Republican leaders said Monday that they had reached a tentative agreement to garner political support for legislation on domestic surveillance, in part by sidestepping the question of whether the president has the constitutional authority to order wiretapping without a court order.
There was wide disagreement about the plan’s impact. Supporters billed the most recent version as a way of requiring a court order for most domestic wiretaps. But civil rights advocates and even some administration officials suggested that it would maintain the status quo in allowing the continuation of wiretapping without warrants under a program approved by President Bush.
Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who leads the Judiciary Committee, said that in recent negotiations, the White House had agreed to delete language from his bill that critics said would have implicitly acknowledged the president’s constitutional authority to order wiretapping without a warrant.
Three Republican senators — Larry E. Craig of Idaho, John E. Sununu of New Hampshire and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — had raised concerns about this and other aspects of the Specter bill, which would submit the wiretapping program to a secret court to rule on its constitutionality. With the changes, they said they could support the legislation, and Mr. Specter predicted he would have enough Senate votes to gain passage.
[…]
Some lawmakers and civil rights advocates said they believed that the three senators had mischaracterized or misinterpreted what they had agreed to and that the White House was retaining the right to order wiretaps without a warrant.
The administration declined to say when it would choose to seek warrants under the new plan.
The program approved by Mr. Bush “does allow for the interception without court order of international communications where one end is within the United States, and this agreement would provide this authority and would establish a process for moving to individualized court orders with respect to individuals within the United States,” said Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman. He declined to elaborate.
Some opponents of the wiretapping program said they saw the new plan as a step backward because of technical language that would narrow the definition of what constitutes “electronic surveillance” that requires a court order and would effectively make warrants optional.
“This is a major setback for the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Securities Studies.
As Norman Ornstein said about the torture cave-in: “It sure doesn’t look to me as if they stood up and did anything other than bare their teeth for some ceremonial barking, before giving the president a whole lot of leeway. I find it really troubling.”
Yes, it is “troubling” to see three more brave Republican defenders of civil liberties (and Arlen Specter) pretend to be standing up for truth and the American way make yet another one of those last minute “deals” with the president that legalizes every heinous thing he’s done and giving him explicit congressional authority to keep doing it.
I hear the Senate is planning to put the combined the torture and spying bill that Mitch McConnell introduced last Friday to the vote. It’s much more efficient to destroy the constitution with one big bill they can hold over Democrats’ heads like a samurai sword if they fail to vote for it. Very clever.
The baseline problem with torture, after all, is that it is prima facie immoral, a violation not just of the Golden Rule and basic Christian precepts, but of nearly any system of ethics. Even the most hard-nosed rationalist will come to this conclusion (see, e.g., Kant’s Categorical Imperative). It’s an obvious one if you’re a Christian.
All you have to present to any Christian, when it comes to torture, is their own favorite moral-guidepost aphorism: What Would Jesus Do?
To anyone familiar not just with Jesus’ teachings but the story of his martyrdom — including his torture at the hands of authorities — the answer is crystal clear.
Exactly. Torture is unacceptable and immoral behavior. It is not for nothing that Bush and Cheney are going to exceptional lengths to hide what they’re doing to people right now. And what they’ve done in the past.
Oh, and Matthew Yglesias? Arguments from inutility vis a vis torture? Uh uh, no good. They are extremely poor arguments to advance in the torture debate. What if I could prove torture did work? Would THAT make it a reasonable “interrogation technique?” It would not. The only strong argument is that torture simply is immoral. It is a gross violation of what it means to be human.
But let’s not forget a recent story, the Clinton/Wallace confrontation where Clinton showed the kind of brilliance and anger towards the rightwing that we can only hope all politicians opposed to Bushism and modern Republicanism will show in the next month or so.
Wallace accused Clinton of providing aid and comfort to bin Laden by withdrawing from Somalia after Blackhawk Down. You may not remember the Somalia story too well or you may be too young to remember. But the standard line propogated for years by the rightwing, and recycled by Wallace in his question to Clinton, is that Clinton cut and ran; therefore bin Laden took from that ignominious flight the lesson that Americans are cowards. The implications are:
1. Clinton behaved like a coward who wouldn’t stay the course and he emboldened the terrorists by leaving.
2. By extension, all Democrats cannot be trusted with foreign policy and national security.
It’s a complete lie. Let Glenn Greenwald tell you who really wanted to cut and run from the terrorists. It was Republicans including St. John McCain.
