Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Backing Up Murtha

by digby

This op-ed in the NY Times from yesterday by James Webb, Reagan’s secretary of the Navy, in which he defends John Murtha against the latest swift boat smears, is a must read. I had occasion to bring this up with some Republican veterans recently and they were uncomfortable with the implications. Unlike Kerry, who they all agreed had joined up purely to advance his political career and was a total phony, Murtha isn’t so easy to peg. And when I asked if it was reasonable that every single Bush critic who is a veteran is either lying about his war record or crazy, much hemming and hawing ensued. And when I questioned their medals, they got angry.

At some point the military itself is going to have to defend itself against these attacks. Every time these swift boat assholes do this they call into question every medal that’s been awarded. If all these public figures could get away with this it’s only logical to assume that the military hands out a great many improper medals. After all, they couldn’t have known at the time that these particular men would someday be politicians. This would have to be a systemic problem.

Webb cautions about its effect on the military:

… in recent years extremist Republican operatives have inverted a longstanding principle: that our combat veterans be accorded a place of honor in political circles. This trend began with the ugly insinuations leveled at Senator John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries and continued with the slurs against Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry, and now Mr. Murtha.

Military people past and present have good reason to wonder if the current administration truly values their service beyond its immediate effect on its battlefield of choice. The casting of suspicion and doubt about the actions of veterans who have run against President Bush or opposed his policies has been a constant theme of his career. This pattern of denigrating the service of those with whom they disagree risks cheapening the public’s appreciation of what it means to serve, and in the long term may hurt the Republicans themselves.

[…]

A young American now serving in Iraq might rightly wonder whether his or her service will be deliberately misconstrued 20 years from now, in the next rendition of politically motivated spinmeisters who never had the courage to step forward and put their own lives on the line.

Rudyard Kipling summed up this syndrome quite neatly more than a century ago, writing about the frequent hypocrisy directed at the British soldiers of his day:

An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;

An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!

The Carpetbagger adds:

On a related note, still no word from the White House on whether the president is willing to denounce this baseless attack on a man Bush recently described as “a fine man, a good man, who served our country with honor and distinction as a Marine in Vietnam and as a United States Congressman.” Scott McClellan wasn’t asked about it at yesterday’s briefing. Maybe today the White House can do the honorable thing and publicly reject this nonsense.

I’m not holding my breath.

Via Jane over a Firedoglake, I see that a message board has sprung up for people to register their wish that Murtha give the Democratic response at the State of the Union. I think it is a teriffic idea and would be an excellent way to show these swift boating scumbags that the Democratic Party will not be intimidated by their smears.

Murtha is just terrific on TV. His grizzled countenance, his obvious sincerity and straighforwardness, his credibility make him the perfect person to speak for the Democrats on Iraq. Even my wingnut Dad has to say “well, he’s got a point.” After listening to the callow preznit spew out words he doesn’t even know the meaning of for an hour, Murtha would be like a breath of fresh air.

And Democrats need, right now with no further ado, to show this brave man that we have his back. By Democrats I mean both the rank and file and the leadership. If they can get away with swiftboating John Murtha, then there is simply no use in any Democrats bothering to speak the truth on national security. Everybody just get ready to fight useless wars whenever these bedwetters have a scary nightmare or need to prove their manhoods.

Here are a the e-mail addresses of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid

sf.nancy@mail.house.gov
Or here is her web page form you can use.

Reid only has the web page form.

If there was ever a time to show these Republican thugs that they can’t just swift boat every Democratic veteran and get away with it, it’s now.

Update: Never mind

National Democratic leaders today will ask Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D) to deliver the party’s response to the president’s State of the Union address, believing that the new governor can best deliver their 2006 message of inclusiveness, American values and high ethical standards.

Feel the magic.

Foiled Again

by digby

Via Kevin, I see that the Republicans have come up with a scathing attack on Harry Reid that is sure to blow the lid off the Democrats’ call for reform:

We are shocked, shocked to see that politics is going on here!

