Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Losing Its Honor

Americablog has a long post up about the warporn, which I wrote about last week. I do not suggest that you click through to the pictures unless you have a very strong stomach.

It’s worth noting that this site and the stories of prisoner torture that came out in the last week are part of a story that nobody wants to deal with — that is, the story of individual soldiers committing depraved acts on their own. Shystee over at Corrente, takes me to task for suggesting such a thing, and I plead guilty. There is a point at which individual soldiers have to take responsibility as well as the higher ups, whom I agree bear the brunt of the blame.

But, I have seen no evidence that the military heirarchy has instituted a policy of posting gory pictures on sex sites of Iraqis whom we’ve liberated from their lives. It’s possible, I suppose, but this looks to be a matter of individuals entertaining themselves. As I wrote before, I know that taking pictures of battlefield dead has been around since Matthew Brady — and it has served the purpose of documenting the horrors of war for all to see. But this melding of sexual porn and bloody war gore is the sign of something sadistic and perverted (and yes, fascistic.)

There is one stomach churning picture that shows a horrible mangled stump where a foot should be, presumably blown up in a land mine or something like it — and the naked crotch of the woman whose stump is being displayed. It’s called “Nice puss/Bad foot.” It’s possible that the picture is photo-shopped, but regardless of the veracity of the picture itself, it’s obvious that any man who gets an erection from that pic is a man who should not be carrying a gun.

These guys are allowing their ids to run wild and I don’t think there is any excuse for it. They know the difference between right and wrong. They are not under orders to post these pictures nor can there be any thought that it helps the war effort by scaring the “Hajis” or giving these soldiers a forum in which to “release” their “steam.” It’s pure tittilation — “warporn” in the most literal sense and it speaks to something seriously wrong with the military culture that says on the one hand that we are there to liberate the Iraqi people and on the other that these people’s dead and mangled bodies are strangely sexually stimulating.

Note that there is no discussion as to whether these Iraqis are “Baathists” “bitter-enders,” “terrorists,” “insurgents” — or the “good” Iraqis who we liberated from the sick, depraved Saddam. One of the pictures is simply entitled “Die Haji Die.” It is assumed that any dead Iraqi is a terrorist — and that, as we know, is impossible.

None of this is to say that the systematic sexual torture regime we’ve seen in both Iraq and Guantanamo is just the result of a barrel of bad apples. Clearly, the military have taken the simple-minded lessons of “The Arab Mind” to heart and believe that if they sexually humiliate the “Hajis” they’ll crumple. (Big strong American men, meanwhile, wouldn’t be affected whatsoever by being forced to simulate anal sex with other men or being jeered at while wearing ladies underwear.)I think it’s pretty clear that the highest reaches of the government signed off on a whole lot of questionable kinky stuff in the mistaken idea that arabs are different from you and me. And it would appear that some of the soldiers have predictably taken this to heart.

And even if you are to set aside the kinky sexual nature of the War On Terror, I can’t actually understand how anyone would think that even the total abdication of the Geneva Conventions allows for a cook to break a prisoner’s leg with a baseball bat because he needed to relieve some stress. (Did the prisoner complain that there was too much lemon in the bernaise sauce and he just couldn’t take it any more?)

I remember this fascinating letter to Josh Marshall back in May of 2004, from an unnamed ex-military officer. It was right as the Abu Ghraib story broke:

“… it is no secret that ON THE STREET the US Army was and remains openly kicking Iraqi asses whenever and wherever they want to.

About the Army – Man, it hurts my heart to write this about an institution I dearly love but this army is completely dysfunctional, angry and is near losing its honor. We are back to the Army of 1968.

[…]

Unlike the wars of the past 20 years where the Army encouraged (needed) soldiers, NGOs, allies and civil organizations to work together to resolve matters and return to normal society, the US Forces only trust themselves here and that means they set their own limits and tolerances. Abu Ghuraib are good examples of that limit. I told a Journalist the other day that these kids here are being told that they are chasing Al Qaeda in the War on Terrorism so they think everyone at Abu Ghuraib had something to do with 9/11. So they were encouraged to make them pay. These kids thought they were going to be honored for hunting terrorists.

The fact that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney said, “we’re taking the gloves off” certainly created an environment in which the rule of law seemed to have been completely tossed aside. This country went temporarily insane after 9/11. I guess the military hierarchy lost its bearings too, which I find surprising since the highest levels of the officer corps are steeped in the lessons of Vietnam and presumably understood that this was likely the road to perdition.