More importantly, let Greenwald show you who fully understood the implications of withdrawing from Somalia precipitously after Blackhawk Down. It was Clinton and Kerry who got it exactly right and understood the situation.
Knowing the truth of what happened regarding the fight over staying or leaving in Somalia, we can apply the “logic” of the rightwing to historical reality. And the implications are very clear:
1. Republicans, including McCain, behaved like cowards who wouldn’t stay the course. They emboldened the terrorists by calling for the US to leave.
2. By extension, all Republicans, including McCain, cannot be trusted with foreign policy and national security.
Note to rightwingers and others who have cognitive difficulties understanding English prose: I do NOT agree with the “logic” of the rightwing. I dislike McCain intensely, but his Vietnam record, like Kerry’s, demonstrates he is no coward. I believe the real implications of this inexcusable piece of historical revisionism are:
1. Republicans, including McCain, were fools for failing to gauge the effects of a precipitous withdrawal. They emboldened future terrorists by their panic in hysterically calling for the US to leave.
2. By extension, all modern Republicans, including McCain, have demonstrated they do not have the judgment or character to conduct competent and robust foreign policy in a sober manner. They can, and they have, made the US far less safe when they are in power than when Democrats have been.
One more note. There are very few parallels between the Somalia situation back then and what is going on in Iraq today. It is utterly fallacious to compare the Republican fools immediately after Blackhawk Down with a majority of the world calling for a US withdrawal more than three years after an illegal invasion.
And for the record, back in 0’3 it was not only liberals horrified that Bush had invaded Iraq in the first place who urged a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. Deluded neoconservatives who were the instigators of the war did as well, confident that the mission was codpieced, I mean accomplished, the only piece missing being the installation of Chalabi as Emperor of Ir…I mean president.
Truly incredible, the extent of the right’s projection and lying. and that they are allowed to get away with it. As Greenwald writes, “As always, no matter how many times it occurs, it is truly disturbing how there seems to be no limit on the false propaganda and rank historical revisionism which can be disseminated by this administration and its followers and uncorrected by our national media. “
Many blogs have linked to the comma quote as one more indication that Bush epitomizes the callous conservative. I agree: it’s a disgusting remark. But I perceive something even more distressing about it than obscene sociopathic indifference to human suffering.
Let’s say I was president of the United States and when someone asks me about my central achievement, I respond that one day it will look like “just a comma.” I think you’d be quite justified in thinking I was very depressed and unsatisfied with my record. Why? Because I’d just told you I hadn’t done anything much more important than an historical speck, a squib, a doodle. And being president, I’d be wanting to accomplish something really big, really memorable. Like, say, attacking a really large country. Like being the first since Truman to drop a nuclear weapon in war. Now we’re talking. That’s worth at least a paragraph in the Book of Human History Before The Rapture.
In other words, I think Bush’s comma is a signal to the world that he’s barely started with the bang bang and the carnage. The casualties he’s already inflicted around the world are too small to mean anything to someone as narcissistic and grandiose as the Churchill of Crawford. He expects – no, he needs – many, many more battles, bigger targets. Real men, after all, go to Tehran. And we know that Bush – Oedipus Tex, the black sheep awol drunk loser who failed at business – has some problems thinking about himself as a real man.
But how realistic is this? That is, setting Bush’s truly dubious mental health aside (and regardless of whether you buy my speculations above, he is not the tightest of screws at the best of times), can the US military actually give Bush something more than a comma to remember him by anytime soon?
Well, there’s a post over at Talking Points Memo which makes a pretty convincing argument that logistically the US military, quagmired in Afghanistan and Iraq, is in no condition to attack Iran anytime soon.
It seems likely this could be true. Unless you consider a first strike nuclear attack as part of a concerted effort to effect regime change. Which is insane. Which, coming full circle, brings up the relevance of the mental state of a president who would characterize the ghastly horrors of the Bush/Iraq war as a mere comma in history.
Please, people. Do not misunderestimate him or this administration. They are crazy, and I am not speaking metaphorically here. They were crazy to ignore the warnings in the summer of ’01. They were crazy to invade Iraq. They were crazy to pass laws keeping a brain-dead woman hooked up to a feeding tube. They are crazy to write into law that George W. Bush has the right to torture people at will. Indeed, they are crazy in their lust to assert their will over anything and everything.
