Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Bipartisan BS

by digby

The media is working hard to make this into a bi-partisan scandal but that is simple bullshit. Ed Henry on CNN, for instance, couldn’t stop talking about Byron Dorgan being implicated in this scandal. I don’t know if Dorgan’s going to be swept up, but let’s just say that if he is he probably deserves it because he would be the stupidest man in the world. He’s the top Democrat on the Indian Affairs Committee and even Steno Sue writes:

Dorgan has asked some of the toughest questions in the committee hearings probing the $82 million Abramoff and Michael Scanlon charged their tribal clients.

I suppose some people would think this is a normal thing for a man on the take to do, but I would suggest that it’s unlikely. Here’s a good rundown on the Dorgan connection (and the media’s predictably bad reporting on it) from Media Matters.

Fasten your seatbelts. The press is surely under tremendous pressure from the Republicans to report this as a bi-partisan scandal and they are already buckling under. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a GOP operation from the get — and they know it.

I wrote a piece a few months back about Abramoff and his two college Republican lieutenants Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist called Nixon’s Babies in which I discussed just how important Abramoff is to the “movement.” And I highly recommend reading Nina Easton’s Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Ascendacy Anybody who looks at Jack Abramoff and sees anything but a hard core GOP influence peddler who was paid very well to finance the GOP machine is either a shill or a fool.

I just saw CNN’s Henry again say that this was a bi-partisan scandal and that Democrats were going to find it very hard to make the “culture of corruption” charge. This was not “he said/she said” — he was editorializing in his piece and his opinion is either uninformed, myopic or biased. This piece was followed by another from William Schneider in which he helpfully points out that while the public indicates that it thinks Democrats are less corrupt than Republicans that’s only because the public understands that it’s because the Republicans are in power and have more opportunity.

Bullshit. The reason people think this is because every few years we find out that Republicans leaders have no respect for the law. It’s like clockwork. If they aren’t selling themselves outright to big business on the floor of the congress they are claiming the constitution allows them to break any law they choose. Just in the past couple of weeks we’ve had news reports about legal trouble for corrupt Republicans George W. Bush, Ken Lay, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Duke Cunningham, Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff. Lot of dots there. Is it too much trouble for the media to connect them?

This characterization of the scandal as being “bi-partisan” is typical bad mainstream journalism, particularly the emphasis they are placing on the very small handful of Democrats who’ve even been mentioned (much less included in any legal procedings.) Not only are they creating some equity and illegality where none exists, by doing it they are missing the real story, as usual.

This isn’t a story about power corrupting or about a few bad apples. This is about a corrupt political machine — a system of money laundering and public corruption on behalf of one political party. It’s about a party that has used every tool at its disposal to legally and illegally enrich itself and enhance its power. It’s right there. It’s unravelling before our eyes.

And all Dana Bash and Ed Hanry can say is that Jack Abramoff lent his skybox to Democrats and Republicans alike. Which he did. He lent it 1% of the time to Democrats and 99% of the time to Republicans. That makes all of them equally corrupt.

Update: Crooks and Liars has some great Tweety spin footage. Seems it’s not partisan because Abramoff is Satan.

.

Press The Meacham

by digby

Media Matters caught Jon Meacham calling Howard Dean insane on Russert yesterday. I think that’s especially rich considering Meacham is the guy who penned this crazy shit:

The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus’ resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.

He’s also the guy who told Imus (scroll down) that Joe Wilson went on his trip to Niger after we had invaded Iraq to “discover if those 16 words were true.” He really knows his stuff.

.

Pratfalls

by digby

Watching Hardball, I just saw Bush’s full face in his appearance yesterday. He looks like shit. It’s not just the scratch on his forehead, which I realize could be the result of some extreme brush clearing over the week-end. There’s something wrong with his lip too and his eyes are all puffy.

I will say it again. It is not normal for a healthy 59 year old man to injure his face as often as this guy does. It just isn’t.

Here’s today (the picture doesn’t do justice to how bad he rally looks):

Here are a couple of pictures from previous pratfalls in the first term:

The first one was the pretzel incident. The second was a fall from his bike in May of 2004. There was another incident just last July when he fell off after crashing into a security officer in Scotland.

I continue to think this is very odd, even for a daredevil brush clearing cycler like Junior.

.