The lies and misdirection conflating Al Qaeda with Saddam probably contributed more than anything to the horrors that many Iraqis faced at our hands during the first year or so of the occupation. Many soldiers surely internalized the idea that they were wreaking revenge for 9/11. In this, the buck goes all the way to the top and comes to a screeching halt on the desk of the heroic Commander Codpiece. Bush and his boys should have to answer for that, but I suppose it will be left to history to sort it out.

The Human Rights Watch Report about the beatings and torture by the 82nd Airborn does not feature the sexual humiliation and torture, but rather the good old fashioned kind.

On their day off people would show up all the time. Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport. The cooks were all US soldiers. One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy’s leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was the fucking cook. He shouldn’t be in with no PUCs. The PA came and said to keep him off the leg. Three days later they transported the PUC to Abu Ghraib. The Louisville Slugger [incident] happened around November 2003, certainly before Christmas.

People would just volunteer just to get their frustrations out. We had guys from all over the base just come to guard PUCs so they could fuck them up. Broken bones didn’t happen too often, maybe every other week. The PA would overlook it. I am sure they knew.

The interrogator [a sergeant] worked in the [intelligence] office. He was former Special Forces. He would come into the PUC tent and request a guy by number. Everyone was tagged. He would say, “Give me #22.” And we would bring him out. He would smoke the guy and fuck him. He would always say to us, “You didn’t see anything, right?” And we would always say, “No, Sergeant.”

One day a soldier came to the PUC tent to get his aggravation out and filled his hands with dirt and hit a PUC in the face. He fucked him. That was the communications guy.

One night a guy came and broke chem lights10 open and beat the PUCs with it. That made them glow in the dark which was real funny but it burned their eyes and their skin was irritated real bad.

If a PUC cooperated Intel would tell us that he was allowed to sleep or got extra food. If he felt the PUC was lying he told us he doesn’t get any fucking sleep and gets no food except maybe crackers. And he tells us to smoke him. [Intel] would tell the Lieutenant that he had to smoke the prisoners and that is what we were told to do. No sleep, water, and just crackers. That’s it. The point of doing all this was to get them ready for interrogation. [The intelligence officer] said he wanted the PUCs so fatigued, so smoked, so demoralized that they want to cooperate. But half of these guys got released because they didn’t do nothing. We sent them back to Fallujah. But if he’s a good guy, you know, now he’s a bad guy because of the way we treated him.

After Abu Ghraib things toned down. We still did it but we were careful. It is still going on now the same way, I am sure. Maybe not as blatant but it is how we do things.

The men who spoke out were conflicted, as I would expect anyone to be. They were bedeviled by a system of rules that broke down when the leadership of this country lost its moral moorings and they did not know how to change the situation from within. You can read their agony of conscience right there on the page. But in the end they have stepped up to report what they saw — and even participated in. They know it was wrong. So do many, many others who have said nothing.

I understand that it is difficult to stand up against the macho military culture that makes it possible to swallow fear and face people who are trying to kill you. I know that soldiers are trained to be machines and they give up a large piece of their free will to their superiors for the good of the unit. But, at some point, each individual is still a human being and has to answer to his conscience. When someone like Joseph Darby comes forward, or this West Point officer and the two sergeants last week, they are acting against a system and peer pressure that is enormous. They are brave men who prove that it is possible to resist the immense pressure to conform. And that is why they are hated. They show that those who participated have violated basic norms of decent human behavior, even in war — and they show that those who say nothing are cowards.

Sadly, I think our sick culture at this point is actually rewarding those who decry the sense of personal responsibility that leads a soldier to speak out against depraved behavior — and excuse barbaric, cruel behavior as a normal way to relieve tension.

Like Rush Limbaugh who says:

I think the reaction to the stupid torture is an example of the feminization of this country.

[…]

You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?

Or these fellows, writing on the warporn site:

Everyone needs downtime, and some need to face the demons, whatever that may be and this site is good for that…It also lets everyone know thsat when they get back they will be accepted …let the entertainment continue.

[…]

This site allows soldiers to blow off some steam…Guys, I love this site and I love the pictures. Keep ’em coming and watch your six boys. Hajis deserve death, never forget it.

[…]

“Oh, by the way, fuck them camel jockeys. We didn’t start this shit, and we certainly aren’t hiding behind civilians with 20lbs of explosives strapped to our chests and hidden in a car.”

Only we did start this shit, didn’t we?

This is why the warmongers who type themselves into a frenzy supporting this war should have the balls to go over and fight it. Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinert and Paul Ghouley should have to stand there and ask themselves these questions — confront the nightmares that are going to curse these soldiers for the rest of their lives as they try to reconcile what they saw and did.

