Speaking of Karl Rove being back in the saddle, this has been the most popular story on AOL news for the last 24 hours:
Bush Makes Promise to Dead Soldier’s Mom
Says He’ll Get Her Reports on How Son Died
CLINTONVILLE, Wis. (Aug. 12) – Nearly three years ago, Beth Karlson’s son died in Iraq. Barely a day after meeting with President Bush, the mother said Friday that she’s much closer to getting some answers about the incident that killed her son.
“We just got off the phone with the White House. It is in the process,” she said Friday. “I am not bashful. When you got his ear, you might as well do something.”
Karlson said she was among some families of soldiers killed in Iraq who had private meetings with Bush at an Oneida police station Thursday during his trip to Green Bay that included a fundraiser for Republican U.S. House candidate John Gard.
Her son, Army Staff Sgt. Warren S. Hansen, 36, was one of 17 soldiers killed when two Blackhawk helicopters collided above Mosul on Nov. 15, 2003.
Karlson, 63, said that during her and her husband’s “very personal” meeting with the president, she brought up her frustration in obtaining the official Army report about the crash.
Karlson said Bush promised that he would look into the matter and get her the reports.
“It was a very private meeting and that is the way we want to keep it,” she said Friday. “He is a wonderful man. How many other presidents have sat down with the families? None that I know of.”
[…]
“He said, ‘I just love the military. There’s just something about military families.’ And he thanked us for raising the type of child we did. That’s part of what he wrote in the scrapbook,” Karlson told the newspaper.
Ok, here we go. Bush the fearless terrorist killer and benevolent Dad is back. It must be election time. Rove thinks he can squeeze out one more win through the bullhorn. They are going full out with a turbo-charged version of their tried and true “Democrats are effeminate pansies and the Republicans are real manly men” campaign. The loving president Dad who manfully “comforts the moms and widders” is a staple of such imagery, making it seems as though attacking him is attacking them.
The constant reference to McGovern is this season’s Swift Boat smear. Since Karl doesn’t have a single candidate to tar with cowardly Vietnam stories he has chosen instead to run against the fabled “left wing” of the Democratic party circa 68-72. The point is less to convince the electorate than it is to trash talk the Democrats into backing off a harsh critique of the war. And it’s remarkably effective. As we can see from countless articles and columns of the past few weeks, nothing sends the timorous insider Dems scurrying like an accusation that the Party is in the clutches of the crazy liberals. The man knows his adversaries.
But the other side of the coin is to present the Codpiece as grown-up contrast and rehab his reputation. Bush is, aftger all, remarkably unpopular and he is what’s dragging down the party. Part of the plan requires him and all his minions to swagger and talk tough, of course. But this formulation of the hippie kids running amuck also needs something less confrontational: the patient parent who can calm the waters. Here comes Ben Cartwright, the pops of the Ponderosa whose credo was”A man’s never wrong doing what he thinks is right.”
I don’t think it’s going to work again. It’s like the third sequel of a bad movie. The hippie extremist plot is absurd, the hysterical dialog is unintentionally funny and the actors are out of shape and looking old. Worst of all, the star is now box-office poison.
It appears that virtually the entire right side of the political spectrum has chosen to disseminate an abject lie. It’s everywhere and it’s permeated the media to such an extent that until I signed on this morning and got around to reading the Washington Post even I didn’t know it was a lie — and I tend to pay attention to this stuff. (Imagine how this has slipped into the conventional wisdom among people who only casually tune in.)
Here it is: the British arrests prove that we need programs like the illegal wiretapping and further prove that the press has been irresponsible by reporting about such illegal secret programs. The truth is precisely the opposite. (Glenn will take you through the details.) The British and the Americans followed the laws of their respective countries that require warrants — and the terrorist plot carried on using telephones and bank transfers long after it was “revealed” in the press that the government was tracking communications and financial transactions.
