Media Matters has a run down on debate expectations and clearly, the media have high expectations of George W. Bush in this debate. Across the board they are assuming that he will win with his two-faced, phony folksy ways. After all, they are the ones who decide such things. So, don’t get your hopes up for John Kerry to “win” this debate even if he wins it. The press is in the tank.
On the other hand, I have a feeling that undecideds may be looking for more substance this year than robotic, on-message non-sequitors and they might just find the president’s slouchy, casual style a little bit disconcerting in a time of serious challenges. It’s easy for him to appear in charge and in control when he’s all by himself on a stage. But, when you see him next to someone who has command of the issues and looks straight in the camera and challenges his unresponsive bumper sticker mantras, they may just be surprised. Anything’s possible.
By the way, has anybody noticed that Bush is sounding a little bit spacey on the stump these last couple of days? Maybe he hasn’t been getting enough sleep or enough coffee. His eyes are very puffy. I don’t know what it is, but he doesn’t seem to be himself. Wierd.
Here’s a fun little tid-bit from page 492, just to whet your appetite:
Barbara Bush was more determined than ever to see her daughter re-marry. She believed that only through marriage could Doro and her children find their safest haven. To that end Barbara encouraged Doro to date.
“We spent a weekend up at Camp David with the Bushes….They had two dogs up there at the time and the divorced daughter,” recalled one congressional wife. “Barbara told me she was concerned because Doro had dated Representative David Dreier for a year and he never touched her… ‘Never laid a hand on her,’ said Barbara… I think Doro had better luck when she started dating a democrat.”
Taking Bob Novak at face value (always a dicey proposition) I think we have to conclude that our vaunted resolute, CEO president doesn’t listen to anyone and can’t manage his way out of a bag of pork rinds.
Paul R. Pillar, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, sat down Tuesday night in a large West Coast city with a select group of private citizens. He was not talking off the cuff. Relying on a multi-paged, single-spaced memorandum, Pillar said he and his colleagues concluded early in the Bush administration that military intervention in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility throughout Islam. This was not from a CIA retiree but an active senior official. (Pillar, no covert operative, is listed openly in the Federal Staff Directory.)
For President Bush to publicly write off a CIA paper as just guessing is without precedent. For the agency to go semi-public is not only unprecedented but shocking. George Tenet’s retirement as director of Central Intelligence removed the buffer between president and agency. As the new DCI, Porter Goss inherits an extraordinarily sensitive situation.
What a good idea it is to re-elect a president who is at war with his own State department and CIA in the middle of a national security crisis. This alleged great leader makes enemies of practically everyone he comes in contact with, particularly those who have expertise and knowledge he desperately needs. Harvard Business School must teach some odd management techniques.
For a man who coasted on his daddy’s name until he was fifty four, antagonizing all of America’s allies and half the US government is quite an achievement in just three short years. His family must be so proud. Four More Years!
Sunday’s Washington Post made me suspect that the Bush campaign really does think things are going poorly right now. Why? Because Republicans are starting to make preposterously overconfident predictions of a Bush landslide.
[…]
It’s well-known that Karl Rove believes that swing voters like to vote for the winner. Therefore, one of the central political strategies for Bush has been to create an “aura of inevitability” that, theoretically, will bring people to his side. If everyone believes you’re a political juggernaut, the theory goes, then you will become a political juggernaut.
[…]
The worse things get for Bush, the more likely his aides are to declare that he is invincible. The Bushies are starting to sound like Baghdad Bob, trumpeting a decisive victory for Saddam Hussein as the American military zooms into Iraq’s capital city. Whenever Bush is in trouble, someone—usually Rove—declares that things are going just swimmingly. The most memorable example of this was Bush’s 2000 campaign trip to California to make it look like his election was going to be a walk even though polls showed that the race was a toss-up. Bush also took a day off from campaigning as a sign of confidence in his impending landslide. On Election Day, of course, Al Gore won more votes than Bush did, and eventually Bush won the presidency with only one more electoral vote than he needed to take office.
And, if one were to make the obvious comparison of their political campaign to their military campaign, then we can see this exact same dynamic at work with the war in Iraq. Lots of happy talk about “winning” and “mission accomplished” when the results are anything bit clear.
Let’s keep this in mind as we go forward this next month. Whatever they say is happy horseshit spin from here on out. And the news media is unlikely to help out much. On Inside Politics yesterday, wide-eyed Judy Woodruff was extremely confused when Tad Devine pointed out that her poll was stacked with Republicans. The cable press corpse ranks only slightly above undecided voters and FoxNews viewers for sheer ignorance of current events.
