Marble Composition

The Ground Zero Swimming Pool

2010-09-11T17:07:00.000-05:00

As the ninth anniversary of the attacks on the United States comes to a close, and a small group of lunatics gather to protest a mosque (that's not a mosque) at Ground Zero (though it's not to be built at Ground Zero), I hope going forward we as a people can do a better job of upholding the ideals that our country was founded upon. Our country may be divided right now, but it was never more so than at the beginning of the Civil War, and in his first inaugural address, Honest Abe had a message that should be remembered not just for Americans, but for all the world:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Kissing The Ring

2008-04-04T09:48:00.003-05:00

Rick Perlstein has a great piece in the Nation about conservatives and how they anoint their presidential candidates:

Conservatism is, among many other things, a culture. The most important glue binding it together is a shared sense of cultural grievance--the conviction, uniting conservatives high and low, theocratic and plutocratic, neocon and paleocon, that someone, somewhere is looking down their noses at them with a condescending sneer. And to conservatives, McCain has been too often one of the sneerers. It is, as much as anything else, a question of affect.

It's a bit lenghty, but well worth the time to read. Go here.

Iraq

2008-04-04T09:42:00.002-05:00

Ilan Goldenberg:

So, just so that we’re clear on this. We are building an army full of people who are still getting pension payments from an organization that the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization. And we are basing our entire future in Iraq on that army. Not only that, but when this army decides it’s going to take out its major opponent for power as it did last week, and doesn’t even tell us about it, we still back it up with air power and American troops as it stumbles. And then we tell everybody that this is a good sign.

Go here to see who he's talking about.

McCain's Press Monkees

2008-03-25T18:04:00.003-05:00

In one of the best blog posts I've read all year, Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly gives us a nice rundown of just how much the mainstream media is in the tank for John McCain:

McCAIN'S CRED....Via Steve Benen, MSNBC analyst Chuck Todd tells us why John McCain can get away with routine demonstrations of abject ignorance, like his recent proclamation that Iran is supporting al-Qaeda in Iraq:

Even if he gets dinged on the experience stuff, "Oh, he says he's Mr. Experience. Doesn't he know the difference between this stuff?" He's got enough of that in the bank, at least with the media, that he can get away with it. I mean, the irony to this is had either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama misspoke like that, it'd have been on a running loop, and it would become a, a big problem for a couple of days for them.
Italics mine. Let's recap.

Hit the clicky thing to see how awful it really is.

Meanwhile, Atrios adds some insight and points us to this new book from David Brock and Paul Waldman from Media Matters: Free Ride: JohnMcCain and the Media. Check it out right here.

There's no doubt that McCain will be able to ride this wave to great effect. As for the coverage in the general election, the extent to which the mainstream media will deflect McCain's fuck ups and foibles, while providing just the right kind of puffery when he needs it, will be glaring to anyone interested in looking at this thing objectively.

And, of course, after all the destruction that's taking place on the Dem side, and the hagiographic articles being written for a shifty dummy like Crashy McStupid, the Rubes will go ahead and pull the lever for at least four more years of slaughter and mayhem in Iraq.

God makes me Love the American People. Beer makes me stupid.

Obama's Speech and The Press

2008-03-18T16:24:00.002-05:00

Jay Rosen over at Pressthink notes that parts of Obama's speech were directed right at the mainstream media:

I was watching CNN for Obama’s speech. Moments after it concluded Wolf Blitzer was asked to tell us what he heard in it. Wolf’s ear is the big ear for the Best Political Team on Television, according to CNN. So he went first. And according to Blitzer, Obama’s speech boils down to a “pre-emptive strike” against various attacks that are still to come, in the form of videos, ads, and news controversies that are sure to keep Reverend Jeremiah Wright and “race” in play as issues in the campaign. (I don’t have his exact words; if someone out there does, ping me.)
Wasn’t the speech about that very pattern?
This is a style of analysis—and a level of thought—we have become utterly used to, especially from Blitzer but also many others on TV: everything is a move in the game of getting elected, and it’s our job in political television to explain to you, the slightly clueless viewer at home, what today’s tactics are, then to estimate whether they will work.
That Blitzer, offered the first word on that speech, did the savvier-than-thous, horse race thing tells you about his priorities (mistakenly “static,” as Obama said about Wright) and his imaginative range as an interpreter of politics (pretty close to zero.)

I point this out because this is exactly the kind of vapid horse shit we say every weekend on all of the policitcal chat shows. It's all about the "process", and rarely if ever is there any substantive discussion of a candidate's policies and how they might effect the public.

Jay has more, here.

Obama's Minister

2008-03-18T09:23:00.002-05:00

Here's John Cole on how the Right is reacting to this flap:

But for some reason, I thought religion would be different, but we now see that it is not. According to modern Republican orthodoxy, it matters not that you are a Christian, church-going, tax-paying adult who believes in God and believes in helping his fellow man and engages in widespread charity for those who are not well off. No, according to the new rules, you have to be the right kind of Christian, and all you have to do is have a minister who wears a flag lapel pin and shares your hatred for the gay and has a fetish for the fetus. Watch out, Christians. You need to believe in God, act in a Christian manner, AND have the right kind of counter-tops. You have been warned.

Here's the rest...

Teacups and Scabbards

2008-03-04T23:26:00.002-05:00

This guy will serve you tea, and then fucking Nazi Stab you. And, you probably deserve it...

The New Stupid

2008-03-04T22:14:00.002-05:00

As Bill Maher helpfully reminds us, undecided and independant voters, along with those shifty dullards known as Reagan Democrats, are just a bunch of ignorant idiots. That they might actually know who's running for president is a source of amazement. So, when I read something like this, call me duely unfazed:

Can someone get Huckabee off the stage and end the most painfully embarrassing concession I think I've ever heard? I mean, put him out of my misery. Huckabee seems to have forgotten that this isn't the end of a grand, hard-fought race. It was a farce that everyone indulged because Huckabee's sort of a feel-good wingnut and had a good sense of humor. When he started on to 'Victory or Death' riff at the end I thought he might be about to end with a stunning crescendo of a ritual suicide. But apparently it was Victory or Death (or windy concession speech), the lesser known original version of the line.

And you thought snake oil sales had diminshed after the end of the 19th century? This joker actually vied for the Republican nomination this year. Here's the funny part: the American media treated this freak show like he was sane, and even weirder, important. Apparently he represented the views of a wide swath of Americans who had no voice in this race, so he was presented as their standard barer. The only problem is he's fucking insane. I find it nearly incredible that this country would elect someone as president that is more ignorant than George W. Bush, but the GOP came remarkably close to making this fraud the GOP nominee. I can't wait to see which kind of Dummy they produce for the 2012 contest.

Over to You, Matt...

2008-02-22T16:02:00.003-05:00

Yglesias that is. He writes for the Atlantic Monthly, and he sure has got the GOP nailed down to a "T" here:

This little GOP web video about Democratic unwillingness to agree to the gutting of the constitution is really pretty striking stuff. In essence, the Republicans are placing a heavy political bet on the idea of a terrorist attack happening some time while their "danger" clock is running. If Americans die, they'll be in a position to clean up. Conversely, if we still have some semblance of legal protections against government surveillance months from now and that clock's still ticking even though al-Qaeda hasn't slaughtered any innocents here in the U.S., they're going to look mighty silly.

That's the dynamics of this specific fight but, of course, it's also a microcosm for 21st century politics as a whole. And it's part of what makes the Republican Party, as currently conceived, so incredibly dangerous. Democracy is a highly imperfect method of getting good government. One thing that makes it work better is the general sense that if good things happen to a country, incumbent politicians will benefit from that whereas if bad things happen, incumbents will suffer. That often leads to election results that aren't really "deserved" since Jimmy Carter didn't cause the 70s oil crisis and Bill Clinton didn't cause the 90s tech boom. But it does keep the incentives where they belong -- insofar as things are under the control of politicians, the politicians try to make good things happen.

But not the post-9/11 GOP. Their political meal ticket is a population terrified of terrorism, and nothing whips that terror up quite like actual terrorism in London, Madrid, wherever. The result is a political party that simply can't adopt policies designed to ratchet-down the level of danger and anxiety.

Of course democracy is a messy business. That was sort built into the American version, and it's one of the things I find very endearing about it. That aside, until the GOP figures out that scaring the be-jesus out of everyone doesn't help them win elections, they'll keep at it.

The Beast

2008-02-04T20:30:00.000-05:00

Once a year, The Beast out of Buffalo throws up their 50 Most Loathesome People in America, and it's always well worth a read. You can check it out, here. I always pick through a few people I want to read about, and then I find it's so good I read the whole thing.

Courtesy of Ian Murphy, this is the best illustration of Rudi Guiliani I've ever seen:

Rudy! winds up being #6 on the Loathesome list, and here's what they had to say about him:

Charges: 9/11 Tourette's syndrome, compounded by compulsive lying. Despite the '93 WTC bombing, didn't act to put all first responders on the same radio frequency and chose to house his Emergency Command Center on the 23rd floor of WTC 7. Giuliani Partners consulting firm routinely did business with a Qatar ministry run by royal Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani, a man whose farm has seen guests the likes of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Osama bin Laden. Wooed mistress and future wife with an NYPD chauffeur and trips to Southampton on NYC taxpayers' dime. Ruined the prospect of a Times Square tug-job.

Exhibit A: Stages phone calls from his wife during campaign stops-to show 'em he's got family values. Family values apparently do not include rudimentary put-it-on-vibrate cell phone etiquette. Invoked 9/11 to explain this.

Sentence: Victim of the next 9/11, which consists of two radio-controlled hobby planes smashing into his face.

Of course, we won't have Rudy! to kick around any more...

Trust me, your kids will pay for this...

2007-12-18T21:48:00.000-05:00

By now, the idea that the GOP is the party of "fiscal responsibilty" should be shoveled permanently into the dustbin of history. The evidence is in, and it's now obvious: The Republican party could not care less about the fiscal solvency of the United States. Scott Horton examines the intersection of media affiliation and sound fiscal policy, here. Note also that there is, and should be, a moral compact here. Are we really willing to sit by while we shovel all this debt onto our children and grandchildren? It represents gross irresponsibilty.

A war is waged. And then another. And then a proxy war or two or three. But under George W. Bush, war entails no sacrifice for the people. Why if it did, the people might actually awaken from their stupor and ask questions about the war. James Madison was adamant, and he was joined on this by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington—each generation must bear the costs of its own wars. It is the gravest irresponsibility to incur long-term debt to fight wars, mortgaging the nation’s future, casting manacles for the coming generations to wear. The Founding Fathers understood a fundamental principle: the moral obligation of those who rule to those who will follow in their wake.
And if there is one single fault of the Bush-Cheney Administration that will haunt it beyond all the others, then it is this: they recognize no duty to posterity. They consume and squander shamelessly. And they mortgage the nation’s future in the process.
Their fiscal conduct matches perfectly their irresponsibility on the premier science issue of our generation: global warming. They repudiated the Kyoto Accords. And in its wake they offered not leadership for the global community, but blissful sleep. Forget about it, they said, this is all a bunch of environmental crazies. And they introduced the new Lysenkoism—pseudoscience that replaced serious science, especially when issues of global warming and profligate consumption of hydrocarbons were on the agenda. Real scientists were ordered to be silent or be fired. Young political hacks were installed within the science agencies as their new voice. The Bush Administration has been the very model of moral irresponsibility.

Head Cheese for the Holidays

2007-12-18T21:38:00.000-05:00

Two books:

Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism - Noami Klein.

The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln - Sean Wilentz.

Yum yum for your mind. Eat!

Jam It...

2007-11-30T20:17:00.000-05:00

If you're not familiar with Charles Pierce, you're missing out big time. He checks in at Eric Alterman's joint every Friday, and it's worth you're three minutes. Regarding Newsweek Editor John Meacham's decision to hire Karl Rove as a political columnist, Charles writes:

So I feel comfortable in saying to the good reverend, in all Christian love and fellowship, that he should take his faith and jam it somewhere sideways. I have faith in my craft, too, and it deserves better than the likes of the Reverend Meacham, who pollutes it by empowering a vicious public liar and heedless political vandal and then wallows in his own public sanctimony like a hog in a vat of syrup.

Go here for the whole deal...

Quote of the Day

2007-11-27T20:23:00.000-05:00

Today, it comes from Kevin Drum over at The Washington Monthly. Regarding the tension in the GOP between the theo-conservatives and the money-conservatives, Kevin writes:

Huckabee's problem is that in the end, in today's GOP, hating unions is more important than hating gays, and eliminating the estate tax is more important than eliminating abortion. Howard Beale would understand.

He sure would...

See This Movie

2007-11-12T19:59:00.000-05:00

May you be in Heaven for half an hour Before the Devil Knows Your Dead...

Dead Blog

2007-11-02T18:15:00.000-05:00

Pretty sad, huh? We'll try to do better. Lots of bloggy goodness where those links are.

Pound That Meme

2007-08-14T19:38:00.000-05:00

Matthew Yglesias, who's an up-and-comer in liberal foreign policy publications, points out one of the fundamental problems with our electorate in this post:

Mark Kleiman points to a real problem, noting the contrast between the attention paid to "Markos Moulitsas's unpremeditated, quickly-retracted dismissal of the deaths of four contract fighters in Iraq" and Stu Bykofsky's publication of a column calling for the deaths of thousands of Americans in a massive terrorist attack in a "large-circulation big-city newspaper and then featured on Drudge and Fox News." Just like Mark, "I don't really wish that we behaved like our wingnut opponents, but their capacity to work up and sustain outrage has to be counted among their structural advantages."

This is what I've referred to as the "hack gap" and it seems to me that it's very important. The nature of two-party democracy is that elections are decided by the small minority of the public too confused or too ill-informed to realize that there are persistent, substantial differences between the two federal political parties. As a result, the issues (or, more likely, pseudo-issues) that are most important in deciding elections tend to be the issues that are least important in substantive terms.
As a writer, though, I'd rather spend my time writing about things that I think are important or at least interesting. Harping away on haircuts, Bykofsky's appalling column, the way George W. Bush lied to the American public about what kind of cheese he likes on his cheesesteak (really!), etc. doesn't seem like an appealing way to spend my time. But the fact that the right has an army of people willing to pretend that this sort of thing is the most important thing in the world is a massive, massive impediment to having sensible policies about national security, taxes, health care, global warming, etc.
[emphasis mine]

It's no mystery why Matt, who's a really smart and thoughtful person, finds writing about trivial horse hockey like the stuff he mentions boring, the problem is it's this kind of shite that decides elections in America.

I'd quibble with his argument that this is the nature of a two party system. It's not. I blame the media on one hand, and the mentally incurious American public on the other. No ones seems to be able to come to grips with the fact that while Americans are good at their jobs, they're basically civic dummies. I'm inclined to think that regular Americans assume that our democracy operates on auto pilot, and that there's no need for them to intervene because the basic structure was so well defined. But guess what? The garden does need tending, and aside from replacing a Rep or Senator here or there, the whole construct is easy to destroy.

American democracy came about at a certain time due to a confluence of events and ideas set in an almost perfect time, enabling it to grow and flourish. Putting the Executive in the hands of despots like Bush, and say, Guiliani, and the whole slips rather easily into just another example of failed statehood. Having complete idiots casting votes doesn't help.

p.s., his reference to Bykofsy's op-ed is here. This guy wants another 9/11 to "unite us all".

Antonin Scalia: Moron

2007-06-19T16:21:00.000-05:00

He's one of the nine justices on the Supreme Court, and as Steve Benan points out:

Remember, in some legal circles, Scalia is considered one of the giants in conservative intellectual thought.

Good to keep in mind considering what a fucking idiot he is. Let's check in with Andrew Sullivan:

"Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent's rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.
"Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. "Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so.

"So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes."
Earth to Justice Scalia: Jack Bauer does not exist. But the assumption that he does can lead to a lot of unusual places:
"I don't care about holding people. I really don't," Judge Scalia said.

Even if a real terrorist who suffered mistreatment is released because of complaints of abuse, Judge Scalia said, the interruption to the terrorist's plot would have ensured "in Los Angeles everyone is safe." During a break from the panel, Judge Scalia specifically mentioned the segment in Season 2 when Jack Bauer finally figures out how to break the die-hard terrorist intent on nuking L.A. The real genius, the judge said, is that this is primarily done with mental leverage. "There's a great scene where he told a guy that he was going to have his family killed," Judge Scalia said. "They had it on closed circuit television - and it was all staged. ... They really didn't kill the family."
But they pretended to. Am I supposed not to feel shock at this stuff any more? This celebration of lawlessness is not conservative. It's something much more radical.

Maybe this is not conservative in the traditional sense according to Andrew, but it certainly is the face of modern conservatism. It defines them. This is what happens when Republican presidents nominate people with ideological blinders on. This guy is the Sean Hannity of the Supreme Court. Scalia is so lizard-brain driven he's sliced himself off from the ideals that formed this country. This is the New America according to conservatives. To him, torture is justice. File that away...