This has been a memorable week of such deep spin swallowing among the press. The Lieberman loss has somehow been morphed into great news for the Republicans and the thwarting of the terrorist attacks in Britain using legal means supports the president’s absolute need to use illegal methods to stop terrorist attacks. We’re through the looking glass again people. Karl Rove is definitely back in the saddle.
(And the press corps breathes a huge sigh of relief — they hate having to report bad news for the GOP. Republicans make their lives a living hell when they do it.)
One can’t expect 100%, certainly. But as I see it, without a doubt the most bizarre aspect of the 9/11 attacks were not that they were imagined and plotted but that they actually happened. Even assuming an incompetent CIA and FBI, there were many, many signs that summer and fall that something was up (start with the 9/11 commission report and work your way through Pretext to War, The One Percent Doctrine, and a slew of other books). But for some strange reason all those signs were missed ignored, failed to rise to the higher echelons. Of course, I would be the last person to suggest that George W. Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were unspeakably, unforgivably, negligent by ignoring the clear warnings of the Clinton administration on Al Qaeda – complaining about all the attention being focused on “just one man;” snickering, “Okay, you’ve coverd your ass” when folks from CIA came to brief them.
Actually, I confess it. I just lied to you. I was one of the first to suggest that the Bush administration, through its utter incompetence, bears a heavy responsibility for the carnage of 9/11. I was saying so a few hours after the attacks to my friends from Finland who called to make sure that we were ok.
If nothing else, the exposure of the latest potential atrocity simply highlights how incompetent the Bushites were. No, they didn’t “let it happen” and it certainly wasn’t a black op to boost Bush in the polls.* It’s just that, well, Richard Clarke had been pushed aside, John O’Neill had quit in disgust to manage WTC security, Robert Mueller was the new kid on the block,and John Ashroft was proofreading an arrangement of “When the Eagle Soars” for seven kazoos and musical saw. Meanwhile, many others were simply ignored and let the obsessive, paranoid and quite essential monitoring of bin Laden’s activities drop.
That failure to pay attention to reality is a hallmark of the Bush administration.
*I know some commenters disagree, but you’ll first have to explain to me how, if this was some sort of nefarious Rovian plot, George Bush was caught on video during the attacks reading “My Pet Goat” to a classroom in Florida. The least we’d expect would be for Bush to be strutting around on in full Commander Codpiece regalia, not flitting in sheer panic all over the country.
No, folks, it was simple stupidity and negligence that enabled bin Laden to wreak havoc in the US – they should have been caught and they could have been if anyone up top had been paying attention. I’ll leave open the question as to whether Rove slapped his forehead on 9/11 and exclaimed, “Damn! Wish I’d thought of that!” Even if he didn’t – and frankly, I’ve always assumed that day Carl was probably cowering under a desk somewhere, overcome by the stench of fresh ca-ca in his pants and wouldn’t have it together to think of much of anything else – the fact remains that within hours of the carnage, the Bush administration treated the attacks as if it were a gift from God to fastlane the prep for an Iraq War and hasten their intended evisceration of the US Constitution.
British and American counterterrorism agencies have been tracking 50 al-Qaeda (or al-Qaeda-ish) terrorists for over a year. They were under intensive surveillance the entire time and never had any chance of pulling off their plans. What’s more, the investigation has probably provided us with hundreds or thousands of additional leads to keep tabs on.
I wonder: what lesson will al-Qaeda draw from this? Osama bin Laden may be a religious fanatic, but he’s not stupid, and my guess is that he’ll conclude that in a post-9/11 security environment it’s simply impossible to keep a plot this big a secret. There are too many entry points and too many ways for a single mistake to derail the whole thing.
Bin Laden may be fond of big statements, but I wonder if this failure will convince him and his compatriots to think smaller? Is our future now more likely to be full of lots of little attacks rather than the occasional big one?
