Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Are We There Yet?

by digby

Following up on my post from Friday highlighting Colonel Sam Gardiner’s statement on CNN that the US already has troops in iran, I see (via robelicit at kos) that Dennis Kucinich has sent a letter to the president asking if such reports are true. He says:

Dear President Bush:

Recently, it has been reported that U.S. troops are conducting military operations in Iran. If true, it appears that you have already made the decision to commit U.S. military forces to a unilateral conflict with Iran, even before direct or indirect negotiations with the government of Iran had been attempted, without UN support and without authorization from the U.S. Congress.

Last Thursday, Raw Story had some interesting nuggets about the pentagon using MEK (an official terrorist group) to do dirty work in Iran:

One former counterintelligence official, who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the information, describes the Pentagon as pushing MEK shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The drive to use the insurgent group was said to have been advanced by the Pentagon under the influence of the Vice President’s office and opposed by the State Department, National Security Council and then-National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice.

[…]

“We disarmed [the MEK] of major weapons but not small arms. [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld was pushing to use them as a military special ops team, but policy infighting between their camp and Condi, but she was able to fight them off for a while,” said the intelligence official. According to still another intelligence source, the policy infighting ended last year when Donald Rumsfeld, under pressure from Vice President Cheney, came up with a plan to “convert” the MEK by having them simply quit their organization.

It is well known that MEK was given a strange dispensation, with some very odd ducks offering public support, one of whom was, of all people, that radical wierdo Tom Tancredo:

Washington, DC, May. 31, 2005 (UPI) — U.S. lawmakers and former military officers are backing Mujahedin-e Khalq, an Iranian opposition group, despite its inclusion on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations and its role in the killing and wounding of U.S. military personnel and civilians in the 1970s.

Supporters acknowledge the status of the group, once funded by deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, as well as its role in the killings of U.S. military personnel and civilians in the 1970s in Iran when it was allied with Ayatollah Khomeini, but say the MEK has shed its past activities and is a potential ally against the theocratic regime in Iran.

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, responded in a written statement saying he supports the MEK because it is an “asset to U.S. intelligence” and “the most reliable source of information for the region.”

In recent years the MEK’s political branch, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, has provided information about Iran’s nuclear facilities, which the Bush administration contends are being used to secretly make nuclear weapons.

Tancredo’s press secretary, Carlos Espinosa, said it is not “too unusual” for members of Congress to support a group listed as a foreign terrorist organization, citing Sen. Ted Kennedy’s support for the Irish Republican Army as an example.

“Are these guys saints? No.” Espinosa said. But, “if there’s a problem, it’s that the MEK is on the list.”

Read the whole article for the rundown on MEK if you are unfamiliar with them. I remember seeing Rep. Ileana Ross-Lehtinen making a public statement in favor of the group a year or so ago and wondered what in the hell was up with that.

So, what does it all mean? I don’t really know, of course. But, as I wrote earlier, I am intrigued by Sy Hersh’s article from last year, that the pentagon has created a new, clandestine service that has no obligation to report to the congress as the CIA does:

George W. Bush’s reelection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.

[…]

Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

[…]

The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’ it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs” the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran.

Here’s what he wrote last week:

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

Today, Richard Clark and Steven Simon, former national security staffers say this:

So how would bombing Iran serve American interests? In over a decade of looking at the question, no one has ever been able to provide a persuasive answer. The president assures us he will seek a diplomatic solution to the Iranian crisis. And there is a role for threats of force to back up diplomacy and help concentrate the minds of our allies. But the current level of activity in the Pentagon suggests more than just standard contingency planning or tactical saber-rattling.

All of this may be some sort of advanced kabuki sabre rattling, of course. But Hersh’s scenario from early 2005 sounds entirely plausible to me. I suspect that these actions have been ongoing since Bush was reelected. Remember his constant refrain about “using his political capital?” His reelection seemed to infuse him with even more grandiosity than he showed before. For instance, his first order of domestic business wasn’t to disband the department of education, a longtime conservative goal. He set out to destroy social security — long known to be the third rail of politics. He thought he was destined (by God?) to fundamentally change the nation and the world. His arrogance knew no bounds.