Hama

2007-06-19T15:33:00.000-05:00

Being a history buff, and an amateur one at best, the name of a city in Syria triggered my memory from the last post: Hama. Fascinating stuff:

Islamists and other opposition activists proclaimed Hama a "liberated city" and urged Syria to rise up against the "infidel". Brotherhood fighters swept the city of Ba'thists, breaking into the homes of government employees and suspected supporters of the regime, killing about 50. The goal of the attack on Hama was to cease the rebellious activities of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. The assault began on February 2 with extensive shelling of the town of 350,000 inhabitants.
[...]
According to Amnesty International, the Syrian military bombed the old streets of the city from the air to facilitate the introduction of military forces and tanks through the narrow streets, where homes were crushed by tanks during the first four days of fighting. They also claim that the Syrian military pumped poison gas into buildings where insurgents were said to be hiding.

Between 10,000 and 40,000 people were killed in the assault on the city. This is the exact strategy our friends on the right have been advocating since the start of the insurgency in Iraq. In short: Kill Them All.

I rather loathe historical and geological comparisons, but let's have some fun anyway. This would be the equivalent of leveling the city of Colorado Springs, CO, here in the U.S. By the the government no less.

Air Strikes

2007-06-19T14:04:00.000-05:00

From William Lind:

Looking idly at the front page of last Wednesday's Washington Post Express as I rode the Metro to work, I received a shock. It showed a railroad station in Iraq, recently destroyed by an American air strike. So now we are bombing the railroad stations in a country we occupy? What comes next, bombing Iraq's power plants and oil refineries? How about the Green Zone? If the Iraqi parliament doesn't pass the legislation we want it to, we can always lay a couple of JDAMs on it.

It turns out the bombed railroad station was no fluke. An AP story by Charles J. Hanley, dated June 5, reported that

"U.S. warplanes have again stepped up attacks in Iraq, dropping bombs at more than twice the rate of a year ago. … And it appears to be accomplished by a rise in Iraqi civilian casualties.

"In the first 4 1/2 months of 2007, American aircraft dropped 237 bombs and missiles in support of ground forces in Iraq, already surpassing the 229 expended in all of 2006, according to Air Force figures obtained by The Associated Press."

Nothing could testify more powerfully to the failure of U.S. efforts on the ground in Iraq than a ramp-up in airstrikes. Calling in air is the last, desperate, and usually futile action of an army that is losing. If anyone still wonders whether the "surge" is working, the increase in air strikes offers a definitive answer: it isn't.

Worse, the growing number of air strikes shows that, despite what the Marines have accomplished in Anbar province and Gen. Petraeus' best efforts, our high command remains as incapable as ever of grasping Fourth Generation war. To put it bluntly, there is no surer or faster way to lose in 4GW than by calling in airstrikes. It is a disaster on every level. Physically, it inevitably kills far more civilians than enemies, enraging the population against us and driving them into the arms of our opponents. Mentally, it tells the insurgents we are cowards who only dare fight them from 20,000 feet in the air. Morally, it turns us into Goliath, a monster every real man has to fight. So negative are the results of air strikes in this kind of war that there is only one possible good number of them: zero (unless we are employing the "Hama model," which we are not).

This will never happen, but I wish someone from the Pentagon press corps would ask General Patraeus about this. This really wreaks of desperation.

Baby Face Finster Cries for Democracy

2007-06-12T20:09:00.000-05:00

Tony Snow, that is. You can watch it here. The quote doesn't do his theatrics justice, but here you go:

Are you saying that detaining people who are plucked off the battlefields is an assault on democracy? Are you kidding me? You're talking about the people who were responsible for supporting the Taliban, somehow detaining them is an assault on democracy?

This phony indignation has now become normal fare. What else would you expect from a Fox News-sponsored shitmouth flak like Tony Snow?

What amazes me is how well this strategy works. The networks go ooh and ahh over some perceived confrontation, the White House Press Secretary provides a gross misinterpretation of the facts, and then clouds the whole issue with his little childish outbursts.

This is classic Anti-Intellectualism at its finest. Get indignant when people raise questions, and then crush them when they actually ask them.

Give 'em Hell, Harry

2007-06-12T16:08:00.000-05:00

I know there are some folks on the left that are not fond of Majority Leader Harry Reid, but count me as a fan. I give you the Honorable Mister Reid:

I’ve learned one thing in listening to all the debates and reading about all these people running for office, and the one fact I’ve learned, I can’t get out of my mind, is that Rudy Giuliani has been married more times than Mitt Romney’s been hunting.

That's how it's done. This crop of moronic Republican presidential candidates deserve nothing but scorn and derision. If I had any advice to give Democratic candidates it would be: Be more condescending.

(via Kos)

MCA

2007-06-09T18:52:00.000-05:00

Scott Horton over at Harper's has written an amazing piece about the military commissions being held down in Guantanamo.

Enlighten yourself, here.

You Should Be Scared

2007-06-06T20:10:00.000-05:00

I'd like to go back to an op-ed piece I referenced before and highlight something that's really important. Two former highly ranked military officers wrote the following in the Washington Post:

The American people are understandably fearful about another attack like the one we sustained on Sept. 11, 2001. But it is the duty of the commander in chief to lead the country away from the grip of fear, not into its grasp.

President Bush recently told NBC White House Correspondent David Gregory the following:

"...But they're dangerous, and I can't put it any more plainly. They're dangerous. And we -- and I can't put it any more plainly to the American people and to them. We will stay on the offense. It's better to fight them there than here.
And this concept about, well, maybe, you know, let us kind of just leave them alone and maybe they'll be all right, is naive. These people attacked us before we were in Iraq. They viciously attacked us before we were in Iraq, and they have been attacking every since. They are a threat to your children, David. And whoever's in that Oval Office, better understand it and take measures necessary to protect the American people."

In my studies of American history, I've never heard a president warn a reporter that a specific group of people are coming to this country to kill his children. Of course, the fear mongering of Bush's administrations, especially the first one, is no secret and has been well documented. Has anyone noticed we don't have a color coded terrorism alert scale anymore? Let's recall that back in 2003 the head of Homeland Security told us we should have duct tape and plastic covering on hand to protect us against chemical and biological weapons:

This includes stashing a three-day supply of water, food and medicine, Ridge said. Among other things, the government-recommended "kit" also includes duct tape and plastic sheeting Ridge said could be used to seal off a room in the event of a chemical or biological release.

"Stash away the duct tape — don't use it!" Ridge said.

Hardly unique, this document provides a blueprint on how Americans can live in constant fear.

Now, because we have Republican presidential debates, fear is back. Because these candidates feel they need to please the 28 to 35% of the public that still approves of the president, they're embracing fear in new way. They need more. Of all of their candidates, former New York city Mayor Rudy Guiliani has grabbed the torch and ran with it:

Look, it's real simple what happened. These people came here and killed us because of our freedom of religion, because of our freedom for women, because they hate us. And all we have to do is look at last week and these people in Fort Dix who are still here planning to kill us, three of them illegal immigrants, the other three here in other ways.

But the reality is, if you are confused about this, I think you put our country in much greater jeopardy. The reality is, these people are planning to kill us because, and this is hard for people to recognize, I usually hear this on the Democratic side. Don't usually hear it on the Republican side. You have got to face reality. If you can't face reality, you can't lead.

He piled on even more in the third GOP debate:

MR. BLITZER: Mayor Giuliani, same question to you. Was it — knowing what you know right now, was it a good decision?

MR. GIULIANI: Absolutely the right thing to do. It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror. And the problem is that we see Iraq in a vacuum. Iraq should not be seen in a vacuum. Iraq is part of the overall terrorist war against the United States.

Facts be damned, the message is clear here: They are coming to kill you.

My question here is: Will any of this work? Can a presidential campaign designed to exploit domestic vulnerabilities succeed in modern American politics? Can fear drive us to elect someone who wants to make us more afraid? These aren't rhetorical exercises; I'm genuinely curious. I'd like to believe Americans are sick of this kind of rhetoric, and will heartily reject it, but I'm not altogether sure.

Imperial Intents

2007-06-05T05:38:00.000-05:00

This kind of statement raises nary an eyebrow in the U.S. anymore:

“We have had troops in South Korea for 60 years and nobody minds,” McCain said. “If you stay a long, long time, but have the Iraqis doing the fighting, and your people are back in the bases and away from the firing line, I think Americans would be satisfied.”

From Senator John McCain (R-AZ).

Hobby Horse

2007-06-04T17:38:00.000-05:00

Destroying the meme that the conservative movement can never fail, only those who fail to adhere to its purest form, is one of mine. Glenn Greenwald, writing for Salon, has taken up the mantle and as usual has done a bang-up job. For openers:

The great fraud being perpetrated in our political discourse is the concerted attempt by movement conservatives, now that the Bush presidency lay irreversibly in ruins, to repudiate George Bush by claiming that he is not, and never has been, a "real conservative." This con game is being perpetrated by the very same conservatives who -- when his presidency looked to be an epic success -- glorified George W. Bush, ensured both of his election victories, depicted him as the heroic Second Coming of Ronald Reagan, and celebrated him as the embodiment of True Conservatism.

I will take issue with one of the phrases in this passage: "now that the Bush presidency lay irreversibly in ruins,...". Let's leave that for the historians to decide. The reason I dislike that kind of rhetoric is because of the ammunitions it provides the other side. I probably shouldn't care, but it's a bit too caustic.

(As an aside, I should probably never care, because most Americans don't even know what an op-ed piece is, let alone ever read one.)

That's all just quibbling though, because with the meat of the argument comes the truth:

There is really only one thing that has changed about George W. Bush from the 2002-2004 era when conservatives hailed him as the Great Conservative Leader, and now. Whereas Bush was a wildly popular leader then, which made conservatives eager to claim him as their Standard-Bearer, he is now one of the most despised presidents in U.S. history, and conservatives are thus desperate to disassociate themselves from the President for whom they are solely responsible. It is painfully obvious there is nothing noble, substantive or principled driving this right-wing outburst; it is a pure act of self-preservation.

Moreover, they're furiously scribbling to distance themselves from someone they themselves proclaimed as a "movement conservative".

I encourage you to check the quotes. It's all there.

Stuck

2007-06-04T12:08:00.000-05:00

That's what's happened to America's foreign policy because of Iraq. At least that's what Fareed Zakaria argues in Newsweek:

In order to begin reorienting America's strategy abroad, any new U.S. administration must begin with Iraq. Until the United States is able to move beyond Iraq, it will not have the time, energy, political capital or resources to attempt anything else of any great significance. The first thing to admit is that our mission in Iraq has substantially failed. Whether it was doomed from the outset or turned into a fiasco because of the administration's arrogance and incompetence is a matter that historians can determine. The president's central argument in favor of the invasion of Iraq—once weapons of mass destruction were not found—was that it would be a model for the Arab world. In fact, the country has fallen apart. Two million people have fled; more than 2 million are internally displaced. Shiite extremists are in power in much of the country, imposing a thuggish and draconian version of theocratic rule. Normal life for nor-mal people—schools, universities, hospitals, factories and offices—is a shambles. If anything, Iraq has become a model in exactly the opposite sense from what Bush had hoped. It has become a living advertisement of the dangers of illiberal democracy.
Things could improve in Iraq over time. But that will take years, perhaps decades. It would be far better for us to reduce our exposure to the current civil war, draw down our forces, let Iraq's internal political forces play themselves out and restrict our troops to certain limited but core missions. We need to continue the battle against Qaeda-style extremists, maintain a presence to reassure and secure the Kurdish region, and continue to train and keep watch over the Iraqi Army. All this can be done with a substantially smaller force—about 50,000 troops, which is also a more sustainable level for the long haul.
The administration has—surprise—tried to play up fears of the consequences of a drawdown in Iraq (which is always described as a Vietnam-style withdrawal down to zero). It predicts that this will lead to chaos, violence and a victory for terrorists. When we listen to these forecasts, it is worth remembering that every administration prediction about Iraq has been wrong. Al Qaeda is a small presence in Iraq, and ordinary Sunnis are abandoning support for it. "If we leave Iraq, they will follow us home," says the president. Can they not do so now? Iraq's borders have never been more porous. Does he think that Iraqi militants and foreign terrorists are so distracted by our actions in Iraq that they have forgotten that there are many more Americans in America?
As for the broader Sunni-Shiite civil war, even if we improve the security situation temporarily, once we leave the struggle for power will resume. At some point, the Shiites and the Sunnis will make a deal. Until then, we can at best keep a lid on the violence but not solve its causes. To stay indefinitely is simply to keep a finger in the dike, fearful of the outcome. Better to consolidate what gains we have, limit our losses, let time work for us and move on.

Kevin Drum notes the following:

This gets it precisely right. Our foreign policy is at a standstill right now, held hostage by Iraq and unable to move in any sensible direction as long as we're there. Only if we get out can we start making serious progress against violent jihadists and their murderous and growing influence on Mideast public opinion.

As usual, though, Zakaria doesn't quite have the courage of his convictions. Rather than suggesting we leave Iraq, he wants only to draw down our forces to 50,000 troops, a strategy that would almost certainly represent the worst of all worlds: a big enough number to keep the Arab public convinced that we intend a permanent imperial presence in the region, but too small a number to accomplish anything effective. Whether we like or not, a presence like that will imply an ongoing police role in Iraq, but without enough troops to carry out that role.

A much better option would be to draw down nearly to zero, keeping troops and air support nearby but not physically within Iraq. Otherwise the pressure to intervene will rear its head constantly and Iraq will stay the festering centerpiece of American foreign policy, preventing us from devoting our attention to more serious issues. We can't afford that, and neither can Iraq.

Not surprisingly, I'm with Kevin on this. Draw down to zero. This would free us up to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and conduct meaningful negotiations with Iran and Syria. Not that Bush would do either one of those things, but hopefully our next president will.

High Horeshit

2007-05-31T20:43:00.000-05:00

In this issue of the Washington Post, "paleo-conservative" George Will attempts to revitalize the underpinnings of his beloved conservative movement. It's no wonder that he feels the need to offer this up after over six years of conservative policy in action: the whole project is a total failure.

Gaze upon this:

Conservatism embraces President Kennedy's exhortation to "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country," and adds: You serve your country by embracing a spacious and expanding sphere of life for which your country is not responsible.

The last bit added is void of any meaning at all. Here he hijacks one of the most famous statements by a Democratic president and turns it into slurry. So, you serve your country for things you'll never be responsible for? Huh?

Here is the core of a conservative appeal, without dwelling on "social issues" that should be, as much as possible, left to "moral federalism" -- debates within the states.

They never are though. George would like these issues to be state issues during presidential election cycles, and they might be if the religious Right hadn't taken over the base of the Republican party. And there's the rub; the core mantle of conservatism can never fail. Not in George's eyes. It's just been implemented badly. Slice away the offensive parts, and it's beautiful.

On foreign policy, conservatism begins, and very nearly ends, by eschewing abroad the fatal conceit that has been liberalism's undoing domestically -- hubris about controlling what cannot, and should not, be controlled.

If we're to believe this last bit, we have to completely forget George W. Bush's doctrine of preventative war, and the administration's vision that we could control what couldn't controlled. To be fair, Mr. Will could be describing what he believes is the high-minded version of conservative philosophy, but to find any of it believable, we need to pretend George W. Bush and his movement never called themselves "conservatives". It's beyond ridiculous.

Digby has written the definitive core axiom at work here:

"'Conservative' is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces. Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals."

Update: Greg Anrig over at TPM Cafe gives Will's article the full treatment, here.

"Torture Betrays Us..."

2007-05-18T12:39:00.000-05:00

This from two former officers:

Charles C. Krulak was commandant of the Marine Corps from 1995 to 1999. Joseph P. Hoar was commander in chief of U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994.

They write in the Washington Post:

...We have served in combat; we understand the reality of fear and the havoc it can wreak if left unchecked or fostered. Fear breeds panic, and it can lead people and nations to act in ways inconsistent with their character.

And, this is quite a slam on our current president:

The American people are understandably fearful about another attack like the one we sustained on Sept. 11, 2001. But it is the duty of the commander in chief to lead the country away from the grip of fear, not into its grasp. Regrettably, at Tuesday night's presidential debate in South Carolina, several Republican candidates revealed a stunning failure to understand this most basic obligation. Indeed, among the candidates, only John McCain demonstrated that he understands the close connection between our security and our values as a nation.

Steve Benan comments:

Josh Marshall adds, “The legacy of this imagination is frightening to behold, its philosophy of force and violence, its lawlessness.”

There are 613 days left in Bush’s presidency. That several of his would-be GOP successors share his twisted values is depressing. That Republican audiences applaud these values is beyond painful.

