U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan guerrilla war can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Taliban and their supporters into the Afghan government.
The Tennessee Republican said he had learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated by military means.
“You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government,” Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. “And if that’s accomplished we’ll be successful.”
Frist said asking the Taliban to join the government was a decision to be made by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida accompanying Frist, said negotiating with the Taliban was not “out of the question” but that fighters who refused to join the political process would have to be defeated.
“A political solution is how it’s all going to be solved,” he said.
Frist may have ben speaking out of turn, but I think he was probably saying what he’s been hearing privately. And it explains why the admnistration has been acting so strangely about that truce between Pakistan and Mullah Omar in Waziristan a couple of weeks ago. The policy in Afghanistan is changing, only they aren’t telling anybody. And apparently that means allowing the Taliban back in power.
Aside from the absurdity of allowing that threat to fester again, this means that all that talk about freedom and democracy is, as we suspected, bullshit. They would be handing the women of Afghanistan back to the people who do this:
The president also voiced support for Hastert, calling him a “father, teacher, coach” and said the Illinois Republican “wants to ensure these children on Capitol Hill are protected.”
What he wants to do now and what he did are two different things.
Dennis Hastert’s office was warned that this was an issue. (According to this morning’s interview on CNN, he was warned about it in the context of “campaign issues” which is telling in and of itself.) As the Speaker of the House, the buck stops with him. He can try to rationalize his behavior all he wants, but the fact is that he was told that there was suspicion that a congressman was preying on the teen aged congressional pages and he failed to ensure that it was fully investigated and dealt with. (He allowed the guy to continue to co-sponsor the child abduction and abuse legislation that was signed into law just last July. Come on.)
The fact that he was a “father, teacher, coach” makes it even worse that he did nothing. He, of all people, should have been particularly sensitive about the welfare of these teen-aged boys in his charge. (It makes you wonder about him too. Did he cover for people when he was a teacher and a coach. Did he think that “overly friendly” correspondence between 52 year old men and 16 year old boys was appropriate back when he was a wrestling coach?)
Republican leaders simply refuse to take responsibility for what their subordinates do and their supporters never seem to require it. From Rummy and Abu Ghraib to Denny Hastert and his cyberstalking congressman, when people in their charge engage in deviant or criminal behavior they blame it on a few bad apples and just move on. The guy at the top protests his ignorance and says he can’t be held liable for what he didn’t know.
I’m starting to become quite serious when I say, “what do we tell the children?” The allegedly conservative leadership class in this country are selling the idea that leadership means never being held responsible for anything. Blame it on the plebes. This is a very dangerous idea for any society to adopt.
Update:
Denny goes on Rush and says:
SPEAKER HASTERT: There were two pieces of paper out there, one that we knew about and we acted on; one that happened in 2003 we didn’t know about, but somebody had it, and, you know, they’re trying — and they drop it the last day of the session, you know, before we adjourn on an election year. Now, we took care of Mr. Foley. We found out about it, asked him to resign. He did resign. He’s gone. We asked for an investigation. We’ve done that. We’re trying to build better protections for these page programs.
But, you know, this is a political issue in itself, too, and what we’ve tried to do as the Republican Party is make a better economy, protect this country against terrorism — and we’ve worked at it ever since 9/11, worked with the president on it — and there are some people that try to tear us down. We are the insulation to protect this country, and if they get to me it looks like they could affect our election as well.
In private conversations with Bush, Cheney said Rumsfeld’s departure, no matter how it might be spun, would be seen only as an expression of doubt and hesitation on the war. It would give the war critics great heart and momentum, he confided to an aide, and soon they would be after him and then the president. He virtually insisted that Rumsfeld stay.
Protect the royals at all costs.
Update II: Ray LaHood (R-buckpasser) on CNN just said that it was the Speaker’s staff who let everyone down. The man himself is blameless.
Via Kevin Drum, I see that the CBS News “free speech” segment has some funny ideas about what is permissable and what isn’t. Bill Maher isn’t allowed to talk about religion but some rightwing fundamentalist is allowed to freely share views like this:
This country is in a moral free-fall. For over two generations, the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum, expelling God from the school and from the government, replacing him with evolution, where the strong kill the weak, without moral consequences and life has no inherent value.