Within that framework, it is entirely believable to me that he could have ordered regime change in Iran more than a year ago. And it is almost certain that he could have authorized a new clandestine service in the DOD that is unanswerable to congress. The administration’s understanding of presidential power during “wartime” allows him to do anything he deems necessary to “protect” the country.

Again, this is tinfoil hat stuff, connecting some very vague dots. A few years ago I would have dismissed it as conspiracy mongering of the worst kind and consigned myself to spend a month digging through illuminati web-sites to cure me of the disease.

After what we have seen, however, I don’t think it’s far-fetched at all:

• The administration has asserted a theory of unlimited executive power in wartime.
• The secretary of defense is committed to creating and using a new and “modern” fighting force using all kinds of unconventional and untried means.
• The president believes he was chosen by God to be his vehicle for spreadin’ freedom.
• The power behind the throne is a devious, powermad greedhead who believes that military dominance is the only way America can stay on top.
• They all have a history of lying about their plans for war and believed that their reelection was a mandate to continue on the same path.

Here was Bush in his first press conference after winning the election:

And after hundreds of speeches and three debates and interviews and the whole process, where you keep basically saying the same thing over and over again, that when you win, there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view, and that’s what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as the President, now let’s work to — and the people made it clear what they wanted, now let’s work together.

And it’s one of the wonderful — it’s like earning capital. You asked, do I feel free. Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style. That’s what happened in the — after the 2000 election, I earned some capital. I’ve earned capital in this election — and I’m going to spend it for what I told the people I’d spend it on, which is — you’ve heard the agenda: Social Security and tax reform, moving this economy forward, education, fighting and winning the war on terror.

The most polarizing president in US history, who assumed office through one vote on the Supreme court the first time and won the second time because of a dubious swing of about 70,000 votes in Ohio says it’s his style to spend the political capital he “earned” when “the people” endorsed all his views.

That’s the kind of guy who thinks he can start secret wars to transform the middle east through sheer force. A megalomaniac child in the hands of manipulative men.

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Ah, The Book Review Strikes Again

by tristero

Recently, the NY Times Book Review’s been bending over backwards to find good things to say about “intelligent design” creationism, and assigning an intellectual lightweight to misread and review Daniel Dennett. Here’s their latest attempt to solidify their reputation for blithering stupidity bordering on functional illiteracy. It’s Pamela Paul’s review of a collection of essays by Caitlin Flanagan on housewifery et, al (accompanied by a scrumptious picture of a 50’s American housewife holding a freshly-baked cake. )

Flanagan is one of them anti-feminist types, apparently. And the reviewer wants us to know that she, too, has contempt for all those foolish feminist excesses. Unfortunately, well… in the spirit of the 50’s, let’s make it a quiz, boys and girls!

Can YOU spot the fundamental error of logic in the reviewer’s – and Flanagan’s – reasoning in the excerpt below?

As it stands, sensitivities are so attuned to the slightest insult of any one of women’s myriad work-life choices that Flanagan’s simplest observations — for example, when a woman works something is lost — are taken as an indictment of working women. Yet any working mother can see the truth in such a statement: time spent working = less time with children = something lost. What’s appalling is that pointing this out raises such ire.

Sigh. I suppose it is too much to ask an editor to catch something like this. But really, there are people who can give Flanagan a fair review who are smart enough to avoid perpetuating her sloppy thinking. And yes, it’s true that, considering the United States has a rogue executive branch that is in the early stages of what very well may escalate into nuclear war – and very few in the msm are willing to say it out loud – this is thoroughly trivial.

But this failure to understand basic logic in an influential literary publication points, and starkly, to a public intellectual culture that is profoundly empty of serious thought and discussion. A public culture in which serious thought and discussion really has to fight to get heard through muddle-headed thinking like Paul’s and Flanagan’s (Not their subject, duh. Their reasoning about the subject. Duh.). No wonder no one’s discussing the imminence of a possible nuclear attack on Iran in the msm. They don’t have the tools to comprehend it.

