Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Spent Capital

I’m Baaaack. Sorry for the interruption in service folks. I’ve been indisposed, but now I’m right as rain and ready to rumble. Or thunder. Or something…

And what do I see first thing? Bush’s Political Capital Spent, Voices in Both Parties Suggest. Sweet.

Two days after winning reelection last fall, President Bush declared that he had earned plenty of “political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” Six months later, according to Republicans and Democrats alike, his bank account has been significantly drained.

In the past week alone, the Republican-led House defied his veto threat and passed legislation promoting stem cell research; Senate Democrats blocked confirmation, at least temporarily, of his choice for U.N. ambassador; and a rump group of GOP senators abandoned the president in his battle to win floor votes for all of his judicial nominees.

With his approval ratings in public opinion polls at the lowest level of his presidency, Bush has been stymied so far in his campaign to restructure Social Security. On the international front, violence has surged again in Iraq in recent weeks, dispelling much of the optimism generated by the purple-stained-finger elections back in January, while allies such as Egypt and Uzbekistan have complicated his campaign to spread democracy.

The series of setbacks on the domestic front could signal that the president has weakened leverage over his party, a situation that could embolden the opposition, according to analysts and politicians from both sides. Bush faces the potential of a summer of discontent when his capacity to muscle political Washington into following his lead seems to have diminished and few easy victories appear on the horizon.

Well, yes. But it’s because he never had any political capital to begin with. This was a big lie, just like the alleged mandate. He had neither. There was just enough of a fading vestige of 9/11 around (and enough of the media’s unctuous sycophancy) to keep a little of that hi-pro glow on the Prez. But he never had a mandate for any of his policies. These guys rode a wave, they didn’t win a landslide.

At some point hype, like helium, dissipates and you are left with nothing but the flaccid balloon. Junior and Rove are not geniuses or political wizards who have reshaped politics in their image. They are the guys who got in on a hummer in 2000 and were in office on 9/11. Period. The only truly impressive legislative victory has been passing massive tax cuts for rich people, which is hardly a difficult thing to ask politicians to do when you also break open the pork barrel and let them gorge on all the pig they can possibly stomach. That’s quite an achievement.

The fact is that Junior has been a lame duck since January 21, 2005. And I believe he’s happy with that. All he ever cared about was getting legitimately elected and doing what his father did not — win a second term. He doesn’t give a damn about legacy. As he famously said, “History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

He’s just going through the motions, like a high school senior who’s already been accepted to college. The Republican caucus is under new leadership — the GOP PepBoys Dobson, Frist and DeLay. I’m beginning to look forward to 2006.

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Give ‘Em An Inch

TBOGG points to this statement by Dr. “Whip It Good” himself:

The rules that blocked conservative nominees remain in effect, and nothing of significance has changed. Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist would never have served on the U. S. Supreme Court if this agreement had been in place during their confirmations. The unconstitutional filibuster survives in the arsenal of Senate liberals.

I assume he isn’t a complete idiot and is just playing to guys like the one who wrote that mess below. Surely he can’t be this stupid. Does he not know that Rehnquist and Thomas were confirmed under Democratic majorities and Scalia with a 98-0 vote?

Democrats confirmed his three ultra-conservative heroes and these are all the thanks we get. Clearly it’s time we stopped doing that. This thing doesn’t exactly go both ways.

The last ultra-liberal on the court was confirmed in 19-fucking-39, for crying out loud — William O. Douglas. The only liberals of the last fifty years have been Brennan, Warren, Blackmun, Marshall, Fortas, and Goldberg. The last of them, Blackmun, retired in 1994.

There are no actual liberals on the court today, ultra or otherwise. Stevens, Ginsberg, Souter and Breyer are moderate place holders under a conservative majority. They are only liberals by comparison to the ultra-conservative triumverate and the conservative twins.

Dobson seems to think that we tried to filibuster his three fave justices, when in fact, we made the terrible mistake of trusting Republicans to be fair, tell the truth and keep their word. A mistake we have, sadly, probably just made again. Not that any of our choices are very good. We really needed to win that last election.