Big conspiracies are very hard to keep quiet. In Europe and North America at least, stepped up law enforcement has made an elaborate Islamic terrorist plot harder than ever. Kevin’s speculation may very well be correct and if so, that is good news. It’s not that small bore terrorist attacks are a good thing, mind you, but simply that they have less shock value and are less likely to provoke the kind of mindless desire to lash out that led so many to support to absurd responses like Iraq. If this is true, perhaps we can, over time and with different leadership, deal with this threat more intelligently in the future.
The problem, of course, is talking these bloodthirsty, WWIII wingnut armageddonists down from the ledge.
Apparently there’s some kind of batsignal for the U.S. punditocracy that tells them all what to write each week. This week their orders are to inform us that the Democrats had better watch out for those far-left elitists like Ned Lamont, who will with their extreme anti-war positions lead them to defeat just like George McGovern did.
[…]
This might make you wonder certain things—like, was opposition to Vietnam the “wealthy, educated” position? I know it’s fun to listen to stories from Uncle Dave B[roder], and extremely boring to look at reality. But let’s give reality a shot just this once. Here’s a Gallup poll from January, 1971:
Check it out. You won’t believe what you are seeing. (Hint: “Real Americans” were not the hawks after all.)
And check out the recent polls about isolationism vs internationalism. It looks to me as if people don’t know what they are voting for.
Regular readers of this blog know that I used to live in Alaska back in the day. In fact, I worked on the Alaska pipeline — the one that’s drizzling oil all over the tundra right now. And I’m sad to report that Alaskans are in the process of one of those horrible leftist purges we’ve been hearing so much about. The state’s Republican Governor, ex-Senator Frank Murkowski, looks like he’s going to lose the Republican primary.
I know it’s shocking to see all those leftwing hippies of the Alaska Republican party be so short sighted as to oust a man with decades of experience in both Washington and Juneau, but they won’t listen to reason. For some reason these Stalinist conservatives are unhappy with their Republican Governor.
He has many problems, the most recent being this oil leak which is not only harmful to the environment (Alaskans expect their oil company landlords to take care of the land) but it’s costing the Alaska permanent fund billions in lost revenue — which translates to dollars not coming into residents’ pockets at the end of the year. He froze state hiring which is a major source of employment in Alaska.
The voters are also angry that he made a secret deal with the energy companies for lucrative natural gas pipeline that greatly benefitted the companies and screwed Alaskans. He failed to fulfill his campaign promise to get ANWR passed (all those friends in high places, you know.) He appointed his daughter to the Senate which still doesn’t sit well with a lot of people. Mostly, he’s seen as being in bed with George W. Bush.
There is a strong military presence in Alaska with many retirees taking up residence there. It’s one reason why Alaska has become such a strong red state. It’s odd that they would vote against a good solid Republican like Murkowski but the numbers seem to show that they are. I’d love to know why.
Finally, Murkowski is behaving strangely and doesn’t make sense half the time. I don’t find this unusual among powerful Republicans, but Alaskans are evidently concerned.
Now I know that Murkowski losing his seat in a Republican primary is an affront to all that is decent and good in our system and that Democrats should be ashamed. This goes without saying. All Republicans’ problems are obviously a result of the crazed blogofascists taking over the Democratic party and pushing it to the left.
Still, if one were to look at this from another angle — you know, like it’s 2006 rather than 1972 — one might see that these primary losses portend a general sense that people are very unhappy with the status quo which, in case nobody’s noticed, is Republican rule.
Oh and by the way, Murkowski is currently coming in third in that Republican primary.
Here’s a story on the pipeline leak from the LA Times.
I’m not as smart as President Slaughterbush and the neocons, but I wonder what came first in their collective minds: the realization that America was dependent on oil, and therefore the US had better come up with a plan to convert it to its own control, or that by virtue of its value, oil would eventually put too much cash into the hands of a ‘hostile’ culture, and therefore the ‘hostile’ culture should be force-assimilated into America’s ‘things-that-glow’ way of life? It’s one of those chicken and egg conundrums.
