out a statement on Saturday saying that he told you in the spring. Do you think he’s lying?
HASTERT: No, I’m not saying. I just don’t recall him telling me that. If he would have told me that, he would have told me that in the context of maybe a half a dozen or a dozen other things. I don’t remember that.
REPORTER: Other allegations of improper e-mails?
HASTERT: No, just other things that might have affected campaigns.
Come on. This was always a campaign issue for the Republicans and that gets to the heart of their problem. They were more concerned about keeping their power than protecting the pages.
Chuck Todd just pointed out that this never would have happened if Tom Delay were still around. The inter-caucus fighting we are seeing between Boehner, Blunt et al is a result of a power vacuum and I think that’s true — Hastert himself was always just Delay’s hand-picked front man, installed by him and run by him. When Delay was ousted, the organization started to fall apart. He was the organization. And it’s quite clear that George W. Bush and Karl Rove don’t have the juice they used to have.
(On a side note, supposedly Tom Delay was calling around yesterday trying to find out if any of his staffers knew about Foley and they told him they didn’t because they were too busy dealing with his scandals.)
There are many moving parts to this scandal, but the one that’s driving decisions so far — from the original revelations months ago until today — is the election. Whether the GOP decides it’s better to stick with Hastert or throw him over the side will be decided purely on that basis until it’s over. In the meantime we are witnessing all kinds of jockeying for power among the ambitious Republican congressmen who are waiting to pounce.
Regardless of what Hastert says today, Scarborough says he is a dead man walking and I tend to agree. Ultimately, I think they are going to need a human sacrifice in a scandal like this and he’s the guy Tony Blankley chose to be the one last week.
Update: Hastert said absolutely nothing in his press conference that we haven’t heard before. The beat goes on.
There’s a huge…hullabaloo this morning over the outing of at least one page by the extreme right and the possible publication of the apparently gay Congressional aides named on The List obtained by David Corn. This should surprise no one.
The rightwing really senses imminent defeat and they will do literally anything they think they can get away with to prevent it. Hence, the release of the name of the page under the pretext that he was actually not a minor when the emails/ims were sent. In fact, that’s a deliberate lie, spread to sow confusion of the he-said-she-said variety. Not only do lies of this sort dislocate the truth to the liar’s advantage, they slow down legitimate investigations as the lies have to be researched and debunked. We’ve seen this strategy many times before from the right. In Rathergate, a lie about typewriter fonts turned out to be highly successful, buying the rightwing enough time to exploit other objections that were more plausible and decisively turn the topic away the important subject: Bush’s dereliction of duty, his drunkeness, and his cowardice.
In the Foley case, it clearly is the hope that by confusing and slowing down the story, evidence of Democratic complicity in the leaking of the story will eventually appear which will again enable Republicans to change the subject and accuse the Dems of vicious campaign dirty tricks (so far, Predatorgate seems to be entirely and stubbornly an intra-Republican scandal).
Also, it may seem paradoxical but the outing of the names and the accompanying lies actually is an attempt to suppress as much real information as possible. Knowing that the extreme right will post your name and your picture and then lie about you all over the internets is a strong incentive to shut up if you were the victim of sexual harassment by Republicans. I suspect their tactic will be extremely effective.
One final point: It’s not about the sex, and especially it’s not about gay sex, sayeth many a commentator. Riiiiiight. Maybe it’s not supposed to be about those things, but the right, at least, is treating it like it is. Hence the dangerously false bullshit about gay men being more prone to pedophilia than straight men. Hence the hypocritical moralizing and also the intensity of the entire scandal. And it surely is doubtful whether the word “disgusting” would surface so often in discussions over hetero cyber-sex between a 16 year-old girl and a middle-aged congressman.
The fact is that this is a sex scandal involving a rightwing political movement which has gone out of its way to claim a God-given moral superiority when it comes to matters of the flesh (and everything else). Their sexual hypocrisy is fully exposed here – covering up for a pedophile while posing with children to pretend they care about their welfare.
