Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Enemy Within

by digby

Following up on my post below featuring Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, I see that Josh Marshall made a similar argument, without the historical context, today also:

I think part of the issue for many people on the administration’s various forms of surveillance is not just that some of activities seem to be illegal or unconstitutional on their face. I think many people are probably willing to be open-minded, for better or worse, on pushing the constitutional envelope. But given the people in charge of the executive branch today, you just can’t have any confidence that these tools will be restricted to targeting terrorists. Start grabbing up phone records to data-mine for terrorists and then the tools are just too tempting for your leak investigations. Once you do that, why not just keep an eye on your critics too? After all, they’re the ones most likely to get the leaks, right? So, same difference. The folks around the president don’t recognize any real distinctions among those they consider enemies. So we’d be foolish to think they wouldn’t bring these tools to bear on all of them. Once you set aside the law as your guide for action and view the president’s will as a source of legitimacy in itself, then everything becomes possible and justifiable.

The key here, I think, is to recognize that they will say that monitoring the communications of the press or political opponents is for the sake of national security. This is what comes of seeing your fellow Americans and political opponents as “enemies” to be eliminated. There is no logical or emotional leap to make between spying on terrorists in Dubai and spying on war protesters in Dubuque and spying on reporters in DC. It’s the natural result of this manichean mindset that openly touts a “with us or against us” philosophy and sees political dissent as acts of treason.

Conservatives have been selling the idea of “the enemy within” for many decades. It’s what they do. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, as amply demonstrated in the excerpt of Perlstein’s book below, rationalized their spying on the press and dissenters as necessary to plug national security leaks. Likewise, the Bush administration will have no problem doing it either.

I personally wouldn’t support giving Gandhi and Jesus Christ the unfettered power to spy on Americans. But allowing these people to do it is unfathomable.

Update: Greg Sargent from TAPPED has a new blog called The Horse’s Mouth. He takes us down another trip through time, reminding us that Republicans have been trashing the press for generations.

(All this reminiscing about my youth is making me yearn for a bottle of Boones Farm Apple wine and a fat joint with seeds popping in it.)

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Same As It Ever Was

by digby

In light of today’s predictable revelations that the administration is spying on the press, Rick Perlstein has given me permission to publish an excerpt from his forthcoming book “Nixonland”.

The trust in President Nixon might have been shaken somewhat on Day 101, when the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee repeated something he first said in October of 1966: time to declare victory and go home. “Common sense should tell us that we have now accomplished our purpose as far as South Vietnam is concerned,” Vermont’s George Aiken proclaimed. It was time for an “orderly withdrawal.” It might have been shaken more on May 9, when after six straight days with nothing on the front page of the New York Times about the fighting in Vietnam, a tiny item in the bottom right corner obscured by a feature on Governor Rockefeller’s collection of primitive art revealed that bombing was taking place in Cambodia.

In a May 14 [1969] TV speech from the White House the president announced, “The time is approaching when the South Vietnamese will be able to take over some of the fighting fronts now being manned by Americans.” Columnists vied with each other to predict the draw-down numbers: 50,000, 100,000, even 200,000. He also offered simultaneous mutual withdrawal of U.S. and North Vietnamese forces (He counted on short memories, having charged of LBJ’s non-simultaneous withdrawal proposal in 1966, “Communist victory would most certainly be the result of ‘mutual withdrawal.'”) It came the week Gallup made phone calls for its polls released June 1. That poll gave him an approval rating of 65 percent. Maybe, a nonplussed public concluded, if any had noticed the Time’s dispatch, Cambodian bombing was what it took to bring the horses into the barn.

Henry Kissinger was not nonplussed. On the morning of the 9th, a Germanic screech rang out from the porch of the Key Biscayne Hotel:

“Outrageous! Outrageous…. We must crush these people! We must destroy them!”

He referred to the Secretaries of Defense and State, whose offices he suspected had leaked the existence of Operation Menu to the New York Times. He rang up Melvin Laird, pulling him off the golf course at Burning Tree Country Club: “You son of a bitch!” (Laird hung up.) Or maybe it had come from the NSC office in the basement of the White House. “If anybody leaks anything, I will do the leaking,” he had told his people at one of their first meetings. The thought of a runaway staff was enraging — not just for diplomatic reasons but for what it suggested to the security-besotted bulldogs around Nixon about an NSC top-heavy with Harvard grads and Kennedy vets.