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Purge The Bushmen

by digby

It appears that the “movement conservatives” are getting ready to cut Dubya loose. (They usually do this when any Republican becomes unpopular, so as not to sully the brand.)

Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances (PRCB) today called upon Congress to hold open, substantive oversight hearings examining the President’s authorization of the National Security Agency (NSA) to violate domestic surveillance requirements outlined in the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, chairman of PRCB, was joined by fellow conservatives Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR); David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union; Paul Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation and Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, in urging lawmakers to use NSA hearings to establish a solid foundation for restoring much needed constitutional checks and balances to intelligence law.

Good for them and welcome to the fight for civil liberties. But lest anyone think that these people have some core of values that make them “different” lets not forget this from March 30, 2005:

Fellow Conservatives,

I’m writing to ask you to join me in doing something effective against the leftist organizations and liberal media who have launched truly vicious attacks on U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

They attack Tom DeLay for just one reason: Congressman DeLay is one of the most effective fighters for conservative principles.

Time and again, Majority Leader Tom DeLay manages the strategy which wins for conservatives in the narrowly divided House of Representatives.

I know personally that Tom Delay is almost obsessively careful to get good legal advice before he takes any step which might conceivably be questioned under the law or suspected as an infraction of House rules. None of the leftist uproar has contains any evidence he has done anything illegal or violated the House rules.

The only fire under all that smoke generated by the leftist attacks is their burning hatred of a good man.

Conservatives must respond with a richly deserved attack on leftist groups and liberal media trying to lynch Tom DeLay. That’s why I’m writing to you.

And you and I must do all we can to make sure any politician who hopes to have conservative support in the future had better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay.

Media and organizations who would let left wingers get away with almost anything are trying to generate a feeding frenzy against DeLay. No matter what he does, they attack him. Not content to make mountains out of mole hills, they invent mole hills to make mountains.

If Tom DeLay preferred Fords to Chevrolets or Chevrolets to Fords, the leftists would gin up reasons to attack his preference either way.

Unscrupulous leftist media will huff and puff to breath life into any trivial or phony leftist complaint against any act of any powerful conservative, no matter how upright and innocent. And they’ll keep doing this until a public reaction begins to embarrass and damage those spreading the propaganda.

You’ve seen this all your life.

These guys appear to have seen the writing on the wall since then. It’s time to start the purges. (For more on this, see Rick Perlstein’s brave foray into the belly of the beast.)

The movement conservatives are not really very comfortable on the inside. Witness their absurd appeal above. It’s all about the “permanent revolution” for them, even to the extent that they could ridiculously defend Tom deLay as innocent, upright and under seige from powerful liberal factions less than a year ago. They seem to have realized that it won’t work any longer and it’s time to begin the conservative purification rituals if they want to keep the revolution alive.

Not that any of that it makes any difference for these purposes. These guys make the illegal wiretap case easier to get past the media’s knee-jerk dismissal of all things Democratic so, viva la revolucion!

Update: Rick Perlstein seems to have caused quite a ruckus by posting the press release over on Free Republic. They are very confused. Here’s a sample:

Hillary will do this stuff anyway. It’s not the present NSA intercepts you have to fear, they were checked and vetted even through the opposition, and no one balked at the program.

Like stated earlier, we don’t need to commit suicide to keep our rights.

Hillary et al are corrupt, and they will do anything (and already have) to maintain their power base. She and her ilk are the dangerous ones. Gore and these so-called conservatives are way off base.

——

But Barr won’t be complaining when or if it happens anymore than the NY Times will be upset about past or future Clinton spying on their enemies, i.e., conservatives, right wingers, political enemies as defined by the Clintons, meaning any Republican, because Barr will not be drawing a paycheck anymore if he does. It’s real simple even if many of you are unable to grasp the facts – the Clintons were doing this before the Patriot Act, before Bush was elected, and they will do it again if given the chance and to hell with the constitution or any law passed or not passed by congress because NONE OF IT APPLIES TO DEMOCRATS or in those immortal words of Al Gore, “There is no controlling legal authority.”