ANSWER: I found the “work vs baby-rearing” construction a classic false dichotomy, especially as framed here by Flanagan and Paul. The way they put it, *any* time away from baby could be construed as a loss – talking on the phone, eating lunch, going to the bathroom – all of these are losses to the mother/baby relationship; work is simply more loss. This strikes me as ipso facto a ludicrously crude position, and indefensible. Is part-time work less loss but still unacceptable? How about an hour a day? The false dichotomy becomes even more apparent if one considers mothers beyond Flanagan’s and Paul’s personal cohort of white, middle-to-upper-middle-class women. Which is not to say that there is even much truth to such a dichotomy within their own cohort.

This leads us to the question, “Why construct such a dichotomy in the first place?” And there are very few answers that don’t revolve around making women feel guilty for abandoning their children for the hedonistic pleasure of being underpaid in the workforce. Thus, the structure of this false dichotomy is, by its very nature, sexist and oppressive.

I hasten to add that I don’t know much feminist theory – since I agree with feminism, I would prefer to spend my time trying to understand things I have trouble agreeing with, or can never agree with – and so have no idea if any feminist has actually made this argument. It simply seems like common-sense to me.

Some commentators noticed that Paul makes a telling unconscious error, conflating “mothers” with “women.” Indeed, that is the hidden assumption that lies behind the urge to advance this kind of false dichotomy.

Please note: I am not saying there are not very legitimate issues surrounding the issues of child-rearing and employment outside the house for mothers (and to a lesser extent, fathers). Of course there are, and they need to be discussed openly and with good faith all around. What I’m saying is that by framing these issues as a simplistic false dichotomy, Flanagan and Paul are indulging, whether they are aware of it or not, in a very nasty kind of guilt-tripping. It is not appalling to object to this worthless style of argumentation. Rather, it is moral as it is the first step towards finding a legitimate discourse that does not take as a given that women should feel guilty about the choices they make.

All Paths Return To The Clenis

by tristero

What I want to know is this: Can Bill Clinton prove he wasn’t in Dallas on November 22, 1963?

Think I’m kidding? If it’s evil, Clinton had a hand in it. Think about it. There was Clinton’s drug smuggling which led to Noelle Bush’s drug addiction. And Clinton cavorting with two disciples of Sappho at a dinner party caused poor Mary Cheney to think that maybe it’s ok to love someone who, chances are, will never adopt her dad’s hairstyle. Not to mention that Clinton’s gory familiar invented the internet, that swamp of filth. (And if you don’t think the internet is perverted, just ask Jeff Goldstein or any other upstanding Republican whose done the research into how appalling it is. They’ll send you a long list of sites they’ve compiled where men and dogs…shocking stuff.) And when Clinton admitted receiving fellatio from Monica Lewinsky, he sent a strong signal that it was ok for America to engage in a literal epidemic of oral sex, dooming thousands of hapless spermatoza to a horrible death, eaten away by stomach acids or left to wither and dry into an icky stain on a blue dress. Those are your children, America!

And now, this. Unforgivable. Iran today is all Clinton’s fault.

See what I mean? Suddenly, Clinton’s presence in Dallas ’63 doesn’t seem so far-fetched, now does it? And I’ll bet if we could examine all the records from Bay of Pigs, we’d learn that Slick Willie called up his pal Castro – ‘course they were buddies, still are, remember that Elian kid he made go back to Cuba? – and gave him all the details.

Pity poor George W. Bush. Six years after Clinton and he’s still wasting time cleaning up Bill’s mess. And people think BUSH makes mistakes? How could he? I’m serious, man. Bush doesn’t have time to make his own mistakes, what with trying to correct all of Clinton’s!

Billmon On Iran

by tristero

Read it all:

And so the most promising opportunities for a rational settlement have all passed us by. Instead of a moderate reform president and a group of nervous ayatollahs anxious to cut a deal, America now has Ahmadinejad – and the dawn of what could conceivably become an explicitly fascist regime in Iran, or at least a very close substitute for one.