We teach there are no absolutes, no right or wrong. And I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including by abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.
That’s your liberal media at work.
Don’t get me wrong — I think the guy has the same right to free speech as everyone else. But CBS was nervous about Bill Maher’s commentary which was critical of religion. The fact that they let this man speak, obviously without restriction, while balking at Maher means that CBS’s little exercize in free speech is not just a milquetoast middle of the road program, it is affirmatively asserting that far right views are acceptable while Maher’s are not. This man says that abortion and teaching evolution are causing school shootings. That’s not mainstream.
If I didn’t know better I’d say that Rathergate successfully intimidated the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite into being a rightwing lapdog. How sad.
We’ll return to our regularly scheduled sexual cyberstalking programming in a few moments, but may I just take a moment to ask just what in the hell is going on with this?
A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.
The account by the spokesman, Sean McCormack, came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall the specific meeting on July 10, noting that she had met repeatedly with Mr. Tenet that summer about terrorist threats. Ms. Rice, the national security adviser at the time, said it was “incomprehensible” to suggest she had ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. McCormack also said records showed that the Sept. 11 commission had been informed about the meeting, a fact that former intelligence officials and members of the commission confirmed on Monday.
When details of the meeting emerged last week in a new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Bush administration officials questioned Mr. Woodward’s reporting.
Now, after several days, both current and former Bush administration officials have confirmed parts of Mr. Woodward’s account.
Officials now agree that on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism deputy, J. Cofer Black, were so alarmed about intelligence pointing to an impending attack by Al Qaeda that they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Ms. Rice and her National Security Council staff.
According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Tenet told those assembled at the White House about the growing body of intelligence the C.I.A. had collected suggesting an attack was in the works. But both current and former officials, including allies of Mr. Tenet, took issue with Mr. Woodward’s account that he and his aides had left the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had ignored them.
Earlier this week, some members of the Sept. 11 commission said they could not recall being told about a meeting like the one described by Mr. Woodward.
On Monday, officials said Mr. Tenet had told members of the commission about the July 10 meeting when they interviewed him in early 2004, but committee members said he never indicated he had left the White House with the impression that he had been ignored.
“Tenet never told us that he was brushed off,” said Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the commission. “We certainly would have followed that up.”
Mr. McCormack said the records showed that far from ignoring Mr. Tenet’s warnings, Ms. Rice acted on the intelligence and requested that Mr. Tenet make the same presentation to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft, then the attorney general.
But Mr. Ashcroft said by telephone on Monday evening that he never received a briefing that summer from Mr. Tenet.
“Frankly, I’m disappointed that I didn’t get that kind of briefing,” he said. “I’m surprised he didn’t think it was important enough to come by and tell me.”
Government investigations have shown that Mr. Ashcroft was briefed by other C.I.A. officials in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.
WTF? Why did the White House and Rice say last week that the meeting never took place? What’s up with the 9/11 Commission? Did they cover up for Condi or did they fail to note meetings that Condi took seriously? (I doubt that last since the commission’s main author is Condi’s good buddy, Phil Zelikow.)
This is important because, as we know, the Republicans are working overtime to write the history to say the Clinton administration let the situation develop and fester without any real action while the Bush administration did everything it could within the short time it was in office. That is demonstrably false.
I honestly don’t care if Tenet and Black “felt” they were brushed off or not. It’s clear that the intelligence communities were warning the administration in dire terms all summer long that a terrorist attack was looming and yet Junior went off to Crawford and cleared brush for the entire month of August.
The overarching reason for all this was that when the Bush admnistration took office they were determined to do everything differently than Clinton, Bush Sr even Reagan. The egomaniacs in charge (and the empty brand name in a suit out front) operated on a childish level that said nothing their predecesors did was correct, none of their priorities were right and they were determined to prove it.
It is documented that these people did not take terrorism seriously before they took office, nor did they take terrorism seriously after they took office. You canlook it up. They are temperamentally incapable of changing their minds in the face of new evidence short of a massive terrorist attack on New York and Washington DC … and even then they saw terrorism mainly as a political opportunity to advance their previous agenda of deposing Saddam Hussein.