You wonder why Bush is able to get away with speaking gibberish?

But then, there’s this:

“So you are okay with warrant less wiretaps? I’m not”

Nor am I.

And I’m pretty astounded by the number of conservatives who are willing to surrender unlimited power to whoever happens to sit in the oval office for the duration of a possibly endless war (can you imagine a time when there is no one who wishes the US harm?)

My wife’s desk is in the Sears Tower – now the tallest building in the country, and presumably short listed by possible terrorists – so I’ve though about this a lot. And my conclusion that in terms of what really matters long term ultimately she’s safer there – at least as long as this is a country where there are judicial checks on the legal powers of the executive branch – than in a country where the Maximum Leader makes whatever rules she or she prefers as tribal War-Lord.

At the moment, it’s often hard to get this point across – some people are willing go to just about any length to avoid facing the question of possible abuse of such power.

But IMO when you see people such as Paul Weyrich being derided as liberal lap-dogs, you know the argument is off the rails – the problem with this sort of approach is that you have dismiss the opinions of ever larger numbers of thoughtful conservative commentators; if they are elected they are RINOs, if unelected, “who do they represent?”, if current members of government they are said to be “disloyal”, if they have left government service they are attacked as “traitors”, and so on.

Still, at the moment I’m in the minority, and can only hope that a majority of voters come to their senses before such power is vested in someone really inimical to our traditional freedoms.

I suspect Rove is beginning to feel that atomic wedgie right about now.

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Crying Wolf

by digby

This article from First Post says it all:

Among British neo-con commentators and policy wonks – the Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld right-wing fan club centred on the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail – anger over the West’s vacillation in the face of Iranian intransigence is running especially high.

[…]

But before they blame everybody else for letting him [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Iranian president] get away with it, the armchair warriors of the right should ask themselves why he seems able to defy the world with such apparent impunity. The invasion of Iraq, the neo-cons’ favourite cause, is one obvious answer. With the US bogged down in Iraq, Tehran can be sure that the American public is in no mood for another Middle Eastern adventure.

Should that show signs of changing, Tehran can up the pressure on the coalition whenever it wants. Ironically, the Iraqi government, installed by the Americans, is dominated by pro-Iranian Shias. So are many of the militias that run large parts of the country.

So pervasive is Iranian influence in Iraq post-Saddam that, when the US and its allies eventually withdraw, Iran is likely to turnout to be the principal beneficiary of the invasion.

The Iraq fiasco has demonstrated the limitations of American power in the Middle East, for all the world to see. If the neo-cons had only bothered to make serious plans for the reconstruction of the country, Tehran might now take Western sabre-rattling rather more seriously.

Then, as always, there is the question of oil. Iran is still the world’s fourth largest exporter of the black gold; and at a time when supplies are tight, that gives it obvious leverage. In addition, the majority of all Middle Eastern oil exports have to pass down the Gulf and through the Straits of Hormuz, which the Iranians effectively control.

If need be, Tehran could have the world literally over a barrel. Experts have been warning about the West’s dangerous dependence on imported oil for years. But the neo-cons have consistently pooh-poohed their warnings and opposed any attempt to curb America’s profligate use of energy.

The other day, Jack Straw said the Iranians were “pushing their luck” by pressing ahead with uranium enrichment. Given the neo-cons’ disastrous record of bad judgment, incompetence and worse, the Iranians must think that they are pushing at an open door.

The neo-cons told us that Saddam had to be removed because he had weapons of mass destruction, when in fact he had none. Now that we find ourselves up against a dangerous country that really is about to get WMD, we discover the neo-cons have already squandered our power and credibility in Iraq.

I have written before about how powerful countries must maintain their mystique or risk having crazy people make mistakes. Once it shows that its military is not omnipotent and that its intelligence is crude, it emboldens madmen to play their cards. It’s a stupid, unnecessary error to be proven impotent by lying so boldly and being wrong so grandly, which is what we did with our misbegotten invasion of Iraq. Powerful nations should only go to war when they either have no other choice or are virtually assured of success in concert with a powerful coalition of allies. Screwing up this way in the nuclear age is especially dangerous.