Kevin Drum adds:

I don't write much about torture these days because the whole subject just makes me ill. I know that's a lousy excuse. I'm sorry. But if I'd tuned in to Tuesday's Republican debate and heard the crowd hooting and hollering as the candidates played "can you top this" over who was most willing to take up the mantle of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, I probably would have lost it. It's not just that it's depraved, it's demagogic, and it's depressing, but also that it's dimwitted. Macho talk about torture may be a great applause line on the right-wing rubber chicken circuit, but it does nothing to make us safer.

It's a really important piece. Go check it out.

White Man Loses His Mind

2007-05-17T18:11:00.000-05:00

That would be Lou Dobbs of CNN on his broadcast tonight over news that the Democratically controlled Congress and the President just might find some consensus on an immigration bill.

Watching it was quite something to behold. He was definitely tweeking. If and when the proposed bill passes, watch for a full meltdown. He also reported on the fact that the minority population had reached 100 million, and will soon be rising.

Lou's message is pretty clear: a Brown America is really unwelcome on his watch.

The only flavor you can get of the show remains here.

Here's a sample question for Lou: Given that Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists were arrested at the Canadian border in 1999, stopping the planned attack to blow up LAX, why aren't we pushing for a wall between the U.S. and Canada?

Leaving Iraq

2007-05-10T17:32:00.000-05:00

What will Iraq look like if American troops start pulling out? There's plenty of talk about doing just that, but almost no discussion about what it would mean to the people of that destroyed country. Mort Kondrake (Roll Call) provides us a glimpse into what it might look like, and I'm surprised he actually wrote this in a column for publication:

Roll Call executive editor and Fox News contributor Mort Kondracke writes today that if President Bush’s escalation policy doesn’t work, his Plan B should be “winning dirty,” which involves “accepting rule by Shiites and Kurds, allowing them to violently suppress Sunni resistance and making sure that Shiites friendly to the United States emerge victorious.”
[...]
"Winning will be dirty because it will allow the Shiite-dominated Iraqi military and some Shiite militias to decimate the Sunni insurgency. There likely will be ethnic cleansing, atrocities against civilians and massive refugee flows."

First off, let's leave out the whole "winning" vs. "losing" talk; It's completely counterproductive to the current discussion. Mort is actually on to something here. What he's describing here is the dirty little secret about Iraq that in more polite circles dare not be mentioned: this outcome is inevitable. Folks on the Left may be appalled, but the situation is so bad there, there are no good options left. The only options left involve the killings of massive numbers of people, and sadly, most of them will be civilians. Here's Kevin Drum on Al Qaeda in Iraq:

...namely that the fastest way to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) is probably for us to leave and let the Iraqis do it themselves. Republicans don't want to acknowledge this for the obvious reason: they want to stay in Iraq and this doesn't help their cause. Democrats, I suspect, also don't want to talk too much about this, but for a different reason: because it tacitly condones the reason the Iraqis can do a better job than us of stamping out AQI. It's not just that Iraqis know their own neighborhoods better than us (though that's part of it), but that when it comes to exterminating AQI Iraqis would almost certainly be far more brutal about it than Americans. That's not really a subject anyone wants to bring up in polite company.
But that doesn't make it any less true. If we leave Iraq, the country is unlikely in the extreme to become an al-Qaeda haven. Partly this is because it's rage at the American presence itself that provides a big part of the fuel for AQI's growth. Our withdrawal would eliminate that source of rage and devastate AQI's ability to continue its recruiting. Partly it's because, as we're seeing in Anbar province right now, even Sunni extremists don't like AQI. Left to their own devices they'll kill off AQI jihadists in order to protect their own tribal turf. And partly it's because once we withdraw, non-Kurdish Iraq will be free to finish its inevitable transition into a Shiite theocracy — a transition that's sadly unavoidable whether we stay or not. Yes, this transition will be bloody, but in the end Iraq will almost certainly be composed of the Kurdish north, which has no use for al-Qaeda; the remaining Sunni sheikhs, who also have no use for al-Qaeda; and the victorious Shiite central government itself, which likewise has no use for murderous Sunni jihadists on its soil. Between the three of them, AQI isn't likely to last a year.

Of all the reasons for staying in Iraq, a desire to finish off AQI is by far the least convincing. It's our presence that largely keeps AQI going, and our withdrawal is the surest way to ensure their demise. It won't happen without a lot of bloodshed, but it will happen.

Trust me, the people that advocated for this war never gave a shit about the Iraqi people in the first place, and the war's detractors need to come to terms with just how bad the situation has become. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people, are going to die. Sorry, that's the bottom line whether we stay or go. Civil Wars only end when on side loses, and the American occupation of Iraq will only delay that resolution.

Much missed was this tidbit from David Ignatius' Washington Post column that appeared on Wednesday, May the 9th. In the context of U.S. - Saudi relations, Ignatius wrote:

The ferment in the region is driven partly by the perception that U.S. troops are on the way out, no matter what the Bush administration says. To dampen such speculation, Bush is said to have told the Saudis that America will not withdraw from Iraq during his presidency. "That gives us 18 months to plan," said one Saudi source.

The Failure of Conservatism

2007-05-04T20:26:00.000-05:00

The absolute repudiation of the ideology of Conservatism is one of my mental hobby-horses, and while I certainly don't write about it enough, a group called Take America Back actually held an entire conference on just that subject. Joy.

They've posted a debate between Robert Kuttner and William Kristol arguing "Can Conservatives be Trusted to Govern", here. Quick answer: if they had any interest in governing, they might care, and therefore be good at it, otherwise, not so much. I thought Kuttner handily won the debate, but that's partially due to how much material he had to work with. As he pointed out, when George W. Bush was elected, the conservative movement had reached it's zenith. They had six years to enact all their pet projects, and the result was near-complete failure.

One thing I found interesting is Kristol's behavior; he's always much more contrite and thoughtful in settings like these. On Fox News Sunday he presents himself as the quasi media administration guy, chock full of his false bravado tough talk bullshit. I give him credit for showing up in such a hostile environment though; good for him.

Not be missed though, is writer and historian Rick Perlstein's posts on Republican primary politics. I've been contemplating a long post on the Wall Street Journal's resident shitmouth John Fund, but let's have Rick start us off, here:

Writes John Fund: "The general election may be a year and a half away but the Democratic National Committee has already released its opposition research packet on the three leading GOP contenders -- just in time for reporters covering tonight's Republican presidential debate at the Reagan Library in Los Angeles."

He seems confused by the the way Democrats argue about their opponents - baffled, apparently, that it focuses merely on, you know, why they'd be bad presidents.

He concludes: "for real, substantive dirt on the Republican candidates, we'll have to depend on the GOP candidates to do their own opposition research."

What's going on here?

Allow me to explain. Character assassination, sabotage, and deception and subterfuge are not incidental to conservative politics but central to it. To them, politics without such things doesn't even feel like...politics. Catch them in a relaxed moment, and they freely admit it - with relish.

One thing that was pointed out, but never quite stated in this way is, just how the Conservative Shitty Government Feedback Loop works: Get elected on a "clean up" Washington agenda, appoint completely incompetent people to head top governmental agencies, when these agencies fail, blame the government for being unable to get anything done, have right-wing gas bags state that government never does any good at all, and then elect more idiots who can't govern.

As for the rest, Perlstein drops some nice stuff in the rest of that post.

California Republicans

2007-05-04T19:48:00.000-05:00

Ah, a special breed they are. "Duke" Cunningham, Jerry Lewis, Gary Miller, and what? Who's this? Oh! It's none other than John Doolittle! Josh Marshall gives us a peak into his little world:

Important to keep in mind, of course, that Doolittle is a serial bamboozler of the most egregious sort. And perhaps he's arguing that FBI raids are actually a new congressional fad like frisbees or the Macarena. But I'm curious whether he knows something here or just more blowing smoke.

The TPM Gang has all the dirt you could wish for on this guy. I'm just thankful my last name ain't Doolittle. No offense meant for all the Doolittle's of the world, but...whatever. Nevermind.

Bloggy blog blog

2007-05-04T19:27:00.000-05:00

I'm a terrible blogger. Why? I don't post news thingys with commentary as often as I should.

For your daily Bloggy Goodness, please go visit The Carpetbagger Report. Although I would imagine the proprietor of said blog may object, it comes with the official Marble Composition Seal of Approval.

It won't be the last time I've been called a disappointment.

Oh yeah, if you would look some insight into how laughably stupid bloggers on the Right are, please visit the Boys over at Sadly, No!

From The Wires...

2007-05-04T19:01:00.000-05:00

From the AP:

JONESTOWN, Virginia. - At a ceremonial luncheon today, Vice President Richard B. Cheney struck England's Queen Elizabeth II in the face today, breaking her jaw and sending her to Jonestown's Augusta Medical Center with a slight concussion. In a similar incident, Cheney hurled an empty wooden barrel at his wife, Lynne, crushing her left leg. Mrs. Cheney was also sent to the hospital with a collapsed femoral artery. Both women were listed in stable condition, but were held overnight for observation.

The Vice President stated that both women were "matriarchal cunts" that had haunted him for decades, and that he had been biding his time for the attack until he had both of them in the same place at the same time. He also stated that "the uppity niggers" that were included in the Jonestown presentation for the Queen had upset him greatly, but that given his knowledge of Virginia Common Law, he knew he could fell the two aging women without consequence. Unfortunately for the Vice President, he had no knowledge that an attack on African Americans in Virginia bears no legal consequences either.

Cost of The Iraq War

2007-05-01T16:15:00.000-05:00

...broken down by the cost to each state (via Daily Kos), here.

What I found striking is how much more us blue-staters are paying for the war than tax payers from red states. For example, here are Idaho's numbers:

24 killed
220 wounded
$1 billion

and here are Connecticut's:

24 killed
205 wounded
$9.2 billion

Of course, blue states pay much more into the Treasury than red/southern states anyway.

Democracy Is Not For You

2007-04-17T19:56:00.000-05:00

Just before the 2006 midterms, right wing talk radio host Sean Hannity said the following:

HANNITY: Now, one other thing here. You know what? I think some of you need to stay home on Election Day. What? That's right. I think -- I know it sounds terrible. I don't want everybody to vote; I want well-informed people to vote.

It does sound terrible, Sean, so who should skip the election?

...and I want you to stay home on Election Day because you must accept the fact that your party has abandoned you. You've gotta accept the fact that your vote doesn't matter anyway. So all you Democrats, stay home. So, you know, why don't you stay home on Election Day? [Fuzzy's emphasis]

Oh ye little faith. Conservatives these days couldn't give two shits about democracy. Neither here nor abroad. Thanks for the advice Sean. Somehow I'm guessing it didn't quite work out how you might have liked.

On a more serious note, isn't this sort of rhetoric actually dangerous for democracy in our country? This guy has one of the most popular radio shows in the country, and here he is asking registered Democrats and swing-voting independents to stay at home come election day. Apparently, for Sean the "throw your purple fingers in the air" doesn't apply here at home.

Citizen Dummy

2007-04-17T17:22:00.000-05:00

The Carpetbagger highlights a new Pew Research Center study and finds:

Americans have countless ways to learn about current events, but we remain a woefully ignorant bunch.

The bedrock of America's democracy rests on an informed citizenry. It's really that simple. More from the Bagger:

One in three Americans don’t know who the Vice President is. One in four don’t know that Democrats now run the House. One in three can’t name their governor. Four in five can’t name the Secretary of Defense. Two in three don’t know that there’s a difference between Sunni and Shia.

The poll asked 1,502 respondents 23 fairly straightforward questions that, I suspect, nearly all of you would get right. Eight answered all 23 correctly in the survey. Not eight percent; eight people.

This has been a pet issue of mine for a very long time, so forgive the rant, but I strongly believe that an uninformed electorate creates a dysfunctional democracy. As Digby put it a while back, “We simply cannot adequately govern ourselves if a large number of us are dumb as posts and vote for reasons that make no sense.”
[...]
But our system relies on a certain level of sophistication among the public, and there’s ample evidence, including this new Pew study, that we’re just not at that level.
[...]
But at a certain point, people have to some making excuses and start taking some responsibility for having a clue. When 31% of Americans don’t know who the Vice President is, it undermines our political system.

The solution to this problem probably requires a multi-layered approach. Perhaps we need required high school and college exit courses pounding home the responsibilities the people of this country owe their own democracy: you need to make an effort to stay informed and vote. Maybe we need a massive taxpayer-funded media campaign to remind people that, hey, we as a nation need to hear from you, come to the table with informed opinions, and make informed decisions based on current information.

By the way, this isn't new. This is well worn turf. Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree."

"No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity."

"Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty."

The population of America seems to think we can all glide on cruise control because our nation was some kind of immaculate conception, and that no tending to the garden is needed at all. That we need not participate because some kind of collective correction will come along at the moment of crisis and right the this listing ship of state. Wrong. It doesn't work that way. This is why we have an incurious idiot for a president.

In the end, you get the democracy you deserve.

Let's Manage The Legacy

2007-04-13T20:04:00.000-05:00

This report, from the Washington Post, has been commented on by a number of bloggers, but I haven't seen anyone state the obvious. At least three Generals have balked at Bush's invite to be the "War Czar" that he seeks.

This one's really simple folks. He needs someone to point the finger at when he leaves office. And so do his supporters. Someone, anyone, has to take the blame on January 21st, 2008. And Lord knows it can't be him.

So, who's signing up for that job?

Exactly, no one in their right mind.

The one point that can't be stated enough is that this president has never taken any responsibility for the decisions that he's made. Now his administration is floating the notion of a "War Czar". They must think we're really that stupid.

(The Carpetbagger has some more of the details.)

Iraq: Forward Thinking

2007-03-29T22:22:00.000-05:00

I don't always agree with Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly, but he's been consistent on this, and he couldn't be more right:

Every day that we stay in Iraq does further damage to our long-range best interests in the Middle East. At best, that would be worth it only if our continued presence there were likely to bring a measure of peace to Iraq itself. The failure of Tal Afar suggests that we don't have either the manpower or the ability to do that, and that in turn means we're literally accomplishing nothing in Iraq except making things worse along almost every dimension.

The sooner we get out of Iraq, the sooner we can rethink our recklessly militaristic approach to the war on terror and instead start applying some common sense to the problem. Unfortunately, it looks like we still have a couple more years of digging ourselves deeper into a hole before that will happen. 2009 can't come soon enough.

Go read the full post, and see what you think.

It appears the U.S. Military is pouring massive amounts of concrete to form four permanent bases in Iraq, which might suggest that the U.S. will never leave Iraq. A continuation of current American policy in the region past the next presidential election will tell us all what the U.S. has in mind for the region. Stay tuned. Think oil policy vis-a-vis China, Russia, and Iran.

US Attorney Scandal

2007-03-26T21:30:00.000-05:00

The one-stop shop for information on this affair is undoubtedly Josh Marshall's TPM blog and its affiliates. They have everything you could ever want to know about what happened, why, and where this case is going. This case is extremely important because it shows the current administration has no problem trashing traditional legal norms within our system of government, and demonstrates why they prefer to operate outside of our Constitutional framework, not as an exception, but as a rule.

As a sharp-eyed commenter over at TPM Muckraker points out today, this wasn't about using the US Attorneys for political gain in the '06 midterms. These latest shenanigans are about the fight for '08, both on the presidential and congressional levels. By the time they got around to really getting this operation into gear, they must have seen the same poll numbers everyone else was looking at for '06, despite Karl's public statements that he was the only one who had the "real numbers". The result was a catastrophic blow to Rove's reputation: out of 468 congressional elections around the country, the number of contested Democratic losses was...(timpany please)...zero (0).

So, looking forward to '08, I'd like to focus on the situation in Arkansas. There, US Attorney Bud Cummins, a loyal Republican with an excellent record, was told by the administration he would have to resign because they wanted to replace him with one of Karl Rove's former assistants. That man, Tim Griffin, had no distinguished career as a lawyer/prosecutor, he was a an opposition researcher for the RNC in Florida during the 2004 campaign for Team Bush.

Let's get to the heart of it, and it's really pretty clear if you take into account all of Rove's past crusades: he planted a toady, a man who's job it is to dig up dirt on Democrats, into a position with prosecutorial powers in Arkansas while Hillary Clinton campaigns for the nomination for president.

The Justice Department has already admitted they were forcing Cummins out for political reasons. Why? Why was Griffin the man to take his place? How closely tied was/is Griffin to the RNC? Why replace a well rated, highly competent, loyal Republican prosecutor with a low-level campaign cretin who's job is to smear the opposition? To ask the question is to answer it.

Like I said, go over to Josh's joint to get the full tilt. Hell, I pitched in $50.- in the first place to get the thing off the ground, so I feel vested (o.k., call me cheap, it's all I had at the time!).

House Rules

2007-03-26T21:12:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the lack of posts. Bad blogger, bad!