Kissinger’s rage had been building at leaks since an early April New York Times piece appeared anticipating troop pullouts. It flared in May, when the Times’ Pentagon correspondent reported modifications in nuclear strategy being considered by the Pentagon, then of administration deliberations over the North Korean spy plane shoot-down.

The Cambodia article wasn’t even damning. It was flattering. The point of “Raids in Cambodia by U.S. Unprotested” was how nicely the Cambodian government was cooperating with the U.S. military. It concluded that “there is no Administration interest at this time in extending the ground war into Cambodia or Laos.” It might not have even been based on leaks: a London reporter had made aerial photographs of bomb craters close enough to the border to raise suspicions, and the Times’ enterprising reporter had gone to check things out.

That wasn’t the point. The point was that they feared the White House’s secrets were being betrayed.

Kissinger called J. Edgar Hoover and told him it was time to move forward on a project they had discussed: wiretaps of the homes and offices of NSC staffers Morton Halperin, Daniel Davidson, and Helmut Sonnefeldt; of Melvin Laird; and of Secretary Laird’s senior military assistant. Thus did the FBI learn about things like Mrs. Halperin’s concern for the surgery of a relative in New York, and the three Halperin boys’ favorite playmates–and that when reporters asked Mr. Halperin to leak Kissinger statements, he steadfastly refused. The tap on Mel Laird was more productive: Kissinger drew a bead on the activities of a hated bureacratic rival. What he didn’t find was any leakers. So the program was extended, on May 20, with wiretaps on two more NSC staffers.

A reporter was next. This time, however, it wasn’t Kissinger working through the legal channel of the FBI. It was the President, tapping one of Henry Kissinger’s friends, in a way that Henry Kissinger couldn’t find out. John Ehrlichman knew just the guy: he got John Caulfield, a new addition to the White House staff, a former detective of New York’s version of the Red Squad who had known Nixon since he’d protected him on the campaign trail in 1960. Caulfield called a friend, who’d worked sweeping Nixon’s hotels for bugs during the 1968 campaign. They cased the target’s Georgetown townhouse and told Ehrlichman the job would be very, very difficult. Ehrlichman insisted they go forward, because national security was at stake. So they scrounged up some phone company credentials and shimmied up a pole to affix a bug to the writer’s phone wire.

He was Joseph Kraft, the same journalist who’d lectured his fellow media professionals to stop coddling liberals. Nixon was tapping Kissinger’s favorite journalist friend to keep tabs on the aide who was supposedly closest to him. Which was only fair. Kissinger was working towards opening an entirely separate channel to glean the secrets Nixon might keep from him.

I hesitate to even comment on this; the implications are so painfully obvious. As time goes on, it has become clear that this administration has in essence been nothing more than a GOP mulligan. Nixon: Part Deux.

The claims that these encroachments on civil liberties are benign are disproven by the actions of another Republican administration within my own lifetime. Many of the architects of today’s imperial presidency learned politics and policy in the Nixon era. It’s almost unbelievable that it could play out like this again, in virtually the same way, but it has, even the infighting. It’s a recurring Republican nightmare. They are asking us to ignore history, specifically their own history, and just “trust them.” Why would this country ever be so foolish?

And once again, the establishment press gets hoist with its own petard.

Perlstein’s “Nixonland” will be released in a few months. about a year. He’ll be taking questions at the second Firedoglake book salon meeting about his Goldwater book, “Before The Storm” next Sunday.

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Aborting The Prescription

by digby

Every time a woman comes into a gynecologist’s office, ACOG wants the doctor to offer her advance prescriptions of the morning after pill. But it is apparently not enough to simply make the offer; indeed, some women are reporting that their gynecologists are insisting that they take the prescription—even if they say repeatedly that they don’t want it. The doctors urge them, “it’s good for a year!” This kind of scenario makes a mockery out of the phrase “pro-choice.” In a situation like this, how can anyone not conclude that “pro-choice” is really “pro-abortion?”

Don’t get me started. Just go read TBOGG. He’ll tell you all about it.

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The Christianists Betrayed

by tristero

Looks like the rightwing operatives who hide behind the skirts of priests are so pissed they are threatening to tell their followers not to vote for Republicans this fall. Good.

I think it’s important, however, to make a distinction that Dave Neiwert made when Judge Roy Moore – he who blasphemed the Ten Commandments by turning them into a textbook example of idolatry – was thinking of running for president and many of us including yours truly were cynically and wrongly cheering him on.