The fact is that this is a uniquely gay sex scandal involving a rightwing political movement which has gone far out of its way to express revulsion for same-sex relationships in the most explicit terms possible, often by lengthy descriptions of sexual acts whose obscene content gets past the FCC only through the substituion of a pseudo-medical vocabulary for the banned vernacular terms.
By going so far as to equate same-sex intimacy with bestiality thereby making it impossible for them to perceive homosexuality as anything but an unacceptable perversion, the delusional rightwing failed, and still fail, to understand that homosexual attraction and sexual behavior is simply normal human behavior. They apparently never realized that they were inviting a sex scandal like the Foley mess which includes homosexual acts that would make it all but impossible for homophobic christianist leaders to stand aside and defer strategically to the corporatists and imperialists.
Like Digby, I feel that as sickening as it is to learn all the ways that Republicans covered up for Foley, and as reprehensible as all sexual exploitation of minors by adults is by Foley or anyone else, the truly outrageous national scandals perpetrated by the modern American rightwing are the rape of the US Constitution; the disgraceful neglect of the citizenry epitomized by 9/11 and Katrina; and perhaps most dramatically tragic, the unspeakable stupidity and madness of the war in Iraq and the utter failure of the Afghanistan war.
[Edited slightly after original post, mostly in the final paragraph.]
Who’s Responsible For the $20 Million “Victory” Celebration?
by tristero
You’ve probably heard about the $20 million snuck into the fine print of some bill earmarked to celebrate the great military victories of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I’ll bet you don’t know who’s responsible for the legislation. Take a guess.
O, ye cynics! You think it was $20 million earmarked for Republican propaganda. Seriously, where has the idealism in America fled to? Here’s the real story behind the $20 million. It starts over 30 years ago:
“People came home from Vietnam and had to sneak back in and they were spit upon,” said Don Stewart, communications director for [the office of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican whip]. For Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, Mr. McConnell felt the troops should be able to “attend ceremonies, get awards.”
That’s right. Liberals opposed to the Vietnam War, who forced soldiers to slink home as objects of scorn, were responsible for the $20 million waste of taxpayers money on non-existent victory celebrations. Liberals, not small-government conservatives.
And check out McConnell’s truly compassionate conservatism. The awards and ceremonies are for the soldiers whether or not there is an actual victory of some sort in Iraq or Afghanistan. Forgive me, I’m gonna weep, It’s just like how they used to give out trophies to my daughter’s 4th grade soccer team, regardless of whether they won, but to bolster their self-esteem. it’s all sooooo touching.
[Note to rightwingers and others with cognitive impairments: The vast majority of the rank and file in the military are decent human beings who have been lied to by George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, but who nevertheless have served honorably and bravely. They deserve our respect and support.
Truly, the best way we can show them that respect is not with “victory” celebrations which they know are utterly bogus, having seen Iraq and Afghanistan for themselves. We show them contempt when we treat them like little children and manufacture celebrations that cheer for what they themselves know are not real victories.
We show the mean and women of the military the greatest respect by insisting that the truth of these obscene, pointless wars get told. We honor these soldiers by removing the scoundrels responsible for these ghastly disasters from power at the earliest opportunity and by seeing whether legal charges can be brought against all those responsible for the serial catastrophes and the exploitation of the American armed forces for spectacular pecuniary gain.]
Desperate times call for desperate measures. It wasn’t with the same lightening speed as RatherGate and the forensic fonts, but it’s the same play out of the same playbook. Apparently, the chess-master in the White House has moved a blog-pawn one square in order to out the identity of Mark Foley’s victim. And like Pavlov’s Dog, the right-wing reptiles know without thinking what to do next: attack the media and attack the victim. (Yesterday’s post outing the young man already has 21 trackbacks and 61 technorati links, and the story is seeping into the MSM.) For those keeping score at home, the victim is being accused of being of age at the time he was allegedly victimized by the pedafoleyac, and ABC News is being accused of knowing that. Raw Story, however, refutes what the chamber is currently echoing. My take is that this will only be a temporary obfuscation of the larger story and won’t grow legs like RatherGate did.