Contextualizing

by digby

Jane discusses this article in today’s NY Times about how blogging is affecting journalism and she makes this important point:

They do not spend the hours and days sifting through raw data now available to average people on the internet. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. That is not what they do. If you want to know some obscure detail about something Judith Miller did or said in June of 2003 you call emptywheel. If you need to know about journalists named in the subpoenas sent to the White House in January 2003 you email Jeralyn. If you expect that kind of depth of knowledge about details from the people whose job it is to dig up new dirt in this case, they don’t have it. They don’t have the time.

In this light bloggers serve the function of analysts. Or re-analyzers, more aptly, who attempt to contextualize as they sort through available data and look for patterns, inconsistencies and greater truths. For my money if I was trying to marry a blog with a newsroom that’s where I’d start — I’m constantly amazed that with all the access to information now available the big news bureaus don’t have a deeper pool of researchers to be the adjunct memories of people who spend their time in the development of external news sources.

There was a guy who did this kind of journalism long before technology made it possible for many of us to carry on the tradition. At their best, bloggers are the heirs to IF Stone, whose methods wwere described by his friend Victor Navasky this way:

His method: To scour and devour public documents, bury himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congressional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time prospecting for news nuggets (which would appear as boxed paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the official line, examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documentation of incursions on civil rights and liberties. He lived in the public domain. It was his habitat of necessity, because use of government sources to document his findings was also a stratagem. Who would have believed this cantankerous-if-whimsical Marxist without all the documentation?

Sound familiar? And while we scruffy bloggers are (mostly) not marxists, we are greeted with great skepticism because we are unregulated, uncredentialed, and in some cases psuedonymous, so we also must go to great lengths to document our findings. Luckily, the technology that gives us such amazing instant access to reams of information also gives us the ability to link directly to our source material — as Arianna once described it “showing our work.” And over time we gain credibility with our readers the same way that newspapers do.

What Jane says about contextualizing is absolutely correct. If you followed the Whitewater scandal (or attempted to) you came to realize that the journalists who were writing about it were so caught up in day to day reporting that somewhere along the line they lost sight of both the big picture and the details. It became a daily exercize in futility trying to sort out what exactly was going on. Until Gene Lyons’ articles in Harpers (that led to his book “Fools for Scandal”) and then a couple of jury trials, I honestly couldn’t figure out what was going on. And I read three or four papers a day at the time. It was a story in desperate need of context, research and command of detail, mostly because it was a story being dribbled out a daily basis by political operatives and Arkansas opportunists to journalists who, in the midst of daily reporting, couldn’t see the larger story. (I have no idea where their editors were.)

I didn’t know how that worked in those days, thinking that journalists would see through spin and report it if it was clearly partisan. But I was wrong. They did fall for that story and turned it into an unintelligible, meaningless scandal that harrassed the president from almost his first day in office.

Today, certain bloggers would keep meticulous track of details, speculation and obvious spin and would report and discuss them in real time. Others would bring the whole story into historical perspective. Still others would try to tie all the disparate threads together to show larger patterns and trends. And many would speculate about the meaning of the scandal and the political ramifications. The scandal might happen anyway, but at least there would also be informed, engaged readers and easy access to those who have taken the time to analyze and contextualize the story as it unfolds. The alternative is to continue to allow the powerful triumverate of official sources, professional PR flacks and political operatives to lead the press (and, therefore, the country) around by the nose as they have so often in the last 15 years.

I’m not suggesting that blogging is a replacement for mainstream journalism. The daily papers, news broadcasts and news weeklies are indispensible. But more and more, people are recognizing mainstream journalism’s vulnerability to conventional wisdom, establishment pressure and partisan spin. And the longstanding reliance on he said/she said “objectivity” is simply no longer adequate in the modern world of sophisticated public relations. Blogs fill in some of the gaps.

I’m a little surprised that so many reporters are fighting them so hard instead of doing the smart thing, which is co-opt them. Good bloggers can be a reporter’s best friends if he learns how to use them.

.

Up Down By 15 Points!

by digby

Steve Benan points out that Elaine Chao needs to find a standard of success other than the Dow Jones to tout this fabulous Republican economy:

[W]hile it was the 0.6% decline for the year that generated headlines, most seem to have overlooked the fact that on the day Bush was sworn into office in January 2001, the Dow Jones stood at 10,732.46. As of now, it’s at 10,717.50.

In other words, after five years of Bush’s presidency, the stock market has a cumulative gain of negative 15 points.

Under Reagan, the Dow went up 148%. Under Clinton, it grew 187%. After five years, Bush isn’t quite breaking even.

