Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Shave and Appeasement, 6 Bits.

Via Matt Yglesias, I read this post by Julian Sanchez on the Spanish elections and ensuing charges of “appeasement,” by the hysterical gasbags on the right.

Aznar had defended the war in Iraq as measure necessary to “guarantee the security of Spaniards from any internal or external threat,” and his government sought to dismiss claims that a Spanish club was targeted for bombing in Casablanca because of Spanish participation in the war. Meanwhile, PSOE officials had suggested that Spain, Britain, and the U.S. were “kicking a wasp’s nest,” that “the war in Iraq was going to provoke more hatred and rancor and, therefore, the threat of more instability.” Transparently, Aznar was mistaken and the opposition was correct. Are Spanish voters to be tarred as cowards if they now hold Aznar accountable for his miscalculation? A few especially glib commentators have suggested that the Spanish should “blame the terrorists,” not the PP. But why can’t they blame both?

Well, yeah. Aside from it being seriously distasteful, this excessive stomping on the body politic of the site of the worst terrorist attack on european soil tells me the wing nuts are in desperate need of a shave with old Occam’s Razor.

As I noted in a post yesterday on American Street, Mark Kleiman unearthed the shattering news that the turn-out was much higher than usual, probably as a result of the bombings and a desire to show public solidarity. It may be that those non-voters would have voted otherwise, but it may also be that they would have done what most voters in high turnout elections in Spain do, which is vote for the left candidate. It possible that the Spaniards are not, in fact, saying to the world, “We’re askeered ‘o ole bin Laden! Please don’t hurt us again!” They may have just been saying, “I hadn’t been paying that much attention to politics, but I usually back the socialists so that’s who I’ll vote for because I think it’s important in this time of tragedy.” Republicans ought to understand that. It’s how they won the midterms.

On the other hand, the very simplest explanation for why people voted out the party in power is being totally ignored by everyone and it’s a pretty good reason, too.

Man say he tough guy. He big friend of bigger tough guy. Man say his country must do what bigger tough guy say to keep country safe. Many people everywhere say bigger tough guy not know what he doing. Man say “too bad” to people.

Then bad guys blow up trains and kill and wound many. People think, tough guy and bigger tough guy not keep country safe like they say. We no like tough guy. We like other guy who not trust bigger tough guy, like we say. We make him our president.

It is hard to know how people would react in any country to a terrorist attack on the eve of an election. But, is it so impossible to believe that they might just BLAME the guys in charge of keeping the country safe for not actually, you know, keeping the country safe? I realize that this idea that you play into your enemies hands if you change your leadership is understandable to people who also believe that CEO’s should be given huge bonuses when they destroy their companies, but isn’t it a bit much for normal people to adopt this attitude? Surely, even Aeron-chair warriors must acknowledge that sometimes, when a leader fucks up, he needs to be replaced.

Then again, you could conclude that any response to terrorism that isn’t total support of George W. Bush’s policies is appeasement. Here in America it’s clear that if we have no terrorist attacks in the US before November it will be because George W. Bush has kept our babies safe and we must re-elect him. To do otherwise would be appeasement. But, if there is another terrorist attack before November we must also re-elect him because to do otherwise would be appeasement.

And, we must shop til we drop. Not shopping is appeasement, too. As is gay marriage. And tax hikes on the rich. And Janet’s nipple. It’s all pretty much the same thing. Al Qaeda is desperately afraid of Bush’s codpiece. Anything less than total support of it, no matter what, and the terrorists will have won.

Original Sin

I am gratified that Atrios has posted about this book by Alesina and Glaeser that discusses the relationship between race and social welfare. They know their stuff. Buy the book.

I wrote a long and boring mostly unread post about this a few months ago when we were all in the midst of discussing the Dean campaign’s strategy in the south, in which I argued that one simply could not separate race from Americans’ hostility to redistributive economic schemes and government social services. Indeed, they have been intertwined throughout our history. If I may be so bold as to quote myself:

The question has always been, why don’t southern working class whites vote their economic self-interest?