The good news, such as it is, is that Ahmadinejad’s end-times ideology doesn’t seem to include any grand territorial ambitions: no “Greater Iran” (Iran is already a greater Iran), no lebensraum in the east. We also have time – time to see how things shake out, to see if the ayatollahs can hamstring their troublesome protege, to see if the democracy movement can make a political comeback. Time for Ahmadinejad to lose some of his popular shine as Iran’s internal problems worsen. Time for our own hardline warmongers to be booted out of power.

But unfortunately, our divinely ordained president may not be prepared to wait (and the last sentence of the preceding paragraph appears to be one of the reasons.) Which means at this point we probably should be worrying less about what happened in Munich in 1938, and more about what happened there in 1972, when the German police moved in and tried to disarm the terrorists.

Multiply that carnage by a thousand, or a million, and you’ve got more than a political slogan; you’ve got a war.

Tancredo’s Mistresses

by digby

McJoan at Kos has posted an action item that’s worth checking out and taking a litle time to participate. It’s about how to counter these bullshit lying radio ads that the RNC has cooked up to blame the Democrats for the GOP’s attempt to turn undocumented workers into felons.

As I wrote yesterday, this is starting to gel as CW among the gasbags and the kewl kidz. I just heard William Schneider saying it as if it’s a fact. That’s not the most important thing, however. The most important thing is that the latino community not be misled. This requires a push back. The Republicans made their racist beds with Tom Tancredo and they have to wake up each morning to his creepy face across the pillow. He’s their problem, not ours.

NDNBlog has more.

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Bush’s Secret War

by digby

Colonel Sam Gardiner is the retired colonel who taught at the National War College, the Air War College and the Naval Warfare College and who found more than 50 instances of demonstrably false stories planted in the press in the run up to the war, back in 2003. He was just on CNN:

CLANCY: Well, Colonel Gardiner, from what you’re saying, it would seem like military men, then, might be cautioning, don’t go ahead with this. But what are the signs that are out there right now? Is there any evidence of any movement in that direction?

GARDINER: Sure. Actually, Jim, I would say — and this may shock some — I think the decision has been made and military operations are under way.

CLANCY: Why?

GARDINER: And let me say this — I’m saying this carefully. First of all, Sy Hersh said in that article which was…

CLANCY: Yes, but that’s one unnamed source.

GARDINER: Let me check that. Not unnamed source as not being valid.

The way “The New Yorker” does it, if somebody tells Sy Hersh something, somebody else in the magazine calls them and says, “Did you tell Sy Hersh that?” That’s one point.

The secretary[sic] point is, the Iranians have been saying American military troops are in there, have been saying it for almost a year. I was in Berlin two weeks ago, sat next to the ambassador, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA. And I said, “Hey, I hear you’re accusing Americans of being in there operating with some of the units that have shot up revolution guard units.”

He said, quite frankly, “Yes, we know they are. We’ve captured some of the units, and they’ve confessed to working with the Americans.”

The evidence is mounting that that decision has already been made, and I don’t know that the other part of that has been completed, that there has been any congressional approval to do this.

My view of the plan is, there is this period in which some kinds of ground troops will operate inside Iran, and then what we’re talking about is the second part, which is this air strike.

CLANCY: All right. You lay this whole scenario, but there are still a lot of caution flags that one would see out here.

GARDINER: Sure. True.

CLANCY: If they do decide on a military option…

GARDINER: Right?

CLANCY: … what’s the realistic chance of success? What’s your — your prognosis for that kind of reaction here?

GARDINER: Yes. Let me give you two answers to that. First of all, the chance of getting the facilities and setting back the program, I think the chances go from maybe two years to actually accelerating the program. You know, we could cause them to redouble their efforts. That’s on one side.

The other side is this sort of horizontal escalation by the Iranians.

My assessment is — and it’s because of regime problems at home — that if we strike, they’re likely to want to blame Israel. Now that’s — because that sells well at home.

Blaming Israel means that there’s a chance that we could see Hezbollah, Hamas targeting Israel. We could very easily see this thing escalate into a broader Middle East war, particularly when you add Muslim rage.