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You’re Going To Love This One

From my right wing e-mailer:

STEM CELLS AND LIBERALS

Firstly, we might thank the South Koreans for stem cells since they seem to be leading the way. If a loved one is saved from a slow horrible death by stem cells you might also thank conservatives since they saw fit to invade South Korea and save it from the Liberal Communists. Instead of starving to death under big government, the freedom loving South Koreans are now inventing stem cells to save your life. Oh how it must kill the cowardly liberals to see it.

As for the slippery slope objections raised regarding stem cells, one has to wonder, since every slope is slippery and everything is on a slippery slope. We have a well respected Constitution that has kept everything nicely balanced on the slippery slope for 200 years. We have a huge military, 1000’s of local police forces as well as about 22 Federal police forces, The Social Security Administration, an ever growing Federal Budget, the Supreme Court, labor unions, Congress, a one man Executive Branch who can take us to war with the phony Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or a phony search for weapons of mass destruction, but through it all our remarkable Constitution has kept power sufficiently divided so that our country has not fallen prey to many of the evils that had afflicted every society before it, throughout all of human history. And, as if that has not been enough, we have even created and preserved the freedom that much of the rest of the world enjoys.

In comparison to all the evil that might have afflicted us, stem cells seem like a trivial threat, but an incredibly huge potential benefit. The threat is that one day we’ll take stem stem cells from older and older embryos or even full grown human beings who are raised for spare parts or even as alter egos. The benefit is that stem cells might cure every sickness on earth. It might save billions of lives from death and excruciatingly painful illness! That this is a good thing ought to be the most painfully obvious thing in the world. If it isn’t obvious, it will be when they or a loved one is dying, at least to about 99% of us in that position.

Perhaps it feels like a threat to many because it is too good to be true; it is a threat to normalcy because eternal life removes too much of the normal burden of everyday life? Indeed, life would be totally redefined. Everything could be put off till tomorrow, but every goal could eventually be reached too. It scares the religious right to death given that their religion was conceived of at a time when science was not. Or, could it be that science, with its nuclear bombs, global warming, genetic technology, and abortions is merely the weapon with which we will finally manage to destroy ourselves as per biblical prophecy?

In any case we face an inevitable brave new world. The immediate problem in which is that you have to kill the embryo to get the stem cells. Never mind that the embryo was scheduled to be killed anyway, or that nature aborts most pregnancies spontaneously, or that we kill 40 million dogs from neglect every year or kill 100 million cows each year all of whom seem far more human than a few embryonic cells too small to even see. Yet to abortion opponents harvesting these stem cells is close to an abortion since there is an embryo or embryo like thing dying in each case.

In reality it is not an embryo since it has been especially prepared by removing genetic material from the mother (egg donor) to be replaced by genetic material exclusively from the patient who wishes to be cloned, or to merely harvest stem cells that eventually can replace damaged cells in his or her own body. The embryo is not put in a human womb or incubator where it might develop into a human being, although one assumes that it will be possible to do so in the very near future.

Personally, seeing an embryo meet its end this way, not even considering the incredible possible benefits, is less troubling than seeing a live lobster being dropped into a pot of boiling water, or a puppy dog being tossed into an incinerator, which we do and ignore millions of times each year.

But, in 100 years when each of us can whip up a nuclear device, weaponized anthrax, and a clone of ourselves that will live forever, sophisticated liberals might well wish quaint religious little old Bush had been taken more seriously. This seems especially true given that today’s liberals don’t have the brains or the guts to go to the Axis of Evil to take away the very deadly, but still very rudimentary, technology that they are manifestly far too immature to handle. Today’s liberals are failing brave new world kindergarten badly.

My own view is that the brave new technological world is inevitable, possibly very beneficial, but catastrophically dangerous as long as cowardly and dumb liberals are involved in the management of it.

This is the problem we face, ladies and gentlemen. Better learn to put on better show because reason is clearly inoperative.

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Changing Their Tune

It appears that the word has gone forth. The GOP voices of God have said “ye shall spin it as a win.”