Onward. Matt Taibbi has a pretty quick read that will give you some insight into how the Chamber of People's Deputies (a.k.a. the House of Representatives) works. In a story that centers around Florida Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Asshole), we're treated to this:

I've spent a good deal of time in the Rules Committee in the past few years and I watched that cocksucker sit there with a gloating, cat-who-has-just-eaten-mouse smile as the likes of Jim McGovern, Louise Slaughter and Alcee Hastings begged, literally begged to have this or that amendment allowed (or "made in order," as they say in Congress) so that it could be voted on by the whole Congress. Since Dreier for the most part couldn't be bothered to show up at the committee hearings, it was usually Diaz-Balart who sat in the chairman's chair and chided the Democrats or their witnesses to shut the fuck up.
And it was Diaz-Balart who at the end of the afternoon would gently stack his papers and disappear behind the majority office door so that the bills could be bastardized, clipped and/or rewritten in the middle of the night. In the 108th Congress, for instance, 78 of the 191 rules were reported after 8:00 p.m., and 21 of those were reported at 7:00 a.m. the next day...

If you like to hear about Republicans acting like foot-stomping panty-wastes, this one's for you.
(credit goes to Billmon for the "Chamber" title)

Surge 2.0

2007-03-08T23:37:00.000-05:00

Bernhard over at Moon of Alabama has a great post which you can read here.

Here was my repsonse in the comments section:

I've read through the reactions to Bernhard's post, and the one thing I haven't seen is the one truth about the Bush presidency: Bush will never leave Iraq. There's no getting away from the fact that domestic American politics drives the outcome of this debate. Yes, House Democrats are slowly forging some kind of weak bill that may limit the president's action, but there is no way what they send to the Senate will make it to the president's desk. Where, he would veto it anyway.

The only way I can see the president giving in is if the monitory leaders in the Senate come to his office, sometime in early to mid '08, and tell the president: "we're going to lose it all." They have twenty-two seats up for grabs, a little less than half the Dems, and the only way the president budges is if he finally realizes that public opinion of his handling of the war has cratered so far that his stance will cost his party the majority for years to come. If he finally bows to the knowledge that they'll suffer further losses in the House, the Senate, and lose the presidency, he'll budge. And maybe not even then. He's stubborn after all.

So, you can debate whether "Surge 2.0" will work or not. It doesn't matter.

It's instructive to keep in mind that Bush is not the dummy that all the parodies will have us believe. It's where he's extremely capable that no one ever focuses on: he's a political hatchet man. He and Rove compliment each other at every turn. They're nothing more than students of the Lee Atwater School of Dirty Tricks. That defines them both, except one of them happens to be president.

When these two ditch diggers are sent back to Texas, we can start reasoning about what will become of Iraq. Until then, we're there to stay. Have these two American frauds ever given a fuck about anything else?

Meet Brit Hume

2007-02-22T23:30:00.000-05:00

He's the bile-spewing shitmouth employed by the Fox News channel, and boy does he get worked up when a decorated war veteran starts proposing limits on American military involvement in Iraq. But for Brit, it has to be a Vietnam war hero. It's hard to imagine the following tirade wasn't planned by the producers of Fox News Sunday; he wanted an editorial ax-grinding moment, and he got it:

HUME: That sound bite from John Murtha suggests that it’s time a few things be said about him. Even the “Washington Post” noted he didn’t seem particularly well informed about what’s going on over there, to say the least. Look, this man has tremendous cache among House Democrats, but he is not — this guy is long past the day when he had anything but the foggiest awareness of what the heck is going on in the world.

And that sound bite is naivete writ large, and the man is an absolute fountain of such talk, and the fact that he has ascended to the position he has in the eyes of the Democrats in the House and perhaps Democrats around the country tells you a lot about how much they know or care about what’s really going on over there.

And while Hume can, and will, fire loaded rhetorical shots at Congressional Democrats over the Iraq War for years to come, he never came close to even reporting what went on Vietnam first-hand, never mind signing a deployment request:

It was a different era, a different administration and a very different Brit Hume.
Thirty-six years ago, as a long-haired reporter for columnist Jack Anderson, Hume was handed information that Spiro Agnew's son had left his wife and moved in with a male hairdresser. Hume tracked down the vice president's son in Baltimore, talked his way in with a made-up tale about reports that Randy Agnew was living in a "hippie crash pad" and confirmed the details. Although Hume expressed strong reservations about the story -- his wife thought it was disgraceful -- he convinced himself that it could be a big deal.

This from the ethically challenged Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, who has more than enough to answer for on his own (another Washington-based shitmouth). Of course, Agnew was forced to resign as Vice President, but he really was the model for Richard Cheney's current reign. And how did Brit later feel about uncovering this petty scandal about the VP's son?

"It's a story I wish I hadn't done," Hume says now. "We had no idea whether what the story implied was true, that the kid was gay and his gayness had anything to do with the rift with his family."

Fine. Whatever. Instead of fretting about some stupid story about the veep's son, how about enlisting to fight in Vietnam? I would love to see how Mr. Hume would've been taken to task by the most popular right-wing bloggers of the current day. I would guess they'd label him a flip-flopper, but absolve him of his past digressions based on his current true-believer status. That said, no one takes apart people like Steve Gilliard, a former military man, and James Wolcott of Vanity Fair. Here's James, and anyone in his cross hairs gets it bad, and as usual, they deserve it:

Hume's lack of self-knowledge would be comic if it weren't so hateful. Like so many white conservative males, he's seething with anger and touchy superiority, yet has apparently convinced himself that it's everybody else who's being emotional. He--he sees things as they are, with rational proportion and worldly perspective; it's women and girly-men liberals and other moral weaklings who lets their sloppy feelings get the best of them. But challenge Brit's patriarchal authority and or contradict him once too often and he goes Aguirre, Wrath of God on you.

It isn't just Jack Murtha that Hume has been pissing on from a high plateau, it's Chuck Hagel as well, whom he has patronized for being overwrought on the issue of Iraq, even referring to Hagel's recent fervency as "sad." As if Hume felt sorry for Hagel that he had let himself go soft this way--such a pity. Five minutes alone with Hume and Hagel could probably stuff that false pity up Brit's nose and feed Fred Barnes' snickering condescension back to him with extra mustard.

There's a discernible pattern here; Hume needs to tear down anyone that actually served in the Vietnam War, whether they're Republican or Democrat. Whether that's self-loathing in action, or his way of tearing down the hated Other in himself, remains to be seen. Maybe we'll never know. Either way, he displays a visceral loathing of anyone that "gave up" in Vietnam.

Why is this important? Why should you care? Here's why: in Washington he's seen as a credible voice; someone that's allowed to moderate debates, and ask questions of potential presidential candidates.

He's nothing more than a shiftless phony. Whether he believes anything he says is really beside the point, he's made himself into something that the craze of the 24-hour news networks need anyway: A stalwart, right-wing gasbag that never saw a Republican policy he didn't like.

I often wonder what it takes to make a truly American asshole like Brit Hume, but when you read about his past, and his meaningless "conversion" to conservatism, he went where the money is.

Seething

2007-01-25T19:35:00.000-05:00

Because I'm such a news junkie, there aren't many things that surprise me anymore when it comes to the madness unfolding in Iraq. Maybe I've become numb to it all. But every once in a while a news item I come across really leaves me seething with anger. Via Kos, Editor and Publisher highlighted a small portion of a report from the New York Times. Here's the part that would interest E&P:

"In this surreal setting, about 20 American soldiers were forced at one point to pull themselves one by one up a canted tin roof by a dangling rubber hose and then shimmy along a ledge to another hut. The soldiers were stunned when a small child suddenly walked out of a darkened doorway and an old man started wheezing and crying somewhere inside.

"Ultimately the group made it back to the high rises and escaped the sniper in the alley by throwing out the smoke bombs and sprinting to safety. Even though two Iraqis were struck by gunfire, many of the rest could not stop shouting and guffawing with amusement as they ran through the smoke.

"One Iraqi soldier in the alley pointed his rifle at an American reporter and pulled the trigger. There was only a click: the weapon had no ammunition. The soldier laughed at his joke."

It's not known which of two Times reporters was the target of this "joke."

Here's the part of the story that makes me want to rip my hair out:

"In a miniature version of the troop increase that the United States hopes will secure the city, American soldiers and armored vehicles raced onto Haifa Street before dawn to dislodge Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias who have been battling for a stretch of ragged slums and mostly abandoned high rises. But as the sun rose, many of the Iraqi Army units who were supposed to do the actual searches of the buildings did not arrive on time, forcing the Americans to start the job on their own.

"When the Iraqi units finally did show up, it was with the air of a class outing, cheering and laughing as the Americans blew locks off doors with shotguns. As the morning wore on and the troops came under fire from all directions, another apparent flaw in this strategy became clear as empty apartments became lairs for gunmen who flitted from window to window and killed at least one American soldier, with a shot to the head."

While this may be a small anecdote, it demonstrates perfectly why the U.S. needs to pull all of its forces off of the streets of Baghdad. Ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods in the city are well underway, and U.S. forces have no business being stuck in the middle of a low-level civil war. Yes, we've all heard that before, but still: it stands. I've read and seen numerous accounts of people all over the political spectrum wringing their hands, saying, "well we can't leave now, look at the mess we've created", or, "we must achieve victory", but at this point we need to cut our losses. Our delusional president stated: "The people of Iraq want to live in peace, and now is the time for their government to act". No they don't. They're perfectly happy slaughtering each other en masse. And, their government's parliament can barely even form a quorum.

Enough.

Update: [1/25/2007 09.24.00 PM] Kevin Drum over at the Washington Monthly has more on Haifa Street, here. And via Atrios, an amazing look into the ongoing civil war from Lara Logan at CBS News, here.

Cart Before the Horse

2007-01-02T21:02:00.000-05:00

Matt Yglesias nails it, here:

Roughly speaking, the fixed point of the president's thinking is an unwillingness to admit that the venture has failed. For a long time the best way to do that was to simply deny that there was a problem. Political strategy for the midterms, however, dictated that the president had to acknowledge the public's concerns about the war and concede that things weren't going well.

That concession only came after the Republicans came to realize just how big their losses might become:

At that point, simply staying the course doesn't work anymore. But de-escalating would be an admission of failure, so the only option is to choose escalation. Thus, the idea of an escalation starts getting pushed and we start reading things in the paper like "Top military officials have said that they are open to sending more U.S. troops to Iraq if there is a specific strategic mission for them." Consider the process here. It's not that the president has some policy initiative in mind whose operational requirements dictate a surge in force levels. Rather, locked in the prison of his own denial he came to the conclusion that he should back an escalation, prompting the current search for a mission.

It's even more light-headed than that. This whole travesty comes down to one word:

“What I want to hear from you is how we’re going to win,” he quoted the president as warning his commanders, “not how we’re going to leave.”

Not that one, this one:

Mr. Bush still insists on talking about victory, even if his own advisers differ about how to define it. “It’s a word the American people understand,” he told members of the Iraq Study Group who came to see him at the White House in November, according to two commission members who attended. “And if I start to change it, it will look like I’m beginning to change my policy.”

Just a Photo

2006-12-28T23:20:00.000-05:00

A Look Back

2006-12-23T22:39:00.000-05:00

Ivo Daadler dug up some real gems from the GOP's platform in 2000:

The reporter told me take a look at the 2000 GOP foreign policy platform, and reread the litany of indictments Bush & Co. had issued with respect to Clinton’s foreign policy.
The administration has run America’s defenses down over the decade through inadequate resources, promiscuous commitments, and the absence of a forward-looking military strategy. [As opposed to breaking the Army and Marine Corp, sending troops to war without adequate body armor and equipment, and only deciding to increase force levels five years into a global conflict.]
The arrogance, inconsistency, and unreliability of the administration’s diplomacy have undermined American alliances, alienated friends, and emboldened our adversaries. [My all-time favorite!]
World trade talks in Seattle that the current administration had sponsored collapsed in spectacular failure. [Doha anyone?] An initiative to establish free trade throughout the Americas has stalled because of this lack of Presidential leadership. [Ah, yes. Bush’s leadership on this issue really has made a difference — 6 years later and we’re not a step closer to a deal.]
The problems of Mexico have been ignored, as our indispensable neighbor to the south struggled with too little American help to deal with its formidable challenges. [Think the Mexicans feel they’ve gotten any help from Bush lately? After declaring the relationship with Mexico America’s most important on September 9, 2001, Bush has ignored our southern neighbors ever since.]
The tide of democracy in Latin America has begun to ebb with a sharp rise in corruption and narco-trafficking. [And since then, only America’s friends in Latin America have won elections… Not!]
With weak and wavering policies toward Russia, the administration has diverted its gaze from corruption at the top of the Russian government, the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians in Chechnya, and the export of dangerous Russian technologies to Iran and elsewhere. [The biggest mistake wasn’t seeing Putin’s soul…]
A generation of American efforts to slow proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has unraveled as first India and Pakistan set off their nuclear bombs, then Iraq defied the international community. Token air strikes against Iraq could not long mask the collapse of an inspection regime that had — until then — at least kept an ambitious, murderous tyrant from acquiring additional nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. [North Korea? Iran? Oh, and what do we do when inspectors in Iraq return?]

Good stuff.

A Fundamental Misunderstanding

2006-12-14T00:26:00.000-05:00

After over three years of war in Iraq, we get a headline like this from the AP:

Bush: Iraq enemy far from being defeated

Let's keep this short. After declaring Mission Accomplished in May of 2003, who are we supposed to believe is the enemy? Who does he think we need to defeat? Of course he won't say. He continues to lump everything and anything into a Frankenstein description of the War in Iraq.

There are at least four separate, ongoing conflicts tearing Iraq apart:

Al Qaeda in Iraq killing American soldiers and Shiites.
A Sunni - Shiite civil war
Intra-sectarian battles between rival Shiite militias.
A Sunni insurgency comprised of ex-Baathists.

Does anyone really believe he'll ever pick a new "enemy", and then defeat it? All we're going to get for two more years is this:

"We're not going to give up. The stakes are too high and the consequences too grave..."

He's got two options on the table: Pick a new "enemy" to defeat, presumably at this point the Sunnis, and witness a massive wave of killings up close, or, pull our troops out now and watch the sectarian slaughter from afar.

Guess which one he'll choose? Neither. He'll kick this bloody can down the road for two more years until he's gone. For Bush, it really doesn't matter what happens in Iraq from here on out. The only thing he's concerned about is that he never gets blamed for "losing the war". Loss of life, both American and Iraqi, and a further descent into violent chaos are no longer on his radar. From now on, he needs to make sure he's remembered as a "winner". Someone who never "gave up." The man who declared "victory". The man who's great "legacy" must be carved in granite.

Trust me, the historians will get it right. This guy was a monkey at the helm of an out-of-control freight train; you know, the one who missed that elusive "victory" thing three stops back.

The Grand Game

2006-12-13T00:26:00.000-05:00

I've read reams of material on the Neoconservatives. I've read the Project for the New American Century's Rebuilding America's Defenses. I've read A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. I've read everything and anything I could get my hands on so I could try and understand what was going on and where we're headed. After all of that, it never dawned on me these people were dreaming of something like this:

Another point, and one I'm not sure is widely appreciated. The folks who brought you the Iraq War have always been weak in the knees for a really whacked-out vision of a Shi'a-US alliance in the Middle East. I used to talk to a lot of these folks before I became persona non grata. So here's basically how the theory went and, I don't doubt, still goes ... We hate the Saudis and the Egyptians and all the rest of the standing Arab governments. But the Iraqi Shi'a were oppressed by Saddam. So they'll like us. So we'll set them up in control of Iraq. You might think that would empower the Iranians. But not really. The mullahs aren't very powerful. And once the Iraqi Shi'a have a good thing going with us. The Iranians are going to want to get in on that too. So you'll see a new government in Tehran. Plus, big parts of northern Saudi Arabia are Shi'a too. And that's where a lot of the oil is. So they'll probably want to break off and set up their own pro-US Shi'a state with tons of oil. So before you know it, we'll have Iraq, Iran, and a big chunk of Saudi Arabia that is friendly to the US and has a ton of oil. And once that happens we can tell the Saudis to f$#% themselves once and for all.

Now, you might think this involves a fair amount of wishful and delusional thinking. But this was the thinking of a lot of neocons going into the war. And I don't doubt it's still the thinking of quite a few of them. They still want to run the table. And even more now that it's double-down. I don't know what these guys are planning now. But there's plenty of reason to be worried.

If anyone thinks the people that we have in charge will choose a less destructive policy over one that will cost hundreds of thousands of lives, you'd better get correct. It might be easy to forget that these are the people that get something wrong, make things worse, and then rinse and repeat. Make that get everything wrong. Why should we believe for one second they'll get it right now? Right, none. The chances favor them, being as incompetent and cut off from reality as they are, choosing the worst options.