You know, if you take the cartoon problem and multiply it times a hundred — you know, the Danish cartoons, you could see how we could end up very quickly with a very serious problem in the Middle East.

CLANCY: Former U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner. Not a very rosy outlook here. A man who thinks the decision may have already been made.

Thank you for being with us.

GARDINER: Certainly.

My tin foil hat is beeping and honking like crazy right now. These generals coming forward is huge.

I really think it’s possible that Bush and Rummy have already got a secret war going on, one that has not been revealed to congress in any form. It’s designed that way. Bush is not going to fire Rummy — he can’t. He’s already committed himself to this thing. This could be the ultimate action of the unitary executive.

Update: Crooks and Liars has the video, here.

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Black Reconnaissance

by digby

It’s obvious to me that this call for Rumsfeld’s resignation by six generals is about stopping this operation in Iran first and foremost. It is not a coincidence that the first salvo came from Sy Hersh last Sunday.

The question I had to ask myself was whether it was really about the nuclear thing or something more that had the military up in arms. In reading back over Hersh’s articles of the last year or so, it became quite clear to me that this has something to do with the fact that Bush instituted the plan to invade Iran more than a year ago when he believed he had been crowned Emperor in the 2004 elections — and that the plan has gone forward without any consideration of changing circumstances on the ground in Iraq. Furthermore, the plan itself comes from the same comic book from which Rummy and Newtie cooked up their RMA fantasy about invading Iraq with only 30,000 troops, a cell phone and a toothpick.

And the beauty of it is, the clandestine operation on which it depends has been folded into the Pentagon and has no congressional oversight.

February, 2005:

George W. Bush’s reelection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.

Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush’s reelection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second guessing.

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah – we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”

Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things went wrong whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s’ vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld’s dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt.

Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’ it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs” the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’ ” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”

Bush just issued a statement of support for Rumsfeld. He is stubborn and refuses to change course, as we know. But if what Hersh reported back in 2005 is correct, Rumsfeld owns him. Back in the heady days of his 2% landslide, Bush authorized a covert war with Iran, with no congressional oversight and without even the cooperation of the CINQ’s. This makes Iran-Contra look like the Canuck letter.

These retired generals are speaking for a military establishment that has been used like monopoly money by Rummy his fellow magical thinkers (like his “advisor” Newt Gingrich) who have spent the last five years attempting to destroy the military with their useless, incompetent war planning and their surreal Toffler-esque vision of a military that doesn’t require an actual army.

I realize that the armed forces always resist change. But I think it’s fair to assume, considering the Iraq cock-up, that Rummy doesn’t know what in the hell he’s doing. The military is finally saying “enough.” We are witnessing a coup by media.

The congress has completely abdicated its oversight responsibility, the media is shallow and incompetent, our allies are considered irrelevant, the UN is being run by a nutcase even more far-out that Rummy and the wishes of the people are, as usual, not considered. It looks like the only institution in America that can bring us back from the brink of a tragic, tragic mistake is the military itself.

If these guys can’t get through, and it doesn’t appear that they will, then it’s time for some of these active duty officers to resign in protest. It would take a lot of guts, but that’s their business, right?

In an article about the possible revolt of the officer corps, Fred Kaplan writes this in Slate:

MacArthur’s legacy in particular has kept even the boldest generals deeply reluctant to criticize civilian leaders over the decades. Rumsfeld’s arrogance, his “casualness and swagger” as Gen. Newbold put it—which have caused so many strategic blunders, so much death and disaster—have started to tip some officers over the edge. They may prove a good influence in the short run. But if Rumsfeld resists their encroachments and fights back, the whole hierarchy of command could implode as officers feel compelled not merely to stay silent but to choose one side or the other. And if the rebel officers win, they might find they like the taste of bureaucratic victory—and feel less constrained to renew the internecine combat when other, less momentous disputes arise in the future.