It’s a nice, pretty abstract concept — fighting tyranny and terrorism for the red, white and blue. But in reality it’s standing in a doorway watching a psychopathic cook break a prisoners leg with a baseball bat because he’s is feeling stressed. It’s hearing innocent people screaming because they have had chemicals dripped into their eyes and on their skin so they’ll “glow in the dark” and amuse the soldiers. It’s having your humanity and your decency challenged every single day and not knowing if you will meet all the tests of bravery, conscience and loyalty that are required in a war that is being fought for vague and inscrutable reasons.

Jonah believes that we are liberating the Iraqi people from a totalitarian dictator. Does he then agree that it’s part of the mission to oggle an Iraqi womans privates while he gloats that her foot was blown off? Does he know what he would do if confronted with sadists who believe that the only good Iraqi is a dead Iraqi? That “they started this shit?”

The chickenhawks can claim that it is perfectly acceptable to support a war that they have no intention of fighting. But they cannot claim that it is just fine to support a war in which our troops have behaved in an immoral and indecent fashion, which the military has covered up and which was implicitly condoned by the highest reaches of our government. If they supported this they should have to share in the trials of conscience that afflict these poor bastards from the 82nd airborn who came forward (and the ones who did not.) They should have to share in the visions of blood and gore that we see on thay sick porn site and they should have to live with what has been done in their name.

If you support this country’s loss of honor you should have to get down in the mud and grovel with all those who’ve lost their struggle to maintain their humanity while fighting a war that has no end, that doesn’t know who it’s fighting that sees sex and violence intertwined in a sick and twisted way — and that celebrates random, wanton killing of the people we are allegedly fighting for. The chickenhawks in this war, of all wars, are the ones who should have to suffer alongside those who lost their souls killing and beating and torturing for a cause that didn’t exist.

If you haven’t read Billmon’s incredible post on this subject, you need to.

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Goldilocks

The Note is a wee bit ruffled because Pre$$titutes called them “a stinking repository of Bush-licking Pre$$titution” and uses the novel defense that Bush defenders say they are biased against them so they must be juuuust right.

I suppose it never occurs to them that while it is true that they cannot be biased both for and against Bush it is entirely possible that they could be biased for or against Bush — and one side or the other is working them. Which side, do you suppose, is most likely to be doing that?

They did not object, by the way, to being named the Karl Rove Official Fan Club and Fluffing Society, so I take that to mean they feel quite comfortable with the label. It’s the Bush-licking that seems to have irritated them.

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Amusement

A new horrifying prisoner abuse scandal, this time revealed by a West Point officer and backed up by two sergeants.

Support for some of the allegations of abuse come from a sergeant of the 82nd Airborne who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch quotes him as saying that, “To ‘F____ a PUC’ means to beat him up. We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs, and stomach, pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every day. To ‘smoke’ someone is to put them in stress positions until they get muscle fatigue and pass out. That happened every day. Some days we would just get bored so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid. This was before Abu Ghraib but just like it. We did that for amusement.

“On their day off people would show up all the time,” the sergeant continues in the HRW report. “Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport. The cooks were all U.S. soldiers. One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy’s leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was the cook.”

Here’s what the pentagon had to say about it, by an officer who obviously studied at the Tom DeLay school of integrity:

Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. John Skinner criticized the report as a predictable effort to try to “advance an agenda through the use of distortions and errors in fact.”

If this is true, I don’t want to hear any more bullshit about “Lord of the Flies” in New Orleans. It’s pretty clear that even our own highly disciplined military can lose their humanity without a whole lot of provocation. These weren’t dipshit national guard hicks either. This was the 82nd Airborn. No excuses.

As much as Katrina revealed the ugly underbelly of poverty and race in the country, 9/11 revealed the ugly underbelly of sadism and blind fury. This is a sick culture.

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I Wonder Why

Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum both discuss the fact that this Section-8 business isn’t catching on. Josh asks:

Just for the sake of discussion, and I’d be particularly eager to hear from TPM’s right-leaning readers on this one, isn’t the idea of giving rent vouchers to refugees rather than stacking them up in mobile housing projects something that folks on both sides of the aisle should be able to agree on?

In truth it is a neat right leaning idea, but it exists only in the Cato Institute’s and Jack Kemp’s wet dreams. In Republicanland (although I’m pretty sure this would be a problem in many places) getting enough people to rent their empty apartments to displaced, unemployed African American strangers is not nearly as easy as giving those evacuess vouchers to pay for them. There are still people who go to great lengths to not rent to gainfully employed African Americans with good credit and references.