These facts are indisputable. The problem is that these details of whether Condi knew on July 10th and whether Tenet felt he was being listened to are the details with which they hope to bury those facts.
Julia has more on this and points out that Ashcroft slashed funding for terrorism after he had these briefings. Maha notes that nobody has yet adequately explained why Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airplanes during the period except to say he was worried for his personal safety.
Don’t blame Clinton. This is all Al Gore’s fault. Had he not invented the Internets, there would have been no Mark Foley scandal.
***
Poor Chris Hitchens. There isn’t enough bourbon in the world to erase the horror and humiliation he must be enduring now that he knows that Henry Kissinger – Henry Kissinger – was a major Bush adviser for the Iraq fiasco. Oh, the humanity!
***
What a relief. At first, I thought Mark Foley might be a pedophile preying on young boys. Fortunately, I’ve learned that he’s an admitted substance abuser who might be a pedophile preying on young boys. Whew! That makes it more tolerable.
Americans John C. Mather and George F. Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for work that helped cement the big-bang theory of the universe and deepen understanding of the origin of galaxies and stars.
Mather, 60, works at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Smoot, 61, works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
The scientists discovered the nature of ”blackbody radiation,” cosmic background radiation believed to stem from the ”big bang,” when the universe was born.
”They have not proven the big-bang theory but they give it very strong support,” said Per Carlson, chairman of the Nobel committee for physics.
”It is one of the greatest discoveries of the century. I would call it the greatest. It increases our knowledge of our place in the universe.”
Their work was based on measurements done with the help of NASA’s COBE satellite launched in 1989. They were able to observe the universe in its early stages about 380,000 years after it was born. Ripples in the light they detected also helped demonstrate how galaxies came together over time.
”The COBE results provided increased support for the big-bang scenario for the origin of the Universe, as this is the only scenario that predicts the kind of cosmic microwave background radiation measured by COBE,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said in its citation.
The big-bang theory states that the universe was born billions of years ago from a rapidly expanding dense and incredibly hot state.
Disgraceful. And do we hear from the other side, that the Bible tells us unequivocally the universe is 6,000 years old? We do not. Not so much as one iota of balance.
***
Finally, while the multiple farces Republicans have made of governance play themselves out in all their tawdry stupidity, nine U.S. soldiers were killed in recent attacks around Baghdad bringing the total US military casualties in Iraq close to 2800. Remind me again: what are they there for?
I simply can’t forget, no matter how gleeful the schadenfreude watching rightwingers squirm through a scandal involving the cover-up of drunken homosexual pedophilia, that these incompetent, sick clowns are getting people killed. Lots of people killed.
Since I’m sure you’re feeling rather set upon right now by that nasty Bobby Woodward, I just wanted to let you know that I’m on your side and totally agree with you. It is absolutely incomprehensible that you ignored repeated warnings about imminent terrorist threats in the summer of 2001.
Tony Perkins of Dobson’s Family Research Counsel was on CNN earlier and I think we are hearing the contours of the Christian Right’s argument. They are going with Newt Gingrich’s formulation: Poor Denny was afraid of being called a gay basher so he didn’t say anything.
Since when has the GOP been afraid to be called homophobic or gay bashers? They positively revel in it. In fact, just a couple of months ago 202 Republican House members voted for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. (It failed to get the required 2/3rds for passage.) Somehow, I don’t think the Republicans are quaking in their boots at being called anti-gay.
And if they were so afraid of being called anti-gay that they allowed a 52 year old congressman to stalk 16 year old boys on the internet, then they are much too timorous to be running the government. These guys are charged with making laws and running wars, for gawd’s sake.
Tony didn’t seem bothered by this. It appears that Focus on the Family has decided that they aren’t going to condemn the leadership for failing to protect these teen age kids. But then should we be surprised? Dobson is a child psychologist who wrote this bit of “professional” advice for his followers who wonder if their sons might be gay:
Meanwhile, the boy’s father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son’s maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.
Dr Dobson undoubtedly believes that Representative Foley was just behaving as any normal older man would in loco parentis.