So consider what the stakes are if America is unable to gain control of the oil and the economy slips into a deep recession. First, everyone would have to give up their picture cell phones and go back to the old kind without pictures. Then, we’d have to return to a normal diet by giving up two-thirds of our 6,000 calories per day. Americans would lose weight making them healthier, which would cause a drop in physician incomes, which would then cause the luxury car market to collapse. Since it’s a trickle-down economy, the average suburban home would go from 4,000 square feet to less than half that.
Without money to buy liquor, alcohol consumption would drop leading corporations to withdraw their television ads from ballgames, and since ad revenue drives the sports industry, the salaries of our athlete-gods would drop precipitously to under a million a year. When the athlete-gods raped women, they would have to hire ordinary lawyers, who would be less likely to get them off scot-free, so the whole sports industry would collapse. As corporate income fell overall, business control of government would slip and the politicians’ fee-income derived from business relationships would dry up.
God, it would be hell.
All these things make up our way of life, so it really doesn’t matter who the oil belongs to. It’s ours. Really. If your conscience bothers you, try the Republican mantra: It’s all about me. It’s all about me. It’s all about me. It’s all about …
I mentioned that President Slaughterbush was a smart guy. As proof, take note that he has moved way up the intellectual food chain from My Pet Goat. Watertiger has the details.
With Vice President Al Gore casting the tie-breaking vote, the Senate gave final Congressional approval tonight to President Clinton’s five-year economic program.
This means that the budget plan, the most important legislative issue of the Clinton Presidency so far, cleared Congress by the narrowest possible margin and awaits only the President’s signature before becoming law. Enactment of the legislation was viewed at the White House as essential to Mr. Clinton’s ultimate success as President.
The outcome was in doubt until Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, the last Senator to announce which way he would vote, declared on the Senate floor at 8:30 P.M. that he would support Mr. Clinton.
At the White House today, Mr. Clinton met for more than an hour with Senator Kerrey in the morning and spent much of the rest of the day on the telephone thanking Democrats who had voted for his plan in the House of Representatives.
After the Senate vote, President Clinton emerged from the White House to greet cheering supporters who had gathered at the front steps.
“This was not easy, but real change is never easy,” he told them. “After 12 long years, we can say to the American people tonight, We have laid a foundation for a renewal of the American dream.”
[…]
George J. Mitchell of Maine, the Democratic leader, declared: “The American people want change. They voted for change last year. And tonight we’re going to deliver change. President Clinton has given us a fair plan. I say it’s fair to give him a chance.”
But Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the top Republican on the Budget Committee, said the increased taxes in the program would devastate the economy.
[…]
Mr. Kerrey, the swing vote, played Hamlet all day.
At 6 P.M., White House officials and Senate Democratic leaders said that they believed Mr. Kerrey was on their side but admitted that they did not know for sure. At 7:55, his fellow Nebraskan, Senator J. James Exon, indicated to the Senate in a speech that he did not know how Mr. Kerrey would vote.
When Mr. Kerrey announced his position to the Senate, he said he did not trust the Republicans to improve the economy if he decided to vote with them to kill Mr. Clinton’s plan. Addressing the President, he declared, “I could not and should not cast a vote that brings down your Presidency.”
Mr. Kerrey had called the President at the White House only moments earlier to inform him of his decision. After their meeting this morning, Mr. Clinton called Mr. Kerrey in the Senate cloakroom to urge him once again to support the plan.
“Obviously, the President’s very happy about Senator Kerrey’s vote,” Dee Dee Myers, the White House press secretary, said tonight after the announcement.
[…]
Senator Kerrey was perhaps the most critical of plan among those who voted for it. “My heart aches with the conclusion that I will vote ‘yes’ for a bill which challenges Americans too little,” he said.
[…]
Unlike the House members, many of whom were on the fence when the debate began, all senators but Mr. Kerrey had announced how they would vote before today. It is safe to say that no one’s position was changed by any one else’s speech.
What a pleasure it must have been to deal with him — kind of like dealing with Britney Spears before she’s had her first Dr Pepper.