In this paper (pdf) Sociologist Nathan Glazer of Harvard (bio), who has long been interested in the question of America’s underdeveloped welfare state, answers a related question — “Why Americans don’t care about income inequality, which may give us some clues. Citing a comprehensive study by economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth called, “Why Doesn’t the United States have a European-Style Welfare State?” (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2/2001) he shows that the reluctance of Americans to embrace an egalitarian economic philosophy goes back to the beginning of the republic. But what is interesting is that both he and the economists offer some pretty conclusive evidence that the main reason for American “exceptionalism” in this case is, quite simply, racism.

“Racial fragmentation and the disproportionate representation of ethnic minorities among the poor played a major role in limiting redistribution…. Our bottom line is that Americans redistribute less than Europeans for three reasons: because the majority of Americans believe that redistribution favors racial minorities, because Americans believe that they live in an open and fair society, and that if someone is poor it is his or her own fault, and because the political system is geared toward preventing redistribution. In fact the political system is likely to be endogenous to these basic American beliefs.”(p. 61)

Glazer goes on to point out how these attitudes may have come to pass historically by discussing the roles that the various immigrant support systems and the variety of religious institutions provided for the poor:

But initial uniformities were succeeded by a diversity which overwhelmed and replaced state functions by nonstate organizations, and it was within these that many of the services that are the mark of a fully developed welfare state were provided. Where do the blacks fit in? The situation of the blacks was indeed different. No religious or ethnic group had to face anything like the conditions of slavery or the fierce subsequent prejudice and segregation to which they were subjected.

But the pre-existing conditions of fractionated social services affected them too. Like other groups, they established their own churches, which provided within the limits set by the prevailing poverty and absence of resources some services. Like other groups, too, thedependentpendant on pre-existing systems of social service that had been set up by religious and ethnic groups, primarily to serve their own, some of which reached out to serve blacks, as is the case with the religiously based (and now publicly funded) social service agencies of New York City. They were much more dependent, owing to their economic condition, on the poorly developed primitive public services, and they became in time the special ward of the expanded American welfare state’s social services. Having become, to a greater extent than other groups, the clients of public services, they also affected, owing to the prevailing racism, the public image of these services.

Glazer notes that there are other factors involved in our attitudes about inequality having to do with our British heritage, religious background etc, that also play into our attitudes. But, he and the three economists have put their finger on the problem Democrats have with certain white Southern voters who vote against their economic self-interest, and may just explain why populism is so often coupled with nativism and racism — perhaps it’s always been impossible to make a populist pitch that includes blacks or immigrants without alienating whites.

So, we are dealing with a much more complex and intractable problem than “southerners have been duped by Nixon’s southern strategy” or that liberals have been insulting them for years by supposedly devaluing their culture. Indeed, even the nostalgia that Howard Dean professes for FDR’s coalition is historically inaccurate. A majority of whites have never voted with blacks in the south. (In the 30’s, as we all know, southern blacks were rarely allowed to vote at all.) In fact, FDR had an implicit agreement with the southern base of his party to leave Jim Crow alone if he wanted their cooperation on other economic issues. The southern coalition went along out of desperation (and also because they were paying very little in taxes.) But, as soon as the economy began to recover, and Roosevelt began to concentrate on programs for the poor, the division that exists to this day re-emerged.

I quote myself at length here, not because I love the sound of my own words, (although they are delightfully boring yet somehow dull) but because I think this work by Glazer, Graezer and Alesina contains an important insight with which Democrats simply must come to grips if we ever expect to create a government that provides a decent enough safety net to maintain a solid middle class and thus a stable and thriving society.