Sam Rosenfeld at TAPPED quotes Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council:

“… Majority Leader Bill Frist has displayed extraordinary patience and determination in the face of liberal obstinacy. We commend him and stand with him in his effort to end the obstruction and move forward with the task of restoring a judiciary that will interpret the Constitution, not legislate a liberal agenda for the nation.”

Rosenfeld comments:

That’s a lot of backpedalling for one day. Not only did the agreement go from “ignoble” to “long-overdue,” but the Frist commendation went from muted to slavish. These religious-right powerbrokers are some real tough guys. We’ll wait to see how the base they speak for reacts in the coming weeks and months. Far be it from me to call them easily led…

I’m surprised it took them so long to get with the program.

Has anyone heard Rush today? Is he still pissed or has he been “persuaded” that the Republicans are the winners in this deal?

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Talking Our Game

Oh how I wish I weren’t so busy right now so that I could spend all of my time parsing the filibuster deal and thrilling my readers with my insights. Luckily, everybody else is doing it so I don’t have to.

There are a couple of points that I’d like to highlight, however. I think Dwight Meredith has the right of it in how low or high the bar has been set with Janice Rogers Brown. It’s actually a little bit more complicated than it seems at first glance.

On another point, I recognise that the right being upset and screaming about this is nothing unusual — they love to be victimized — and it doesn’t indicate that we actually won anything. In the post below, I was referring to the optics of the deal; as long as the right is screeching about this as a sell out and a Democratic victory there is good reason to think that many average folks will come to believe that it is so. The right wing noise machine bleeds into the discourse whether we want it to or not. This is one instance where we want it to.

According to Dobson and Weyrich, the Dems thrust their big swinging man(and woman)hoods at John McCain and they won. This is something we want the American people to think we are capable of. Remember, we are the party that is losing white males by the bucket load. It’s this kind of thing that may release them from their adolescent “manly” impulse to side with the alleged tough guys on the right against their own best interests.

The fact is that on the substance, this deal is a compromise that cuts both ways. That’s what compromises usually do. But for Democrats, who have virtually no power anyway, it is as important to be seen as strong and resolute as it is to actually win. The game we are really playing is for 2006. Because let’s face it, this is a Republican majority government and they can, if they really want to, do any damned thing they please whether we like it or not.

The far right and religious fanatic base is not going to convert to the Democratic party. We need to prove to the moderates, independents and western libertarians that we are tough enough. If James Dobson and Rush Limbaugh want to portray us as dragon slayers, more power to them. They have a big microphone. Let them use it to shout to the world about the big meanie Dems and the sniveling cowardly Republicans who buckled under to them. Works for me.

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Live To Fight Another Day

My first reaction to the nuclear fizzle was disappointment, partially I admit, because I thought this was a very clever opportunity for Democrats to do the single most important thing they have to do improve their image with the public — stand up for themselves and show some guts. The “optics” of this were sufficiently murky to make that a risky play, but I felt that we had nothing much to lose. As the Milquetoast Party, anything that shows our willingness to stick together, act on principle and face down the Republicans is indisputably a good thing. This deal doesn’t exactly get that done, I’m afraid.

On the other hand, the way the wingnuts are whining and blubbering, it did, so maybe that’s all that matters. I’ll be very interested in hearing what Rush has to say today. If he’s gotten the word to spin this their way, that dynamic will change forthwith. The right prefers the fight so their first instinct when denied one is petulance. But they’ll fall into line if their voices from God tell them to.

My only question going forward is this: if Janice Brown is not considered to be an “extraordinary circumstance” then who in the world could Bush possibly nominate who would be worse? Ann Coulter? (She does, after all, call herself a constitutional scholar.) I’m not sure that there are any judges who are to the right of Brown or who express more hostility not only to the constitution but to the enlightenment thought that guides it. The only thing absolutely worse would be to put an Islamic fundamentalist on the supreme court.