And they are crazy to plan any kind of attack on Iran (in both senses: it’s nuts to consider it, and they really, really want to do it). They are crazy to think that threatening something like that will put pressure on the Iranian government to capitulate; if anything it will increase Iranian nationalism, fuel anti-Americanism and increase the Iranian government’s support.
They are also crazy to think that retaliation will come only via terrorist attacks on the US and those attacks will increase domestic support for the Bush regime (“we’re the ones serious about national security”). No. Retaliation for a pre-emptive strike on Iran will be swift, brutal, and on numerous fronts. The US will be economically and culturally quarantined. The world will unite to fight the US on trade agreements, will implement sanctions and make international business deals impossibly difficult. To those rightwingers who say, “Yeah? The Frenchies gonna threaten us? Haha! Bring ’em on!” I say, be careful what you wish for. They don’t call this a global economy for nuthin’.
Again, as unlikely as it seems, as offhand as it appears to be, I see the comma remark as one more indication that Bush expects to attack Iran very soon. And, while he doesn’t go so far as to believe it will involve nuclear, I note that Gary Hart writes, “It should come as no surprise if the Bush Administration undertakes a preemptive war against Iran sometime before the November election.” It’s not just inconsequential bloggers who are very worried, dear friends.
This ain’t no party. This ain’t no disco. This ain’t no fooling around.
[Update: As pointed out by a coupla folks in comments, Steve Gilliard has a terrific take on Bush’s comma:
When Bush said Iraq was a comma, he was speaking in dog whistle to the fundies. It comes from a saying “Never put a period where God puts a comma”.Which means things will get better. Which is, of course, insane.
Indeed. And while I agree with Steve, and glad he mentioned it, I’m not sure that necessarily invalidates my psychoanlytic interpretation, although, it’s true, it seems less convincing to me in the light of Steve’s post.]
As mentioned in a previous post, my copy of Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions by Iranian author Shahram Chubin arrived and it looks very good, very compact, and very detailed.
Assuming that those of you who expressed interest in reading the book together will receive it by today/tomorrow, I propose we read up throught the first two chapters, to page 43, and discuss it this Friday, when I’ll post a summary and some thoughts of my own.
In glancing through it, it’s dispassionate, clearly the work of a serious and knowledgeable author, and seems to be free of polemics. Heaven knows we need more resources like this.
Jonathan Wells, the Moonie from the Discovery Institute who is one of their principle shills for “inteliigent design” creationism – and, incidentally, a man who actually believes that the earth is about 6,000 years old, tops – has released a book with a title so misleading it amounts to blatantly false advertising. As the delicious multi-part series at The Panda’s Thumb makes quite clear, it should be titled “The Thoroughly Incorrect Guide to Darwinism [sic] and Intelligent Design.”
Check it out.
And by the way, those of you who object to my calling Wells a Moonie and referring to him in an obviously contemptuous fashion, perhaps you should remember that Wells is the stupid sonuvabitch who once compared biologist Ken Miller to the Hitler’s propagandist Heinrich Himmler, thus simultaneously exhibiting the gutter level at which his department at Discovery operates, his historical ignorance and the sheer sloppiness of his “scholarship.”
I just heard John McCain get pissy on on Face the Nation about his bogus torture legislation and say, “The ACLU and the NY Times may not like it but we think people will recognise it defends both our values and our security.”
I honestly don’t know whether he’s stupid or immoral. But assuming he isn’t a complete idiot, I have to say I’m not sure if a man can sink lower than to leverage his heroic status as a tortured POW to codify his own government’s torture policy. You really don’t need to know any more about the man’s character than this.
And in case anyone’s wondering about the vaunted integrity of Huckleberry Graham, after he went on at length on Fox news this morning about protecting the soldiers and the rule ‘o law, he let this slip:
I want one of these guys tried in my lifetime and I’m tired of the supreme court throwing this back. It wasn’t my idea to give em Geneva Convention protections, it was the supreme court. Once the supreme court rules that the Geneva Convention applies we have an obligation to make it work.
And establish yourself as a manly, macho maverick McCainiac. So much for principle.