It’s November 2, and the presidential election looks close in Ohio. An army of lawyers are dispatched by the Bush and Kerry campaigns to scour all 11,614 precincts in the state for any hint of voting irregularities. Within hours, both sides have filed competing suits in state courts challenging the standards for counting provisional, absentee, and military ballots, as well as for the use of different voting machines. Within days, Laurence Tribe and James Baker are filing petitions to the Supreme Court, arguing that Bush v. Gore–the case that decided the 2000 election–compels the justices to intervene. The justices, who once confidently predicted that Bush v. Gore would have no effect on future elections, are horrified. Even the Bush v. Gore dissenters are shocked at the mess the decision has created. After all, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called Bush v. Gore a “one-of-a-kind case” as recently as February 2003 in a speech to San Diego law students, adding optimistically, “I doubt it will ever be cited as precedent by the court on anything.”
[…]
Unfortunately, the hopes that Bush v. Gore would fade from memory like an embarrassing dinner guest have proved to be wildly mistaken. And, if the election is close, the nightmare scenario described above seems all too likely to come to pass. During the four years since Bush v. Gore, the case has emboldened political candidates to file a tangle of litigation challenging election procedures in federal and state races–from the recall of Governor Gray Davis in California to the replacement of Senator Robert Torricelli in New Jersey. Moreover, in response to the legalization of politics that has followed Bush v. Gore, Democratic and Republican legal swat teams have been assembled to challenge the results of the 2004 presidential election if the vote in any state proves close enough to provide the margin of victory in the electoral college. And, even if the presidential election is not close, Bush v. Gore will continue to haunt congressional and local elections in November and beyond. “You could have dozens or even hundreds of cases filed on the Wednesday morning after the election,” says Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School. “Given the litigation opportunities in Bush v. Gore, you could have real, real uncertainty for many weeks and months, not only about national elections but about local elections. And it’s likely to get worse.”
If this came from anyone but Rosen I would think it was another of those Greenfield-esque parlor games in which they sit around on CNN for hours at a time in stultifying discussion of bizarre election scenarios that will never happen. But we’d be fools to ignore the fact that Bush vs Gore is a cancer that has the potential to metastisize very rapidly if this election is as close as we expect it to be.
If you haven’t had a chance to read the fascinating in-depth article in Vanity Fair this month about the Florida debacle in 2000, here are the (pdf) links to it— Part one and Part two. It opens with a conversation between two of the Supreme court clerks who seem to have had the exact same opinion that I forcefully espoused at a dinner party during the recount drama (as I imagine many others did throughout the country.)
Shortly after the presidential vote in November 2000, two law clerks at the United States Supreme Court were joking about the photo finish in Florida. Wouldn’t it be funny, one mused, if the matter landed before them? And how, if it did, the Court would split five to four, as it so often did in big cases, with the conservative majority installing George W. Bush in the White House? The two just laughed. It all seemed too preposterous. Sure, friends and relatives predicted that the case would eventually land in their laps, but that was ignorant, naïve talk — typical of people without sophisticated legal backgrounds.
A majority of the justices were conservatives, but they weren’t partisan; mindful of the Court’s fragile authority, the justices had always steered clear of messy political spats. Moreover, the very jurists who’d normally side with Bush were the ones most solicitous of states’ rights, most deferential to state courts, most devoted to the Constitution’s “original intent” and the Founding Fathers had specifically provided that the Congress, not the judiciary, would resolve close elections. To top it off, the Court rarely took cases before they were ripe, and the political process in Florida was still unfolding. “It was just inconceivable to us that the Court would want to lose its credibility in such a patently political way,” one of the clerks recalls. “That would be the end of the Court.”
Boy, was I ever wrong. And as you read the article the sheer partisan nature of the court’s involvement becomes even more obvious than we have previously known. The article goes on to show how Anthony Kennedy, widely considered dumb as a post and obsessed with his own grandeur, had been staffed by the right wing with a cadre of federalist society Hitler Youth who “guided” him the partisan direction Big Tony and the Chief wanted him to go. (Our gal Sandy, it turns out, was in the tank from the get-go.)
The Bush’s petition for certiorari – that is, for the Court to take the case?went initially to Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose task it was to consider all emergency motions from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. For Kennedy, then 64, a man known to relish the pomp and circumstance of the Supreme Court and his own, often crucial role in close cases, weighing such a momentous matter must have been glorious indeed. Batting aside a Thanksgiving Day plea from the Gore campaign to pass on the case, Kennedy urged his colleagues to take it on, suggesting that the Court was absolutely the essential arbiter of such weighty matters. He conceded, though, that Bush faced an uphill struggle on the law. When Kennedy’s memo circulated, one flabbergasted clerk had to track down Justice John Paul Stevens on the golf course in Florida and read it to him over the phone. Under the Court’s rules, Kennedy needed only three votes beside his own for the Court to hear the matter. Quickly, the four others who make up the Court’s conservative block signed on: Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Sandra Day O’Connor.