Both paths are cluttered with drear and danger. Does President Bush know this is going on? If he does, he would do the nation—and the Constitution—a big favor if he launched a different sort of pre-emptive attack and got rid of Rumsfeld now.

The problem may be that Bush can’t replace the person who is running his secret war.

Oh, and get ready for the swiftboating. I can hear them revving their engines already.
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Breeding Republicans

by digby

Following up on my post from yesterday about Chuck Colson’s lament that about all the aborted babies who could be working in the fields today, the indefatigable Carolyn at MakeThemAccountable reminds me that she wrote about this sometime back — and this is not just some isolated whim on Colson’s part. It seems that there are conservatives who back all kinds of family support like universal health insurance that might place them as close to the progressive camp as the conservatives — until you see what their motives are:

Does this mean that the progressive fight for economic justice now over? Can we sit back and relax?

Not exactly.

The problem is with the reasons Douthat and Salam give for making families’ lives easier. Maybe it’s idealistic, but some of us have thought the reason to encourage strong, economically secure, and loving families is because that is what is most likely to enable people to reach their human potential, and to live full and rewarding lives. Any government participation in that effort is geared toward fulfilling its obligation, stated in the preamble to the Constitution, to promote the general welfare.

Those are not the reasons these authors give. They are concerned that reduced baby production, especially the lack of “bonus babies” (presumably, more babies than the two per family most common in America today) will cause economic problems in the future. “Without a youthful population, the costs of supporting retirees are unsustainable, and the innovation and entrepreneurial zeal that make America the world’s economic leader will slowly wither.” An extra added attraction for helping families is that it will solidify Republican political dominance, these authors say.

Their ideas about how to support families are typical GOP claptrap that won’t work (they don’t have a clue about how to do anything but cut taxes and start wars) but I just love the idea that they think they can breed Republicans. My father is the most rightwing Republican in the universe.

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Krugman

by tristero

Paul Krugman socks the Bush administration right in the keister. It is a joy to read:

Now it can be told: President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney based their re-election campaign on lies, damned lies and statistics.

The lies included Mr. Cheney’s assertion, more than three months after intelligence analysts determined that the famous Iraqi trailers weren’t bioweapons labs, that we were in possession of two “mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox.”

The damned lies included Mr. Bush’s declaration, in his “Mission Accomplished” speech, that “we have removed an ally of Al Qaeda.”

The statistics included Mr. Bush’s claim, during his debates with John Kerry, that “most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans.”

Compared with the deceptions that led us to war, deceptions about taxes can seem like a minor issue. But it’s all of a piece. In fact, my early sense that we were being misled into war came mainly from the resemblance between the administration’s sales pitch for the Iraq war — with its evasions, innuendo and constantly changing rationale — and the selling of the Bush tax cuts.

Moreover, the hysterical attacks the administration and its defenders launch against anyone who tries to do the math on tax cuts suggest that this is a very sensitive topic. For example, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa once compared people who say that 40 percent of the Bush tax cuts will go to the richest 1 percent of the population to, yes, Adolf Hitler.*

And just as administration officials continued to insist that the trailers were weapons labs long after their own intelligence analysts had concluded otherwise, officials continue to claim that most of the tax cuts went to the middle class even though their own tax analysts know better.

How do I know what the administration’s tax analysts know? The facts are there, if you know how to look for them, hidden in one of the administration’s propaganda releases…

[explanation of how the “Tax Relief Kit” inadvertently demonstrates that 53% of the tax cuts went to the top 10% of the population and 32% of the tax cuts went to the top 1%]

I’m sure that this column will provoke a furious counterattack from the administration, an all-out attempt to discredit my math. Yet if I’m wrong, there’s an easy way to prove it: just release the raw data used to construct the table titled “Projected Share of Individual Income Taxes and Income in 2006.” Memo to reporters: if the administration doesn’t release those numbers, that’s in effect a confession of guilt, an implicit admission that the data contradict the administration’s spin.