The LA Times discussed this issue today and reports something that is completely inexplicable — unless the reasons have nothing to do with money or expanding government programs over the long haul:

Two days after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to issue emergency vouchers aimed at helping poor storm victims find new housing quickly by covering as much as $10,000 of their rent.

But the department suddenly backed away from the idea after White House aides met with senior HUD officials. Although emergency vouchers had been successfully used after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the administration focused instead on a plan for government-built trailer parks, an approach that even many Republicans say would concentrate poverty in the very fashion the government has long sought to avoid.

[…]

At least in the case of housing, critics say that the president’s unwillingness to rely on existing programs could raise costs. Instead of offering $10,000 vouchers, FEMA is paying an average of $16,000 for each trailer in the new parks it is contemplating. Even many Republicans wonder why the government would want to build trailer parks when many evacuees are now living in communities with plenty of vacant, privately owned apartments.

The article compares this situation to the admnistration’s reluctance to expand Medicaid, but it is not the same thing. This was an emergency voucher program that, unlike health care, would have cost a finite amount of money — a one shot deal. There is no rational reason not to put people in existing housing if it is going to cost less than putting them in Bushville trailer parks — unless they wouldn’t actually be able to put evacuees in that existing housing for other reasons. (And yes, Halliburton will make a killing.)

“Crime” (which along with “poor” are loaded racial terms in this context) is already becoming a prime concern:

After a crisis with indisputable elements of race and class _ searing images of mostly poor, mostly black New Orleans residents huddled on rooftops or waiting in lines for buses _ some Americans worry about strains in the nation’s social fabric.

Women were especially concerned. One of them is Sue Hubbard of Hueytown, Ala., 64 years old. She does not believe race played a deliberate part in who got out of New Orleans, but she is deeply worried about tensions inflamed by those who do.

“I just think it took everybody by surprise,” says Hubbard, who is white. “I don’t care if it would have been the president himself, they couldn’t have gotten there to those people. Some people _ not everybody _ are trying to make a racist thing out of it.”

The poll underscores the literal reach of Katrina as well: 55 percent of Americans say evacuees from Katrina have turned up in their cities or communities, raising concerns about living conditions for the refugees, vanishing jobs for locals and _ among 1 in 4 respondents _ increased crime.

Among respondents with incomes under $25,000 per year, 56 percent were concerned about living conditions for refugees in shelters; that was higher than among those who make more money. And the poll indicates people in the South, which has absorbed huge masses of evacuees, are most concerned about the costs to their local governments.

Ann McMullen, 52, of Killeen, Texas, who works as a school administrator at Fort Hood, says she worries about gang violence, simply because of the prodigious numbers of people flowing into Texas communities.

“They can’t even locate the sex offenders,” she says. “And every population has gang members. It’s theft, it’s murder, it’s more chaotic crimes in the community. Hopefully we’ll be able to put these people back to work.”

In order for the Section 8 plan to work on the scale necessary, they would have to put enormous pressure on landlords to accept something like 350,000 people with vouchers. I’m not sure even huge rental subsidies at twice the market rate would persuade people that it’s a good idea to take in a large number of black evacuees into their neighborhoods.

25% of the population already expressing their concerns about an influx of crime — at the moment of people’s greatest feelings of sympathy and generosity — makes it pretty clear that this is a lurking issue. And it is one that will likely pay dividends in the long run for the GOP. Before it was a television show, “Law and Order” was the slogan for the southern strategy.

Oh, and by the way, the Richard Nixon also had another electoral strategy that reverberates to this day and was heavily influenced by race — the suburban strategy.

Richard Nixon did not invent the politics of suburban segregation. Opposition to housing integration in suburban America was well entrenched prior to the 1970s. Yet President Nixon solidified public opposition to federal desegregation of the suburbs at a time when the nation was poised for change. He enunciated a policy declaring that the national government would not pressure the suburbs to accept subsidized low-income housing against their will. In so doing, he formally embraced a fundamental suburban belief: that government should not and could not force a community to accept economic – and by extension racial – integration. Nixon’s policy cemented [*479] the politics of suburban segregation that informally existed before his administration. He converted suburban political preferences into national public policy – a policy that remains largely intact to this day. No president between Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton revoked that policy, and Nixon’s federal court appointees perpetuated it through their judicial decisions (pp.3-4

Rick Perlstein’s new book discusses un great detail the wars over the Fair Housing Act — which were vicious and essentially broke the back of the civil rights consensus in the Democratic party. Voting, public access and employment were one thing. Forcing people to live side by side was another. And it wasn’t just a southern thing.

Housing remains one of the racial fault lines in this country. Many people who are not consciously racist (or classist) consider being forced to live among people not of their tribe to be a fundamental affront to their liberty — and an automatic threat to their equity.