This ancient attachment to racism in this country is going to finally bring us down if we do not force it out of the body politic once and for all. The need is urgent, not just on a moral basis — the moral case is always urgent — but on a pragmatic, survival basis as well. The American frontier is closed, our total dominance of the world economy is rapidly diminishing and globalization and technology are pressuring the middle and working classes of this country in ways that we are only now beginning to see. This path of ever lower taxes and higher deficits in service of a nonsensical insistence on the ruination of public schools, a refusal to endow universal health care, a systematic destruction of social security and the combined devastation of rolling back workplace regulations while destroying unions is based on a theological belief in unfettered capitalism and American “individualism.” This romantic notion manifests itself as modern Republicanism but, in fact, it is nothing more than the same phony excuse for opportunism and racism that has existed since the founding. (It fueled the more virulent forms of anti-communism, as well.) Unless we commit ourselves to keeping this country’s education and health care systems secure, ensure that workers continue to have the opportunity to thrive and achieve in the workplace and provide a decent safety net for those who cannot work, we are shortly going to find ourselves living in a high tech banana republic.

The power structure of the modern GOP is centered in the south and they cannot achieve victory without it solidly behind them. These studies reveal that there is no mystery as to why its philosophy of low taxes and minimal social services finds such loyalty among people who should logically believe the opposite. Democrats must recognize that this correlation between racism and the resistence to a fair and equitable redistribution of wealth is why populist appeals will not work for us in the south or among other demographics in which this correlation is salient.

And that means we must accept, once and for all, that our commitment to civil rights cannot be separated from our commitment to reasonable taxation in service of a stable society. In our culture they are inextricably bound to one another and we will never achieve one without achieving the other. As I wrote in my earlier post on this topic, racism is America’s original sin. Until we politically and socially emasculate it, we will continue to be shackled by a fantasy of individualism and a Hobbesian worldview that can no longer be ameliorated by an endless frontier or global economic dominance.

The worst impulses of American culture are drawn from racism and those malevolent impulses are taking us into a highly competitive future without a safety net. There might be dumber reasons for a once great society to crumble but I can’t think of any.

Klaatu Barada Nikto

South Knox Bubba finds the Non-Sequitor of the Week, which had me cleaning out my ears when I heard it as well.

BEGALA: Greg, one of the ads concludes with President Bush praising freedom, faith, families and sacrifice. What sacrifice has our president asked of the rich?

MUELLER: I think everybody’s making money right now. We’ve got a Hispanic middle class, “The New York Times” reported about last year. George Bush created a Hispanic middle class.

Maybe the RNC is having a hard time recruiting talking heads or something but I’m hearing an awful lot of this kind of bizarre blather lately. I hear Ann Heche is available. She speaks fluent Martian.

Bad Hostess Behind Bars

On Friday, a jury convicted Martha Stewart of lying about a 2001 stock sale in which her broker gave her insider information concerning pharmaceutical maker ImClone. On Saturday, the media was saturated with coverage of the verdict–coverage that perpetuated the oft-repeated canard that the Stewart case was somehow an example of corporate wrongdoing. Meanwhile, in a real case of alleged corporate wrongdoing, Bernie Ebbers, the disgraced former WorldCom CEO, and Scott Sullivan, the company’s head accountant, were indicted last week in the largest case of accounting fraud in the country’s history. But those developments ended up serving as the week’s undercard to Stewart’s featured event–obscuring the fact that the two cases have little in common, and that the WorldCom case is far more important.

…apparently hungry for sensational news, many of the country’s leading media outlets failed this weekend to explain the distinction. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called Stewart the “highest-profile figure in a procession of corporate scandals that emerged after the tech stock boom-and-bust of the 1990s.” The Los Angeles Times described her as “the first major figure convicted by a jury in the wave of corporate scandals.” And The New York Times called her “the latest and most prominent executive to be convicted since a wave of corporate scandals unfolded with the collapse of Enron.”

So-called “celebrity justice” features have long been a staple of tabloid journalism, but since the O.J. Simpson trial, the media has increasingly treated those cases as hard news…The Times and other upper-tier papers–which ostensibly shun “celebrity justice” news but were unwilling to miss out on the Stewart story–developed a narrative that made no distinction between Stewart’s trial and the cases of Ebbers, Lay, and Rigas.

