Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Luskin’s Friendly Chat

by digby

Since Luskin supposedly unveiled some sort of exciting eleventh hour evidence that gave Fitzgerald so much pause I wondered if maybe Viveca Novak had been called to provide exculpatory evidence for Rove. (I would have thought that Fitzgerald would have moved a little quicker with that thrilling new angle, however, if it could have closed this investigation.)

The Washington Post article today says Novak and Luskin are personal friends and:

Unlike Cooper, Viveca Novak is not seeking to protect a confidential source and was not subpoenaed to testify.

Jane thinks that this is total crap and that Viveca Novak is being called for reasons other than Luskin’s 11th hour pause giving “evidence”:

If Luskin is dragging in Viveca Novak to substantiate something he said, then it seems likely Fitzgerald has some piece of evidence her testimony is intended to counter. Something within the timeframe must indicate that Rover wasn’t being completely honest with either the FBI or the grand jury, and they hope to prove that if Luskin was out there selling his own client’s special brand of bs then Fitzgerald should buy it, too.

Luskin has a history of playing reporters. He may very well be playing VandeHei here too (although VandeHei does report that another source says this Novak testimony has nothing to do with all this Luskin fluffing.)

The article says Novak will write a piece about her deposition, so we will soon find out what this is all about.

But this brings up a question I’ve long wondered about. Why in the hell did Rove hire Luskin in the first place? The article Jane references in the link above (from The New Republic) describes Luskin this way:

[S]coring Rove was a coup. Luskin is an unlikely choice for a Republican, let alone Rove. In fact, during the 1990s, a wide swath of the conservative movement spent a good chunk of its time trying to destroy his reputation. For the last ten years, Luskin has served as the in-house prosecutor for the Laborers’ International Union, where he has been charged with fighting corruption. The right was miffed that the Clinton administration let the Laborers clean house on their own rather than under the tutelage of the Justice Department, as was done with the Teamsters. One gadfly conservative organization, the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), turned discrediting Luskin into its own personal crusade. They produced a highly unflattering 13-page report that set off a cascade of critical stories and editorials in the conservative press. Under the headline “Luskin’s Ties to the New England/Patriarca Crime Family,” the report documented a fishy episode wherein Luskin was forced to return $245,000 in legal fees that he received from a client named Stephen A. Saccoccia, who was sentenced to 660 years in prison for laundering South American drug-cartel and mob money. A U.S. attorney, accusing Luskin of “willful blindness,” reasoned that, when Luskin started getting paid with solid gold bars (he ultimately received 45 of them, worth $505,125) and wire transfers from Swiss bank accounts, he should have known the payments were from illicit sources, especially since his client’s crimes involved gold bars and wire transfers from Swiss bank accounts.

Many of the other anti-Luskin criticisms concerned alleged conflicts of interest stemming from his defense of several clients wrapped up in Clinton-related scandals. Luskin soon became a target of The Washington Times, Investor’s Business Daily, The Weekly Standard, National Review, and The American Spectator, each arguing a version of the NLPC line that he was ethically unsuited for his job at the Laborers’ Union.

But, by the end of the ’90s, Luskin had established himself as a top-tier defense attorney. He abandoned his boutique law firm for the gilded hallways of Patton Boggs. Still, big-name Washington lawyers say he’s not really part of the small clique of attorneys that seem to pop up during every investigation–people like Jacob Stein, Abbe Lowell, Plato Cacheris, Robert Bennett, and Reid Weingarten. “Let’s just say that I haven’t been in a case where he represented anyone,” sniffs a member of Washington’s legal royalty.

These political cases require very specialized legal experience. That’s why clients usually hire from the small pool of attoprneys who know how to feed the beast, protect their client’s reputation to the degree possible) and deal with special prosecutors who operate under different rules and restraints than the usual US Attorney. I’ve never understood why Rove, the man who said he wanted to “get” Wilson purely because he was a Democrat, hired this guy.