And what about the people Senator Grassley compared to Hitler, those who say that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans will receive 40 percent of the tax cuts? Although the “Tax Relief Kit” asserts that “nearly all of the tax cut provisions” are already in effect, that’s not true: one crucial piece of the Bush tax cuts, elimination of the estate tax, hasn’t taken effect yet. Since only estates bigger than $2 million, or $4 million for a married couple, face taxation, the great bulk of the gains from estate tax repeal will go to the wealthiest 1 percent. This will raise their share of the overall tax cuts to, you guessed it, about 40 percent.

Again, the point isn’t merely that the Bush administration has squandered the budget surplus it inherited on tax cuts for the wealthy. It’s the fact that the administration has spent its entire term in office lying about the nature of those tax cuts. And all the world now knows what I suspected from the start: an administration that lies about taxes will also lie about other, graver matters.

* In the interest of providing my dear Hullabaloo readers with extra value, Here’s Charles Grassley’s Hitler comparison as reported in the Congressional Record, October 1, 2002

“I am sure voters will get their fill of statistics claiming that the Bush tax cut hands out 40 percent of the benefit to the top 1 percent of the taxpayers. This is not merely misleading, it is outright false. Some folks must be under the impression that as long as something is repeated often enough, it will become true. That was how Adolf Hitler got to the top.

It’s no longer surprising to read these scummy lies from Republicans, but nevertheless it never fails to induce a state of sheer awe and wonder at the audacity of it all.

Uptight, Crazy and Reactionary

by digby

In this post about the developing generation gap between Boomers and Millenials (which is child’s play compared to the generation gap between boomers and the greatest generation — now that was real hell) I read that boomers “express greater concern than any other generational grouping with virtually every specific issue examined in the survey” and “have substantially more negative and pessimistic perceptions of the political process than any other generational grouping.” Evidently, boomers are also “uptight, crazy, and reactionary, featuring rightwing views on ‘lifestyle issues and crime’ and, generally speaking, ‘are often characterized by taking strong, relatively extreme positions on issues.'”

Yglesias says this means we should chill. He’s probably right. We’ve always taken strong, relatively extreme positions on issues. I used to think that was a function of being young, but I guess we are just extreme by nature.

However, I might also suggest that the fact that we are all in our mid forties to early 60’s means we are taking care of both the elderly (who are living to amazing old age) and the young (who stay young a lot longer than they used to) while looking at a scary old age that some factions of the government are actively trying to fuck with, and who may very well succeed.

The younger cohort, like me, looks at greatly reduced opportunity in a shrinking job market that is unkind to older workers. Many cling to their pathetic jobs with their brittle fingernails for fear of having to pony up many thousands of dollars in health care premiums if they lose it (and having to take a shit job at Walmart when nobody will hire them at their formerly decent wage.) Health is becoming a big issue for us — the system is quite inconveniently breaking down just as we enter our unhealthy years. This economy feels very unstable and if you are over 50 you know you will not be able to make it all back if it goes.

We are feeling a little bit stressed.

And as for our pessimistic view of politics, whether we are on the right (and refuse to admit it) or on the left (and are all to aware of it) we have all watched our government take us into two useless wars, first killing large numbers of us and now threatening to kill large numbers of our kids and grandkids for no good reason. A number of our big political heroes were literally gunned down. We have lived through a bunch of presidencies now, including Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush. One ended with assasination; one ended ignominiously through a total lack of support for his war from his own party; three of them featured major corruption and/or national security scandals, one of whom resigned in disgrace; one was a non-stop soap opera that ended in impeachment; the latest may be the biggest failure of all. All of them were tumultuous and ultimately disillusioning for a generation that grew up in America’s most confident and hopeful era after America’s triumph of World War II.

We’d have to be delusional not to be negative and pessimistic about the political process after all that.

I’d also point out that as much as everyone may want us to chill, we boomers are all entering the period of life in which voters typically begin to turn out to vote with a vengeance. We have huge numbers and we are shortly going to be concentrating almost exclusively on our aches and pains,the early bird special at Dennys — and politics. Hoo boy. Like every other period in our lives, for good and ill, boomers are going to dominate until the day we die. We can’t help it.

Blame the greatest generation. That’s what we always did.

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