TNR goes on to say “it was a clever way for “serious” papers to get in on a piece of the Martha action–and also retain their respectability,” and how this may result in less scrutiny for the more important Worldcom and Enron trials. The public, suffering from corporate scandal fatigue after Martha will feel that justice has been served and are no longer interested. Sadly, they are probably right.

But, I’ve always wondered why Martha became such a top tabloid story in the first place. She’s famous, but that’s not the most important element in a tabloid story, certainly not one that garners the kind of wall to wall coverage this one’s gotten the last few days.

In order for it to be a truly fine tabloid story it must feature sex or violence, preferably both, neither of which were present in the Martha trial. But, when I watched the week-end coverage I realized where the tabloid element of this story lies. It’s the prurient vision of Martha Stewart in a woman’s prison, surrounded by tough, tattooed, hardened criminals. Seriously. I must have heard dozens of comments like:

“What will it be like for Martha behind bars, will she be kept from the general prison population for her own safety?”

“Martha will be serving time with the type of women she normally doesn’t invite to her dinner parties in Connecticut.”

“The women in those prisons probably don’t think much of Martha’s decorating tips.”

“Martha’s going to need to learn how to negotiate with women who don’t wear aprons and get 300 dollar haircuts.”

Now, it’s obvious that there are quite a few misogynist men who simply think the uppity business bitch must be shown her place. And, among many women there seems to be a strong resentment of her cold perfectionism. I don’t pretend to understand why she evokes such strong feelings in some people.

But, the tabloid media interest in the story became clear as the week-end went on. They are aroused and tittilated by the idea that Martha Stewart could be forced to endure some sort of prison violence, sexual or otherwise. The gleam in their eye as they speculated about her fate was very revealing. Corporate wrongdoing never made these vultures so breathless and flushed.

Our press corps seems to suffer from a strange form of mass sexual neurosis. I don’t know why, but time after time they act out a twisted form of immature sexuality when covering certain public figures who apparently confuse them in some way. They really need to talk to somebody about this. This is the kind of thing that can lead people to do bad things and then who knows what could happen? Kelly Arena could find herself in a woman’s prison, scantily clad and vulnerable, at the mercy of Big Mama, the ex-Hell’s Angel and leader of the cell block who likes to “initiate” all the new girls….

Ad War

With all of this hoopla about the president’s ad campaign, I am grateful that Matt Stoller at BOP news, found this great resource at the Museum of the Moving Image called The Living Room Candidate, which shows political TV ads going back to 1952. If you have time, you should look at all of them.

I was particularly fascinated by the

1992 Election Page which showed a Bush Sr ad campaign that was almost entirely based on character assassination. Trust, trust, trust. Character, character, character. Lots of “man on the street” interviews with average Americans saying “there’s just something about him I don’t trust.”

I wouldn’t be surprised to see a reprise of this campaign. It’s what these guys do. Just check out 1988, if you want to see more (and also dispell the idea that Dukakis never fought back. He did, but he didn’t attack back, he defended. That’s the difference.)

Anyway, thanks to Matt for the link. It’s a fascinating site.

All The World’s A Stage

Ellen Goodman asks:Presidential election or casting call?

I have long believed that it is a casting call. Just as I think, sadly, that for many people 9/11 and Iraq are now seen as reality TV shows from last season. Kind of like Survivor. The question in this election is whether they want to watch the re-runs.

It’s a little bit much, however, that a member of the fourth estate would act surprised by this. After all, Goodman and her ilk cover politics and news events as if they were television shows, critiquing the “performances” of the players, even (especially) themselves, and look at all events through the lens of a pre-ordained narrative.