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The Noose Around The Hydra

Franklin Foer has written an absolutely must-read article this week in The New Republic (which, unfortunately, is subscription only.) He writes about the College Republicans, who are key to understanding the modern Republican party. I know that sounds absurd, but it is absolutely true. His thesis is that the operatives of the GOP learn to fight the Democrats by fighting with each other.

Before the election of new leadership this year, the College Republicans, fresh faced little gangsters that they are, had already been accused of corrupt fundraising by bilking little old ladies out of large sums of money. As with all College Republican elections, this one was distinguished by dirty tricks, betrayal and strong arm tactics:

Everyone who watched this summer’s race for College Republican National Committee (crnc) chair with any detachment has a favorite moment of chutzpah they admire in spite of themselves. Leading the count are the following: speaking sotto voce of your opponent’s “homosexuality”; rigging the delegate count so that states that support your candidate have twice as many votes as those that don’t; and using a sitting congressman to threaten the careers of undecided voters. I can understand the perverse appeal of each of these incidents. But I cast my vote for the forged letter.

He goes on to describe a beautiful little piece of ratfucking that will stand the victor in good stead when he’s called upon to destroy political opponents in the future. And there is much more. But the thing that is most interesting about this is that he points out what very few people seem to realize — that this is not just a bunch of kooky co-eds having fun. It is officially sanctioned and run by the Republican establishment. After all, it was the training ground for the entire political apparatus of the modern GOP — including a bunch of names we’ve seen a lot of recently in association with words like “arrest,” “indictment” and “federal investigation.” And there’s money involved, of course.

Behind the scenes, in the campaign war rooms, small armies of veteran Republican operatives and congressional staffers toil. That’s because there’s much more at stake in the elections than a swish post-college gig. After campaign finance reform, the College Republicans reinvented themselves as a big-time 527–a group legally allowed to spend an infinite amount of its own money on campaigns–with a budget of over $17 million. They have a massive network of operatives to send into the field to bolster candidates, and they have patronage to spread among friends and through direct-mail firms. In other words, it’s well worth tearing a Shermanesque path to the sea to control College Republicans, no matter the carnage–and no matter the expense. Michael Davidson said he spent an estimated $200,000–raised off high-rollers who normally sign checks to senators and presidential wannabes–trying to claim the grand prize.

But the significance of the crnc goes beyond that. The Committee is the place where Republican strategists learn their craft and acquire their knack for making their Democratic opponents look like disorganized children. Many of the biggest-brand Republican operatives–from Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, to Charlie Black and Roger Stone, to Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist–got their starts this way. Walking through the halls of the convention, it is easy to see the genesis of tactics deployed in the Florida recount and by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Republicans learn how to fight hard against Democrats by practicing on one another first. “There are no rules in a knife fight,” Norquist instructed the young conventioneers in a speech. And, while Norquist described a knife fight, the Gourley-Davidson rumble transpired around him.

[…]

… Gourley received the blessing of the outgoing chairman, Eric Hoplin. But, in reality, he had won the blessing of a force more powerful than a single politician. He had won the blessing of an entity that College Republicans speak of in hushed tones and that they compare to the Empire in Star Wars–the Establishment.

When College Republicans invoke the Establishment, they mean a clique of former College Republicans–now grown-ups playing politics at the highest level–who will trample anyone to maintain their clique’s control of the organization. Like all good cabals, it is hard to know exactly who belongs to the Establishment and how Machiavellian their meddling is. Before his tumble from grace, the lobbyist Jack Abramoff would lend College Republicans his skybox at the MCI center, donate money, and lead training sessions. (In 2002, the crnc paid Jack Abramoff for “accounting & legal services.”) Rove reportedly keeps tabs, and Norquist invites the group’s chair to attend his celebrated Wednesday gathering of conservative big shots. But the convention offered some more suggestive examples of the Establishment’s methodology. Just past 2 a.m. on Saturday, wavering delegates from Louisiana received calls from Morton Blackwell, the legendary veteran of the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns, urging them to vote for Gourley. It was a perfectly calibrated tactic. “A 19-year-old Republican will generally do whatever a demigod of the conservative movement like Morton tells them,” one Davidson supporter griped.

And they are even more likely to respond to entreaties from a congressman. Patrick McHenry, a dough-faced 29-year-old freshman representative from North Carolina and former crnc treasurer, went to war on Gourley’s behalf. “I got a call. They said, ‘The congressman is on the line,'” University of North Carolina junior Jordan Selleck told me. “He basically said that we’d be screwed if we didn’t switch to Gourley. Our careers in politics would be over.” As Jennifer Holder, who served as a state chair in the ’90s, lamented, “There are a lot of sharks infesting the kiddie pool.”