Update: Gary Bauer sent around an email:
This latest scandal in Washington is just further evidence that the pro- family agenda is desperately needed for the country. We are the ones who have argued that human sexuality should be channeled through marriage. We are the ones who have argued that marriage is between one man and one woman. We are the ones who have argued that schools should teach kids how to read and write and stop handing out condoms and birth control pills. We are the ones who say that all our children should be welcomed into the world under law. We are the ones who say there are reliable standards of right and wrong. And we are the ones who have led the charge against the sexualization of our children.
“And we are the ones whocover for and enable 52 year old pervs to banter with 16 year old boys on the internet:
Maf54 (7:46:33 PM): did any girl give you a haand job this weekend
Xxxxxxxxx (7:46:38 PM): lol no
Xxxxxxxxx (7:46:40 PM): im single right now
Xxxxxxxxx (7:46:57 PM): my last gf and i broke up a few weeks agi
Maf54 (7:47:11 PM): are you
Maf54 (7:47:11 PM): good so your getting horny
Xxxxxxxxx (7:47:29 PM): lol…a bit
Maf54 (7:48:00 PM): did you spank it this weekend yourself
Xxxxxxxxx (7:48:04 PM): no
Xxxxxxxxx (7:48:16 PM): been too tired and too busy
LIMBAUGH: I’m just thinking out loud here. What if somebody got to the page and said, you know, we want you to set Foley up. We need to do a little titillating thing here. Keep it and save it and so forth. How would you get a kid to do that? Yeah, who knows? You threaten him or pay him. There’s any number of ways given the kind of people that we’re dealing with and talking about here.
Now, folks, I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I’m not trying to mount any kind of a defense. That’s a bad word. I’m not trying to get into a defense of what Mark Foley did. Please don’t misunderstand. I’m just telling you that the — the — the orgy and the orgasm that has been taking place in the media since Friday and with the Democrats is — it’s all coordinated, and it’s all — it’s all oriented toward the election. There’s no concern about the kid — no concern about the children.
There is — there is — there’s not even any real problem with what Foley did, as we’ve discussed. In their hearts and minds and their crotches, they don’t have any problem with what Foley did. They’ve defended it over the — over the years.
Everybody’s on to Hastert’s transparent ploy to shift attention from his own culpability in refusing to keep the disturbed congressmen away from the high school kids. It’s ballsy. But there is a more subtle intention. It’s also clear that he’s desperate to get a formal investigation going either in DC or Florida that will allow them to claim that law enforcement has asked that they not comment any further. The administration discovered with the Plame case that they can stonewall for months with that.
This could be quite different, however. The players in this case aren’t all DC insiders but rather kids from all over the country and their respective parents, friends and relatives who may be willing to talk to the press. And this is so juicy, the press is actually out looking for them. I don’t think it’s containable even if the entire FBI is investigating.
Still, I suspect we have a very few days, if that, before the entire GOP congress clams up because of the “pending investigation.” Hopefully the press will dog them constantly.
But there’s no reason their surrogates in the media, and they are legion, shouldn’t be asked to constantly speculate about the nature of the acts and the cover-up and be forced to explain to the public just why it is that the entire Republican government is collapsing under the accumulated weight of scandal, incompetence and lies. That’s why they get the big bucks. Now they are going to earn it.
Update: Fineman is not getting it on Hardball. He thinks that Hastert, by asking the FBI and the Florida authorities to look into these IMs, is going to provoke the kids who had them to come forward. That is not what Hastert’s doing at all. He’s trying to get the FBI to track the kids down and tell them NOT to come forward or comment “while the investigation is ongoing.” I wouldn’t be surprised if Alberto Gonzales himself advised him to do it. As I said, I don’t think it’s containable, but they are going to try to do what they can.
Update II: Speaking of surrogates in the media, this is simply unbelievable. John Amato pulled some clips from Drudge’s radio show this week-end and Jane transcribed them:
Clip #1: And if anything, these kids are less innocent – these 16 and 17 year-old beasts …and I’ve seen what they’re doing on YouTube and I’ve seen what they’re doing all over the internet – oh yeah – you just have to tune into any part of their pop culture. You’re not going to tell me these are innocent babies. Have you read the transcripts that ABC posted going into the weekend of these instant messages, back and forth? The kids are egging the Congressman on! The kids are trying to get this out of him. We haven’t got the whole story on this.