This reminds me of an article I read in the LA Times over the week-end. In the relativistic fashion we’ve come to love in the Bush era, that inconvenient fact has made many people simply decide that the Dow is no longer relevant:

As for the Dow, many believe the 109-year-old index of 30 large, blue-chip companies hasn’t been an accurate barometer of the economy or the broader stock market for the past two years.

Yes, and we’re actually winning in Iraq and global warming is a hoax — which you’d never know just by looking at the facts. Clearly, the facts are biased.

.

Hold Harmless

by digby

Hey all you macho Republicans. Do you know why you elected Junior Bush to be the president?

I was elected to protect the American people from harm.

Thank goodness for Daddy.

And here I thought the Republicans were against that sort of fuzzy wuzzy kumbaaya pussified crapola. I guess not. How about a federal helmet law for bicyclists, then? (Gawd knows he needs one) Maybe he could outlaw pretzels and alcohol too. Or driving over 35 miles an hour. Or trans-fats. If protecting us from harm is what we elect presidents to do then he’s been seriously falling down on the job. There’s a ton of harm out there he hasn’t done even one thing about.

Oh, and isn’t it inappropriate for the administration to be talking about this while there’s an ongoing investigation? Seems I heard that somewhere.

.

Divine Right Of Republicans

by digby

This Newsweak story is, well, weak:

The message to White House lawyers from their commander in chief, recalls one who was deeply involved at the time, was clear enough: find a way to exercise the full panoply of powers granted the president by Congress and the Constitution.

First of all, I’m sick of this bullshit about the president being the commander in chief all the time. This isn’t a military dictatorship. Citizens, and even lawyers in the Justice department, don’t have a commander in chief. We have a president. I know that’s not as glamorous or as, like, totally awesome, but that is what it is. A civilian, elected official who functions as the commander in chief of the armed forces.

But that’s nit-picking. This is some real bullshit:

When the story of the NSA’s program broke in The New York Times on Dec. 16, there was an immediate uproar in the press and on Capitol Hill. The reaction was predictably partisan. Most Republicans and conservatives defended Bush for safeguarding the country (though warrantless spying gave libertarians some pause). Most Democrats and liberals cited the eavesdropping program as more damning evidence that Bush and Cheney, already caught countenancing torture and jailing detainees without any legal rights, were running roughshod over civil liberties.

This is wrong. The Cato institute, which I think everyone in the DC orbit will agree is a libertarian think tank said this:

Cato senior fellow in Constitutional studies Robert A. Levy says, “President Bush’s executive order sanctions warrant-less wiretaps by the National Security Agency of communications from the United States to foreign countries by U.S. persons. Reportedly, the executive order is based on classified legal opinions stating that the president’s authority derives from his Commander-in-Chief power and the post-911 congressional authorization for the use of military force against Al Qaeda. That pernicious rationale, carried to its logical extreme, renders the PATRIOT Act unnecessary and trumps any dispute over its reauthorization. Indeed, such a policy makes a mockery of the principle of separation of powers.

Crook and Liars has footage of libertarian (and Republican hitman) William Safire joining with the critics this morning on Press the Meat.

That’s more than a pause. It’s a full stop, hold your horses, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? This is a partisan issue to the extent that the Republicans are invertebrate, hypocritical chichenshits who would be having a full on case of the vapors if anybody but their Dear GOP Leader tried a stunt like this. They certainly called for the smelling salts often enough over a couple of furtive blowjobs, shrieking to high heavens about tyranny and the rule ‘o law.

Harken back to the immortal words of Henry Hyde:

That none of us is above the law is a bedrock principle of democracy. To erode that bedrock is to risk even further injustice. To erode that bedrock is to subscribe, to a “divine right of kings” theory of governance, in which those who govern are absolved from adhering to the basic moral standards to which the governed are accountable.

We must never tolerate one law for the Ruler, and another for the Ruled. If we do, we break faith with our ancestors from Bunker Hill, Lexington and Concord to Flanders Field, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Panmunjon, Saigon and Desert Storm.

Let us be clear: The vote that you are asked to cast is, in the final analysis, a vote about the rule of law.

The rule of law is one of the great achievements of our civilization. For the alternative to the rule of law is the rule of raw power. We here today are the heirs of three thousand years of history in which humanity slowly, painfully and at great cost, evolved a form of politics in which law, not brute force, is the arbiter of our public destinies.

We are the heirs of the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic law: a moral code for a free people who, having been liberated from bondage, saw in law a means to avoid falling back into the habit of slaves.