The president of the United States plays the role of a cowboy rancher when he can’t ride a horse and didn’t buy his “spread” until he was running for president. He lands in a fighter plane on the deck of an aircraft carrier, prances around in a skin tight jumpsuit and the press never bothers to correct the erroneous impression that he actually flew the plane.

Why in the hell shouldn’t the Democrats get a little of that action too? If we are casting the role of “President” I’m definitely going for the face that belongs on Mt Rushmore rather than the one that appears on the cover of MAD Magazine.

This is the way it is, boys and girls, and while I’m not thrilled, I think it’s long past time that Democrats got with the program. The TV program.

Smite Me

Josh ‘n Matt are all shocked ‘n shit that the Bush administration is reportedly blocking an Israeli pullback from Gaza until after the elections.

I guess they forgot that our esteemed leader informed the players long ago that he was on a tight evil-smiting schedule and they had to move fast:

“God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me, I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.”

Mideast peace will just have to wait. The elections have come and God has told him to strike the Democrats. He has no choice. He’ll get back to them next December after he smites the sodomites and takes a little R&R in Crawford.

Naderama

Over at Pandagon: Kerry vs. The Extremists, Ezra very wisely points out that Nader is probably not someone to be ignored, no matter how much we might like to. As I wrote last week, I think we ignore him again at our peril.

For some reason I’m reading a lot of overly optimistic commentary about this election that strikes me a naive. We have a good chance to win, but there is absolutely no reason to assume that it’s a slam dunk, either on the basis of poll numbers, money or enthusiasm. Both sides are loaded for bear. The smart move is to assume that this election is going to be very close and strategize accordingly.

I know that people don’t want to hear this, but Uncle Karl has a mountain of money and this being America, that mountain of money is power. And they’re not just using it for ads; they are building a turn-out operation the likes of which we’ve never seen. He has the power of his office to get Judy Botox to cut away at a moments notice to cover his boring flag draped stump speech every single day, replete with canned cultlike shrieks of approval and hand picked children of color. He can control world events in ways that we don’t even want to think about. Incumbency is very, very powerful.

All this means is that despite the fact that he is a manipulable moron and a demonstrable failure, he’ll be able to command the loyalty of his 45 percent no matter what he does. And, if they play their cards right he’ll get a few dumb swing voters who think they are watching American Idol.

Ralph is polling right now at 6%. I’m sure that’s too high and he’ll come nowhere close to that. But, he will continue to cause trouble and he’ll continue to have salience with some who might otherwise be persuaded to vote for Kerry on idealistic grounds. If this election is close — and I believe that we should plan for it to be — then it is important to deal with Ralph. If we are going to fight for every vote, all the way down to the precinct level, it’s foolish to ignore someone who could possibly get half a million votes, a fraction of which could make the difference.

Ezra’s advice is for Kerry to use Nader as a liberal foil. That was my first thought as well. It can only help Kerry look more moderate for Nader to be in the race. The strategy here is that we could possibly get more swing voters by running against both Nader and Bush as extremists.

On the other hand, maybe we could try to convert the Naderites. They were impossible to deal with during 2000, but perhaps we are dealing with a different phenomenon this time. It may be that they could be persuaded with a better knowledge of John Kerry’s history of fighting the Republican proclivity for supporting death squads and arming dictators around the world. And maybe if they knew that Kerry was the reigning expert (and senate prosecutor) on the single most corrupt multinational, bipartisan big money scam in history, BCCI, they might be persuaded that he isn’t such an establishment tool after all.

Of course, Nader supporters generally demand that a politican be a sort of Knight errant, pure of heart and spirit in every way. So, perhaps the best way to deal with this problem would be to expose their candidate to the same harsh spotlight they shine on Democrats. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it might be effective.

Josh Marshall quoted a Gore insider friend of his as saying:

We took Nader too lightly in 00. We didn’t challenge him. We didn’t point out his sizable personal fortune, his complete lack of assistance on any environmental cause for decades, his sources of funding. Oh progressives do not make this mistake twice in your lifetime or Nader’s.