We toppled Saddam, but we exposed the fact that our greatest asset — the belief that we have super, high tech intelligence and military capabilities beyond anyone’s imaginings— was a sham. And our poor planning proved to everyone that the military braintrust running this country can at times be so wrong that it can render our superior military and economic prowess irrelevant.

And the neocons know it. Here’s Ken “Cakewalk” Adelman suddenly turned into Ken “Kumbaya” Adelman on Wolf Blitzer last Monday. And here I thought we were fighting World war IV:

BLITZER: … Joining us now to talk about the possible showdown [with Iran]is Ken Adelman. He’s a former deputy U.S. representative to the United Nations, former director of the U.S. arms control and disarmament agency.

[…]

BLITZER: Is there a military option, a viable U.S. military option to go ahead and knock out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

ADELMAN: I don’t think we should ever take it off the table, but when you look at the practicalities of knowing what they are doing, knowing where they are doing it and knowing that you can get to those targets, it seems very improbable to me.

[…]

ADELMAN: …I hope there is a regime change in Iran. And then it can come about not by military action but that can come about by subverting the regime right there, using the methods of Martin Luther King to tell you the truth, civil disobedience, peaceful, nonviolent techniques.

BLITZER: Well, should the U.S. and its allies be engaged in covert action to try to result in this regime change?

ADELMAN: Sure, we should have been doing that for the last 30 years. And that’s part of the spread of freedom the president talks about, but we haven’t done enough on that.

And what you can do, very quickly is take the playbook from Poland, from our approach to Poland in the early 1980’s with — from the Carter administration, and then especially the Reagan administration, dealing with solidarity, and just update it. Instead of using money to give for machines, use the Internet. Now instead of walkie-talkies, you now use cell phones. But what you want to do is to help Democratic forces.

BLITZER: So to encourage the dissidents in Iran right now to overthrow the regime.

ADELMAN: Absolutely.

BLITZER: And you think that is a doable option?

ADELMAN: Well, it’s certainly doable to give them support, more support than we are doing. Whether they succeed or not, you just don’t know, but one thing you can do is to model it after what you had in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, what you’ve had in peaceful demonstrations around the world.

BLITZER: Well, I’ve heard, you know, that scenario, but the U.S. has been trying to do that in Cuba, for example, for decades unsuccessfully to get rid of Fidel Castro. North Korea, the U.S. has been trying to do that for decades to get rid of Kim Jong-il unsuccessfully.

Yes, there was a successful end of the Cold War and all the change, the Democratic reforms in central and eastern Europe, but is Iran, in that model?

ADELMAN: No, Iran is a much more right model. It’s more like Poland is at the outset of solidarity. Why is that? Because what we know is the majority of people in Iran, the vast majority, can’t stand these corrupt and really awful repressive laws.

And so you have the conditions, it’s a far more educated population. It’s a far more open population. It’s a far more open country than others. So that you can really go in there and these kind of techniques that you had in Poland, and you in the Ukraine, and you had in Georgia.

I mean, this is a proven technique. Now, it’s not proven everywhere, and it doesn’t work everywhere, but it’s not going to work unless you help it.

BLITZER: I’ve heard top administration officials say that the goals should be to delay Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon for as long as possible, with the hope that perhaps in the interim there could be regime change.

ADELMAN: That’s fine. I would agree with that.

BLITZER: The question is how long is it going to take them to develop, to get beyond the point of no return?

ADELMAN: I mean, we have been by and large very successful since the early 60’s in non-proliferation. You have to worry now about India and Pakistan leading the way, you have to worry about Iran and North Korea on the verge.

But overall, it’s remarkable, Wolf, when you think of a 1963, I believe it was, Kennedy — President Kennedy gave a speech in which he predicted by the 1970s, that there would be 25 nuclear nations, nuclear-armed nations around the world.