We are the heirs of Roman law: the first legal system by which peoples of different cultures, languages, races, and religions came to live together in a form of political community.

We are the heirs of the Magna Carta, by which the freeman of England began to break the arbitrary and unchecked power of royal absolutism.

We are the heirs of a long tradition of parliamentary development, in which the rule of law gradually came to replace royal prerogative as the means for governing a society of free men and women.

We are the heirs of 1776, and of an epic moment in human affairs when the Founders of this Republic pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor – sacred honor – to the defense of the rule of law.

We are the heirs of a tragic civil war, which vindicated the rule of law over the appetites of some for owning others.

We are the heirs of the 20th century’s great struggles against totalitarianism, in which the rule of law was defended at immense cost against the worst tyrannies in human history. The “rule of law” is no pious aspiration from a civics textbook. The rule of law is what stands between all of us and the arbitrary exercise of power by the state. The rule of law is the safeguard of our liberties. The rule of law is what allows us to live our freedom in ways that honor the freedom of others while strengthening the common good. The rule of law is like a three legged stool: one leg is an honest Judge, the second leg is an ethical bar and the third is an enforceable oath. All three are indispensable in a truly democratic society.

Very moving, no? All those fine words about the rule of law safeguarding our liberties, the arbitrary exercise of power and Bunker Hill, Lexington and Normandy went right out the window on 9/11. That was when Henry and the rest of his stalwart defenders of the rule of law promptly wet their pants and then let their president use the constitution to clean up the puddle.

Update: For a full compendium of conservative critics of the president on the NSA illegal spying scandal (including one leg of the Powerline stool!) read this excellent post by Glenn Greenwald.

.

Shaft of Sunlight

by digby

I wrote the other day that I thought it was time for some angry Justice Department lawyers to step up and reveal what in the hell went on with the White House cherry picking and stovepiping the legal advice that allowed them to create a new commander in chief infallibility doctrine.

It looks like we know the name of one of them and he’s a biggie, James Comey. Comey is, by all accounts, a very straight arrow. He’s exactly the kind of guy whose credibility is required to make this case if there is one. If this article is true, he refused to sign on on their little plan when he was filling in for Ashcroft when he was in the hospital. Jane has all the details. She’s been following Comey for a long time and will have lots of tid-bits about this development for us I’m sure.

Also, Walter Pincus reports this morning that the NSA shared its illegally obtained information with other departments, including the pentagon, which we know has been tracking anti-war protestors.

The picture gets clearer every day. The evidence increasingly points to the possibility that NSA and others illegally monitored Americans who disagreee with administration policy and shared that information with all the federal police agencies in the government. This does not surprise me. They’ve called us unpatriotic to our faces. They’ve written best-selling books calling us treasonous. It’s not exactly a stretch to suspect that these were not just rhetorical flourishes.

.

Happy New Year Everyone!

.

Clearing The Ranchette

by digby

This is the wierdest damned article I’ve read in ages. I knew that Junior did the brush clearing thing, but I assumed that he did it for photo-op purposes. It turns out that he’s actually obsessed with it.

He’s obsessed with brush clearing.

On most of the 365 days he has enjoyed at his secluded ranch here, President Bush’s idea of paradise is to hop in his white Ford pickup truck in jeans and work boots, drive to a stand of cedars, and whack the trees to the ground.

If the soil is moist enough, he will light a match and burn the wood. If it is parched, as it is across Texas now, the wood will sit in piles scattered over the 1,600-acre spread until it is safe for a ranch hand to torch — or until the president can come home and do the honors himself.

President Bush, shown clearing cedar at his Crawford, Tex., ranch in 2002, has not lost his enthusiasm for the task during recent trips to what aides call the Western White House.

Sometimes this activity is the only official news to come out of what aides call the Western White House. For five straight days since Monday, when Bush retreated to the ranch for his Christmas sojourn, a spokesman has announced that the president, in between intelligence briefings, calls to advisers and bicycling, has spent much of his day clearing brush.

This might strike many Washingtonians as a curious pastime. It does burn a lot of calories. But brush clearing is dusty, it is exhausting (the president goes at it in 100 degree-plus heat), and it is earsplitting, requiring earplugs to dull the chain saw’s buzz.

For Bush, who is known to spend early-morning hours hacking at unwanted mesquite, cocklebur weeds, hanging limbs and underbrush only to go back for more after lunch, it borders on obsession.

The president of the United States likes to spend his suburban ranchette vacation killing time cutting stuff down with a chainsaw and then torching it. Holy shit. Does it get any more symbolic than that?