More importantly, it must be carefully studied by the leadership of the Democratic Party. This is exactly how to respond to the right wing’s attempt to load the questions and manipulate the debate to their advantage. Notice how Clinton responds immediately to the rhetorical framing* of the question by challenging its honesty. Notice how he reinforces that assertion of opinion – the question is loaded, biased and cheap – by literally overwhelming Wallace with clear, detailed, assertions of fact. Wallace expected evasion and bluster. But he clearly had no idea who he was dealing with.
Within the space of a few minutes, Wallace realized he was in way over his head – that Clinton, this figure he’s held in contempt, knew far more about the subject of his responsibilities, his successes, and his failures than Wallace ever would – and that the trap Wallace had tried to spring on Clinton had totally backfired. He seemed to be all but begging Clinton to let him off the hook. But Clinton, both furious and capable of channeling that fury, toyed with him longer. By the end of the segment, Wallace looked drained, grinning inanely, and Clinton appeared as if he was just getting started.
Many honest folks, as opposed to rightwingers, had serious problems with the Clinton presidency – NAFTA, welfare “reform,” don’t ask don’t tell – and I’m not sure they’re wrong. But warts and all – damn, that was a helluva president and is a helluva human being. There are some great potential presidents out there – Gore, Clark, Kerry, add or subtract your own names – but it is very, very unlikely this country will see anyone as brilliant as Clinton – both intellectually and emotionally brilliant – in my lifetime.
Watch the video. The only thing I can compare it to is Coltrane live at the Half Note or the Ives Concord Sonata. A simply amazing treat for which we have the hapless Chris Wallace to thank almost as much as Clinton. Chris Wallace is surely no Elvin Jones. He’s more like an insipid melody like “My Favorite Things” or “Inchworm” which a genius can turn inside out, develop and reveal a reality that the melody itself could hardly imagine it held.
*Simply because fans of Lakoff have made the words “frame” and “framing” trendy, slathering them on arguments where they don’t belong, is no reason to avoid using it in the proper context.
So I see that the NY Times has teamed up with Drudge and Fox News again, calling any Democrat “crazy” who doesn’t fold himself into a little ball in the corner and meekly take his punishment from the Republicans.
Earlier the wingnuts started hyperventilating that Bill Clinton had completely lost it when he vociferously defended his honor in the face of Mike Wallace’s hellspawn Chris sandbagging him on Fox News after persuading him to come on to talk about the Global Initiative. It made Big Bill a little hot under the collar to have to be rudely interrogated by this Faux journalist who was dutifully following the “Path to 9/11” script and implying that he was responsible for the attacks. Frankly, I would have thought there was something wrong with him if he hadn’t gotten mad.
And now I see that a would-be MoDo named Jennifer Senior is reviewing books written by liberals and calling them “berserk,” unhinged and unglued. Worst of all she feels they confirm all the worst stereotypes about liberals, which is so awfully annoying when you are a smug, contemptuous journalist writing book reviews about politics for the NY Times and everyone confuses you with people who just don’t know how to behave.
One can certainly understand how these developments — and Bush’s correspondingly rotten approval ratings — have emboldened the opposition. The problem is that these developments have also made the president’s critics more susceptible to rhetorical excess, and Bush, like his predecessor, already has an impressive gift for bringing out the yawping worst in those who disagree with him. Otherwise reasonable people go slightly berserk on the subject of his motives; on the subject of his morality, the hinged fall off their door frames and even the stable become unglued. This is both an aesthetic problem and a substantive one. Substantively, it means gerrymandering evidence so that inconvenient facts don’t make it onto the map. And aesthetically, it means speaking in a compromising and not wholly credible tone.
Yes, getting angry about usurping the constitution, torture and sending thousands to their deaths in a losing war for inexplicable reasons among a hundred other outrages is aesthetically jarring. Please, children, use your indoor voices. There’s no reason to scream.
I haven’t read Lapham’s book, although this review prompted me to order it immediately. I expect polemics to be filled with righteous indignation and I’m quite sure I will not be offended by the intemperate tone. Indeed, that’s why I bought it. Lapham, apparently, still has a beating heart in his body and a functioning brain in his head.
I have read the other book, “How Bush Rules” by Sidney Blumenthal and I simply don’t get what Senior’s gripe is. It’s a compilation of columns written during Bush’s tenure that lays out in damning detail the case for his total immorality, corruption and incompetence. The truth hurts but it’s still the truth. There are no inconvenient facts to “gerrymander” (which means, what?)