Well, you know, in the 1970s there were probably seven or eight. There weren’t 25. And here we are in 2006, and there are not 25. So we’ve done much better than expected, and I think if we do Iran right — really concentrate on regime change through nonviolent means, through peaceful means, through Martin Luther King means — I think we can make some progress.

More cartoon history. Last time we were re-creating WWII, this time we are re-creating Selma and Solidarity. (And I can’t help but be amused that Adelman and his pals, who only two years ago said that the non-proliferation regime of the last 40 years was liberal mollycoddling, are now wrapping themselves in it. Chutzpah, thy name is neocon.)

Immature political thinkers that they are, the Bush administration and the neo-con cabal had been aching to prove America’s manhood (and their own) to the world for so long that they prematurely ejaculated. Now we are spent, at least for a time, and the whole world knows it.

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House Slave

by digby

Tweety is gleefully flogging Hillary’s “plantation” comment like he just discovered his little winkie.

There has bever been as great a GOP tool as Tweety Matthews. He gets a little bit uppity once in a while so they force feed him some bullshit which he happily regurgitates with gusto so as not make somebody important in the Republican establishment really, really mad at him. (When that happens, as we know, Monsignor Tim reports him to the Big Boys.)

Atrios has put this link up explaining why the Republican Magnolias having the vapors over this plantation comment is a steaming pile of fetid, GOP talking points.

I don’t know if any of you would like to tell Chris Matthews how to use Google, but of you would, here’s his e-mail: hardball@msnbc.com

Maybe he or his staff would like to look over those links and then explain why he and his Republican pals thinks she’s so out of line.

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What’s Wrong With This Picture?

by digby

Speaking of CNN, I don’t know what to make of this, but it’s interesting. I mentioned yesterday that Bill Schneider said this on the Situation Room yesterday. It was quite soon after gore’s speech so I figured he would get an earful from the powers that be and we’d hear the last of it. But today he pretty much repeated it verbatim. To my ears, it sounds non-judgmental veering on positive. Schneider isn’t usually a very reliable observer, but this strikes me as pretty fair and pretty provocative toward the Bushies. Am I wrong?

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Wolf, Democrats heard a voice from the past today, but it’s a voice that may be charting a course for the party’s future.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(voice over): Who speaks for Democrats these days? Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are minority leaders. Howard Dean’s job is to represent the broad range of Democratic views. Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards may run for president, and they are pretty cautious. So is Bill Clinton who is invested in his wife’s political future. Enter Al Gore, giving full throated voice to the outrage that many Democrats feel over the administration’s wiretapping of American citizens.

GORE: … What many believe are serious violations of law by the president.

SCHNEIDER: Violations of law? Exactly.

GORE: … Into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the president.

SCHNEIDER: That may be grounds for impeachment. Gore never used the I word, but he did call for …

GORE: …The appointment of the special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by the warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the president.

SCHNEIDER: A special counsel would have to be appointed by the attorney general, who works for President Bush, and how realistic is it to think about impeachment when Congress is controlled by Republicans? Gore’s answer?

GORE: It should be a political issue in any race, regardless of party, section of the country, house of Congress, for anyone who opposes the appointment of a special counsel.

SCHNEIDER: Gore is telling Democrats, let’s make this our issue.

Just the fact that Schneider brings up Impeachment, which Gore did not, seems to me like a good thing. I must be missing something.

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Down On The Plantation

by digby

I’m glad to see that CNN has booked two African-Americans agreeing that Hillary Clinton was wrong to compare the Republican House to a plantation, so that’s good. The poncy Republican is calling for her to resign but the other thinks that probably isn’t necessary. We’re getting fair and balanced coverage on this issue.

Apparently, this is an outrageous thing to say. I wonder if anybody thought this article by Joseph Farrah of World Net Daily called “Racism on Dem plantation” (available today only on Google cache for some reason)was out of line. Or how about this one on on Townhall by Cal Thomas who refers to “the Democratic Party and its plantation mentality.” And then there’s Rush Limbaugh who’s been know to refer to anybody who’s in the leadership position in the Democratic Party” as “pimps” who attempt to deceive black people into remaining on the “Democratic plantation.”