Any thoughts?

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Better Stop Sobbin’ Now

by digby

The Duke-stir has been a prick for years. He said that the liberal leaders of congress should be lined up and shot. He calls for the death penalty for drug dealers and then cries at his son’s sentencing hearing for possession of 400 lbs of marijuana and asks for mercy because his son has a good heart. Here’s how the conservative San Diego Tribune editorial board described him back in 1998:

Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Escondido, responded to a heckler at a San Diego forum on prostate cancer by gesturing toward him with his finger and declaring, “(expletive) you.” During his remarks at the weekend event, the congressman also described a rectal procedure he had received as “just not natural, unless maybe you’re Barney Frank,” a reference to the openly gay lawmaker from Massachusetts.

Cunningham later apologized, saying his actions were inappropriate for a member of Congress. He certainly got that right.

But this was not the first time Cunningham let his temper get the better of him.

In 1995, Capitol Hill police had to break up a scuffle between the San Diego County lawmaker and Rep. James Moran, D-Va. A year earlier, Cunningham challenged Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., to a physical confrontation on the House floor. On another occasion, he used the degrading term “homos” to describe gays in the armed forces.

As a four-term veteran of the House, Cunningham has exerted constructive leadership on important military and education issues. But his reputation for vulgar conduct — a reputation he seems intent on reinforcing at regular intervals, despite his own repeated apologies — is an embarrassment to San Diego.

And it turns out he was a thief, too. What a big surprise, what with him being such a great guy and all.

Cunningham is a typical loud mouthed bully who fairly represents the (large) angry white male faction of the Republican party. Like Limbaugh the criminal drug addict and DeLay the thieving crook, they think they are immune from laws they seek to inflict on the rest of the American people.

Good riddance.

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Clean Break

by digby

Mickey Kaus has been flogging his “scoop” about Libby calling up Russert to complain about Chris Matthews using the allegedly anti-semitic term “neocon.” We would only know this for sure if Russert would reveal his conversation with Libby and he won’t because he isn’t a journalist, he’s a talk show host. Just as Jay Leno wouldn’t want to upset Jessica Simpson, Russert doesn’t want to upset the White House.

Kaus brings up something interesting, however, to explain Libby’s bone deep hatred for Wilson. (We know what Rove’s reason was — “he’s a Democrat.”) He writes:

What Wilson quote is most likely to have angered Libby? I’d nominate the following excerpt (again, via Maguire) from a discussion by Wilson at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center on June 14, 2003, about a month before Libby’s call to Russert:

I think there are a number of issues at play; there’s a number of competing agendas. One is the remaking of the map of the Middle East for Israeli security, and my fear is that when it becomes increasingly apparent that this was all done to make Sharon’s life easier and that American soldiers are dying in order to make Sharon’s life–enable Sharon to impose his terms upon the Palestinians that people will wonder why it is American boys and girls are dying for Israel and that will undercut a strategic relationship and a moral obligation that we’ve had towards Israel for 55 years. I think it’s a terribly flawed strategy. [Emphasis added. Audio here at 13:33]

Kaus notes that there is no way of knowing if Libby had heard about this talk when he went over the edge on Wilson, but it’s possible.

It reminds me that Wilson has long held that the administration’s Iraq policy could most simply be explained by the “Clean Break” document which was written for the Netanyahu government in 1997. It’s interesting to note how many of the current players were involved in that document:

Following is a report prepared by The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ “Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000.” The main substantive ideas in this paper emerge from a discussion in which prominent opinion makers, including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser participated. The report, entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” is the framework for a series of follow-up reports on strategy.

If you haven’t read that document, you should. It’s amazing.

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Mexamerica

It’s clear that Bush is going to try to change the subject with a big push on the immigration issue. This article in TIME discusses the various pressures on both parties.

Having spent a good part of my almost 50 years in California, I have observed that the immigration issue is usually a sign of a weak economy or some other form of discontent. It’s been around forever and rears its head every once in a while as people perceive a “crisis” and then it goes underground again.