Does everyone remember how Bush was extolled as the guy who would bring honor and integrity back to the White House? How the grown-ups were in charge? These are his people:

Back in 1981, Abramoff and his campaign manager, Norquist, promised their leading competitor, Amy Moritz, the job of crnc executive director if she dropped out of the race. Moritz took the bait, but it turned out that Abramoff had made the promise with his fingers crossed. Norquist took the executive director job and named Moritz his deputy. That demotion didn’t last long, either. After discovering the talented Ralph Reed, Norquist handed the Christian Coalition godfather Moritz’s responsibilities and her office space. They placed all of Moritz’s belongings in a box labeled amy’s desk. Even 25 years later, she hasn’t shed her role as College Republican doormat. Abramoff used her think tank, the National Center for Public Policy Research, to funnel nearly $1 million into a phony direct-mail firm with an address identical to his own.

While College Republicans have a vague understanding of Abramoff’s ascent, they all can recite the ballad of Rove and Atwater–the ultimate object lesson in how the Establishment strikes back. In 1973, Rove was the Establishment candidate, and Atwater, the original Sun Tsu-quoting College Republican, was his prime campaign operative. They spent the spring of 1973 crisscrossing the country in a Ford Pinto, lining up the support of state chairs–basically the right-wing version of Thelma and Louise. But, in point of fact, Rove was hardly the right-winger in the race. His two opponents, Terry Dolan and Robert Edgeworth, were. And, when Dolan threw his support to Edgeworth, Rove had no other alternative. He had to cheat.

When the College Republicans gathered for their convention at the Lake of the Ozarks resort in Missouri, Rove and Atwater relentlessly challenged the legitimacy of Edgeworth’s delegates, even if the evidence did not justify their attacks. Because of Rove’s allegations, the convention ended in deadlock. In revenge, Dolan went to The Washington Post with recordings that captured training seminars where Rove boasted of his campaign techniques, including rooting through opponents’ garbage cans and other forms of campaign espionage. The Post broke the story under the headline “gop probes official as teacher of tricks.” The Republican National Committee chairman, one George H.W. Bush, however, didn’t punish Rove for his less-than-high-minded behavior. Instead, he gave Rove the chairmanship and sent Edgeworth a scathing letter accusing him of disloyalty. “He wrote me out of the party,” Edgeworth told James Moore and Wayne Slater, the authors of the biography Bush’s Brain.

(Where do you suppose anyone would get the idea that Karl Rove might be the type of person to purposefully out a CIA agent for political purposes?)

These tactics have worked well since the Nixon administration and those who use them are responsible for building the most powerful and successful political machine in the modern era. Way back when, in the glory days when Abramoff, Norquist and Reed ran the college Republicans, Norquist is quoted as saying:

[Stalin] was running the personnel department while Trotsky was fighting the White Army. When push came to shove for control of the Soviet Union, Stalin won. Trotsky got an ice ax through his skull, while Stalin became head of the Soviet Union. He understood that personnel is policy.

Brownie was no accident; the placing of hacks in positions of responsibility is not just ad hoc political payback. The cronyism is by design.

Needless to say, none of these people had a clue — or any interest — in actual governance. They are political hit men. But they control the party apparatus and when they finally achieved what they had been dreaming of for many years, they got greedy.

I wrote the other day about the idea that the only thing that can stop these people is the legal system. This is because the press and politics are too easily manipulated by entertainment values, spin and confusion right now. It’s a lot harder to bullshit someone who has the power to subpoena your records and arrest you for lying. Federal prosecutors squeeze anyone and everyone they can to get someone to flip on big fishes. And there are a lot of little fishes now. And medium sized fishes too.

Every one of these former college Republicans (the Establishment) are now in the cross hairs of the legal system. Norquist hasn’t been officially named, but his affiliations with all the people who are coming under legal scrutiny are so close that it’s just a matter of time. Safavian, especially, is an interesting connection because he also feeds into a nervousness among the fervent neocons about Grover’s unseemly closeness to Muslims:

Norquist has for some years now been promoting Islamist organizations, including even the Council on American-Islamic Relations; for example, he spoke at CAIR’s conference, “A Better America in a Better World” on October 5, 2004. Frank Gaffney has researched Norquist’s ties to Islamists in his exhaustive, careful, and convincing study, “Agent of Influence” and concludes that Norquist is enabling “a political influence operation to advance the causes of radical Islamists, and targeted most particularly at the Bush Administration.”