Whether that would convert any votes to Kerry, either swing voters from the middle or shocked and disappointed Naderites from the left, is another question. And that is the question that must be answered.

There are ways to deal with Ralph. But we must deal with him. We can’t afford to leave anything to chance.

Passionate Denial

Bob Sommerby is defending “The Passion” this week and I don’t have a lot to say about it because I haven’t seen, and have no intention of seeing, the film. However, I do find it interesting that Sommerby quotes Gibson as saying unequivocally that, contrary to his father’s views, he is not a Holocaust denier:

SAWYER: In that New York Times Magazine interview, [Gibson’s father] seemed to be questioning the scope of the Holocaust, skeptical that six million Jews had died. So what does Gibson think?

GIBSON: Do I believe that there were concentration camps where defenseless and innocent Jews died cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do, absolutely. It was an atrocity of monumental proportion.

SAWYER: And you believe there were millions, six million?

GIBSON: Sure.

SAWYER: I think people wondered if your father’s views were your views on this.

GIBSON: Their whole agenda here, my detractors, is to drive a wedge between me and my father. And it’s not going to happen. I love him. He’s my father.

To be clear, Sommerby was responding to a correspondent who wondered why nobody had ever asked Gibson right out if he was a Holocaust denier. He isn’t trying to defend Gibson’s views, per se, although he does say that he didn’t find the film anti-Semitic.

Again, I haven’t seen the movie so I have no idea if it is or not. But, I did happen to read this Peggy Nooner interview with Gibson in Reader’s Digest while I was standing in the grocery store line and his answer was just a little bit more “nuanced”:

PN: I read that your father has some very conservative religious beliefs and that he has questioned some of the accepted versions of the Holocaust.

Gibson: My dad taught me my faith and I believe what he taught me. The man never lied to me in his life. He lost his mother at two years of age. He lost his father at 15. He went through the Depression. He signed up for World War Two, served his country fighting the forces of fascism. Came back, worked very hard physically, raised a family, put a roof over my head, clothed me, fed me, taught me my faith, loved me. I love him back. So I’ll slug it out until my heart is black and blue if anyone ever tries to hurt him.

PN: The Holocaust happened, right?

Gibson: I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. World War Two killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds to me like a guy who doesn’t think that the systematic genocide of Jews in WWII was much of a big deal. Moreover, like his father in the New York Times Magazine article that Sawyer references, he is clearly questioning the “scope” of the Holocaust. He even has some handy statistics to back him up as if he’s given it quite a bit of thought and has made the point before.

“Some” Jews were killed in concentration camps, sure. War is hell. Atrocities happen. What a bummer.

I can’t say absolutely that he is anti-semite based on this comment, but it’s not much of a stretch to make that assumption. No matter what, however, it’s probably a mistake to be too awfully impressed with his theological scholarship. The guy is clearly a cretinous airhead.

“Narrowin’ the Noose”

I have been on the case of this little group of Bush administration dirty tricksters called the Office of Global Communications(OGC) formerly the Coalition Information Center (CIC), for over a year and when the Plame thing was first revealed, this guy, Jim Wilkinson, was who I first suspected. When the story first leaked last July, I wrote:

It would be very wrong of me to speculate wildly that the infamous smear operation of the South Carolina primary that is now working right in the White House “communications shop” could possibly be behind this (or, more trivially but just as telling, behind the Drudge Report expose of the “Gay Canadian” reporter.)

[…]

I’m certain that these same people who now work extremely closely with George W. Bush and his advisors would never resort to such dishonorable and undignified behavior in the sacred office of the President of the United States. It’s merely a coincidence that the tactics are so very similar.

According to Newsday today:

Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

So, it now turns out that the “Iraq Group,” the supervisory marketing arm of the Iraq march to war is in the sights of the Plame grand jury. Jim Wilkinson is the one member of the administration who is simultaneously a member of the OGC and the Iraq Group.