It is not a partisan issue; many Democrats are very exercised about Mexican immigrants overrunning the borders and allegedly taking away jobs from Americans or at least holding wages below what they would otherwise be. On the other side are liberals who see a subtle and no so subtle racism in the border debate and feel that all this talk of cultural dissonence is a false construct. There are conflicting values of economics and human rights involved and it’s confusing.

The Republican have a different set of divisive issues. TIME characterizes Bush’s dilemma this way:

So far, he has not been able to bridge his party’s business leaders, who need a steady supply of workers willing to do hard labor, and its cultural conservatives, who fear that something essential about the American character is vanishing under the crosscurrents of multilingualism and demographic change and ethnic pluralism.

This is clearly going to be an issue. Even up in Ohio, which I didn’t know until recently has been a mexican migrant crop picking destination forever, is having a fit about illegal immigration and all the alleged problems associated with it.

My feeling is that this time we are dealing with displaced fear and frustrating impotence. The terrorist boogeyman has been fully internalized and people are afraid. But it is an ephemeral and distant enemy. Another brown hoarde is conveniently available. I think my theory is borne out by the right’s increasing emphasis on the Mexican border being a national security threat and the sudden seriousness of Pat Buchanan’s “fence” concept:

This latest fence proposal comes from an organization called Let Freedom Ring, and its WeNeedaFence.com project. It’s funded by Dr. John Templeton, a generous supporter of a range of conservative causes.

Colin Hanna, the group’s president, says we shouldn’t be messing around with the flimsy and partial fences we’ve built so far. What’s needed is a serious border fence, one modeled after what the Israelis are building on the West Bank.

What Hanna has in mind is a barrier consisting of a “pyramid” of rolls of barbed wire piled 6 to 8 feet high. Alongside it would run a deep ditch, followed by a fence, a security road, another fence, another ditch, and then another wire pyramid. Cameras and motion detectors would monitor the fence to create a formidable barrier 40 to 50 yards wide. The cost: $2 million to $4 million a mile, or $4 billion to $8 billion in total.

Hanna says his proposal is entirely consistent with President Bush’s emerging proposal to legalize some illegal immigrants through a temporary guest-worker program. In fact, he says, it will complement it. Unless more illegal migrants can be kept out after Bush’s guest-worker program is established, more will keep coming in. ”The fence is the sine qua non of immigration reform,” Hanna argues. “If you don’t have a secure border, all the rest is whistling in the wind.”

To promote his ideas, his group has lobbied on Capitol Hill and aired two television spots in the Washington area. One cites statistics of North Koreans and Iraqis crossing the Mexican border, and includes a clip of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center.

I’m also hearing a lot about rapes, animal mutilation and kidnapping along the border.

I understand the strong negative feelings that many Democratic populists have about illegal immigration. Disdaining the cheap immigrant labor the wealthy thrive on is an understandable populist impulse. I do hope, however, that Democrats give some long and serious thought to the underlying racist implications of some of this on the right —- and understand the dangers of getting into bed with people whose real agenda has nothing to do with economics:

…the great migration north continues. Some 1.5 million are apprehended every year on our southern border breaking into the United States. Of the perhaps 500,000 who make it, one-third head for Mexifornia, where their claims on Medicaid, schools, courts, prisons, and welfare have tipped the Golden State toward bankruptcy and induced millions of native-born Americans to flee in the great exodus to Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Colorado. Ten years after NAFTA, Mexico’s leading export to America is still–Mexicans. America is becoming Mexamerica.