So Holy Joe thinks calls for Denny Hastert to resign are too “partisan.” I guess we can say he’s a full fledged member of the GOP torture and molestation club now. Even that liberal Democrat Tony Blankley thinks Hastert should resign.
All I can say is that it’s a good thing Foley wasn’t having an extra-marital affair with an adult woman because Holy Joe would have a fit — after all, that behavior tells our children that values and morals are fungible.
Covering up cyber-sex with 16 year olds? Hey, let’s not rush to judgement. Somebody might think you are too partisan.
In Iraq, “staying the course isn’t good enough because a course has to have an end,” Powell said…In the U.S. today, a challenge the war poses is a question of whether an essential “bond of trust that must exist within a nation…has been shaken,” he said. The extent of the damage to trust will be measured in the November elections, he said.
How about the damage to our troops? It’s a meat grinder over there right now:
Two months after a security crackdown began in the capital, U.S. military deaths appear to be rising, even as fatalities among Iraqi security forces have fallen, U.S. military sources and analysts said.
The U.S. military Tuesday revised to eight its count of American deaths in the capital on Monday, the highest daily toll in a month. In September, 74 U.S. troops died nationwide, about a third of them in Baghdad, according to the military.
21 have died just since Saturday.
Observers also noted recent statements by Al Qaeda in Iraq that reveal a strategy to redirect its attacks from Iraqi troops to U.S. forces.
Well, George said to bring it on …
…although Al Qaeda is the most virulently anti-American insurgent force in the country, it is by no means the only one. The Sunni Arab insurgency is composed of many elements, including former members of Saddam Hussein’s toppled regime. Iraq’s national security advisor, Mowaffak Rubaie, said last month that 80% of the insurgency was made up of local fighters.
The latest casualties come as the U.S. military’s focus has shifted from a broad, national counterinsurgency effort to suppressing sectarian fighting in Baghdad.
The rising number of U.S. fatalities is dwarfed by the tally of violent Iraqi deaths, which in July and August reached the highest point since 2003: more than 5,000 in Baghdad alone, according to the United Nations. The Iraqi government is planning to release September’s death toll this week.
The high number of slain civilians, many of whom were Sunni Arab victims of Shiite death squads, suggests that U.S. forces eventually may have to take on Shiite militias as vigorously as they have fought insurgents — a prospect that probably would lead to even more American deaths.
“As long as they are fighting the Sunni insurgents, you don’t have a problem with the Shiites,” said Anthony Cordesman, a Washington-based military analyst. “But the minute they try to deal with the overall sectarian violence — you can’t do that without coming into occasional conflict with sectarian and ethnic elements who are not insurgents and not terrorists. These are things that don’t offer easy choices to make.”
The U.S. military has not released data on the number of attacks against Americans by Shiite fighters, but anecdotal evidence suggests that they may be rising.
“We’ve seen attacks by various groups of extremists on both sides of the equation,” Army spokesman Johnson said.
A senior U.S. military official said last month that Shiite militias were obtaining high-quality bombs from Iran that were occasionally used against U.S. and British troops.
U.S. forces have been met with heavy resistance during occasional raids on Shiite militia strongholds such as Sadr City, a poor Baghdad neighborhood named for the father of anti-U.S. cleric and Al Mahdi militia founder Muqtada Sadr. On Sunday, U.S. forces engaged in a shootout with militiamen as they attempted to detain a suspected death-squad leader.
U.S. officials have complained that Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite, has blocked a more concerted effort to combat militias in Shiite neighborhoods.
On Tuesday, U.S. military sources said that U.S. Army Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, which has operational control of ground forces in Baghdad, canceled a planned raid on a national police station. The predominantly Shiite police brigade is suspected of kidnapping 26 Sunni Arabs from a Baghdad meat processing plant Sunday. Most of the abductees have been found dead.