Kerrey went on to make an ass of himself many times over the next few years. And he and Lieberman (along with the sainted drunk Moynihan) have a long history of being santimonious, self-centered pricks together:
While they were thoughtful and measured, Mr. Lieberman’s remarks were the most pointed of any Democrat thus far, and threatened to undermine an intense drive by the White House and leading Democrats to contain the political fallout from Mr. Clinton’s disclosure two weeks ago that he had had an improper relationship with Ms. Lewinsky.
The Senator’s comments immediately prompted two of Mr. Lieberman’s Democratic colleagues, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, to break their silence and rise to the Senate floor to praise Mr. Lieberman — and offer more bristling words for the President. And Republicans, including the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, lauded Mr. Lieberman’s for what Mr. Lott termed his ”moral compass.’
Maybe all these egomaniacs can join the “Unity” party. They’ll be so busy shoving each other away from the mirror they won’t have time to muck things up the way they usually do.
I guess the wingnuts are finally doing what they have been wanting to do since 9/11: demonize all muslims, especially Americans, who disagree in any way with Bush. (Welcome to our world!) Yglesias points out that this is a very stupid thing to do since you can’t deal with Islamic fundamentalism without the help of Islamic moderates.
This other thing where “Muslim moderate” means something like “agrees with the National Review’s take on American national security policy” is just to generate a world where you could fit all the world’s Muslim moderates into Fuad Ajami’s living room and have a nice party. There’s no reason to look at the world like that, but doing it seriously does risk transforming a manageable terror problem into an overwhelming one.
That’s precisely the point. It appears that warporn works the same way regular porn often does; the more someone watches it the wilder the stimulation they need. The right’s bloodlust can’t be sated with fevered thoughts about al Qaeda and Iraq anymore. (And those wars haven’t really given them much of a release.) They need “the big one.”
Newtie’s got a stomach churning op-ed today called “The Only Option Is To Win” in the Washington Post. I would suggest that everyone take him quite seriously. There is a lot of pressure on the right to conform with this line of thinking and these ginned up crises tend to force their acceptance for a long enough time that there’s no turning back. Lest we forget their boy still has his finger on the button:
Holbrooke has set the stage for an important national debate that goes well beyond such awful possibilities as Sept. 11-style airliner plots. It’s a debate about whether we are in danger of losing one or more U.S. cities, whether the world faces the possibility of a second Holocaust should Iran use nuclear or biological weapons against Israel, and whether a nuclear Iran would dominate the Persian Gulf and the world’s energy supplies. This is the most important debate of our time. It rivals both Winston Churchill’s argument in the 1930s over the nature of Hitler and the Nazis and Harry Truman’s argument in the 1940s about the emerging Soviet empire.
Holbrooke indicates that he would take the wrong path on American national security. He asserts that “containing the violence must be Washington’s first priority.”
As a goal this is precisely wrong. Defeating the terrorists and thwarting efforts by Iran and North Korea to gain nuclear and biological weapons must be the first goal of American policy. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if violence is necessary to defeat the terrorists, the Iranians and the North Koreans, then it is regrettably necessary. If they can be disarmed with less violence, then that is desirable. But a nonviolent solution that allows the terrorists to become better trained, better organized, more numerous and better armed is a defeat. A nonviolent solution that leads to North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons threatening us across the planet is a defeat.
This piece is explicitly coming out against any kind of containment. (Naturally, since containment worked in the cold war and is thus discredited as are all things that turn out in retrospect to have been right.) Note also how he says “if they can be disarmed with less violence that would be desirable.” You can almost see the pinched, sour expression on his face. He is subtly backing up his silly WWIII rhetoric by saying we are simultaneously fighting “the terrorists,” Iran and North Korea and there is no way to deal with them but “defeat” them militarily. (I particularly like his cynical use of the term holocaust in this discussion.)
“I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War,” Mr. Lieberman said.