But if Norquist is indeed a convert to Islam, it could be that he is not just enabling the Islamist causes but is himself an Islamist. (April 14, 2005)

That’s Daniel Pipes, neocon prince. Norquist marrying a Palestinian American woman sent him into an absolute tizzy. But Norquist has been involved with the Muslim community for some time — for purely political reasons, in my opinion. Norquist’s cause and religion is Republicanism. He was just doing what he does — building the coalition. They’ve been courting Christians for decades and he thought he could court Muslims too — except he apparently couldn’t finesse the neocon fixation with Israel or the violent fixation of Osama bin Laden. The man is not a miracle worker after all.

Safavian is an Iranian American from Detroit, the home of the biggest Islamic population in the US. He’s a political hack in the Norquist/Abramoff posse. Still, it is more than amusing that Norquist’s ties to the Islamic community have been so well tolerated by all the right wing gasbags who have been one handedly typing the word “islamofascist!” for the past four years — amusing but not surprising. After all, nobody but a few cranks at Horowitz’s operation cared that Norquist and his pal Dana Rohrabacker were hanging out with the Taliban right up until 9/11.

But Norquist and Safavian (and Abramoff, the allegedly pious Jew) were involved with some unsavory characters that this scandal is going to bring to the surface. Grover may be in the kind of trouble his big brother Rove is in — national security style trouble. At the very least, his effectiveness is going to be curtailed as these investigations circle around him. Money people get nervous at times like this.

I have long agreed with the old saying that if you want to kill the snake you’ve gotta go for the head. In the case of the modern Republican Party, it’s a four headed hydra consisting of Karl Rove (strategy), Tom DeLay (party enforcer), Ralph Reed (christian right) and Grover Norquist (movement organizer.) They all interact with one another at the nexus of K Street and the RNC. They may be taken down by one guy — their good friend, ex uber-lobbyist, Jack Abramoff. (Uncle Karl, of course, is likely in even deeper shit.)

The Democrats have never exploited (or never been able to exploit) the sheer criminality of this gang. They all learned the ratfucking business while still little sprouts in the College Republican organization. According toe Rick Perlstein’s fine book about the Goldwater campaign “Before The Storm,” as early as 1964, college student Morton Blackwell — who later named the “Moral Majority” and ran Jeff Gannon Guckert’s alma mater, the (GOP) Leadership Institute — was sabotaging the competition at the GOP convention. They’ve been at this a long, long time.

Back in May, I wrote:

These are [Nixon’s] political heirs, raised and nurtured on the mother’s milk of corruption and dishonesty; scarred while very young by the ignominious downfall of their political father; driven to wreak revenge and recapture what they perceived as their rightful ownership of American politics. They are the spawn of Watergate resentment and this country will never be healthy until this group of radicals are removed from positions of power.

Watch this Abramoff scandal. It may go nowhere, but the potential for a lethal, if not mortal, wound to the conservative movement resides inside it.

The baby bad guys were on display at the College republican election — and the baddest baby bad guy won. But the article shows that the win was really accomplished with the collusion of the anointed bad boy with the professional operatives. If they go down this chain may be broken.

As I said, I don’t think that normal political processes will be able to deal with this gang of crooks. But it looks like greed and hubris may have pushed them into the sights of the justice system. There are no guarantees, of course, but it’s just possible that with this particular mob of political criminals under the gun — and some of them out of the picture — the Nixon era may finally come to a close.

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Done Good

Congratulations to local boy Ezra Klein, for just graduating from UCLA (in three years,) while blogging like a maniac and maintaining a normal 21 year old’s social life. Political writer types were different in my day — unwashed, unpleasant to look at and unsocialized. These kids today, I tell you …

He’s already moved to DC and is blogging over at TAPPED. I’m going to take a nap.

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Batten Down The Hatches

Bush is flying into San Antonio in the middle of the crisis and then going to Colorado to track the storm at NORAD (now Northcom.) He says he’s going to monitor the interaction between the military and the state and local authorities. He assured everyone that he’d make sure he and “his entourage” won’t get in the way. Sure.

He doesn’t need to be interfering with grown-ups who are trying to do their jobs under pressure. He has no more experience dealing with a large scale disaster than Brownie did. It’s bad enough that he interfered with the relief efforts in New Orleans and Mississippi after Katrina. To insist on photo-ops during the crisis itself is just unconscionable.

When people complain that Bush is disengaged it’s not because he isn’t staging enough political pageants. They don’t want him throwing on a flightsuit and putting on a show. They want him to go to his fucking office once in a while and do his fucking job. At the White House. Where the president is supposed to be during a crisis.