By way of her amazing reporting, Laura Rosen has shed light on the administration's proposed "tilt" towards the Shiites. I guess with what Josh has given us above, it's all starting to fall into place.

Just to round things out, today CNN is reporting that Bush is leaning towards sending 20,000 to 30,000 more troops into Bahgdad to try and quell the ethnic cleansing going on there. As Michael Schwartz amply points out in his piece, the last time we tried putting more troops into the capital, the more the violence increased, on all sides. This option will of course be cheered on by the beltway crowd ("we're doing something"), but those of us out here in the hinterlands should treat this option with nothing but derision and contempt. It will only result in more suicide bombings, more civilian deaths, and more dead American soldiers; the rates growing exponentially based on how many troops we add.

When the next minor shift in policy fails, we'll be treated to more of this:

The pattern has always been:

1. Declare that we must stay in Iraq to prevent some Bad Thing from happening.

2. Bad Thing happens anyway.

3. Declare that we must stay in Iraq to prevent some Worse Thing from happening.

4. Worse Thing happens anyway.

5. Reiterate sequence.

At no point does the “Sensible Center” consider that the previous failures implicate our ability to fulfill the new mission, which is always paradoxically grander in scale while being a retreat from previous ambitions.

There are titanic shifts underway in the Middle East, and the fuel that charges those changes is blood. Expect a tanker's full of it to be spilled in the next couple of years, with U.S. troops stuck right in the middle of it. Duncan Black has stated over and over again that Bush will never pull out of Iraq, and that Bush believes leaving equals losing, and I've long thought that something might come along to change the president's mind. Given his rejection of the Baker-Hamilton commission's report, I would now concede that there is no other conclusion to be made.

If one needed any indication that Bush will not change his strategy on Iraq, all one needs to do is listen to what he says:

Yet Bush is described by another recent visitor as still resolutely defiant, convinced history will ultimately vindicate him.
"I'll be dead when they get it right," he said during an Oval Office meeting last week.

Even the historians that study his presidency will get it wrong. That is, unless they agree with him.

The overarching point here is that things can always get worse in the Middle East. Much worse, and at a moment's notice. The policies that the American administration seems to be poised to make will only add fuel to the fire. They couldn't care less, as long as their legacy is looked upon somehow as favorable. In what might be viewed as some sort of sad, Faustian bargain, they've taken to listening to Henry Kissenger. History will judge them on its own terms, and worry not, they'll be plenty of graves to be dug for everyone.

It's Not Mania, It's MADNESS

2006-12-12T01:10:00.000-05:00

This isn't trivial, it's CUPCAKE INSANITY:

CUPCAKE MANIA....The Washington Post reports today about a brewing parental backlash against schools that try to ban birthday cupcakes. An expert explains what's behind it:
The cupcake-as-symbol-of-childhood is powerful: It's wrapped in the cultural definition of what it means to be a good mother, something that's a moving target in this society, said Kathryn Oths, an anthropologist at the University of Alabama who studies food and culture.

...."Think about it. Banning cupcakes is almost like an assault on the national identity," Oths said. "It comes at a time when there are fears of terrorism and the immigration brouhaha that they're 'watering down' our traditional American culture — meaning middle-class white America — that's slipping out of our grasp."
Um, OK. But what I really want to know is where this cupcake mania came from in the first place. Do modern parents really bring in cupcakes for every single birthday? That must be 20 or 30 cupcake days a year. Seriously?

Question: has this changed over the years, or was Orange County just a cupcake-less wasteland during the 60s? I don't recall even celebrating birthdays in school when I was growing up, let alone being fed trays of cupcakes on a regular basis. And believe me, if cupcakes really are a celebration of middle-class, white, better-dead-than-red Americana, Orange Country would have been leading the pack in cupcake feedings.

So when did this start? Is it a regional thing? Did I miss out? I know I have plenty of teachers who read this blog. Help me out in comments.

UPDATE: Responses are all over the map. Some people remember vast feeding frenzies of youthful cupcakes, other went entirely cupcake-less like me. Best comment comes from Chicago Liberal:
You have no idea.

You try to raise a non-obese, relatively healthy kid and you do okay until they hit kindergarten. Between the cupcake days, the party days, and the "specials" (teacher's day, Arbor Day, whatever) there's hardly a day that isn't loaded with extra artificial food coloring, high fructose corn syrup and fat. And then we wonder why the kids all misbehave. Blue, tattooed "froot" leather does not occur anywhere in nature! But try to tell that to most parents.

Seriously, parents will get near violent with you when you suggest at an average suburban school that maybe we should just have one cupcake/candy/sweet treats day a month, or otherwise limit sweets. So, you can tell your kid that she can sit in the corner and eat her grapes and carrots while her friend passes out the sponge bob froot snacks. You can harp on the teacher. Or you can take it to the [PTA] where they will roll their eyes at you.

Oh, so the PTA is rolling their eyes at the Terrorists? The Nazi's never gave out cupcakes and they lost WWII. What does that tell ya?

Thickness of the Bubble

2006-12-11T16:18:00.000-05:00

From Paul Bedard at U.S. News:

And now we learn that President Bush really believed the GOP was safe, too. On the day before the elections, he asked embattled House gop leader Dennis Hastert to run for speaker again so he could guide the White House's agenda in Congress.

This appears to be a rumor, but given what we know, it sounds credible. If true, I guess Karl Rove really did have him convinced that the numbers he had were accurate. Guess that didn't turn out so well, huh? Hastert's been booted from the leadership entirely.

And via Steve Benan at the Carpetbagger Report, this from the New York Daily News:

Outside Republican sources report that except for isolated pockets of realism, the West Wing bunker hasn't yet absorbed Bush's diminished power.
"The White House is totally constipated," a former aide complained. "There's not enough adult leadership, and the 30-year-olds still think it's 2000 and they're riding high."
One White House assistant insisted to a friend last week that the election was merely a repudiation of Bush's execution, not his policies.
"They don't get it," a GOP mandarin snapped. "The Iraq report was their brass ring to pivot and salvage the last two years, and they didn't grab it."
...
"We will get an immigration bill, and the President will make a valiant but doomed attempt at entitlement reform," he said. "But we are looking at two frustrating years of gridlock and several foreign policy failures."

Several foreign policy failures? Sounds promising. I wonder which ones that person has in mind.

Tough Guy? No, Sniveling Coward

2006-12-10T19:20:00.000-05:00

Josh Marshall has an important post up at his site that should not be overlooked:

I'm not sure I've ever heard anything truer said on the whole sorry topic of this war. And it gets to the heart of the issue. He won't ever change course. Not because there's anyone who can't see that the present course is a catastrophe, but because changing course would cut the legs from under the collective denial of the president and his supporters. As bad as things get they can still pretend they're on the way to getting better. It's a long hard slog to January 2009 when it becomes someone else's fault. Once they pull the plug themselves, though, they admit it was all a disaster, that the whole presidency was, in Dick Gephardt's half forgotten phrase, "a miserable failure."
That is why we're in Iraq today. Get your head around it.

Go get the rest.

More on the "80% Solution"

2006-12-10T18:36:00.000-05:00

I should've pointed out in an earlier post that Laura Rosen over at War and Piece had already broken this story in the L.A. Times:

AS SECTARIAN violence rises in Iraq and the White House comes under increasing pressure to revamp its strategy there, a debate is emerging inside the Bush administration: Should the U.S. abandon its efforts to act as a neutral referee in the ongoing civil war and, instead, throw its lot in with the Shiites?

A U.S. tilt toward the Shiites is a risky strategy, one that could further alienate Iraq's Sunni neighbors and that could backfire by driving its Sunni population into common cause with foreign jihadists and Al Qaeda cells. But elements of the administration, including some members of the intelligence community, believe that such a tilt could lead to stability more quickly than the current policy of trying to police the ongoing sectarian conflict evenhandedly, with little success and at great cost.
...
AS SECTARIAN violence rises in Iraq and the White House comes under increasing pressure to revamp its strategy there, a debate is emerging inside the Bush administration: Should the U.S. abandon its efforts to act as a neutral referee in the ongoing civil war and, instead, throw its lot in with the Shiites?

A U.S. tilt toward the Shiites is a risky strategy, one that could further alienate Iraq's Sunni neighbors and that could backfire by driving its Sunni population into common cause with foreign jihadists and Al Qaeda cells. But elements of the administration, including some members of the intelligence community, believe that such a tilt could lead to stability more quickly than the current policy of trying to police the ongoing sectarian conflict evenhandedly, with little success and at great cost.

She has more on the "Salvadorization" of the war, here.

The Crux

2006-12-10T18:22:00.000-05:00

Ivo Daadler gets to the heart of the matter with regard to the Iraq Survey Group:

The most basic flaw in the report is the belief that political reconciliation is still possible in Iraq. But there is no evidence to support that belief — and there is plenty of evidence that the opposite is true. Iraqis are dying at a rate of well over 100 per day — which adds up to 40-50,000 Iraqi men, women, and children perishing each year. Many times that number are seriously wounded. Those that aren’t killed or maimed are leaving Iraq — currently at a rate of 1 million Iraqis per year. These are numbers that affirm, in ways that no spin can counter, that Iraq is now and has been for quite some time descended into a deadly civil war — a war in which Baghdad, the Iraqi capital city, stands at the bloody center.

It's a quick read if you'd like to give it look.

I'd argue that it's worse than a civil war in Iraq: it's a completely failed state.

SCIRI

2006-12-04T19:45:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note. If you told the denizens of wingnuttia in early 2003 that the Iraq War had gone so badly that George W. Bush would have to meet with Abdul-Aziz Al-Hakim in The White House, their collective heads would've popped like the lancing of a massive boil. We're talking beyond unthinkable.

And who is this stately Shiite Holy Man?

He's the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. He's been waiting in Iran (Axis of Evil, et. al.) for years to return home to claim the Shiite's right to power. Here's a little tidbit as well: the holiest sites for the Shia sect of Islam reside in Iraq, not Iran.

Islamic Revolution. Yes, the kind that overthrew the Shah of Iran. Hostages. 1979. Ayatollahs. 444 days.

Islamic Revolution and George W. Bush. Come to think of it, I didn't see that one coming myself.

The "80% Solution"

2006-12-01T18:41:00.000-05:00

From the Washington Post :

The Bush administration is deliberating whether to abandon U.S. reconciliation efforts with Sunni insurgents and instead give priority to Shiites and Kurds, who won elections and now dominate the government, according to U.S. officials.
The proposal, put forward by the State Department as part of a crash White House review of Iraq policy, follows an assessment that the ambitious U.S. outreach to Sunni dissidents has failed. U.S. officials are increasingly concerned that their reconciliation efforts may even have backfired, alienating the Shiite majority and leaving the United States vulnerable to having no allies in Iraq, according to sources familiar with the State Department proposal.

Note that this is a "crash review". One might wonder what they've been up to for well over three years. More:

Some insiders call the proposal the "80 percent" solution, a term that makes other parties to the White House policy review cringe. Sunni Arabs make up about 20 percent of Iraq's 26 million people.
Until now, the thrust of U.S. policy has been to build a unified government and society out of Iraq's three fractious communities. U.S. officials say they would not be abandoning this goal but would instead leave leadership of the thorny task of reconciliation to the Iraqis.
...
Opponents of the proposal cite three dangers. Without reconciliation, military commanders fear that U.S. troops would be fighting the symptoms of Sunni insurgency without any prospect of getting at the causes behind it -- notably the marginalization of the once-powerful minority. U.S. troops would be left fighting in a political vacuum, not a formula for either long-term stabilization or reducing attacks on American targets.
A second danger is that the United States could appear to be taking sides in the escalating sectarian strife. The proposal would encourage Iraqis to continue reconciliation efforts. But without U.S. urging, outreach could easily stall or even atrophy, deepening sectarian tensions, U.S. sources say.
A decision to step back from reconciliation efforts would also be highly controversial among America's closest allies in the region, which are all Sunni governments. Sunni leaders in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf sheikdoms have been pressuring the United States to ensure that their brethren are included in Iraq's power structure and economy.

I think we need to emphasize that these are internal deliberations, so we don't know if these ideas will be implemented. But if they are, this is nothing short of utter madness. If the U.S. is seen as taking sides at this point, it will start a regional war. And how do we know that? Because the Saudi's have explicitly told us so:

In this case, remaining on the sidelines would be unacceptable to Saudi Arabia. To turn a blind eye to the massacre of Iraqi Sunnis would be to abandon the principles upon which the kingdom was founded. It would undermine Saudi Arabia's credibility in the Sunni world and would be a capitulation to Iran's militarist actions in the region.
To be sure, Saudi engagement in Iraq carries great risks -- it could spark a regional war. So be it: The consequences of inaction are far worse.

It's almost unreal that we have these kinds of clowns running our foreign policy. That they are considering a policy they know would start a massive sectarian war, one that involves multiple countries across the wider Middle East, is all you need to know about the caliber of the Bush foreign policy apparatus.

Is the Modern GOP "Mainstream"?

2006-12-01T18:13:00.000-05:00

No. In many ways, they're insane. I don't use that term lightly either. It just happens to be the truth. Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly has this:

Click the link to read a summary of the Texas State Republican platform for 2000, the one they passed after six years with George Bush at the helm. Like so many revolutionaries before them, they're perfectly happy to proselytize their plan to the world openly with no hemming or hawing. You don't have to guess what their goals are, you just have to read what they themselves say they are.

The South has always been with us, but it's the Texas strain of militant conservativism that's made the South so toxic in recent years. If the country is finally starting to tire of their messianic insistence that you're not a real American unless you worship at their churches, watch their sports, and raise your family the way they tell you, it's not a moment too soon.

If you think the elimination of the separation of Church and State, abolishing Social Security, and taking back the Panama Canal sound like conspiracy theories; think again. Go ahead and click the link in his post (it's actually one of my favorite blog posts ever).

Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy has never looked smarter.

What's the Mission?

2006-11-30T20:30:00.000-05:00

Here's the finish from a great op-ed by Harold Meyerson:

We have plumb run out of mission in Iraq. We have enemies galore, but, other than the Kurds, precious few friends. We defend the idea of Iraq in the absence of Iraqis willing to do the same. We are at best a buffer -- unable to deter the daily atrocities but ensuring by our presence that they won't grow cataclysmically worse. Since we cannot deter the sectarian polarization, however, the cataclysm will follow our leave-taking whether it comes sooner or later.
Those who argue that we should send more troops (as if we had them) to Iraq, or train more Iraqis, or stay until the situation stabilizes should at least explain how the situation will stabilize, how nation-building will work in a nation that doesn't want to be built. We should, as George Packer has argued, rescue as many individual Iraqis as we possibly can on our way out. But rescuing Iraq from the forces we unleashed is plainly beyond us.
Or we could, I suppose, wait it out. About 100,000 Iraqis now flee the country every month for Syria or Jordan. At that rate, if we just hang on for 20 years, Iraq will be completely depopulated. The insurgency will be vanquished; sectarian strife will subside. Victory will be ours, and we can go home.

Well worth reading the rest as well. And this from Juan Cole:

The Iraq Study Group or Baker-Hamilton Commission will urge intensive diplomacy with Syria and Iran to help deal with the Iraqi civil conflict but will not urge a phased pull-out of US troops.

If they don't, they should specify the mission. What is the mission of the US military in Ramadi [in Al-Anbar Province]? I hope my readers will press their representatives in Congress and the executive branch to answer this question. What is the mission? When will it be accomplished?
...
Syria and Iran are not responsible for the resistance in Ramadi or Baquba and probably can't do anything about it. Therefore negotiating with them is not a silver bullet, though it might be useful in its own right.

What is the military mission? I can't see a practical one. And if there is not a military mission that can reasonably be accomplished in a specified period of time, then keeping US troops in al-Anbar is a sort of murder. Because you know when they go out on patrol, a few of them each week are going to get blown up or shot down. Reliably. Each week. Steadily. It is monstrous to force them to play Russian roulette every day unless there is a clear mission that could thereby be accomplished. There is not.

A day after that, ABC News reported: Pentagon Considers Moving Troops From al-Anbar Province to Baghdad. Juan picks out the take-away quote:

' "If we are not going to do a better job doing what we are doing out [in al-Anbar], what's the point of having them out there?" said a senior military official.'

Enough said.

Uncorking Ethnic Slaughter

2006-11-22T20:10:00.000-05:00

I'm going to give this terribly short shrift, and people much wiser than me have written entire books on these subjects, but the historical record stands:

- After the fall of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia crumbled and a massive ethnic/civil war ensued. The U.S., allied with NATO, ended the violence.

- After 9/11, the U.S. decided to overthrow Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq, thereby unleashing another sectarian/civil war.

If you pull the top off of a brutal regime, one that has suppressed tribal and religious differences for decades, you'd best be ready for an all out slaughter when those forces are set free to roam the country and settle up differences.

Just sayin'...