Mohammed Daini, a Sunni Arab legislator, said that warrants were issued Tuesday for 15 members of the police brigade but that 12 of them fled before they could be detained.
Meanwhile, police said they found 15 bodies in Baghdad on Tuesday, most of them bearing bullet wounds and signs of torture. Attacks killed at least 12 Iraqis in the capital, and two in Kirkuk.
Jesus oh jesus. What are we doing in the middle of that hell? (Why did Bush create that hell?) Every day, they find piles of dead bodies that have been tortured and beheaded!
This is a nightmare.
I’m firmly in favor of beating the shit out of the Republicans with this disgusting Foley thing or Woodward’s book or whatever. This world desperately needs someone to put some brakes on Bush and Cheney. But, really, no matter what happens now, what they have done to Iraq is so huge, so horrible, so fundamentally immoral I don’t know what the United States can ever do to make it right. We invaded a country that was under political repression and turned it into a chaotic bloodbath in which neighbor is killing and torturing neighbor.
In “A World Transformed,” the memoir that he and Bush senior published in 1998, [Brent] Scowcroft makes it clear that while all Bush senior’s top advisers had different perspectives, the fundamental division lay between Defense Secretary Richard Cheney and everyone else. By his account, and by those of others in the administration, Cheney never trusted Gorbachev. In 1989 Cheney maintained that Gorbachev’s reforms were largely cosmetic and that, rather than engage with the Soviet leader, the US should stand firm and keep up cold war pressures. In September 1991 Cheney argued that the administration should take measures to speed the breakup of the Soviet Union—even at the risk of encouraging violence and incurring long-term Russian hostility. He opposed the idea, which originated with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, that the US should withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe and South Korea. As a part of the preparations for the Gulf War he asked Powell for a study on how small nuclear weapons might be used against Iraqi troops in the desert.
The man is a psycho.
Taylor Marsh has more on the ongoing hell on the ground, including some video from Baghdad that will make your hair curl.
I’m really beginning to resent all those people who say Bush really is smart, he’s just incurious. No. He’s clearly an idiot and an arrogant, immature idiot at that. He’s been manipulated by a bunch of wily, evil men with competing agendas creating lawlessness, chaos and incoherence in our government.
Over the last six years when we watched Bush shift uncomfortably and babble incomprehensibly in response to complicated questions, when we saw him lash out at anyone who dared to question his judgment or his authority, when we observed him humiliating those around him, we weren’t hallucinating and it wasn’t an act. This intellectually deficient, petulent man-child was exactly what he appeared to be — and his inept, arrogant administration is a perfect reflection of him.
One of the more troubling subplots running through “State of Denial” involves Prince Bandar, the long-time Saudi ambassador to the United States. By Woodward’s account, when then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush decided to run for president, his worried father enlisted Bandar, an old family friend, to tutor the son on foreign policy. When Bandar arrived in Austin, the younger Bush blithely observed that while he had lots of ideas about domestic policies he didn’t have a clue about foreign affairs. The Saudi took him under his wing, but he proved a trying pupil, who addressed his mentor as “asshole” and “smart aleck.” (Perhaps this is how hereditary princelings affectionately address each other?) At one point, the younger Bush peevishly demanded to know why he needed “to care about North Korea.” Bandar pointed out that, if he became president, he would have 35,000 American troops sitting on the DMZ.
Oh, right….
Later, with a Bush back in the White House, Bandar bullied the president into explicitly endorsing a two-state solution to the Israeli-conflict by threatening a total cutoff of Saudi support for U.S. policies. (Bush may never have played poker, but Bandar obviously has.) In another instance, the Saudi prince imperiously demanded — and, worse, obtained — two CIA officials to accompany him on a wild goose chase to Pakistan, where he hoped to kill Bin Laden. During a meeting in the Oval Office, according to Woodward, Bush personally thanked Bandar because the Saudis had flooded the world oil market and kept prices down in the run-up to the 2004 general election.