I do agree that Blumenthal is guilty of a very serious misjudgment, however. He sees a difference between the Ken Starr witchhunt and Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the Valerie Plame matter. You see, Blumenthal thought that a blatantly partisan special prosecutor fishing around in President Clinton’s pants was inappropriate. Therefore, by Senior’s logic, he must think that all federal prosecutions are inappropriate. The fact that he dedicated his book to Joseph Wilson and included columns about the Scooter Libby jihad (oh, excuse me, that’s so aesthetically inappropriate) … Scooter Libby’s noble whistleblowing campaign to inform the American people what their government was doing, is hypocritical. Surely his previous defense of president Clinton against the Republican smear machine means it would be inconsistent for him to speak out on behalf of another victim of the Republican smear machine. Oh wait.
Anyway, he’s done something aesthetically hypocritical but I can’t quite figure out what it is. And he’s kinda crazy and obsessive, too.
After a while, it’s hard to deny that these columns have a certain cumulative power. But their content has also been curated with one aim in mind, and that’s to cast the Bush administration in the grimmest possible light, rather like Philip Roth telling the story of his protagonist in “Everyman” from the point of view of his illnesses. Blumenthal also has a taste for tiresome epithets — he calls Paul Wolfowitz “the neoconservative Robespierre” and compares Bush (yawn) to a cowboy. And rather than letting damning facts speak for themselves, Blumenthal insists on pushing his arguments to the breaking point. He claims Bush had “plenty of information” to act on before Sept. 11, but fails to produce anything more specific than the findings of the 9/11 Commission. He suggests the tragedy of New Orleans might have been prevented if funds for a flood control project hadn’t been diverted to the Iraq war (as if dozens of other factors hadn’t conspired against the poor city). He even suggests that Rudolph Giuliani became a figure of national reassurance after the Sept. 11 attacks “in large part because President Bush was not to be seen for days.” (Does he really think Giuliani would have been less impressive if Bush had responded with alacrity? Was Blumenthal anywhere near New York that morning?)
Well, this clears something up once and for all. Apparently it is quite common for journalists like Jennifer Senior to believe that it’s their job to mitigate unpleasant facts about President Bush or risk being accused of lacking credibility. Good to know.
Apparently, Mr Bringdown Blumenthal should have included a few columns about some of the “good things” Bush has done to even out the grim ones. I’m not sure what they would be. Those Barney videos are sort of cute; perhaps Blumenthal could have gotten a column or two out of them. After all, as she says “it’s hard to trust a narrator who only and always assumes the worst.” Lord knows George W. Bush has given us little reason to assume the best but he does like to make jokes at others’ expense, so maybe that should count for something. (Senior really enjoys that kind of humor apparently.)
I, on the other hand, couldn’t help but be amused that she faults Blumenthal for not providing more evidence that Bush had “plenty of information” than the 9/11 commission did. After all, all the 9/11 commission found was that Bush sat on his ass for eight months ignoring terrorism while Richard Clark and others were running around with their hair on fire screaming that the terrorists were getting ready to strike inside the United States any day. Surely one needs more evidence than that before one can condemn Bush for his inaction.
Senior delivers the sweeping coup de grace in her final paragraph:
The left has often complained that what it needs isn’t polite speech, but voices as pungent as those on the right. Maybe so. But even the angriest people on the right tend to be funny. Books like this one are a depressing reminder of how important it is for writers to have a slight sense of humor about themselves, if they want to be taken at all seriously.
Oh my goodness yes. The most obvious characteristic of the right’s “pungent” books about liberals being “Unhinged,” “The Party of Death” and “Godless, Slanderous Traitors,” is their self-effacing humor. How refreshing it is to be called a fascist by people with such delightful wit.(And you’ll note that those books are written about their fellow Americans, not the political leadership, as these books about Bush are.) I now understand why the rightwing publishing industry is taken seriously by journalists like Jennifer Senior. They apparently share an aesthetic obtuseness, which explains a lot.
Blumenthal’s book, by the way, is very good. You probably read at least some of the columns in Salon or elsewhere before, but it’s seeing them in their totality, over time, that gives the full picture of how Bush rules. And I have to say that when I read it I didn’t find a thing funny about it. I guess somewhere between the intelligence faking, the waterboarding and the constitution shredding I lost my sense of humor.