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Pretzel Addiction?

Jeebus. It looks like Bush has another scrape on his face today. Left temple.

This is ridiculous. How often does this have to happen before people finally ask some serious questions? Falling on your face all the time is simply not normal.

And if he’s out falling off his bike again while the country is going to hell in a handbasket then people need to know that too.

Update: Maybe not. It could be something else. My bad.

On the other hand, he’s flexing his jaw like crazy in a strange repetitive way. Too much coffee this morning, perhaps.

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Flaking Teflon

I have been annoyed over these past five years at how the tabloids have been so solicitous of Junior when they treated Bill Clinton and his family like they were coke addicted soap stars.

Seems the teflon is finally off the codpiece. The National Enquirer is featuring a story about Bush drinking again. I have no idea if it’s true — sometimes tabloid stories are, sometimes they aren’t. But they wouldn’t be printing it if they didn’t think it would sell…

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The “F” Word

Andrew Sullivan has two posts today that it seems to me are interrelated, although I don’t think he meant them to be.

First he highlights a web-site that encourages soldiers fighting in Iraq to post sickening pictures of dead and wounded Iraqis in exchange for free (sexual) pornography. He writes:

If you send in pics of dead insurgents or Iraqis, you get free access to the porn part of the site. The pics that are appended have names such as “What every Iraqi should look like,” “DIE, HAJI, DIE,” and “Cooked Iraqi.” I would think this violates the Geneva Conventions, not that the U.S. under this president cares about those very much any more. But it’s also beyond depraved. Eric Muller sounded the alarm. Like the pictures from Abu Ghraib, these images are also a propaganda coup for Zarqawi and his monsters – a consequence of war in the Internet age. Have we really sunk to this?

I think Abu Ghraib pretty well settled that question. This psycho-sexual sickness has been officially sanctioned, at least when it comes to “interrogations,” and such behavior has been giddily celebrated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who is beamed to the military all over the world on Armed Forces Radio. This is not an aberration; it is an ongoing feature of the war on terrorism.

Sullivan also links to an interesting critique that draws some very compelling comparisons between the Bush administration’s governance and fascism. Sullivan doesn’t use the “F” word himself, of course, but the article does:

Describing the President’s panicked political response to his falling poll numbers as “compassionate conservatism”, (as New York Times columnist David Brooks did last Sunday, “A Bushian Laboratory”, September 18, 2005), borders on the ludicrous. Mr Bush has now overseen the fastest increase in domestic spending of any president in recent history. Furthermore, he has never resolved the inherent contradiction between his so-called “compassionate” spending policy and his small-government tax policy (which was ostensibly designed to “kill the beast” of Big Government once and for all, according to the President’s conservative apologists). And his casual dismissal of the remnants of civilian authority in the Gulf basin – “It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces — the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment’s notice” – evokes something more along the lines of Mussolini-style fascism than any coherent, mainstream conservative, philosophy.

[…]

The reconstruction of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama provides a fascinating picture of how the Bush administration actually works. His government represents an odd melding of corporatism and cronyism, more in tune with the workings of 1930s Italy or Spain. In fact, if one looks at fascist regimes of the 20th century, it is appears that the Bush administration draws more from these sources than traditional conservatism. Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism – Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights – Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause – The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military – Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism – The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media – Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security – Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are intertwined – Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is protected – The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is suppressed – Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts – Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment – Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption – Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections – Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

(Source: The Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism, Dr. Lawrence Britt, Spring 2003, Free Inquiry)

Perhaps it is unfair to characterise the Bush Presidency in these terms, because it would imply the existence of a coherent governing philosophy.

Haha.

You cannot help but be struck by the similarities between our current political culture and that description of fascism. It should not be blithely dismissed. If it walks like a duck …

I realize that soldiers have been taking battlefield pictures since the dawn of photography. But I really don’t think we’ve seen the sick combination of sadistic battlefield gore, sexual humiliation and pornography since some very, very bad things happened in Europe in the middle of the last century. That was not mentioned in the list of fascist characteristics, but it was certainly present in the worst fascist governments. (Read about the sexual torture that was done in the Dirty War, for instance.) This melding of sex and violence is not unique, of course, in human psychology. But it is a rare society that officially sanctions its use by the military and an even rarer one that openly celebrates it.

I think the reaction to the stupid torture is an example of the feminization of this country.

[…]

The thing though that continually amazes — here we have these pictures of homoeroticism that look like standard good old American pornography

[…]

And these American prisoners of war — have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture.

[…]

This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?

Update: Great minds and all that. I just noticed that Kevin Drum wrote about this too — and we even used the same headline.
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