Iraq

2006-11-22T17:51:00.000-05:00

Suzanne Nossel over at Democracy Arsenal had a great post the other day about where we are now (here's her summary):

So what do we do next:

In short, develop a withdrawal scenario that includes whatever steps can reasonably be taken to minimize the chaos in our wake. A regional conference, talks with Syria and Iran, improved training and reconstruction efforts, political mediation and efforts to bolster the security of less violent regions should all be part of the package. To the extent we can engage Iraq's neighbors as well as any other global powers who are willing to step up to the plate and help us and Iraq, we should. We should be honest with ourselves and with the Iraqis about what we are doing and why, acknowledging all of the above rather than pretending that we're handing off a country that's in better shape than it is. But we should commit to getting out of there regardless of how the diplomacy and mediation progress.

Our exit should be as responsible and forthright as our entrance was wanton and misleading. The best thing we can promise troops who are now being asked to put their lives at risk for an all-but-declared failure is that they are taking risks to enable the US to make the best out of a terrible situation, preserving what can be saved of both Iraqi stability (in geographic pockets) and of American credibility. Its by no means the mission they signed up for, but its an important one nonetheless.

Kevin Drum higlighted the last point in her post, and for good reason:

If we don't begin a planned exit, there's a good chance we'll find ourselves in an unplanned one - Its surprising that by now we haven't experienced the Iraqi equivalent of the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut or the dragging of a corps of an American soldier through the streets of Mogadishu a decade later. But it seems likely that that day will come.

Oh, very likely indeed:

The intrepid Edward Wong of the New York Times reports that a car bomb targetting the Iraqi speaker of parliament, Mahmud Mashhadani [Sunni], was detonated inside the Green Zone on Tuesday. The Green Zone is a 4 square mile area of downtown Baghdad behind concrete walls, with a heavy US military guard. It houses the main political institutions of the new Iraq, and many parliamentarians live there. Likewise the US embassy and other Coalition institutions are based there. This is the most serious incident inside the Green Zone for some time.

As much as I loathe the thought, I believe the moment that Suzanne describes is coming. As unpopular as this war has become, wait until Americans get a look at some kind of Mogadishu moment in Iraq. At that point, support for the war will plummet. Another far-fetched possibility is one where the armed forces' supply lines are cut off. While airlifts would pick up the slack, and the severing would probably only be temporary, the effect on the view here at home would be major.

In other news, it's pretty clear the Brits are headed for the door. They may be tip-toeing around it, but they want out by next year:

"We expect Najaf to be the next province to be transferred to Iraqi control in December," Beckett told lawmakers in the House of Commons.

"In our own area of responsibility, we expect Maysan to follow in January," she said. "The progress of our current operation in Basra gives us confidence that we may be able to achieve transition in that province too at some point next spring."
Last month, Defense Secretary Des Browne said Britain was "quite far down the process" of transferring responsibility to the Iraqis.

No Magic Bullet, No Silver Lining

2006-11-15T20:43:00.000-05:00

As I was rooting around blogostan, as I tend to do, a theme popped up. That theme would be: even though it's being hailed as some kind of savior in the media, The Iraq Study Group won't have much to add or offer us in the way of policy changes in Iraq. And why is that? There are no good options left. Let's do a little roundup.

From David Kurtz at Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo:

It has become the consensus view, crosses party lines, and seems to be based in part on the assumption that anything is better than the current Iraq policy and its chief implementer, Don Rumsfeld.
[...]
If the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have a problem, then we may be at that first step. Our long national denial may be over. But admitting you have a problem doesn't in and of itself solve the problem. And right now Iraq is a problem begging for solutions.

Go read the meat of that post.
Kevin Drum mined the essence of the media dance from the National Review:

You are sure to hear time and again how Baker et al. have given the Democrats cover to push even harder for withdrawal. And why do they need this "cover"? Well, because they are going to be attacked by Republicans. Now, every time some GOP spokesman tells Tim Russert that the Democrats want to cut-and-run, Russert can respond that even the Baker Commission wants withdrawal (turn on your televisions; this is already happening). And why does the Baker Commission have such "credibility"? Because the press has been telling us that it does. What a beautiful circle.

Foreign policy expert Juliette Kayyem offers this:

I know we all should be eagerly awaiting the results of the Baker-Hamilton report, right? The press is giddy with the notion that this will be the cure for what ails us: an insolveable problem in Iraq, a way forward between the "stay the course" and "cut and run."

Let's be serious here, cause it is war. We, including Democrats, are setting ourselves up for some closure that doesn't exist. As Jim Zogby has written, we're all "waiting for godot." Remember, he never arrives.

And finally, Michael Hirsch from Newsweek sums it up:

...and [Washington] anxiously waits for the sage Jim Baker to fix the mess made by the Bush family’s black sheep, who also happens to be president of the United States. The headline is: "Will Bush Talk to Iran and Syria about Iraq?" Apparently that's a big part of the Baker plan, judging from the long, convivial dinner he had the other week with Iran's ambassador to the U.N., Javad Zarif, which according to an informed source was all about Iraq.
[...]
It’s easy enough to blame the departing Donald Rumsfeld for this, as he leaves town like the biblical goat cast into the wilderness. But let's not forget that Rummy, for all his sins, wanted to pull out of Iraq quickly after the spring 2003 invasion and leave things to the Iraqi Army. It was Bush, with his vague ideas of a deeper transformation communicated just as vaguely to civil administrator Paul L. (Jerry) Bremer III, who opted to dismantle the Iraqi Army and Baath Party. That committed Bush to a long occupation, but he never bothered to check whether his Defense secretary was following through with the troops and resources that were needed (Rummy wasn't). If Barbara Tuchman were alive, she'd be adding another chapter to "The March of Folly." Sorry folks. Iraq is broken, and all the Jim Bakers and all the Bob Gateses can't put Humpty Dumpty together again.

With Cheney isolated because of the departure of Rumsfeld, let's see how this plays out. Any way you slice it, it's a national nightmare.

Another Horrific Month

2006-11-15T20:32:00.000-05:00

We're halfway through November, and so far 41 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq. While everyone in Washington is sitting on their hands and waiting for a report from some commission, our kids are dying. Despicable doesn't even come close. Decide something and make a change, assholes.

Corporal Joker

2006-11-10T13:16:00.000-05:00

From Laura Rosen:

Hashim al-Menti smiled wanly at the marine sergeant beside him on his couch. The sergeant had appeared in the darkness on Wednesday night, knocking on the door of Mr. Menti’s home.

When Mr. Menti answered, a squad of infantrymen swiftly moved in, making him an involuntary host.

Since then marines had been on his roof with rifles, watching roads where insurgents often planted bombs.

Mr. Menti had passed the time watching television. Now he had news. He spoke in broken English. “Rumsfeld is gone,” he told the sergeant, Michael A. McKinnon.

“Democracy,” he added, and made a thumbs-up sign. “Good.”

The marines had been on a continuous foot patrol for several days, hunting for insurgents. They were lost in the hard and isolating rhythms of infantry life.

They knew nothing of the week’s news.

Now they were being told by an Iraqi whose house they occupied that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, one of the principal architects of the policies that had them here, had resigned. “Rumsfeld is gone?” the sergeant asked. “Really?”

Mr. Menti nodded. “This is better for Iraq,” he said. “Iraqi people say thank you.”

The sergeant went upstairs to tell his marines, just as he had informed them the day before that the Republican Party had lost control of the House of Representatives and that Congress was in the midst of sweeping change. Mr. Menti had told them that, too.

“Rumsfeld’s out,” he said to five marines sprawled with rifles on the cold floor.

Lance Cpl. James L. Davis Jr. looked up from his cigarette. “Who’s Rumsfeld?” he asked.

"The Plan Was Solid"

2006-11-09T22:50:00.000-05:00

"There was nothing wrong with the plan."

Conservative leaders meet to plan a comeback; Return to power is based upon policies that lead to resounding defeat.

That may as well have been the title of the article in the L.A. Times if you go through the guts of it.

There's some good stuff in here, like this:

"There was no ideological rejection in this election," said Richard Lessner, former executive director of the American Conservative Union..."This was about the Republican Party not behaving like Republicans," Lessner said. "And the voters gave the party a timeout and said, 'Go stand in the corner.' "

Not behaving like Republicans? If that means acting like Democrats, well, they have a word for that: Treason. These were the people they wanted elected. Here's the soon-to-be-former head of the RNC, Ken Mehlman:

"We have a long history as a movement, if you think about it — of using our difficult election outcomes to make ourselves better," Mehlman said. "The fact is, we do need to do better, and I think we need to look at it as a big opportunity as a party and a cause to return to our reformist approach and our reformist principles."

His "reformist" calptrap is nothing more than a code word. He means to reform nothing. This talk is about continuing to shift the overall tax burden from corporations and the wealthy onto the middle class and the poor.

Here's more talk about how, "I didn't do it!":

"There's no doubt in my mind it was not a repudiation of conservatives but it was a repudiation of the Republican Party," said the group's president, former congressman Pat Toomey.

I wonder which other vehicle Pat sees as his horse to ride to victory? I guess Pat needs more "reformist Republicans" in his camp. If Pat went Libertarian, and ran on his choice of ticket anywhere in PA., we could rightly write him off for good. But Pat doesn't like to work on the fringes, he likes to shake things up! Indulge me for a minute. Pat, an anti-tax zealout, served in the House, and then ran to defeat in the 04' PA. Senate race against Arlen Spector. Now he's the head of the Club for Growth, a phony astroturf outfit that has been nailed dead to rights:

Elsewhere, Christina Larson documents the pain of the Club for Growth's Pat Toomey. It seems the Club took a poll before the election and they didn't like the results:
Two-thirds agreed with the notion that the GOP used to be the party of fiscal responsibility and limited government but was not today. By an 11-point margin, likely voters expressed greater confidence in Democrats to handle select fiscal matters responsibly. “We have lost our brand,” Toomey bemoaned.
Get real, guys. The Club for Growth and its ilk have never cared a tenth as much about lower spending as they have about lower taxes. They know perfectly well that if a Republican administration actually cut spending to match its tax cuts it would get voted out of office for the next century.

And they've never cared. They just want low taxes (the easy part of fiscal responsibility) without the spending cuts (the part that gets you voted out of office). It's similar to the GOP's Iraq strategy: they want the glory of winning a war, but without the pain of making the hard choices it would take to actually do so.

Toomey's Phony Shithouse came close to casting Rhode Island's popular Republican Senator Lincoln Chaffee out of office in a primary, even when they knew the candidate they had backed would lose the seat to Democratic candidate Sheldon Whitehouse by overwhelming margins. Turns out, Chaffee won the primary against the Club for Growth cretin, and still lost the seat to a Democrat. And now Toomey "bemoans" the "brand"? He'll bemoan anything but his way of thinking. If I were a Rhodie Republican, I'd tell Toomey to go sell his dogma elsewhere, because what he put the GOP incumbent through in a useless primary certainly didn't help Chaffee in the general. What a sham.

Now, I bring you Grover Norquist:

Despite short-term setbacks, Norquist said, the conservative movement is "perfectly healthy. No one is losing because they favor tax cuts, are pro-life, pro-gun or pro-growth.

"In two years, there is no George W. Bush and almost no Iraq war as presently constructed," Norquist said.

Now, that's moral clarity. Grover's pining for the time when the Iraq War is not as it is "presently constructed". If it weren't for Richard Perle, I couldn't think of a more colossal asshole on the planet than Grover Norquist. When his "Ass To Mouth" movement has failed, he knows where the blame goes:

"'And Democrats will be standing there, naked to the winds, having been forced by Nancy Pelosi to vote for tax increases, gun control and impeaching the president,"' he added, referring to the future speaker of the House."

Yeah Grover, whatever. Conservatives should took a long look at their ideology and quit blaming the vehicle they chose to implement it.

Update: Right on cue, here's Newt Gingrich:

"We have to recognize that this was a defeat for Republicans, not for conservatives," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Washington Times yesterday.
There is hope to advance a conservative agenda, Mr. Gingrich said, if House Republicans can find allies among conservative Democrats.
"The balance of power in the House is now 50-plus blue-dog [conservative] Democrats," he said.

We can't debunk this enough.

Big Doin's

2006-11-09T21:31:00.000-05:00

Obviously.

The House and the Senate.

Pretty Sweet.

Now the circular firing squad is in full effect on the Right. It'll continue for a couple of months at least due to all the ensuing firings and "stepping downs".

Looking back, it kills me how much time and how many lives have been wasted in Iraq, just so a bunch of idealouges could prove they were right all along, even though many of us knew they were wrong about literally everything. Sickening and tragic at the same time.

This midterm election was a call for a massive shift in the political direction our country. And none too soon.

Look for hard core conservatives to start braying about how it was never conservatism that failed, only the GOP's implementation of it. Let's drown that baby in the tub now. It's a fallacy. The generations that follow mine will become more and more open to different ideas, which in turn means more and more centrist and liberal.

The future, from my vantage point anyway, just turned a lot brighter.

What's Being Left Out

2006-11-07T00:18:00.000-05:00

Well, it's now wall to wall election coverage for the next day or two at least.

As we pass into the 7th day of this month, there have been 18 U.S. military casualties in Iraq so far in November. That includes a helicopter crash, killing two.

In the last two days I have yet to see one report in the news, from the myriad of sources I check every day, that would inform the American people of this fact. Astounding as well is how fast the fact that 105 U.S. military personnel perished in October has been swept under the rug by the mainstream media as they pursue all the horserace "drama" of the midterms.

Just to add a little perspective, the last time we had more American losses than this October was January of 2005. In addition, October's losses are the the fourth highest monthly total for the entire war. And given the numbers for November so far, we're in for another horrific month.

All this shows a major escalation in attacks on American troops in Iraq. The media's nowhere to be found on this. I'm unsurprised as usual.

My heart goes out to all that have lost loved ones and friends.

Best Campaign Ad EVER

2006-11-07T00:01:00.000-05:00

Tube it...

Bring on the Recriminations!

2006-11-04T18:03:00.000-05:00

There's lot of buzz about this new article in Vanity Fair featuring some of the neoconservatives that pushed for the Iraq War. Kevin Drum has a great post about it, here:

It's worth saying very plainly what's going on here: the neocons are using these interviews to make the case that neoconservatism is in no way to blame for the disaster in Iraq. If they had been in charge things would have been different.

This baby needs to be strangled in its crib. The 1997 "Statement of Principles" of the Project for a New American Century, the neocon Bible, was signed by, among others, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Scooter Libby, and Elliot Abrams. All of these men were deeply involved in the formulation, planning, and execution of the Iraq war. The neocon creed was part and parcel of every move they made.

That's the teaser, go read the rest.

The long knives are definitely out. If the GOP loses both the House and the Senate, there's going to be a virtual Conservative bloodbath. Oh the coming schadenfreude...

President Shitmouth

2006-11-02T22:17:00.000-05:00

Oh yes, we're turning very shrill over here at the MB. One of the best bloggers in the business is Steve Benen. He hangs his shingle under the name The Carpet Bagger Report. Pretty sweet. I'm hoping Steve won't mind, because I'm snagging this entire post:

Bush doesn't realize he's already 'changed the tone'

Once in a great while, Bush says something so unbelievable, I have to wonder if he's an incredibly good liar or living in some kind of bizarro world in which reality has no meaning. Consider, for example, this gem from the president's interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity.

"I don't like the tone in Washington, D.C. I feel like that the politics has gotten ugly, and that tends to discourage people around the country. And that's just too bad.

"I would hope in my last two years I can — and, by the way, I've never really resorted to name-calling. And I'm not trying to say, well, you know, I'm innocent and everybody else is guilty. That's not what I'm trying to say. But I understand that it's one thing to disagree with a person, but it's another thing to have to resort to kind of shameless name-calling. And I really don't think it's fitting for the president to drag the presidency into that kind of a mudslinging."

You've got to be kidding me.

"Gotten ugly"? A few weeks ago, the president kicked the campaign season into high gear with some unusually bitter rhetoric. "We know the enemy wants to attack us again," Bush said, whereas Democrats "offer nothing but criticism and obstruction and endless second-guessing." Shortly thereafter, the president upped the ante, telling a partisan crowd, "If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party, it sounds like — it sounds like — they think the best way to protect the American people is, wait until we're attacked again." This week, Bush pushed the envelope to the breaking point, telling a crowd that Dems want terrorists to win.

"Drag the presidency into that kind of a mudslinging"? Bush is the first president to so blatantly use a war to smear his political opponents with unfair and untrue attacks.

In what universe can this man consider himself above the fray?

This is, after all, the president said in 2002 that Senate Democrats are "not interested in the security of the American people" because they disagreed with him on a labor issue, and then refused to apologize.

When Dick Durbin questioned the administration's gulags, Team Bush has accused Democrats of being traitors.