Source: Where The Right Went Wrong, by Pat Buchanan, p.166 Sep 1, 2004

Mexifornia? How silly. The word “California” is spanish. So are “Los Angeles” and “San Francisco” and “Las Vegas” and “Santa Fe” and “San Antonio.” This country has always been Mexamerica. Perhaps Pat doesn’t know this being from Washington DC, but those of us from the border states don’t find this “alien culture” alien at all. It’s always been here. And, yes, there are plenty of people who have always hated it — the same way that some white southerners are intimately familiar with black culture and hate it at the same time. But contrary to what Pat and some of the other “American culture” hysterics are trying to promote, this isn’t new. It’s been literally going on for centuries. And we’ve been having these panics about it every so often for centuries too.

We can argue about the degree of the immigration problem and about solutions. But we should remember that populism isn’t only a leftwing ideology. It swings both ways as Pat Buchanan’s racist right wing populism shows. Sadly, it’s been most successful when it combined both elements. I hope that liberals don’t find it “useful” to subtly play to some of these sentiments no matter how tempting it might be. We should be very thoughtful about this.

Update: Kevin Drum discusses the policy implications of the immigration debate. Sadly, I don’t think this debate is really about policy. It’s about the boogeyman.

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It Ain’t Over Rover

by digby

How odd. A new reporter is being subpoenaed in the Fitzgerald investigation and the press is actually reporting details about it. Shocking breach of DC etiquette, what what?

A second Time magazine reporter has been asked to testify in the
CIA leak case, this time about her discussions with Karl Rove’s attorney, a sign that prosecutors are still exploring charges against the White House aide.

Viveca Novak, a reporter in Time’s Washington bureau, is cooperating with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who is investigating the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity in 2003, the magazine reported in its Dec. 5 issue.

Novak specifically has been asked to testify under oath about conversations she had with Rove attorney Robert Luskin starting in May 2004, the magazine reported.

Novak, part of a team tracking the CIA case for Time, has written or contributed to articles quoting Luskin that characterized the nature of what was said between Rove and Matthew Cooper, the first Time reporter who testified in the case in July.

Luskin has talked a lot of trash from the get. It will be very interesting if his big mouth gets his client in trouble.

There is nothing about this on the TIME web-site but if the AP got it, I expect there will be. And I expect that Viveca Novak will write a story after her testimony. They seem to be catching on to the fact that while they may be inhibited from divulging the names of their anonymous sources, they have an obligation to find a way to report the substance of what they tell them. TIME’s Matt Cooper set the standard for how a responsible journalist deals with this sticky wicket (even if his publisher was very mealy mouthed.) It can be done.

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Clean Up The Mess

by digby

I’ve always thought that in order to really put a monkeywrench into the modern GOP’s political machine it was important to take out prime movers Rove, Delay, Reed and Norquist. The CIA leak scandal has wounded (perhaps mortally) Karl Rove. Ronnie Earle has weakened Delay in preparation for the coup de grace Abramoff scandal that may just take down him, Reed, Norquist and a bunch of others in short shrift.

It doesn’t mean that the machine will be irreparably broken, but it won’t work as smoothly as it did with the original parts. Those men have unique gifts that they honed over a long period of time to create a very efficient political mechanism. It may not be that any one of them going down would make the difference, but all of them going down at virtually the same time certainly does.

They do not look good. Here’s the latest on Grover:

The knives are falling all around him, but Grover Norquist — antitax crusader, Republican lobbyist, and Weston native — insists they won’t fall on him.

A Norquist friend and former colleague, Jack Abramoff, is under criminal investigation for his lobbying activities, some of which involved the same Native American tribe on Norquist’s client roster. The noose on Abramoff appeared to have tightened Monday when his former business partner, Michael Scanlon, agreed to cooperate with prosecutors after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to bribe public officials and to defraud Indian tribes.

At a breakfast meeting with reporters the next morning, Norquist behaved as if this was all nuisance background noise, as he mostly held forth on the state of the ongoing war between the political left and right.

Finally, when pressed on the investigations, he was curt and unapologetic. ”We worked with the Choctaw Indians. We did a book, and I was hoping to do more outreach with Native Americans,” said Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform. ”Jack, I’m sure he advised the Choctaws. But the Choctaws worked with ATR and they’re happy with ATR.”