Here’s the thing. When the Republicans talk about the “plantation” they are specifically talking about race, claiming that the Democrats are using (presumably stupid) Black Americans against their own interests.

Hillary was talking about the fact that the Republican leadership treats their own caucus (not to mention the minority) like they are slaves.

Now which of those views is racist?

Yet, the Republicans are all over this and they will probably end up getting her to apologise because Democratic politicians have never learned how to respond to being called racist. Until they do, the Republicans are going to use this ridiculous epistemic relativism against them.

Update: As a couple of commenters remind me, perhaps the most famous of these plantation comments cane from none other than Newtie:

“…on the eve of his great electoral victory ten years ago, the speaker-to-be told a reporter he was leading a “slave rebellion” against the Democrats who “run the plantation.”

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The Whole Schmear

by digby

I agree with Kevin that the ineffectiveness of the illegal wiretap program is not the most important issue. The president having unlimited power, even to the extent that he is not bound by the law or the constitution, is the fundamental threat and this wiretap program is just the most recent example of it.

However, this revelation that the illegal wiretapping is a waste of time does refute the most important argument of the other side. That argument is best articulated by today’s winner of the Golden Globe for best tease, Trent Lott:

“I don’t agree with the libertarians,” said Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.). “I want my security first. I’ll deal with all the details after that.”

If the details show that the FBI is wasting valuable man hours chasing its tail, it’s not exactly giving you “your security” is it? Not only is the president breaking the law, he’s wasting the valuable time and energy of the FBI which could be spent preventing terrorism and catching criminals. Why on earth would that make a frightened little bedwetter like Trent Lott feel safer? It should scare the lil’ guy to death.

Josh Marshall has an insightful post up today about Al Gore’s speech yesterday that speaks to how these issues all work together.

The point Gore makes in his speech that I think is most key is the connection between authoritarianism, official secrecy and incompetence.

The president’s critics are always accusing him of law-breaking or unconstitutional acts and then also berating the incompetence of his governance. And it’s often treated as, well … he’s power-hungry and incompetent to boot! Imagine that! The point though is that they are directly connected. Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It’s a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power. Katrina was a good example of this.

The basic structure of our Republic really is in danger from a president who militantly insists that he is above the law.

The illegal wiretap scandal is a perfect example of this — authoritarianism, official secrecy and incompetence. (No wonder they call it “the president’s program.”) When you add in endemic corruption, you have a recipe for a constitutional crisis and a political tyranny — which is exactly what they have been cooking up.

It’s awfully hard to respect people who are so frightened they don’t know they are helping the terrorists to achieve what the terrorists couldn’t achieve on their own.

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Trent’s Slot Safe

by digby

Incumbent Senator Trent Lott called a press conference to announce whether he’s running again. He’d hinted that he might not, so the suspense was palpable. A Democrat, after all, was favored to win if Lott didn’t run. Would he or wouldn’t he? What was going to happen? Oooh, it’s the kind of thing that sends chills down your spine. After about ten minutes of stirring oratory celebrating all the fine people he’s worked with over the years, he soulfully looks into the camera, nods his head to his staff and then announces … he’s running again.

And now Ed Henry talking about how this sets the stage for him to make a great comeback and win back the majority leader job! Is Trent awesome or what?

None of the CNN anchors even have the decency to look sheepish about being played for morons. But then, why would they?

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Arlen’s Spectacle

by digby

Isn’t this special?

In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Brownback said he was heartened by the hearings. He argued that in the 2004 elections, Republicans had showed Democrats that “we can run on abortion rights and win the public,” adding, “they are trimming their sails some on it.”

The apparent outcome of the Alito nomination may call into question a political assessment that Mr. Specter made after those elections. Mr. Specter said at the time that it was highly unlikely that a Supreme Court nominee who would change abortion rights precedents could be confirmed, in part because of the determined opposition of the Democrats. Some leading Democratic senators publicly agreed.