It’s one thing to encourage the Republican party to tell the christianists to crawl back underneath whatever rocks they hale from. The sooner the Dobsons of the world are politcally marginal in the US, the better. It’s quite another, in an effort to defeat Republicans, to root for a splintering of the GOP into two groups such that the christianists establish a seriously powerful second national party* in opposition to Republicans.

As the past five plus years have shown, the last thing this country needs is a wealthy politcal party hellbent on inflicting its nutty theocratic agenda on the rest of us. Divested of the (admittedly weak) secular anchor of the rest of the GOP, these people could wreck this country even faster than you could say George W. Bush.

So if the christianists are to break away and establish a National Christianist Party – let’s call it the NaXi Party – it should be accompanied by strenuous efforts to exacerbate their tendency to fight amongst themelves, thereby making it impossible for them to cohere around a national agenda. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds at first glance, what with their alarming goose-stepping solidarity in opposing marriage rights and adequate healthcare for the poor. There are major differences between Catholic christianists and Protestant ones and they can be exploited. And there are other ways to weaken them politically. Let’s not forget that evangelicals had a long tradition of focusing on their own salvation and avoiding national political organizing, as they did in the decades immediately post-Scopes. This, too, can be used to limit their effectiveness (yes, I know it’s a lot more complicated than that, but Christianity is supposed to be a religion, for crissakes, not a political movement, and it’s time evangelical leaders looked at the log in their own eye).

So, yes, Republicans should boot the Bible-thumpers out of positions of serious influence in their party. But no, the christianists should not be encouraged to form a NaXi Party as that could rapidly lead to Very Bad Things which all of us, especially liberals, would come to regret. And let’s not make the mistake many liberals (and mainstream conservatives, too) made in the 70’s and 80’s. The christianists represent a very, very dangerous element in American culture; they should not be ignored, dismissed, underestimated, or in any way encouraged.

*For many years, the Democrats have failed to demonstrate they are serious about being a national politcal party. Although Dean’s work as Chairman is encouraging, and more so the more I hear of what he’s doing, the jury is still out as to whether other influential Democrats actually will permit him build a viable party, ie, one capable of winning and retaining either house of Congress, not to mention the presidency.

Hear The Hum

by digby

Nobody senses the zeitgeist like Atrios. If he says he hears it, believe it. Stay tuned.

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60’s’60s Trip

by digby

Some of us are gathering over at Jane’s place at 2pm (5 ,est eDt) to discuss Rick Perlstein’s classic book “Before the Storm” about the Goldwater campaign. It has much to teach us now…

Come on by.

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“A Red-Ass In A Hurry”

by tristero

Dave Neiwert succinctly discusses Bush’s character now that the blinders have been removed from the American public. David also links to this important, famous Gail Sheehy article in Vanity Fair from October, 2000 which, sadly, the country has learned far too late, is all-too-accurate. It’s worth reading again 5 1/2 years later::

Once, after his mother banished him from the golf course, she turned to Hannah and declared, “That boy is going to have optical rectosis.” What did that mean? “She said, ‘A shitty outlook on life.'”

Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn’t lose. He’ll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. “If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15,” says Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. “If he wasn’t winning, he would quit. He would just walk off…. It’s what we called Bush Effort: If I don’t like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that.” So why could George get away with it? “He was just too easygoing and too pleasant.”

Another fast friend, Roland Betts, acknowledges that it is the same in tennis. In November 1992, Bush and Betts were in Santa Fe to host a dinner party, but they had just enough time for one set of doubles. The former Yale classmates were on opposite sides of the net. “There was only one problem—my side won the first set,” recalls Betts. “O.K., then we’re going two out of three,” Bush decreed. Bush’s side takes the next set. But Betts’s side is winning the third set when it starts to snow. Hard, fat flakes. The catering truck pulls up. But Bush won’t let anybody quit. “He’s pissed. George runs his mouth constantly,” says Betts indulgently. “He’s making fun of your last shot, mocking you, needling you, goading you—he never shuts up!” They continued to play tennis through a driving snowstorm.

It is something of an in-joke with Bush’s friends and family. “In reality we all know who won, but George wants to go further to see what happens,” says an old family friend, venture capitalist and former MGM chairman Louis “Bo” Polk Jr. “George would say, ‘Play that one over,’ or ‘I wasn’t quite ready.’ The overtimes are what’s fun, so you make your own. When you go that extra mile or that extra point … you go to a whole new level.”