Last year, a Senate committee investigating allegations that Abramoff defrauded Indian tribes obtained e-mail traffic from ATR, but Norquist says he had not been contacted by government prosecutors in the Abramoff case. Now the conservative activist is on the warpath against Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who is leading the Senate investigation.

After ATR turned over its e-mails, Norquist charged, McCain tried to ”steal our donor list.”

”He subpoenaed our donor records and we said no,” Norquist said. ”He took a shot at me and it didn’t work and it embarrassed him.”

Norquist then accused McCain and Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, of discrimination by targeting lobbyists who worked for Native American tribes. Abramoff and his partners collected $82 million in fees from Indian tribes and their casinos over four years.

”The implication is that it’s money laundering to raise money from Native Americans, and spend it,” Norquist said.

. . . And senator’s camp fires back

An early favorite in the 2008 presidential race, McCain is in a delicate position with political conservatives, who have held a grudge against him since he ran in 2000 against George W. Bush.

While McCain has been trying to smooth ruffled feathers on the right, his investigation into the Abramoff scandal, which he has called ”a complex and tangled web . . . a story alarming in its depth and breadth of potential wrongdoing,” reinforces the bad blood with Norquist and his political allies. Apparently, McCain could not care less.

When we asked the senator’s staff for a comment on Norquist’s fusillade against McCain, his chief of staff, Mark Salter, had a lot to say. ”In Norquist’s world, the truth is for suckers. And it’s as pointless to respond to him as it would be to respond to some street-corner schizophrenic,” Salter responded.

”There is nothing remotely accurate about his recollection of the committee’s dealings with him,” he added. ”Nor, obviously, is his charge of discrimination credible, considering that it is made against someone who has a long and well-known record of respect for the tribes by someone who excuses ripping them off.”

Grover’s natural instinct is to viciously counter-attack. It’s what he does. McCain is having none of it and with a weakened political machine, McCain has much less to fear by ignoring them.

I do not want John McCain to be the next president. But I think that he might be if he keeps this up. His greatest appeal to crossover Dems and independents is that he isn’t afraid of these assholes like Grover Norquist and Tom DeLay. When you hear George Will sniffing about the “criminalization of politics” over bribery scandals and leaking of classified information, when you see a guy like John Warner embarrasingly attempt to dance on the head of a pin as he did this morning on Press The Meat, defending the indefensible, McCain looks damned good. Even to regular Democrats whose fondest wish is to see these arrogant scumbags have to eat their words.

These scandals are dealing a major blow to the corrupt GOP political machine, which is an unalloyed good thing. But it would be a shame if John McCain were the one who benefitted from it. He’s long cast himself as a crusading reformer and the time is ripe for one of those. The Dems ought not let themselves be left in the lurch on that message. Instead of the smarmy “together, we can do better,” we ought to be shouting “once again, the Democratic party is called on to do the patriotic thing and clean up the mess the corrupt Republican party has made with its free lunch policies and taxpayer rip-offs.”

If we don’t say it, McCain will win on personality alone.

Update: I do agree that McCain will have a hard time getting past the Christian Right in the primaries, but I fear that a whole lot of independents (and some Democrats) will make up for it. If the machine is weakened, it will be more difficult for it to shut him down in states with open primaries and even those that aren’t. I personally know Democrats who will register as Republicans to vote for him in the primary. Hardcore Dems like me will never vote for such a conservative politician, but to many people in this country, he is a very attractive candidate. I think he is, by far, our biggest political threat.

Update II: Laura Rozen discusses this NY Times article taking the temperature of the country on the Bush administration (decidely cold, frigid even) and the malaise among her Republican relatives. So far they can’t think of a single soul to vote for, McCain being seen a disloyal to the party.

My relatives, on the other hand, are warming to the flyboy. It’s a military thing. He served. He understands. He will beat the terrorists. Suddenly, Junior and Unka Dick’s lack of military service is meaningful.