[…]
As was customary, the Court did not detail how many justices had voted to hear the case, or who they were, and Gore’s lawyers didn’t really want to know. At that point, they felt a certain faith in the institution and in the law: it was inconceivable to them that the court would intercede, much less decide the presidency by a vote of five to four.
As you continue through this article you see that this was the problem for the Democrats throughout the recount period. It wasn’t cowardice, it was a naive faith in the rule of law. It was the last vestige of true, internalized belief that the American legal system was immune from naked, opportunistic partisanship.
Desperate for legal advice, Klain reached out to prominent firms in the capital of Tallahassee. He found little help. “All the establishment firms knew they couldn’t
cross Governor Bush and do business in Florida,” recalls Klain. And so he improvised,
pulling together a team headed by former secretary of state Warren Christopher, now a Los Angeles-based lawyer in private practice. Christopher, Gore felt,would imbue the team with an image of decorous, law-abiding, above-the-fray respectability.
[…]
Unlike Christopher and company, Baker spoke to the press loudly and often, and his message was Bush had won on November 7. Any further inspection would result only in “mischief.” Privately, however, he knew that at the start he was on shaky political ground. “We’re getting killed on “count all the votes,” he told his team. “Who the hell could be against that?”
Baker saw his chance that Thursday, November 9, when the Gore team made a formal request for a manual recount in four counties: Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade. Asking for a recount in these large, Democrat-dominated counties left the Gore team fatally vulnerable to the charge that they wanted not all votes counted, as Gore kept claiming in his stentorian tones, but only all Gore votes. Yet the Bush team knew full well that Gore could not have asked for a statewide recount, because there was no provision for it in Florida law. A losing candidate had 72 hours to request a manual recount on a county-by-county basis or wait until the election was certifed to pursue a statewide recount. The requests had to be based on perceived errors, not just the candidate’s wish to see recounts done. Certainly, Gore chose counties that seemed likely to yield Gore votes. But he chose them because that’s where the problems were.
Proper as this was by Florida election law, the Democrats?strategy gave Baker the sound bite he’d been seeking: Gore was just cherrypicking Democratic strongholds. It was a charge the Bush team wielded to devastating effect in the media, stunning the Gore team, which thought its strategy would be viewed as modest and fair.
Foolishly, Gore thought that being modest and fair still meant something. He was not prepared for a streetfight. And, looking back I realize that I wasn’t either. Like a green youth I didn’t believe they’d actually go that far. Even after the impeachment sideshow, an event that solidified my belief in the lethal, fascistic nature of the modern Republican party, I was not fully prepared for the no holds barred approach they would take in this situation.
It is what led me to the point at which I am able to say without any sense of restraint or caution that I would put NOTHING past them — even a staged terrorist attack. This is because every time I think they have some limits, they prove me wrong. As the old saying goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice…won’t get fooled again….
Gore and his team knew that the Republicans would fight with everything they had, but they still maintained some faith in the legal system to require basic fairness in something this important. And, even the most cynical of us thought that the egos of the Supreme Court justices would never allow them to make a purely partisan decision because history would remember them as whores.
If I had any political idealism left it died on the day that Antonin Scalia stopped judges from counting votes in Florida.
This article shows that fix was in from the beginning. Had Gore audaciously requested a statewide recount he would have been accused of not following the strict laws that required him to show problems in each precinct. It was always headed to the Supremes and once they took the case, the interviews with the Supreme court clerks show that there was never any question about who would win. It was always a decision in search of a rationale.
If Jeffrey Rosen is correct and dozens of lawsuits await filing in close races out there, all based on this ill-considered opinion, then we are likely to see a repeat. After all, the same five vote majority still sits on the court today. And like all the others who voted for this irresponsible, unqualified, incompetent boob in 2000, they are not likely to admit their mistake and vote otherwise this time out.
This time, we must operate on that assumption and prepare for a knife fight — in the courts and in the realm of public opinion. There are no rules other than winning.
I urge you to read the entire article. There is much more about the disenfranchisement of the black community and the shocking actions they’ve taken since then to supposedly update the voting system. (Kevin Drum has more on this latest.) With fine fellows like “Buckhead” working on the wing nut Voter Integrity Project, and Ashcrofts new intimidation tactics, this election could be very, very ugly.
One of my readers, who works at the UN, noticed something unique about George W. Bush’s speech last week.