The thing to remember about both the OGC and the Iraq Group is that they are not just spin artists. They are propagandists. They were very involved with Alisdair Campbell in the “sexing up” of the WMD threat, so it will be very interesting to see if these documents are turned over without a lot of national security hoo-hah.

There is a big story in those documents, perhaps much bigger even than Plame, although the subpoenaes are only for July 2003 so they won’t reveal the really interesting stuff about the blatent WMD lies. Because, not to go into too much tin-foil hat territory, there is a very interesting story to be told about the unprecedented “PR” sell-job that the White House coordinated to convince the American (and British) people that Saddam was a “grave and gathering” danger.

Many of you have probably read the paper written by Sam Gardiner, the retired colonel who taught at the National War College, the Air War College and the Naval Warfare College ( in PDF here) in which he claims to have found more than 50 instances of demonstrably false stories planted in the press in the run up to the war and charges the OCG and the Iraq Group as the culprits. This overview of the paper, originally published in The Edge brings up something quite interesting that ties it into the Plame affair:

Colonel Sam Gardiner (USAF, Ret.) has identified 50 false news stories created and leaked by a secretive White House propaganda apparatus. Bush administration officials are probably having second thoughts about their decision to play hardball with former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Joe Wilson is a contender. When you play hardball with Joe, you better be prepared to deal with some serious rebound.

After Wilson wrote a critically timed New York Times essay exposing as false George W. Bush’s claim that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger, high officials in the White House contacted several Washington reporters and leaked the news that Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent.

Wilson isn’t waiting for George W. Bush to hand over the perp. In mid-October, the former ambassador began passing copies of an embarrassing internal report to reporters across the US. The-Edge has received copies of this document.

The 56-page investigation was assembled by USAF Colonel (Ret.) Sam Gardiner. “Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II” identifies more than 50 stories about the Iraq war that were faked by government propaganda artists in a covert campaign to “market” the military invasion of Iraq.

[…]

According to Gardiner, “It was not bad intelligence” that lead to the quagmire in Iraq, “It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war” that was designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner’s research lead him to conclude that the US and Britain had conspired at the highest levels to plant “stories of strategic influence” that were known to be false.

The Times of London described the $200-million-plus US operation as a “meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.”

The multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign run out of the White House and Defense Department was, in Gardiner’s final assessment “irresponsible in parts” and “might have been illegal.”

“Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to the right decisions,” Gardiner explains. Consequently, “Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage.” For the first time in US history, “we allowed strategic psychological operations to become part of public affairs… [W]hat has happened is that information warfare, strategic influence, [and] strategic psychological operations pushed their way into the important process of informing the peoples of our two democracies.”

Joe Wilson apparently knew that this propaganda machine inside the White House had something to do with his wife’s outing if he was handing out this inflammatory report by Sam Gardiner.

It could have been any one of the Iraq Group miscreants who leaked Plame’s identity. I still think that one of them is very likely to have been Jim Wilkinson. He was, after all, privy to the highest levels of information. As Gardiner notes in the paper:

One of the things that struck Gardiner as revealing was the fact that, as Newsweek reported: “as soon as Lynch was in the air, [the Joint Operations Center] phoned Jim Wilkinson, the top civilian communications aide to CENTCOM Gen. Tommy Franks.”

It struck Gardiner as inexplicable that the first call after Lynch’s rescue would go to the Director of Strategic Communications, the White House’s top representative on the ground.

As far as the honor and integrity of these fine people, we have only to look, again, at Jim Wilkinson, strutting around in a phony uniform (just like his boss) who told a member of the press in Iraq:

“I have a brother who is in a Hummer at the front, so don’t talk to me about too much fucking air-conditioning.” “A lot of people don’t like you.” “Don’t fuck with things you don’t understand.” “This is fucking war, asshole.” “No more questions for you.”

Presumably, he toned down his goosestep as he walked away.

Joe Wilson has a new book coming out in May. I can hardly wait.