I suppose that they may have made some sort of informal agreement as to what constitutes a circumstance more “extraordinary” than this, but I don’t know how much trust I would put in such a thing. If Brown, Owen and Pryor are confirmed, the bar has been set very, very low. It’s hard to imagine how Bush could come up with anyone even less qualified or philosophically unacceptable than that, but they seem to be able to find the worst judicial freaks in the country so maybe they’ve been holding out on us. It also pays to remember that Earl Warren wasn’t even a judge before he became Chief Justice. Bush could name James Dobson if he wanted to.

In the end, politically, I think the filibuster showdown is a wash. The Republicans didn’t get to turn the Senate into the House of Representatives but they will get three unabashed idiots, racists and pre-modern troglodytes on the federal bench. It could have been worse.

More importantly, the fascist element, led by Dick Cheney, was denied the opportunity to flush another little piece of of our system of government down the toilet as a fun exercise of pure power. Each time these bastards rip out another bit our of the constitution or “change the rules” to favor one party government or “reinterpret” the law to favor Republicans, we move one step closer to a country that we will soon not be able to recognise as the one in which we grew up.

This action put that day off — in the case of the nuclear option, maybe forever. That’s a good thing.

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Stem Sell

“I made it very clear to the Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayers’ money to promote science which destroys life in order to save life is – I’m against that. And therefore, if the bill does that, I will veto it.”

Just in case you are confused, using taxpayers money to destroy this life in order to save lives is evil:

But using taxpayers money to destroy this life in order to save lives is good:

It looks to me as if the best way to convince Bush and his followers to support stem cell research is to propose that we only use arab embryos.

Via Suburban Guerrilla

Update: Apropos of this subject, Kevin at Catch points to this article By Sidney Schanberg from last week.

Warning: more sad (or in the words on one commenter, “tasteless”) pictures. Violent death, I agree, is quite tasteless. The death of a bundle of human cells, not so much. It’s unfortunate that one has to illustrate the difference so starkly but in America today it’s clearly necessary.

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Pulpified

If you are having trouble staying awake this morning, read this account in the New York Times about how the US forces beat prisoners to death in Afghanistan; you will possibly never sleep again. Apparently, they commonly used what is known as a “common peroneal strike” – a potentially disabling blow to the side of the leg, just above the knee. They did this so often to certain prisoners within a short period of time (mostly just to hear them scream — it was funny) that they developed blood clots from the injuries and died. The tissue on their legs, as the coroner described it, “had basically been pulpified.”

As we already know from the stories in Guantanamo, many of the prisoners were sold or turned over to the Americans by Afghan warlords with an agenda. They were not guilty of anything:

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar’s face.

“Come on, drink!” the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. “Drink!”

At the interrogators’ behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

“Leave him up,” one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

Read the whole article. This man’s story is relayed in full detail as well as others who were kicked in the genitals, arms chained to the roofs of their cells for days on end, threatened with rape and other “interrogation techniques.”

The main unit consisted of body builders who were called “the testosterone gang.” They decorated their tents with the confederate flags. There seems to have been almost no supervision of the 21 year olds who were “leading” interrogations. These guys were not a bunch of scared kids on the front lines fighting for their lives. They were a bunch of guys just “blowing off steam.” I’m sure Rush would just love to have been there. They were having quite the party.

Some of the same M.P.’s took a particular interest in an emotionally disturbed Afghan detainee who was known to eat his feces and mutilate himself with concertina wire. The soldiers kneed the man repeatedly in the legs and, at one point, chained him with his arms straight up in the air, Specialist Callaway told investigators. They also nicknamed him “Timmy,” after a disabled child in the animated television series “South Park.” One of the guards who beat the prisoner also taught him to screech like the cartoon character, Specialist Callaway said.

Eventually, the man was sent home.

There’s some South Park Republicans for you.

Perhaps most tellingly, the soldiers felt they were justified in beating and torturing prisoners because the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, had declared that the detainees, as “terrorists,” were not covered under the Geneva Conventions. They took the gloves off. Just as their superiors told them to.

Perhaps when Newsweak “takes action” to remedy the damage they caused to US credibility, they can explain this:

With most of the legal action pending, the story of abuses at Bagram remains incomplete. But documents and interviews reveal a striking disparity between the findings of Army investigators and what military officials said in the aftermath of the deaths.

Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan, then-Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said he had no indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to the two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said, were “in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques.”

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Ricky In Paris

I think it’s fairly predictable that we are going to see the 101st keyboarders go into high gear tomorrow in response to the blogstorm developing over Little Ricky Santorum’s Hitler remarks. They are going to bring up Robert Byrd’s previous statements and say that it’s even steven. And the press will probably see it that way as well. Overheated rhetoric, he-said-she-said and all that.

While I agree that it’s probably not a good idea to evoke Hitler on the floor of the senate, I do think it’s fair to take a look at the substance of the two statements by Byrd and Santorum and see if there is any actual merit in either of them.

Santorum said today:

The audacity of some members to stand up and say, “how dare you break this rule.” It’s the equivalent of Adolph Hitler in 1942 “I’m in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It’s mine.” This is no more the rule of the senate that it was the rule of the senate not to filibuster. It was an understanding and agreement. And it has been abused.

So, Santorum is clumsily blabbering that the Democrats are trying to stop the change of a rule that they’re abusing. Or something. His point is that there was no rule to begin with — it’s an agreement, an understanding — and even if there had been, the Democrats violated it by abusing it.

Santorum, of course, is speaking out of his ass. Norm Ornstein has definitively written about this. The Republicans are breaking the rules.

To make this happen, the Senate will have to get around the clear rules and precedents, set and regularly reaffirmed over 200 years, that allow debate on questions of constitutional interpretation–debate which itself can be filibustered. It will have to do this in a peremptory fashion, ignoring or overruling the Parliamentarian. And it will establish, beyond question, a new precedent. Namely, that whatever the Senate rules say–regardless of the view held since the Senate’s beginnings that it is a continuing body with continuing rules and precedents–they can be ignored or reversed at any given moment on the whim of the current majority.

Santorum is full of shit and everybody but the theocrats and the press knows it. Even Ricky. His analogy is wrong. The correct analogy to this situation would be if the French said to Hitler, “We have a treaty, you can’t bomb our cities. You can’t invade Paris!” Which they did. And he invaded anyway. I think you can figure out who represents the French and who represents Hitler in our little senate passion play.

Which brings us to Byrd:

But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that “Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact.” And he succeeded.

“Hitler’s originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.”

And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate.

That is correct. Hitler didn’t defy the rules or the law. That’s one of the hallmarks of the totalitarian state. They always operate within the law. They just make sure the law confers upon them absolute power, that’s all.

So, we have both Byrd and Santorum making references to Hitler as regards this rules change. One is barely comprehensible and posits an absurd analogy to Democrats being Hitler in Paris. The other quite astutely points out that these arbitrary rules changes to advance the power of one party are not without precedent. Indeed, Hitler was a master at it.

I suppose that Hitler references are always going to cause a stir. But, aside from the sheer glory of Byrd’s rhetoric compared to Santorum’s incomprehensible blubbering, there is a serious point to be made. When one party is acting in ways that seriously draw the comparison, maybe it’s fair to look at the substance of the charge. The fact is that while this rule change may not be the end of the world, it is another in a long line of pure power plays on the part of the Republicans who show no signs of having any limits. I know it’s not nice to bring up the H-word, but if the shoe fits…

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Downing St Revelations

I suppose that I understand to a certain extent why the press is so disinterested in the Downing Street memo. It’s because they think that the memo merely says the US was inevitably going to war as early as 2002 — and everybody already knows that. In fact, we knew it at the time. As Juan Cole documents in detail in this Salon article, Bush and his national security team made it quite clear that they wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11 and launched into high gear to make it happen immediately after. This memo is an official rendering of something that I think the press believes people have absorbed — and assume that the election settled. They’re wrong, but then what else is new?

There are a number of other important revelations in the memo, the most startling being the rather casual acceptance of the need to create the illusion of legality. We knew that going to the UN and dealing with the inspectors were a form of Kabuki on the part of the Bushies, but it’s never been clear before now that they planned it that way. Some of us actually believed that there may have existed a genuine desire on Blair and Powell’s parts to slow down the process and try to persuade the Bush administration to back off under international pressure. Apparently not. Everybody signed on to this egregious scam from the very beginning —- it was always a matter of finding the proper cover. I wonder if the Scowcroft (and Poppy) messages were part of it too?