(It reminds me of the tales his pals told about his childhood, stuffing frogs with firecrackers and blowing them up.)

Certainly the 1,583 acres of rugged canyons and rocky hillsides, creeks and pasture land on Prairie Chapel Ranch contain a lot of brush. Bush, a creature of habit, is not in danger of finishing the job. The Bush ranch, however, is not a working ranch. The president has kept only a handful of cattle on the property since Kenneth Engelbrecht, who sold him the former hog farm six years ago, stopped leasing back some pasture land that supported a herd of cows.

[…]

Real ranchers, who need to clear a whole lot of brush for pasture land, either hire someone to spray herbicides from the air or run an excavator through it. They tend to tend cattle, several said.

Bush, by contrast, practices a selective, do-it-yourself sculpting to enhance his enjoyment of his property, local experts say. He will clear underbrush to preserve beautiful live oaks and pecan trees, or to prepare the 50 acres where Laura Bush is cultivating native grasses, or to help carve nature trails through the ranch’s many canyons.

“It’s a selective control of the brush,” said Sam Middleton, owner of a West Texas ranch brokerage, who added that this enhances a ranch’s value.

Then again, there will be times when the president drives around his property and “will see a stand of cedar trees and say ‘Let’s clear those,’ ” said Joseph Hagin, Bush’s deputy chief of staff, who has been cutting brush with his boss all week. They do not talk a lot of policy over the sound of their chain saws, he said.

You can’t compare this to his bicycling or running obsessions, because those have a certain meditative yet thrilling physical challenge. This is something else entirely. This is the the only thing he can think of to do when he isn’t running or biking. Mindless, loud, repetitive manual labor. It’s like obsessively jackhammering sidewalks for fun.

A reader wrote me an e-mail asking me what conclusions I had come to about Bush after all this time. Is he evil? Is he stupid? Is he a religious fanatic, a spoiled frat boy, what?

I haven’t actually changed my mind from the first impression I had of him when he said “Christ. He changed my life” in answer to the debate question about favorite political philosophers. He’s simple but well-trained. And he hasn’t changed. The person we have been watching for the last five years is the same inarticulate, testy, arrogant and shallow, rich mediocrity he was when he took office.

He’s also as laughably robotic and unresponsive as ever. (Only Scott McClellan is less spontaneous.) But the Republicans discovered that if the president doesn’t submit himself to spontaneous situations and is disciplined in his message, people will get used to it after a while and stop expecting him to actually answer questions. This was new. Reagan wasn’t a genius, but he understood the public after a lifetime of training in what they wanted from a celebrity. He also had a good sense of humor and great timing. He was very capable of dealing with the press. Clinton was a master of detail who could riff on anything. His intellect and his obvious enjoyment in governing prepared him to answer any question that was thrown at him. Bush senior was bumbling but professional. He responded.

Junior simply doesn’t engage unless he is forced to, seeing encounters with the press as nothing more than an oppportunity to get out the message of the day and run out the clock. He is a living stone wall who speaks in strange parables and cliches and sometimes just pure gibberish. He falters, he stammers, he looks uncomforatble and weak. Yet he was until fairly recently perceived by most to be a strong and resolute leader. (The post 9/11 delusion was some powerful mojo.)

I know that it’s not considered wise to “misunderestimate” him and I’ve heard many people say that he’s got political acumen that we elitist nerds just don’t get. I don’t believe it. I know what I see. The man has been in over his head since the day he entered the presidential race and he’s still in over his head. 9/11 got him reelected in 2004, but he and his administration have been hanging on by their fingernails since the day they took office. They wear suits and ties and say sir and ma’m, but it’s all to cover for the fact that they had no idea how to govern and by now it’s clear they never will.

I see a man who is barely holding back his panic; a man who clings to his pathetic “war president” image like a talisman. He looks confused and hurt by the criticism he’s receiving from people who he thought bought into the program and reportedly knows on some level that he’s been duped by his advisors. He has no choice but to keep barreling along pretending that he knows what he’s doing. He barks at underlings and pretends to be in charge even as he gets more and more confused. He’s distanced from his father, the one person everyone thought could help guide this callow airhead if the shit came down. He trusts no one now.

So he clears brush like a madman everytime he gets the chance, hiding behind his Oakley’s, blessedly unable to hear anything over the sound of chainsaws —- maybe even the voices inside his head that remind him that he’s still got three more years of this horrible responsibility he knows he cannot handle.

.