Evidently, the official UN transcript is the exact speech that Bush read off the teleprompter. My reader says that nobody who works there can ever remember a leader having to have words phonetically spelled out before, as it is here (pdf):
In the last year alone, terrorists have attacked police stations, and banks, and commuter trains, and synagogues … and a school filled with children. This month in Beslan [bez-LAN] we saw, once again, how the terrorists measure their success in the death of the innocent, and in the pain of grieving families. Svetlana Dzebisov [day-BEES-off] was held hostage along with her son and her nephew and her nephew did not survive.
This is the best the so-called greatest nation on earth can do?
Matthew Yglesias makes an interesting observation about this new charge of “emboldening” the enemy by criticising the war in Iraq. As he notes:
Does anyone really believe, after all, that our enemies currently lack for boldness of all things? One can say accurately various nasty things about Osama, his hardened core of terrorists-cum-special-forces, his more conventional guerilla fighters, Zarqawi, al-Sadr, their followers, etc., but one thing they certainly aren’t is some kind of chickenshit force that would be really scary if only they got bolder.
[…]
The notion that the USA could possibly impress these guys with grand displays of machismo is silly. The bad guys here are hard core and that’s just the way it is. A strategy to beat them has to be smart and has to use the many advantages America really does have. Worrying about the other side’s boldness isn’t going to get us anywhere.
And anyway, doesn’t it seem a bit, well…girlie-manish…for our swaggering Crusdader Codpiece to be tremulously waving his hands and shushing his opponents because it might make the nasty terrorists even bolder than they already are? Surely, superheroes such as he are much too strong and manly to care whether the bad guys are emboldened by talk of any kind. Real men say “bring it on,” right?
Clearly, people who are willing to blow themselves up aren’t suffering from a lack of physical courage. That is not the problem. Indeed, until we create a corps of suicide bombers they have the advantage in willing human cannon fodder material. Our military superiority isn’t supposed to be our “courage” and “boldness” it is our international leadership, advanced technology and smart strategy, none of which Junior has employed worth a busted fuck.
This has been part of the fallacy driving Junior’s misbegotten strategy from day one. While it’s obvious that a fair amount of his ridiculous Hopalong Cassidy bullshit was calculated to thrill the rubes here at home, there is ample evidence that many of the starry-eyed neocons truly believed that a thrilling show of Big American Power would snap some of those Ay-rabs out of their little dreamworld and bring them around right quick to the knowledge that they can never win against us, the Ubermenschen.
Having destroyed the Taliban, having destroyed Saddam’s regime, the message to the others is, “You’re next.” Two words. Very efficient diplomacy. ” You’re next, and if you don’t shut down the terrorist networks on your territory, we’ll take you down, too. Is it worth it?” Of course it isn’t worth it. It isn’t worth it for any of them.
You can almost smell the testosterone, can’t you? These guys really believed this Neverneverland nonsense. I’m afraid our Boy King still does.
He’s just being his typical two-faced self bellowing “bring ’em on” one day and then falling over with the vapors the next because Kerry’s words might make the badguys mad. Nothing new there.
President Musharraf is a friend of our country, who helped us capture Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational planner behind the 9/11 attacks. Today, because we are working with Pakistani leaders, Pakistan is an ally in the war on terror, and the American people are safer.
ZAHN: Is the world a safer place because of the war in Iraq?
MUSHARRAF: No. It’s more dangerous. It’s not safer, certainly not.
ZAHN: How so?
MUSHARRAF: Well, because it has aroused actions of the Muslims more. It’s aroused certain sentiments of the Muslim world, and then the responses, the latest phenomena of explosives, more frequent for bombs and suicide bombings. This phenomenon is extremely dangerous.
ZAHN: Was it a mistake to have gone to war with Iraq?
MUSHARRAF: Well, I would say that it has ended up bringing more trouble to the world….
ZAHN: Has that happened in Iraq?
MUSHARRAF: Well, there are difficulties. One can’t predict. Maybe the difficulties are surmounted and then it ends up with a victory, with a success. But, at the moment, we are bogged down, yes, yes indeed….
ZAHN: Do you think that the war in Iraq has undermined the overall war on terror?
MUSHARRAF: It has complicated it, certainly. I wouldn’t say undermined. It has further complicated it. It has made the job more difficult.
America does not create terrorists. But under President Bush, we will defeat them. (Applause.) And we will defeat them where they live and plot and plan so that we do not have to fight them on the streets of our own cities. (Applause.)
The invasion of Iraq was a profound diversion from the battle against our greatest enemy, al-Qaida, there’s just no question about it. The president’s misjudgment, miscalculation and mismanagement of the war in Iraq all make the war on terror harder to win.
Uh Oh.
This is the kind of thing that gives Lil’ Crusader Codpiece a headache and makes him want to drink some choco-milk, eat a PB&J, grab his favorite pilly and go to bed early.