Oh, and John Kerry is still a lying, lily livered coward, just like all the Democrats who want to offer therapy to the French terrorists.

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VI Day!!!!

by digby

Yea! President Bush has finally achieved consensus for his Iraq pull-out plan. It wasn’t easy. Joseph Biden has tacitly admitted that the Bush administration has been right all along in its insistence that we pull out large numbers of troops in 2006.

As you know, Democrats have long been insisting that the US stay in Iraq indefinitely. It was only through the wise counsel and patient persuasion of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush that they were convinced that a timed withdrawal was the best way to go.

While it’s great news that the Iraq war is over and done with (and the liberals can finally stop obsessing over it) it’s going to take some work to get them to stop lobbying for more tax cuts and destroying social security. When are they going to get some responsibility and recognize that there is no free lunch?

At least the Bush administration finally got the liberals to let the poor Katrina victims keep a roof over their heads until after Christmas. Jeez, what Scrooges.

Update: The really neat thing about this is that Rove has decided that Joe Biden should be the 2008 Democratic nominee. Feel the magic.

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Taking On Woodward

by digby

I have taken a rather strong stand in this Plame case that the elite beltway reporters involved lost sight of their primary mission, which is to inform the public. I’ve even (unpopularly) criticised Tim Russert for not adequately explaining his involvement, even if Patrick Fitzgerald asked him not to. I don’t think that reporters should not report things just because authorities ask them not to unless there is an immediate danger involved — even if our friend the straight-shootin’, Rove-killin’ prosecutor requests it.

I’m glad to read a real, live credible investigative journalist make these points clearly and unambiguously. Sydney Schanberg writes:

He openly says that protecting his sources is his highest priority. Here’s a response he gave to Howard Kurtz, media reporter for The Washington Post: “I apologized [to the executive editor, Leonard Downie] because I should have told him about this much sooner. I explained in detail that I was trying to protect my sources. That’s Job No. 1 in a case like this. . . . I hunkered down. I’m in the habit of keeping secrets. I didn’t want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed.”

Again, something is missing. Reporters have lots of different thoughts and emotions when they come across an important story. In my life, and the lives of most reporters, “Job No. 1” is getting the story confirmed and into the paper quickly. Get it to the readers now, not two years from now, so they can assess it and act on it, if they choose. A second emotion: Get it to them before the competition gets wind of it.

I believe it’s fair for a reasonable person, without being inside Woodward’s head, to listen to his explanations and arrive at the notion that his main priorities are protecting his sources and protecting the exclusivity (and therefore marketability) of his next book. That wasn’t true when he and Bernstein were prying open the Watergate story. He didn’t have any book contracts then to muddle and infect the issue. In this instance, his explanations include no thoughts about writing an early story for his paper, no reservations about holding back information from the public.

No one is questioning Woodward’s reporting skills or his intelligence. And I don’t want to know the names of his sources. I believe in granting confidentiality when it’s the only way to get a story out—and in going to jail if that’s the consequence of refusing to identify a source or turn over notes. But when your modus operandi is to hold on to information instead of publishing it right away, then, in my opinion, you are not serving the public.

Yep. it wasn’t just Woodward, it was all these guys, except for Cooper and Royce and Phelps who wrote in real time what they knew. Pincus and Kessler wrote some of what they knew, but at least they wrote something. Woodward, Miller, Russert, Mitchell and who knows how many others offered opinions, grilled others or sat on relevant information for years. I just don’t see how that can be journalism.

Schanberg says something that I think is relevant to the Plame case, for you plamaniacs who are jonesing:

And also, in my experience, important conversations about important stories do not fade quite the way Woodward intimates they do when he says he doesn’t recall whether Libby or Card brought up Wilson’s wife. Reporters almost always remember such things.