The Downing St. Memo contains another smoking gun that I haven’t heard anyone mention. It says:

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss [the timing of the war] with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.

I must say that this answers definitively one of the biggest questions I had in the run-up to the war. I had always wondered how, if anyone believed even for a second that Saddam had serious biological or chemical weapons, that we would ever have placed 100,000 American soldiers like sitting ducks in Kuwait over the course of several months before the war. It was an incomprehensible risk, I thought, considering that everyone knew that the war was unnecessary in terms of the terrorist threat. Even Bush couldn’t be that craven and stupid. And he wasn’t. He expected a razzle dazzle military “cakewalk,” not a catastrophic loss of life, and that’s what he got. It seemed clear to me then that we knew with certainty from the start that there wasn’t a serious WMD threat in Iraq.

Most of us have known for some time that the administration cooked the intelligence, although no commission or congressional investigation has been undertaken to determine if that’s the case. (The Silbermann-Robb commission goes to great lengths to explain that this conveniently wasn’t their mandate.) All this nonsense about how the intelligence services “misled” the president is rightly seen a crapola. I do think people assumed, however, that the Bush administration felt they needed to cook the intelligence because they actually believed that Saddam probably had WMD even though they didn’t have the intelligence to support that claim. People thought they had overlearned the lessons of the first Gulf War when the CIA had underestimated Saddam’s capability and they just weren’t taking any chances.

And from a public relations standpoint, I’m sure most people felt it was nonsensical that they would have taken the risk of being shown as complete assholes in front of the entire world with all of their absolute pronouncements of Saddam’s arsenal if they hadn’t legitimately believed that he had one. More importantly, it would have been shockingly irresponsible after 9/11 to expose our intelligence services to the whole world as being completely unreliable if they knew for a fact that there was no real threat. But that’s what they did.

This memo shows that they knew he didn’t have that threatening arsenal and it appears they just didn’t care about the fallout. Clearly they believed they could say anything and get away with it. And they are right. Both Bush and Blair were re-elected despite the fact that they invaded a country to “disarm” it and found out that the country didn’t have any arms in the first place. That should have been a firing offense, but it wasn’t. Now we know they knew it all along.

Who knows if people would have voted differently if they knew that their leaders knew ahead of time that there was no serious threat of WMD? My suspicion has long been that a fair number of voters believed that in spite of all the hoopla about not finding WMD that their leaders must have known something for sure that they couldn’t tell us about. This memo proves that they were right. What they knew for sure was that the country they wanted to attack presented no threat.

One interesting thing in the Cole article that I hadn’t heard before was a reason why Tony Blair went along with all this. It’s just unbelievable:

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Washington on Sept. 20, 2001, he was alarmed. If Blair had consulted MI6 about the relative merits of the Afghanistan and Iraq options, we can only imagine what well-informed British intelligence officers in Pakistan were cabling London about the dangers of leaving bin Laden and al-Qaida in place while plunging into a potential quagmire in Iraq. Fears that London was a major al-Qaida target would have underlined the risks to the United Kingdom of an “Iraq first” policy in Washington.

Meyer told Vanity Fair, “Blair came with a very strong message — don’t get distracted; the priorities were al-Qaida, Afghanistan, the Taliban.” He must have been terrified that the Bush administration would abandon London to al-Qaida while pursuing the great white whale of Iraq. But he managed to help persuade Bush. Meyer reports, “Bush said, ‘I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.'” Meyer also said, in spring 2004, that it was clear “that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn’t be to discuss smarter sanctions.” In short, Meyer strongly implies that Blair persuaded Bush to make war on al-Qaida in Afghanistan first by promising him British support for a later Iraq campaign.

Tony Blair had to make a deal with Bush that he’d support him on Iraq to get him to go after Al-Qaeda. Is there anything more pathetic — and frightening — than that?

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