I can hardly believe he would say this. Aside from the fact that it is deeply offensive to anyone with intellectual integrity it is cheap demagoguery at its most obvious. Let’s get one thing straight. Nazism was a evil as it gets. And there was no more mortal human threat to the planet in world history than the threat of accidental or purposful nuclear war during the cold war. MAD was the ultimate threat — real Armageddon. We have many challenges and threats facing us, not the the least of which is nuclear prolifieration. Yet both Newtie and Joe find it completely acceptable that the military dictatorship and home of hotbed of islamic fundamentalism, Pakistan, and its arch rival India among a host of other countries have such weapons.
I’m sure all this macho talk is emotionally satisfying to some people but there is no reason that Democrats should allow themselves to be trash-talked into another Iraq style debate where the only parameters that can even be discussed are the how not the why. That’s what they are trying to do — get us into a position where we will start saying “ok, yes, this is WWIII, but I don’t think we are at war with Iran and North Korea — just Iran.” Or “of course this is an existential threat and we are in a global war against islamic fascism, but we should get the UN involved, don’t you think?”
I remember that feeling of being bulldozed on Iraq like it was yesterday. Many of us knew the war was ill timed and unnecessary (not to mention illegal and immoral) but it was clear from the beginning that there was nothing we could do. It was like watching a car accident in slow motion. We are in the midst of another attempt to create a crisis for which the only answer is more war and once again I get the sense that the entire system is paralyzed by it.
I don’t think the American people are on board at the moment, but if the Democrats don’t supply an alternative narrative — and do it with strength and conviction — many people will think that the decison has already been made and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. That’s where the Republicans want the country be in November — scared Republicans streaming to the polls to support their government and disillusioned Democrats staying home.
But there is something much bigger at stake than domestic politics and much more dangerous, I think. Newtie and his friends are using the specter of this WWIII and a nuclear armed Iran to begin the process of removing the taboo against a US first strike.
The great big neoelephant in the middle of the room is tactical nukes. We have proved with Iraq that we can’t back up our big threats with conventional warfare. So what we are left with is “shock and awe” and there is only one thing left in our arsenal that can carry that mail:
To those who have been paying attention to the Bush administration’s pronouncements on nuclear policy since 2001, Hersh’s revelations come as little surprise. During its first term, the Bush administration codified a new nuclear doctrine that identified several specific scenarios in which the United States would consciously choose to initiate nuclear war. The 2002 “Nuclear Posture Review,” almost wholly unnoticed by the peace and progressive communities, put forth explicit plans for launching nuclear attacks against nonnuclear nations. It even named seven states—including Iran—as possible targets of a U.S. nuclear first strike.
[…]
If the U.S. actually does roll out a few atomic bombs in the skies over Iran, there will be no turning back for any of us. The taboo that has prevailed since Hiroshima and Nagasaki will prevail no more. The distinction between conventional and nuclear war will forever be lost. The inhibition that has kept everyone from stepping over the nuclear precipice will disappear in a single flash. Once someone throws open the nuclear Pandora’s box that has been so precariously held shut since Aug. 9, 1945, it will never be shut again.
Busting taboos is a specialty of the Bush administration. The taboo against torture is now pretty much fully inoperative. The taboo against genocide is being currently tested. Nukes are the most efficient way to get there so that taboo is being discarded too.
Of course, the neocons and other hawks have always been big believers in nuclear weapons and thought the taboo against a first strike was “tying our hands.” Part of their original raison d’etre was their antipathy toward detente back in the 70’s which led them form Team B and Committee on the Present Danger to hype the Soviet threat. They were hysterical then and they are hysterical now. But we are in a different world. The WWII veterans and foreign policy establishment types who knew to keep these crazies at bay are long gone. The crazies are in charge.
If we let Gingrich and Lieberman get away with this insane, reckless rhetoric comparing some would-be bombers with Hitler and Stalin and characterizing the GWOT as an existential threat requiring extreme violence, within a very short time period the slow motion car wreck will have begun and we will wake up one morning to find Cheney and his pals have exercized their “only option to win.”