This has bugged me from the first. Woodward doesn’t remember if Libby or Card brought up Wilson’s wife or if he brought it up with them. But that’s not the problem. He does remember having “Joe Wilson’s wife” written on a series of questions when he spoke to them. This is a huge gift to Libby’s defense.

The indictment shows that Libby learned of and discussed Plame’s identity from a bunch of people other than Woodward, so it doesn’t change the fundamentals of the case. But they can put Woodward on the stand and grill him about whether he might have told Libby about Plame’s wife and muddy the waters. If it can be believed that Woodward ever brought up Plame to Libby, it bolsters his “dazed and confused” defense.

I continue to wonder if Woodward didn’t bring up his involvement just for that purpose.

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An Observation From Highpockets

by digby

For reasons I don’t fully understand, there is something about “leaders,” especially self-appointed leaders, and most especially those who are drawn to intensive participation in organizations, that tends toward liberalism. We see this in politics all the time, of course: it is one thing to vote for conservatism, something else entirely to get it from our elected leaders.

All of which makes me especially thankful, this year, for democracy, limited government and free enterprise: the best measures yet devised to protect us from our leaders.

I’m seeing a lot of this lately. Movement conservatives are getting ready to write the history of this era as liberalism once again failing the people. Typically, the conservatives were screwed, as they always are. They must regroup and fight for conservatism, real conservatism, once again. Viva la revolucion!

There is no such thing as a bad conservative. “Conservative” is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals.

Get used to the hearing about how the Republicans failed because they weren’t true conservatives. Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed by weak-minded souls who refuse to properly follow its tenets. It’s a lot like communism that way.

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Burning Witches

by digby

As regular readers know, I have been exercised about the fact that some people believe that torture is no longer taboo — that we are normalizing the concept in our minds in anticipation of the government legalizing it. Some have called me shockingly naive for not knowing that we have always tortured and abused and that this is nothing new, but I think this misses my point. It is true that our nation has always engaged in bad acts, I am well aware of that. But this is something new. We have high level people in our government attempting to create a legal torture regime on the basis of a new constitutional finding that the executive branch is unfettered by the rule of law in a time of war — our current “war” conveniently having no obvious end. For a long, long time now, if our government tortured and abused, it at least had the decency to hide it.

If you want proof that torture is still not publicly acceptable in our culture, you need look no farther than the 90-7 vote in the senate. A whole lot of big shots, including tough guy red-state Republicans, don’t want to be associated with supporting torture. They know damned well that it is beyond the pale. (For now.)

If we allow this to become normalized, I don’t think it will stop at suspected terrorists — eventually people will ask why we should have all these laws and prohibitions in the case of non-terrorist, but equally heinous, crimes. How do you tell the family of a victim of a suspected gang killing that the suspected perpetrators have a right to lawyers and a right not to incriminate themselves? Is their pain less than the pain of terrorism victims? Why shouldn’t these “worst of the worst” be tortured by the police or the FBI to find out what they know? After all, more people could die if they aren’t forced to give up their home boys.

The reason that people do not demand this now is because we have long required a public adherence to the rule of law — and we have instinctively understood that authorities sometimes make mistakes, are corrupt or inept. Due process is required to mitigate those human failings. Yet, innocent people are still caught up in the system even with all these processes. Imagine what would happen if we didn’t have them?

Once you introduce torture into the equation, justified by the fact that these are people alleged to be “the worst of the worst” you are letting go of the idea that innocent people are sometimes incarcerated, and that it matters that we don’t treat innocent people barbarously, even if we are inclined by primitive notions of revenge to treat guilty people that way. We know that non-terrorists have been caught up in the net and have been tortured and abused. Even more horrifyingly, we know that even innocent, mentally ill people have been tortured and abused. (I don’t think you can go any lower than that — maybe children, but they did that too.)

There are important moral and human rights arguments to be made against torture of anyone, guilty or innocent. I believe that it makes an entire society, an entire culture, immoral. But the most immoral act of all immoral acts is to torture an innocent person. And since nobody is omniscient, to torture a person with no due process, no right to confront accusers, no way of proving their innocence, it is guaranteed that we are doing this under our torture regime. As I said, we know that we are.