You don’t have to be Michael Moore to find all this unsettling. Equally disquieting, Woodward’s source for all this has to be Bandar or one of his intimates, acting at the Saudi’s behest. What that suggests is that, after decades of arduously cultivating the Bush family, one of the shrewdest operators on the world stage has written off George W. Bush.
Yes, I do find it somewhat disquieting to know that our president needed to be told why he should care about North Korea. But then, we all pretty much knew he wasn’t exactly well informed on world affairs before he was elected, didn’t we? He was quizzed on that radio show and mumbled and sputtered like a 6th grader, showing that he didn’t even have rudimentary knowledge of foreign affairs. But everyone said it was snobbish to complain, that it wasn’t necessary for a president to have none ‘o that book smarts because he would have all these grown-up around him. Like these:
Vice President Cheney is described as a man so determined to find proof that his claim about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was accurate that, in the summer of 2003, his aides were calling the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, with specific satellite coordinates as the sites of possible caches. None resulted in any finds.
But then, this shouldn’t have been a surprise either, should it?:
Having figured out that the general was being too cautious with his fourth combat command in three decades of soldiering, Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being “as bad as it could possibly be… But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn’t die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney’s staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait.”
That well-known kook was the grey eminence who was supposed to wisely guide Junior through the difficult decisions he would have to make as president. (We also thought Daddy Bush would be a prominent advisor, but Junior couldn’t take the competition. Nutballs only needed apply.)
As for the Bandar stuff, I also have to admit that it’s a little unsettling that dimwit Junior was being tutored in foreign affairs by the ambassador of Saudi Arabia in the first place. It’s even more disconcerting that the little princelings were concocting hairbrained schemes to sneak Bandar into Pakistan to get bin Laden when the administration had already shown they had no particular interest in doing it. But then terrorism has never really been taken seriously by this administration. They wanted a war like Uncle Dick Nixon’s or Daddy’s, only they’d do it much, much better than those old poops ever did.
Honestly, when all the smoke has cleared (if it ever does) I think the overriding lesson we can take from all this is that when someone looks and acts incredibly stupid or incredibly crazy they probably shouldn’t be elected president and vice president of the United States. Perhaps this is the insight that could heal the red-blue divide once and for all.
It’s pretty clear to me that it will be a miracle if Hastert survives, mainly because his own lieutenants are turning on him like a pack of slavering heathers:
As conservatives debated whether House Speaker Dennis Hastert should resign over his handling of the complaint, the House majority whip, Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said he would have done things differently if he’d known about it. He was the acting majority leader when the complaint was raised.
Although he did not criticize Hastert, his remarks to reporters in Springfield, Mo., were no endorsement of the speaker’s actions.
“I think I could have given some good advice here, which is you have to be curious, you have to ask all the questions you can think of,” Blunt said. “You absolutely can’t decide not to look into activities because one individual’s parents don’t want you to.”
Palace coups are a staple of Republican house leadership and sometimes they fail quite spectacularly. But this one is such a doozy that I don’t think Hastert survives even though highly moral religious leaders like James Dobson support his covering up for sexually predatory congressmen:
Apparently the leaders of the Christian Right have decided that they will win this argument by accusing the Democrats of hypocrisy and whining about the unfairness of the media.
I don’t doubt that a number of their followers, for whom Christianity is no more than tribal identity or a team sport, will be more than willing to go along. But there must be some for whom this creates a terrible cognitive dissonance. In one breath their leaders condemn the libertine, liberal culture (Bauer even going so far as to claim common cause with foreigners — terrorists? — who are aghast that we are exporting our deviant sickness.) In the next they are complaining that the media and the Democrats are being unfair to the Republicans on the subject. It’s hard to tell from these crude videos, but it sounded to me that the biggest applause lines came at the condemnation of the sexual predator while the whining about the media and the hypocrisy of the Democrats, not so much.