When Jack Murtha unveiled a redeployment plan for Iraq, Team Bush said Murtha has endorsed "the policy positions of Michael Moore" and suggested Murtha wants to "surrender to the terrorists."

When Patrick Leahy questioned no-bid contracts for Halliburton, Bush's VP told him to go f*** himself.

And, of course, lengthy books are available on Team Bush's vicious smears of John McCain and Al Gore in 2000, and of John Kerry in 2004.

The "tone" in DC is noxious because Bush and his team a) made it that way; and b) prefer it that way. For the president to lament the environment that he created is simply breathtaking.

As you can plainly see, I'm a little bit more harsh with blog post titles than Steve is, but he's a respected guy, and I'm a shitmouth myself.

When Steve says, "You've got to be kidding me", he's not joking. I said the same thing to myself when I read Bush's phony horseshit. Then I remembered that this was the playbook Newt Gingrich created to energize the voting public to buy into the Contract With America in 1994, and ultimately vote Republican. Have a look at the words Republicans were instructed to use to describe Democrats:

abuse of power
anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs
betray
bizarre
bosses
bureaucracy
cheat
coercion
"compassion" is not enough
collapse(ing)
consequences
corrupt
corruption
criminal rights
crisis
cynicism
decay
deeper
destroy
destructive
devour
disgrace
endanger
excuses
failure (fail)
greed
hypocrisy
ideological
impose
incompetent
insecure
insensitive

intolerant
liberal
lie
limit(s)
machine
mandate(s)
obsolete
pathetic
patronage
permissive attitude
pessimistic
punish (poor ...)
radical
red tape
self-serving
selfish
sensationalists
shallow
shame
sick
spend(ing)
stagnation
status quo
steal
taxes
they/them
threaten
traitors
unionized
urgent (cy)
waste
welfare

Somewhere along the line, George got the memo. After all, "traitors" is on the list, and I'll probably be dead before the Republican party stops using that term to describe anyone that opposes them. In this case George pictures himself as "above the fray". Someday he'll figure out that he is the fray.

Unpopular? No, Toxic

2006-11-02T21:04:00.000-05:00

According to a new NY Times/CBS News poll, the president's approval rating is at 34%.

The president hasn't broken the 50% barrier since right after the '04 election, where he had an approval rating of 51% (11/18-21/04).

At this time during the 2002 midterms, he had an approval rating of 62%.

If the Democrats win the House, and Nancy Pelosi becomes Speaker, she has stated that impeachment of the president is off the table. I couldn't agree more.

He's already promised to leave all of his disastorous policies in place, and to try and privatize Social Security again. Let this fraud of a man become the most unpopular two-term president in American history. Let the stench of the dead albatross around his neck ensure long-term darkness for the band of criminals he's brought into power with him. And, let the Bush name be wiped clean from American politics forever.

Let him crawl out of the White House on January 21st, 2009, on his knees in shame for what he has done to our democracy.

I'll be amazed if he leaves with more than a 26% approval rating, if that. If he's not impeached, he'll make Nixon look popular.

Blood like rain fallin' down

2006-11-02T20:50:00.000-05:00

Eye on the TV
'cause tragedy thrills me
Whatever flavor
It happens to be

Like:
"Killed by the husband"
"Drowned by the ocean"
"Shot by his own son"
"She used the poison in his tea
"he kissed her goodbye"
That's my kind of story
It's no fun til someone dies

Don't look me at like
I am a monster
Frown out your one face
But with the other
Stare like a junkie
Into the TV
Stare like a zombie
While the mother, holds her child
Watches him die
Hands to the sky cryin,
"Why, oh why?"

Cause I need to watch things die
From a distance
Vicariously, I
Live while the whole world dies
You all need it too - don't lie.

Why can't we just admit it?
Why can't we just admit it?
We won't give pause until the blood is flowin'
Neither the brave nor bold
Will write us the story so
We won't give pause until the blood is flowin'

I need to watch things die
From a good safe distance
Vicariously, I
Live while the whole world dies
You all feel the same so
Why can't we just admit it?

Blood like rain fallin' down

Part vampire
Part warrior
Carnivore and voyeur
Stare at the
transmitter
Sing to the death rattle

La, la, la, la, la, la, la-lie

Credulous at best
Your desire to believe in
Angels in the hearts of men.
But pull your head on out
Your head please and give a listen
Shouldn't have to say it all again

The universe is hostile
So impersonal
Devour to survive
So it is, so it's always been ...

We all feed on tragedy
It's like blood to a vampire

Vicariously, I
Live while the whole world dies
Much better you than I.

Lately, Some Mencken...

2006-11-01T20:57:00.000-05:00

H.L. that is:

"As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

Billmon reminds us:

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

November Surprise? The Media.

2006-11-01T19:31:00.000-05:00

Way back when, I predicted that reducing the number of troops in Iraq, along with parades and patriotic fanfare, and another declaration of "We're Winning", would be the big October surprise.

I knew I was wrong months ago when reports kept dribbling in about increases in troop numbers, Operation Together Forward in Baghdad, and Rove planning on driving the votes home by highlighting the war.

Stupid me.

Now, it seems the news networks want a hand in helping the GOP grunt the ball over the goal line. I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens on Tuesday, but one flub by the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate has sent to media into a mindless frenzy. Apparently, the numerous dictums, even recent ones, from our man-child president are just ho-hum by now; six years into his failed presidency. He's an idiot that can't speak well, yes, but he sure is authentic!

I know, I'm being gloomy, and I hope this flap goes away before it's featured as the first story on the nightly news for the third fucking night in a row.

I watched with mort and marvel as Tim Russert, NBC's political "expert", grabbed his lower lip, yanked it over his pumpkin-sized head, and uttered this shit:

First the Democrats, they are furious about this because this is the third news cycle that this has dominated political news coverage...

Stop right there. Another Democratic circular firing squad, all generated by the media. Why is this the third consecutive news cycle where this has dominated everything? Because, for morons like you Tim, that's what passes for actual news.

Every time I see a little sign that our country may be on a path towards better leadership, I see this filth that passes for news, and I'm left wondering who will vote which way, or who will even vote.

Even if the Dem's gain control of one House, the sniping from the Right will be merciless, haughty, sickening, and un-American. It's coming...

Bomb

2006-10-26T18:30:00.000-05:00

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert

Cooked

2006-10-25T17:45:00.000-05:00

I ran across Charlie Cook's dispatch today from the National Journal, and there's some really good stuff in there (I'm a sucker for historical comparisons).

In the House, Republicans are most likely to see a net loss of 20 to 35 seats, and with it their majority. In the Senate, the GOP could lose at least four, but a five- or six-seat loss is more likely. A six-seat change tips the chamber into Democratic hands.

October surprise put into context:

Could the situation change? Could the trajectory of this election be altered if the spotlight shifts from Iraq, congressional scandals, budget deficits, Hurricane Katrina, Terri Schiavo, stem-cell research and immigration onto something else, like terrorism or national security? Of course it could. In the time it takes to read this article, something could happen. A confrontation at sea involving a freighter going into or coming out of North Korea, for example, could dominate the news and the public consciousness. But unless something of that magnitude happens, we have to go with the situation as it stands.

This year, not so local:

Could the situation change? Could the trajectory of this election be altered if the spotlight shifts from Iraq, congressional scandals, budget deficits, Hurricane Katrina, Terri Schiavo, stem-cell research and immigration onto something else, like terrorism or national security? Of course it could. In the time it takes to read this article, something could happen. A confrontation at sea involving a freighter going into or coming out of North Korea, for example, could dominate the news and the public consciousness. But unless something of that magnitude happens, we have to go with the situation as it stands. compare the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, conducted October 13-16 among 1,006 registered voters nationwide, with the comparable NBC/WSJ poll from October 1994. President Bill Clinton and the Democrats were in the hot seat, headed toward a 52-seat loss in the House and an eight-seat Senate defeat.
In the October 1994 NBC/WSJ poll, 39 percent of voters thought the country was headed in the right direction, compared with 48 percent who said it was on the wrong track -- a nine-point lead for wrong track. In the recent poll, just 26 percent said right direction and 61 percent said wrong track; a net difference of 35 points, significantly worse than 1994.

Charlie's a pretty shrewd guy, and I tend to agree with most of what he says here. That six-seat Dem grab in the Senate is the one I've got my eye on. If I wake up on November 8th and that has come to fruition, there will be some gleam in this dummy's eye. There's more there if you want to check it out. I think it's all going to be too close to call in the Senate.

Cheney: Serious About Foreign Policy

2006-10-20T19:17:00.000-05:00

That's what the American public was told when he nominated himself to be George W. Bush's running mate in the 2000 election, and then became Vice President. I'm not going to go through the myriad of foreign policy failures he's presided over in the last five years. Let's go with the past week. On the 17th of this month, our Vice President said this:

They’ve had three national elections with higher turnout than we have here in the United States. If you look at the general overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well.

The next day, ten U.S soldiers were killed in Iraq.

And today, the Mahdi militia briefly took total control of the town of Amarah.

Last night, in a question and answer with a local news outfit, he said this:

Q: Are you saying that you believe fighting in Iraq has prevented terrorist attacks on American soil? And if so, why, since there has not been a direct connection between al Qaeda and Iraq established?

CHENEY: Well, the fact of the matter is there are connections. Mr. Zarqawi, who was the lead terrorist in Iraq for three years, fled there after we went into Afghanistan. He was there before we ever went into Iraq. The sectarian violence that we see now, in part, has been stimulated by the fact of al Qaeda attacks intended to try to create conflict between Shia and Sunni.

No, the fact of the matter is, the Vice President of the United States is a paid professional liar. He's not a stupid man, and he knows that trying to backtrack or reverse course will only lead to more lies, so he keeps telling the same ones over and over again.

By sheer instinct, being the dirty politico that he is, he knows the sloth ridden American media will never ever call him on his horseshit. Al Gore can "invent the Internet" and the dogs line up at the starting gate to chase, but when "Mr. Serious" plunges our nation into a generational conflict, we're all supposed to bow to his wisdom. Because he's "serious about national security".

Why this man is not a national joke by now is astounding.

Crazy Curt and PA's 7th

2006-09-21T19:54:00.000-05:00

Because my family originally settled in this country in Pennsylvania in the 1600's, I have a natural affinity for the state. I wasn't born there, nor have I ever lived there, but I've visited many times, and the amount of rural space in the state tends to warm the cockles of this old shitkicker's heart. Hell, one of my favorite bands is from York, PA. It's the quintesential American state; a thing of enormous beauty. And if you've never visited Gettysburg and the national park there, then you'll have to answer this question: Why do you hate America?

That said, the modern elected Republican politicians from PA. are fucking nuts. Rubber room, certifiable, man-humps-dog, crazy people. The 7th Congressional district is represented by Curt Weldon, whom I've written about before. Thankfully, just in time for the electoral mid-term shenanigans for '06, The American Prospect has published this little ditty from Laura Rosen:

Probably Weldon’s most notorious venture into the dark side is something known to insiders as “Able Danger,” an obscure and now defunct Pentagon data-mining program. Weldon claims the program identified the chief September 11 hijacker months before the attacks. The villains in his theory are civil-liberties-minded Pentagon lawyers who supposedly blocked analysts from sharing their findings with the FBI. He has even alleged that the 9-11 Commission conspired in a cover-up of the Able Danger findings. (Both the Pentagon and the 9-11 Commission vigorously dispute his accusations.) [Update: The Pentagon, in a report released today, told Curt he was full of shit.]
Iran is another area in which Weldon has consistently pushed a black-helicopter narrative. He published a tabloidish book on Iran, titled Countdown to Terror, and went on Meet the Press to denounce the CIA for failing to hire his secret Iranian intelligence source. The source turned out to be a business associate of a discredited former Iran-Contra arms dealer and intelligence peddler Manucher Ghorbanifar, who has been deemed a fabricator by the CIA and was looking to get on the U.S. payroll once again.
In his latest headline-grabbing tirade, Weldon has insisted that the Bush administration actually suppressed evidence of weapons of mass destruction being found in Iraq. At one point he even planned to fly to Iraq secretly and commandeer Army equipment to go dig the hidden arsenal up himself, according to Dave Gaubatz, who had planned to accompany him. (The trip was called off when Gaubatz backed out, alarmed that Weldon was trying to politicize the project.)

Curt wanted to dig up some 500 '80's-era mustard gas shells burried in the desert, keep the military in the dark about his little find, and then invite the media out so he could proclaim, "we've found the weapons of mass destruction!".

Here's a few choice quotes from Republican staffers (keep in mind, they're GOP toady suck-ups):
- “Weldon is erratic,”
- “The intelligence community does not take him seriously,”
- “Anything connected to him has the same treatment. The opinion of Weldon is that he is on a crusade.”

Laura provides a nice roundup. Go check it out.

Don't let the hypnotic hand motions fool you, the crazy shit's between his ears.

Okay, This Isn't Good

2006-09-21T19:30:00.000-05:00

Or, more accurately, it's a really bad sign:

The Pentagon has created a new desk to work on Iran policy. That worries some at the CIA, who point out that many of the new Iran-desk staffers are the same people who staffed the now-notorious Office of Special Plans in the run-up to the Iraq war.

They mislead America into a useless war once. Why wouldn't it work again?

If you'd like to learn more, go here and check out Laura Rosen's amazing reporting. She's truly one of the best.

How Low Can We Go?

2006-09-16T20:51:00.000-05:00

In an e-mail to a friend the other day, I wrote: "I never thought I would see, in my lifetime, an American president pushing Congress to enact a law that would explicitly allow the torture of detainees in U.S. custody." It's a testiment to just how far we've fallen as a nation.

One way I haven't seen this framed in the media would go something like this: "Bush Defies Military on Torture Policies." That's exactly what's going on here, but no one will come right out and say it. Opposing Bush in Congress there's a former Air Force JAG lawyer, a former Secretary of the Navy and WWII vet, and a former Vietnam POW and torture victim. Outside of the government, two former Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell and Vessey, have come out against Bush's proposal. The military's top uniformed lawyers have questioned the legality of the administration's bill. Even The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America oppose Bush and Cheney. In a very poigniant statement, one of their leaders wrote, "Mr. President, If You Had Fought, You Would Understand."

Bush and Cheney have used up America's military in Iraq, downgraded its readiness, and appear to view it only as a tool for their foreign imperial ambitions. Here, Eric Alterman breaks down a detailed study conducted by the New Republic:

There are a lot of reasons why pro-military types and their families vote Republican and while they exist for understandable historical reasons as a reaction to particular historical and cultural phenomena, fewer and fewer of them can be considered rational in light of contemporary developments. The long and the short of it, as Lawrence Korb, Max Bergmann & Peter Ogden demonstrate in this week’s TNR, is that Bush has declared a de facto war on the U.S. Army. Consider:
Fully two-thirds of the active U.S. Army is officially classified as "not ready for combat."

The National Guard is "in an even more dire situation than the active Army but both have the same symptoms; I just have a higher fever."

The Army has almost no nondeployed combat-ready brigades at its disposal.

The equipment in Iraq is wearing out at four to nine times the normal peacetime rate because of combat losses and harsh operating conditions.

The total Army--active and reserve--now faces at least a $50 billion equipment shortfall.

After failing to meet its recruitment target for 2005, the Army raised the maximum age for enlistment from 35 to 40 in January--only to find it necessary to raise it to 42 in June.

The number of Army recruits who scored below average on its aptitude test doubled in 2005, and the Army has doubled the number of non-high school graduates it can enlist this year.

Basic training, which has, for decades, been an important tool for testing the mettle of recruits, has increasingly become a rubber-stamping ritual. Through the first six months of 2006, only 7.6 percent of new recruits failed basic training, down from 18.1 percent in May 2005.

Thousands of white supremacists may have been able to infiltrate the military due to pressure from recruitment shortfalls.

Only people that would choose to avoid combat would know what kind of gall it would take to lead our nation into the myriad of foreign policy and military failures that we have endured in the past five years. For them to admit that a few mistakes were made along the way is to excuse the fact that they were wrong from the outset about everything. Completely and utterly wrong. I'd challenge anyone who would assert they were right about anything. Anything.

We need to hear from some other voices. Duncan Black (a.k.a. Atrios):

Since 9/11 our rulers have elevated American Exceptionalism to absurd heights, arguing anything we (meaning, actually, George Bush) does is by definition Right and True and Correct. Torture is fine when we do it, bad when others do it. They see no advantage in trying to achieve the moral high ground because whatever we do is moral.

American might in the world always depended in large part on its moral authority. No one thought the country was perfect or that it ever came close to living up to its ideals, but the ideals were still there.

Aside from disgusting me, losing that perception of moral authority makes everything we do more costly and more dangerous.