One might assume that there is no one on the planet who thinks that torturing innocent people is right. Certainly, it’s going to be hard to find intelligent educated people who believe that it is a moral good to do so. But not impossible. As it turns out there is a moral argument for torturing innocent people:

From Orrin Judd:

You might want to go back and brush up on your history, witchcraft was quite popular, even within the Church, for an awfully long time. In fact, it’s back today in the form of Wicca. In its denial of the basis of Western Civilization it is so transgressive that it deserved to be and was persecuted. People who deny there were witches because they don’t like how the religious treated them are akin to the Left denying there were Communists because they don’t like that Americans reviled them. Jews too were justifiably, though unnecessarily, persecuted for their beliefs and inability to conform to social norms. The great injustice was the persecution of the conversos in Spain, who were sincere converts to Christianity.

Of course, anti-Semitism only became exterminationist once you mixed in Darwinism and racial theory, by which it is necessary to kill any group outside your own discrete gene pool.

There are of course variations within any group, but folks conform to type more than less.

Posted by: oj at November 25, 2005 01:49 PM

I think he understands something I failed to understand about this argument. This isn’t about terrorism. It isn’t about national security. It isn’t about the rule of law or enlightenment values. It’s about conforming to social norms. That puts the whole thing in perspective, doesn’t it? What I call “innocent” isn’t innocent at all. Just being a practicing Muslim makes one guilty.

It’s nice to know that we shouldn’t be persecuting those who have converted to Christianity (or properly protestantised Islam, which translates into an embrace of Western Civilization.) The good news is that “protestantising” (forcing Western conformity on) the billion Muslims out there will be a cakewalk:

You can have a number of voices so long as everyone has just one hymnal. That’s the essence of the protestantism that the End of History requires. It’ll be easy enough to Reform Islam, just as we did Catholicism, Judaism, and the rest.

Posted by: oj at November 25, 2005 10:56 AM

And here I thought the whole “End of History” thing had been laughed out of town by the events of 9/11. Apparently History has only been postponed. Protestantism is still on the march, “reforming” witches and Muslims alike. And if it takes a little waterboarding or burning at the stake to get the job done, so be it. These people have to understand that we’re going to end History one bloody non-conformist bastard at a time if we have to.

I have to hand it to Orin Judd. Like Ann Coulter, who’s rhetoric is not nearly as elegant, he is at least willing to put his beliefs on the table and take responsibility for them. So was Ann, when she wrote:

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.

Like the Spanish inquisitors and Salem witch burners before us, we owe it to the world to continue to End History by torturing and persecuting those trangressive non-conformists who deny “the basis of Western Civilization” as necessary. Indeed, we can’t help ourselves. It’s our destiny.

But I have to say that Orrin is very mistaken to think that exterminationism only came into existence once Darwinism and racial theory emerged. As good Protestants, ‘reformed” and unreformed Catholics and Jews know, that is something that has been going on for a very, very long time. Dig it:

1 Samuel 15

15:1 Samuel also said unto Saul, The LORD sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the LORD.

15:2 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt.

15:3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

15:4 And Saul gathered the people together, and numbered them in Telaim, two hundred thousand footmen, and ten thousand men of Judah.

15:5 And Saul came to a city of Amalek, and laid wait in the valley.

15:6 And Saul said unto the Kenites, Go, depart, get you down from among the Amalekites, lest I destroy you with them: for ye shewed kindness to all the children of Israel, when they came up out of Egypt. So the Kenites departed from among the Amalekites.

15:7 And Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt.

There’s more. Saul spared the Amakalite king and some good sheep and oxen, sorely disappointing God. Samuel promptly kills them himself, on God’s orders. Ain’t nothin’ new ’bout genocide. Sometimes it’s God’s work.

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