Yessirree, that’s Bush, alright. And for those folks who think this is merely the Cheney administration with a total puppet for president, please recall the fall of 2000 and the numerous congressional battles, and the total ignoring of any and all laws. Then re-read the above. That’s Bush’s personality at work, my friends. Yes, it’s Cheney too, but don’t misunderestimate Bush’s influence.

And then there’s this, which gives us a sense of the seriousness with which the man takes his job. For in fact, as Bush sees it the presidency is just a necessary evil on the journey to his true destiny:

“He wanted to be Kenesaw Mountain Landis,” America’s first baseball commissioner, legendary for his power and dictatorial style. “I would have guessed that when George grew up he would be the commissioner of baseball,” says Hannah. “I am still convinced that that is his goal.”

One assumes that this close pal of the Republican presidential candidate is speaking with tongue in cheek. But no. “Running for president is a résumé-enhancer for being the commissioner of baseball,” he insists. “And it’s a whole lot better job.”

Truer words have never been written about the character of George W. Bush. No wonder that memo in August 6, 2001 didn’t make an impression. And then:

He proudly rejects introspection and has no interest in looking back over the “youthful indiscretions” that characterized his first 44 years. In interviews Bush repeatedly says, “I’m not one of those people who say, ‘Gosh, if I’d have done it differently, I’d have … ‘” He pauses for a few seconds to contemplate his life, then confidently concludes, “I can’t think of anything I’d do differently.”

Man, that’s so painful to read now, because we know that in a few years he will stand in front of the nation, having launched a useless war, having ignored intelligence of an imminent bin Laden attack, and be totally stumped when asked to name a single mistake he had made.

Be sure to read the entire Sheehy article if you haven’t already.The article’s long, but the ending will give you tremendous insight into Bush’s plans to tackle the related problems of air pollution and global climate change.

Address All Future Correspondence To: “Frank Rich, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba”

by tristero

Looks like Mr. Rich may be the next candidate for an extended Carribean holiday at government expense:

It’s the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press’s exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That’s where the buck stops, and if there’s to be a witch hunt for traitors, that’s where it should begin.

…

It’s often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.

…

It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 — “Tomorrow is zero hour” for one — and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden’s N.S.A. also failed to recognize that “some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose,” as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and “for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores.”

If Democrats — and, for that matter, Republicans — let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.

Do I need to point out the obvious here to you folks? That Rich is accusing not only the people he directly names of incompetence so profound it looks like treason, but also the person who nominated them? I thought not.

About time.

Leadership

by digby

Leading Democrats tell the New York Times that it would be better if the party doesn’t win in the fall — and if it has the sad misfortune to do so, it would be better off not holding any investigations into the Bush administration.

And if, somehow, the party does unfortunately win and “the loud left” insists that the party holds Bush responsible for his misdeeds against the wishes of these wise men, we already know Democrats will be like the Republicans in 1996 who lost seats because they shut down the government and like Republicans in 1998 because they impeached Bill Clinton. (Lord knows the Republicans have suffered in the wilderness ever since then.)

Besides, everything’s a big old mess and you just know the Republicans are going to blame it all on us. Wouldn’t it be better to let Bush stew in his juices until 2008? Of course, the country will still be in a mess then (undoubtedly worse than it is today even) and the loud left will be causing all sorts of trouble so maybe it would be just as well if they don’t win then either.

In fact, the best thing to do would be to keep losing until everything is perfect so they don’t have to do anything unpleasant and the loud and angry left will have nothing to scream about.

If anyone’s wondering what the Democrats’ master plan has been for the last few years, I think we’ve found it.

Memo to the party mandarins dispensing all this wise advice: If you have a chance to win, you win. Not because you want to do a victory lap but because you care about the country and you will do anything you can to stop the hell these crazy bastards have unleashed and start down a new path. Do you want them to continue to have free reign over the next two years while they pump up this phony threat with Iran? Do you want them to be in charge of another natural disaster like Katrina? More money thrown into the black maw of GOP contributors? What are you thinking?

This is why the establishment is becoming irrelevant. It isn’t a game to us hicks out here in America. These are our lives these people are talking about.

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Ladies Men

by digby

Everybody needs to go over and read the delicious, juicy stuff Laura Rozen has today on Brent Wilkes and Dusty Foggo’s ways with the ladies.

Have you seen pictures of these two guys?

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