Conservatives, upset at Mr. Specter’s comment, almost unseated him from the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee.

After the hearings ended on Friday, Mr. Specter said he would vote for confirmation and declined to revisit his earlier comments. But he said it was impossible to know how Judge Alito might vote as a Supreme Court justice. He said abortion rights groups had also opposed Justice David Souter, Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor – all Republican nominees who have voted from the bench to uphold the core abortion rights precedents.

“There are weighty considerations involved in changing Roe v. Wade, very weighty considerations in modifying that principle and a woman’s right to choose,” Mr. Specter said.

This is why everyone should laugh in Arlen Specter’s face when he says this:

A top US Republican senator on Sunday for the first time mentioned impeachment in connection with President George W Bush’s authorisation of electronic surveillance inside the United States without a court warrant.

Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, cautioned it was too early to draw any conclusions as his committee gears up for public hearings into the growing controversy early next month.

But in his appearance on ABC’s “This Week” program, Specter insisted the Senate was not going to give the president what he called “a blank cheque.”

When asked what could happen if lawmakers find Bush in violation of the law, Specter answered: “Impeachment is a remedy. After impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution, but the principal remedy … under our society is to pay a political price.”

He made it a point to clarify, however, that he was speaking theoretically and was “not suggesting remotely that there’s any basis” for a presidential impeachment at this moment.

[…]

He added that the issue of wartime presidential powers was “a very knotty question” that “ought to be thoroughly examined.”

Specter assured he was prepared to listen to the administration’s explanations, but warned, “I’m going to wear my skepticism on my sleeve.”

Uh huh. This man has run for years as a pro-choice Republican in a swing state. This is probably his last term. And he tossed abortion rights out the window without a second thought. This emerging narrative that Arlen is going to be tough on the administration on these wiretapping charges is total bullshit:

Gonzales said he had agreed with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania, to testify in hearings on the controversial program that eavesdrops on U.S. phone calls and e-mails.

Gonzales said he would not discuss any operational details at the hearing and would only explain the legal justification.

The testimony will take place in Senate hearings that are expected to be held early next month.

It was unclear whether the judiciary committee would also hear testimony from senior intelligence officials such as the NSA director, Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, or Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, the No. 2 U.S. intelligence official who ran the NSA when the eavesdropping program began.

“What we‘re thinking is that this is primarily the attorney general‘s show,” said an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because plans for the hearing had not been finalized.

Yeah. Arlen’s in charge allright.

Here’s what’s going to happen. The Republicans will carefully plan and coordinate their strategy. Guys like Jeff Sessions will be in charge of fear-mongering and ad hominem attacks on dissent. Huckleberry Graham will express grave concerns about liberty only to be convinced by the end of the hearing that the gravest threat to the nation is Democratic rudeness. Gonzales will then say this is nothing but a high tech illegal deportation across the Rio Grande. Sam Brownback will offer objections to abuse of presidential power but will concede that it is necessary since godless abortionist terrorists are trying to kill us all in our sleep. His wife will inexplicably start crying and run out of the room. Everyone will agree that Alberto Gonzales has been remarkably forthcoming. Arlen will concede that the constitution does indeed provide for a King.

The Democrats, meanwhile, will take a much needed week long vacation before the hearings. They’ll meet up in the mens room just before they begin, to discuss a strategy. (Dianne will watch the door.) Kennedy will suggest that he attack Gonzales on presidential power and Shumer will snap that he’s sick of Kennedy getting all the good attacks and insists that Kennedy takes that boring Unitary Executive bullshit this time. Biden will request that he lead the questioning which will make Pat Leahy tell him to go fuck himself. Joe will remind the whole group that he once had a phone call overheard in college so he’s been the victim of warrantless wiretapping and can bring the personal touch to the hearings. Feinstein will ask, “what are these hearings about again?” In the end the Democrats will strongly object to Arlen’s conclusions that the constitution provides for a King.

Senator Reid: I’m begging you, man. If there is any way you can move these hearings to another venue, please, please do it. I can’t go through this again so soon.

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