[…]
Clip #2: You could say “well Drudge, it’s abuse of power, a congressman abusing these impressionable, young 17 year-old beasts, talking about their sex lives with a grown man, on the internet.” Because you have to remember, those of us who have seen some of the transcripts of these nasty instant messages. This was two ways, ladies and gentlemen. These kids were playing Foley for everything he was worth. Oh yeah. Oh, I haven’t…they were talking about how many times they’d masturbated, how many times they’d done it with their girlfriends this weekend … all these things and these “innocent children.” And this “poor” congressman sitting there typing, “oh am I going to get any,” you know?
Yeah, maybe they were all just “blowing off steam.” These sexually deviant Republican radio mouthpieces like Drudge and Rush (who are feted like rock stars by the entire GOP establishment) give me the creepy feeling we have entered the last days of the Roman Empire.
Torture and sexual abuse of prisoners are just frat boy pranks, a congressman sexually stalking 16 year olds in the nations capital is actually a victim of young “beasts” who won’t leave the poor man alone. I’m beginning to realize why they were so freaked out by Bill Clinton having an extra-marital affair — it was so mainstream and predictable compared to their personal habits that they thought it was kinky.
I just love it when CNN posts an utterly unanswerable survey question:
If I say yes, it will make me less likely to vote Republican, then I’d be lying, because my intention of voting for Republicans was zero to begin with. But if I answer no, it won’t make me less likely to vote Republican, then that might be construed to mean I might be voting for Republicans, or that the Foley meltdown doesn’t matter to me, which is both wrong and totally misleading.
[NOTE to readers of Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions: I haven’t forgotten or not read the first two chapters. I’ve been overwhelmed with meat-world responsibilities. Tomorrow, I’ll post on Chaps 1 and 2.]
So Tony Snow referred to the Foley matter as “some naughty emails” this morning and got slapped by the press corps. His response warmed me to the depth of my soul. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time:
“You’re right. That may sound a little bit too glib – I think I’ve used the words… horrifying, appalling, disturbing. “Fill in the blanks,” he added. “It’s absolutely inappropriate.”
Well I’m sorry, but that just won’t do. Republicans had better get out their Thesauruses because we are now deep into sex scandal disclaimer territory. They are going to have to arm themselves with all the words and they are going to have to use them lest their political opponents be allowed to paint them as soft on covering up underage cyber-stalking by middle aged congressmen. These are the rules they made up — they’d better get with with the program.
Here are a few to start with: deplorable, reprehensible, unforgiveable, intolerable, contemptible… you get the drift. There’s plenty more where that came from, but the rules dictate that they use all of those words to describe Foley and the irresponsible House leadership every single time they speak of the matter — and before they even utter a peep of defense.
They can look over any given transcript of the Chris Matthews show during the Lewinsky scandal and see how the Democrats who were forced to do this handled the situation. They were required to make this disclaimer, in ever more florid terms as the scandal unfolded, each time they appeared on television. That’s how it works. No “fill in the blanks” allowed.
They will also find in those transcripts the approved Republican talking points of the period which repeatedly claimed how repulsive and nauseating it was for a middle aged man to become involved with a 22 year old who worked in his office. That might give them some clues about what’s about to happen to them. This time, of course, you have the specter of multiple 16 year old victims, the perpetrator being a closeted, gay Catholic Republican and the House leadership pretty much giving the guy a thumbs up and an “attaboy” — so there’s a lot more for their opponents to work with.
In fact, if you feel like getting involved in this yourself, you can follow Josh Marshall’s advice and give your Republican congressperson a call today and see whether he or she has lost confidence in Denny Hastert and the GOP leadership. (Here’s a web site with all the phone numbers.) You might want to also ask if he or she finds their behavior in this matter deplorable, contemptible, unforgiveable and reprehensible.
I certainly do. In fact, words can’t express just how abominable and despicable I think they are.