But even if I’m indulging in some wishful thinking, the inability of even the Christian Right leadership to work up a head of steam over a Republican cover-up of a predatory congressman says they are heading for a crack-up. They can blame it on the culture all they want, but at some point they are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they are being taken to the cleaners by the corrupt, immoral Republicans —- and the powerful Elmer Gantrys who are so enmeshed in the same corrupt, immoral system that they can’t fully condemn them.
The chief of staff for Republican Congressman Tom Reynolds, Kirk Fordham, resigned after questions were raised about his role in the handling of the congressional page scandal, according to Republican sources on Capitol Hill.
Those sources said Fordham, a former chief of staff for Congressman Mark Foley, had urged Republican leaders last spring not to raise questionable Foley e-mails with the full Congressional Page Board, made up of two Republicans and a Democrat.
“He begged them not to tell the page board,” said one of the Republican sources.
People familiar with Fordham’s side of the story, however, said Fordham was being used as a scapegoat by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.
It sounds to me as if Fordham needs some friends to whom he can unburden himself. He’s been treated just terribly, don’t you think?
Kirk Fordham told The Associated Press that when he was told about Foley’s inappropriate behavior toward pages, he had “more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene.”
The conversations took place long before the e-mail scandal broke, Fordham said, and at least a year earlier than members of the House GOP leadership have acknowledged.
So I read that Wes Clark is going to Connecticut to stump for Lamont. I’m sure it will make Holy Joe Tortureman pretty uncomfortable to know that General Clark also gave a speech at UCLA on Monday denouncing the torture legislation:
Clark — who was supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization under President Clinton and led a coalition of nearly a score of countries to successfully end Serbian oppression of Kosovo’s Albanians in 1999 — said the Bush administration’s insistence on more leeway in applying Geneva Convention standards to the interrogation of terrorism detainees runs counter to America’s history of observing international law.
[…]
Making his debut as a senior fellow at the Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations at the university’s International Institute, Clark called law “the ultimate human construct — more important than bridges, more important than [micro]chips…. Law is sacred in the American system.”
Clark’s appearance was the first in what he said would probably be monthly visits to UCLA to speak with faculty, address graduate seminars and participate in academic conferences. A former Rhodes scholar with a master’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University, he taught political science at the U.S. Military Academy for three years.
Recent congressional action authorizing the administration to try terrorism suspects before military tribunals and banning torture — while not prohibiting specific coercive techniques — will not silence the debate over the Geneva Convention, he said. The trials of the suspects will raise questions, he said: “What coercive tactics were used? How reliable was the information” thus obtained?
“It’s going to bring everything back to the surface,” Clark said.
Most important, he told the approximately 40 people who attended the breakfast roundtable, backtracking on the Geneva Convention represents a retreat from values America once promoted to the world.
“It was America that led to the creation of the Geneva Convention,” he said, “and now we’re walking away from it, from the very values we espoused?”
Apparently the highly moral Senator Tortureman finds that view very old fashioned.
I’m glad to see Clark going up to Connecticut to support Lamont. Any Dem politician who cares about having a Democratic Senate should do so too. Lieberman is openly blackmailing the Democratic caucus now pretty much saying that if he’s stripped of his seniority he’ll bolt to the Republicans. I wouldn’t have thought it would take more than him running as an independent against the Democratic nominee to prove that he is a disloyal backstabber, but this really should be the last straw. This man who has abandoned the Democratic party is now demanding that he be rewarded for his perfidy. He really needs to be defeated.
The most important thing is that you continue in your jihad in Iraq, and that you be patient and forbearing, even in weakness, and even with fewer operations… Do not be hasty. The most important thing is that the jihad continues with steadfastness and firm rooting, and that it grows in terms of supporters, strength, clarity of justification, and visible proof each day. Indeed, prolonging the war is in our interest, with God’s permission.
Where would the Republican heroes be without their al Qaeda anti-heroes?