From PA., the respected Billmon:

[As] Marty Lederman asks over at Balkinization, if Article 3 is so "vague," and our organs of state security never use torture (as President Cheney and his underlings tell us repeatedly) then why are the administration's mouthpieces fighting so hard to get Congress to bar the courts from reviewing methods such as hypothermia, near drowning, standing in place with hands shackled over head for 40 hours or more, etc.? And why are the Rovian clone clowns on Capitol Hill trying to amend the War Crimes Act? And why are CIA operatives suddenly taking out torture insurance (including the "accidental" death or dismemberment rider)?

The answers are pretty obvious: They're all exposed. Their great big flabby asses are hanging out in the legal breeze, and they know it. They actually are scared it could come to this.
[...]
We're not there yet, but that is the direction we're heading, and a unilateral decision to redefine the Geneva Conventions (without actually admitting that we're doing it) would take us another few hundred miles down the road.

What this amounts to (and what Powell was really complaining about) is the final decommissioning of the myth of American exceptionalism -- once one of the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal. Without it, we're just another paranoid empire obsessed with our own security and willing to tell any lie or repudiate any self-proclaimed principle if we think it will make us even slightly safer.

To put it mildly, this is not the kind of flag the rest of the world is likely to rally around, no matter how frantically we wave it. Even Shrub seems to understand this somewhere in the dimly lit attic that is his mind -- thus his recent remark that an America that doesn't advance the cause of freedom is an America that has lost its soul. It's easy to paint this as delusional, or an updated version of the old Orwellian slogan that slavery = freedom, but Shrub at least seems to understands that America will have to convince the world it stands for more than just power, privilege and profit if it's going to attract the support of the 80% of the human race that lacks all three. How, exactly, would ditching the Geneva Conventions further this goal?

Then again, maybe it's best if the myth gets permanently busted. Maybe America should take public responsibility for torturing prisoners -- instead of just pawning the job off to the Jordanian or Egyptian or Saudi intelligence services, who could and would hook car batteries to testicles with gusto while we piously pronounced our hands (and hearts) clean. A U.S. torture statute would at least bring a certain degree of clarity to the "vague" and "open to interpretation" policies that have long allowed the United States to enjoy the fruits of torture (and other crimes) without actually committing them ourselves. I know that's not exactly the kind of clarity Shrub was asking for today, but it would still be a refreshing oubreak of honesty.

That said, though, nobody should have any illusions about what that kind of "clarity" would reveal and which side of the moral line the United States would be seen to be standing on.

We give the final word to DK, guest posting at Talking Points Memo:

The torture debate in Congress--I never expected to write such words--is as surreal to me as watching the collapse of the Twin Towers. If the Democrats are able to take control of at least one chamber in November, then surely the President's pro-torture bill will be viewed in hindsight as the nadir of the Bush presidency. If not, how much lower can things go?

I am beyond being able to assess the political implications, one way or the other, of this spectacle. Regardless of which version of the bill finally passes, this debate is a black mark on the soul of the nation. Of course passage of a pro-torture bill will diminish U.S. standing internationally and jeopardize the safety and well-being of U.S. servicemen in future engagements. But merely having this debate has already accomplished that. Does anyone honestly believe that if Congress rebuffs the President in every respect that the rule of law and the inviolability of human rights will have been vindicated? Of course not.

The Republicans have defined deviancy down for the whole world, including every two-bit dictator and wild-eyed terrorist.
[...]
Only the weak, scared, and evil torture. Those who order and sanction torture, but leave the dirty work to others, are an order of magnitude more culpable morally. (A special place is reserved for the lawyers who give legal cover for such orders.) In their fear and their weakness and their smallness, the President and those around him stepped over the line. To do so in the heated days after 9/11 is understandable to a point, though not justifiable. Yet they persisted, first in saying that they did not step over the line and now in seeking to redraw the line. So which is it?
They are descending from the morally reprehensible to the morally cowardly.

The "Other" Iraq?

2006-09-13T21:51:00.000-05:00

Oh yes indeed:

Kurdistan - The Other Iraq

While the Sunni-controlled province of Anbar burns, and Bahgdad is being ripped apart by civil war, it sure looks a lot sunnier up there in the Kurdish north. After looking at that website, you might even guess it was a completely seperate country! By the way, that's exactly what the Kurds want, and it seems they're well on their way.

After the Gulf War, nestled under the northern no-fly zone, they were left pretty much to their own devices, and they formed a government, an army, and many of the other institutions a people would need to function autonomously.

I've read a bit about how things were going much better in Kurdistan than they were in the south, but I never dreamed I could find that out by watching a commercial!

In all seriousness, now that Iraq has been effectively broken into three parts, I hope the Kurds make their piece a great nation.

Cheney's Woodshed

2006-09-08T20:31:00.000-05:00

That's the place where Republican Senators go when they disagree with the Vice President. That goes for virtually everything. That's where, lest we forget, that Arlen Spector was taken, and summarily beaten, before he was allowed to take the high Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was told, tow the line, or have the chairmanship yanked and we'll hand to someone who will. As Glenn Greenwald helpfully points out, Old Arlen is standing at full attention and telling us Cheney can ignore the 1978 FISA law altogether, and spy on anyone he wants. So much for Arlen's "legacy", but Glenn's post highlights the fact that it necessary to have a good lawyer around (Um, that would be Glenn, not Arlen).

There are many other examples as well, such as Pat Roberts, Chair of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, and his sham Phase I investigation, and his stalling of Phase II on the dissembling and lies the administration told to lead us to war in Iraq. Pat knows his place very well.

Now, as Bush makes his electoral push to shred some more of the tenants of American democracy, namely HabeusaCorpus and Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, there are three Republican Senators standing in his way: John McCain (R-AZ), John Warner (R-VA), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Cheney is saying, basically, that evidence obtained under extreme duress (read: torture) , can be used against accused terrorists, and that the "defendants" cannot see the evidence against them if it's classified.

As the New York Times has reported, Senator Graham appears unwilling to play ball:

“It would be unacceptable, legally, in my opinion, to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has played a key role in the drafting of alternative legislation as a member of the Armed Services Committee and a military judge. “ ‘Trust us, you’re guilty, we’re going to execute you, but we can’t tell you why’? That’s not going to pass muster; that’s not necessary.”

From the same piece, the Marines don't seem to back the bill either:

Brig, Gen. James C. Walker, the top uniformed lawyer for the Marines, said that no civilized country should deny a defendant the right to see the evidence against him and that the United States “should not be the first.”

As this bill percolates up through committee, and to the full Senate before the recess, it'll be interesting to see whether these three "moderate" Senators hold their ground, or become just another trio of folders that we can toss away into the heap known as the The Fraud Caucus.

One thing you can be sure of is that when you're summoned to the Woodshed, it's not Old Hickory you'll be struck with; Cheney prefers a lead pipe.

More Intolerable Ignorance

2006-09-08T18:46:00.000-05:00

From a recent CNN poll:

"Do you think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th terrorist attacks, or not?" Half sample, MoE ± 4.5

Yes - 43%
No - 52%
Unsure - 6%

8/30 - 9/2/06

This completely unacceptable. Every newspaper, newscast, and legitimate news website in the country needs to blare the fact that Iraq nothing to do with 9/11. And, apparently this needs to re-run every single day until we get the number of people who do believe this falsehood down into the safety zone of only 10%, the makeup of which would consist of only complete whackjobs. This American boobheaded ignorance is really driving me nuts of late, and I'm starting to think it's not just ignorance but stupidity on a massive scale. Perhaps Billmon said it best today:

"How much longer can this corrupt, idiotic excuse for a republic keep stumbling along on sheer inertia?"

Good question. If these types of things don't straightened out soon, my guess would be not much longer. In addition, if this continues, I'll be convinced that most Americans are Functional Political Retards.

"Path to 9/11": The Storyboards

2006-09-07T20:49:00.000-05:00

ABC will air a "docudrama", whatever that is, on the anniversary of the attacks, and that sure has caused a bloggy firestorm. The Editors at The Poor Man Institute have got the storyboards. Go...

Sometimes We Write Letters

2006-09-07T18:33:00.000-05:00

In response to this post by Rich Lowry over at the National Review, I wrote him this e-mail:

A "Better War in Iraq"?

Dear Mr. Lowry,

It might be instructive to take a close look at the titles of not only your post on the NR blog, but the article itself as well.

A "Better War" suggests that America has fought the wrong one since its inception. You were one of the people pushing for this war from the beginning. What happened to "We're Winning"? Now we need better war?

As for "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife", there are two year old children that know that doesn't work. Is that a policy recommendation? Seriously, that's the most stupid excrement I've heard in years. Maybe Americans can get their head's around the "oil spot" theory, but knives with soup? What do you take us for, fucking retards?

Let's have a look at this:

"The most important lesson of the past is the critical role of national patience and persistence in defeating an insurgency. We are three years into a counterinsurgency campaign that history suggests will take at least a decade to win. This lesson cannot be repeated too often, sobering though it is for a democracy accustomed to quick victories or speedy withdrawals from intractable conflicts: Insurgencies are long wars."

Why won't the president come forward and declare that this war will take decades to win? The one in Iraq that is. If, as you suggest, we as a country should be prepared to support a foreign campaign that grinds up Iraqi civilians and the American military at steady rates for the next ten to twelve years, where's the sales job?

I look forward to your defense of all of these policies as they appear in, what, 2016? 2018?

Good Luck with all that.
*********************

I'm sure he'll ever so pleased with that. I did screw up that second-to-last sentence, so he probably thinks I'm an idiot, but oh well (I'm sort of an idiot, but not a complete one). The sentiment, however, I believe shines clearly.

Another Bit of Propaganda?

2006-09-06T18:12:00.000-05:00

Apparently, all the headlines we saw last month, claiming that the violence in Iraq was way down, was complete shit. Where do we learn this? From an ABC news blog:

What Dropoff? August Death Total in Baghdad Morgue Triples

We took an interesting phone call today from an official at the Baghdad morgue. We get these calls every day – a daily tally of the violence. But this one was particularly sobering.

It turns out the official toll of violent deaths in August was just revised upwards to 1535 from 550, tripling the total. Now, we’re depressingly used to hearing about deaths here, so much so that the numbers can be numbing. But this means that a much-publicized drop-off in violence in August – heralded by both the Iraqi government and the US military as a sign that a new security effort in Baghdad was working -- apparently didn’t exist.

Operation Together Forward, the main thrust of the new strategy, involves establishing pockets of security in select neighborhoods and then slowly adding more. These latest numbers add substance to fears Together Forward creates a whack-a-mole effect: that is, secure one area and the violence will pop up somewhere else. Violent deaths now appear roughly in line with the earlier trend: 1855 in July and 1595 in June. Officials at the Baghdad morgue have no good explanation for the dramatically revised number. We’ll see what the U.S. military has to say.

This stinks to the high heavans. It should be the kind of stuff that makes the front page of every major newspaper. Who ordered them to doctor the figures? The only thing that baffles me is why this particular dung nugget wasn't rolled out in the next couple of months, and then discovered after the mid-terms.

Update: The good folks at Think Progress have picked up the story. Let's see where it goes from there...

TPM Cafe

2006-09-06T17:31:00.000-05:00

Over at Josh Marshall's joint, he asked the following:

I guess it's right to stay true to form. In a report out today, the Bush administration is saying that on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 "America is safer but we are not yet safe."

I take this to mean that just in time for the November elections we have arrived at the administration's sweet spot of terror preparedness: a lot safer thanks to all the good things the president has done to foil the terrorists but also not so safe that people should feel safe enough to vote for the traitorous Democrats.

Truly the sweet spot.

In response to that, I wrote the following:

I would argue the average American isn't stupid, but he/she is certainly woefully ignorant about politics in general. It took forever for the American public to come around on the Cheney administration's incompetance. Cynically, I think Rove and Bush know this and figure the only items most of the American public will be exposed to is the sound bites that come from these three speeches. Hence, all the repetition of the same trite rhetoric.

After the president was re-elected, it's clear that the American public is nothing more than a mirror of George W. Bush.

Time will tell if ignorance and fear will win Bush and Rove another election.

As for the sweet spot, it struck me the same way; Republicans are the ones that can protect you, but always remain ever fearful of your future.

They sure have brought us low.

Just wanted to share this with the millions of readers I attract here every day. Indeed.

Great Reads

2006-09-06T16:30:00.000-05:00

I highly recommend these two books:

Consrvatives Without Conscience by John Dean, and Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire by Morris Berman.

Not exactly light summer reading, but lots of food for thought. Give them a look.

It's the Ignorance You Dummy

2006-09-01T16:09:00.000-05:00

I came across a fascinating study a week or two ago that deals with political ignorance in America (I'm not sure if it was Stephen Brenan over at The Carpetbagger Report, or Digby at Hullabaloo that tipped me off to it, but I try and give credit where it is due. Either way, they both have amazing websites, so go visit them both often).

The American National Election Study, carried out by the University of Michigan, is broken down by the Political Opinion Pros, here, and it paints a pretty sad picture. So let's have a look at some of their findings.

Some of the data regarding the differences in political parties, and voters' identification of political figures is less than encouraging, and the "Pros" find the public "out to lunch". Color me unsurprised. In addition, the study asked the public a couple of questions, and I found the results shocking:

[From 2004]
- Which political party held the most seats in the House of Representatives before the elections?

Republicans: 56% (correct)
Don't know: 30%
Democrats: 14% (incorrect)

- Which political party held the most seats in the Senate before the elections?

Republicans: 51% (correct)
Don't know: 38%
Democrats: 11% (incorrect)

Put another way, 44% of average Americans had no idea that Republicans control the House, and have done so since 1994. That's not just ignorance and apathy, it borders on willful blindness. Maybe the only reason that the Senate figures are slightly worse is because the D's did control the Senate between 2000 and 2002. That's thanks to Vermont Senator James Jeffords telling Bush to go pound sand and switiching from Republican to Independant, and thereby throwing control of the Senate to the Democrats. Even given that, 49% of the public had no idea which party controlled the Senate.

Why is this important? Just for an example, let's take the House of Representatives. Under Republican rule, we get the following:

Extreme Centralization. The power to write legislation has been centralized in the House Republican leadership. Concretely, that means DeLay and House Speaker Dennis Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, working with the House Committee on Rules. (Hastert is seen in some quarters as a figurehead, but his man Palmer is as powerful as DeLay.) Drastic revisions to bills approved by committee are characteristically added by the leadership, often late in the evening. Under the House rules, 48 hours are supposed to elapse before floor action. But in 2003, the leadership, 57 percent of the time, wrote rules declaring bills to be "emergency" measures, allowing then to be considered with as little as 30 minutes notice. On several measures, members literally did not know what they were voting for.
Sorry, No Amendments. DeLay has used the rules process both to write new legislation that circumvents the hearing process and to all but eliminate floor amendments for Republicans and Democrats alike. The Rules Committee, controlled by the Republican leadership, writes a rule specifying the terms of debate for every bill that reaches the House floor. When Democrats controlled the House, Republicans complained bitterly when the occasional bill did not allow for open floor amendments. In 1995, Republicans pledged reform. Gerald Solomon, the new Republican chairman of the committee, explicitly promised that at least 70 percent of bills would come to the floor with rules permitting amendments. Instead, the proportion of bills prohibiting amendments has steadily increased, from 56 percent during the 104th Congress (1995-97) to 76 percent in 2003. This comparison actually understates the shift, because virtually all major bills now come to the floor with rules prohibiting amendments.
DeLay has elevated votes on these rules into rigid tests of party loyalty, on a par with election of the speaker. A Republican House member who votes against a rule structuring floor debate will lose committee assignments and campaign funds, and can expect DeLay to sponsor a primary opponent.
How does this undermine democracy? As the recent Medicare bill was coming to a vote, a majority of House members were sympathetic to amendments allowing drug imports from Canada and empowering the federal government to negotiate wholesale drug prices. But by prohibiting floor amendments, DeLay made sure that the bill passed as written by the leadership, and that members were spared the embarrassment (or accountability) of voting against amendments popular with constituents.
One-Party Conferences. The Senate still allows floor amendments, but Senate-passed bills must go to conference with the House. Democratic House and Senate conferees are increasingly barred from attending conference committees, unless they are known turncoats. On the Medicare bill, liberal Democratic Senate conferees Tom Daschle and Jay Rockefeller were excluded. The more malleable Democrats John Breaux and Max Baucus, however, were allowed in. [See Matthew Yglesias, "Bad Max," page 11.] All four House Democratic conferees were excluded. Republican House and Senate conferees work out their intraparty differences, work their respective caucuses and send the (nonamendable) bill back to each house for a quick up-or-down vote. On the Medicare bill, members had one day to study a measure of more than 1,000 pages, much of it written from scratch in conference.
Legislation Without Hearings. Before the DeLay revolution, drafting new legislation in conference committee was almost unknown. But under DeLay, major provisions of the Medicare bill sprang fully grown from a conference committee. Republicans got a conference to include a weakened media-concentration standard that had been explicitly voted down by each house separately. Though both chambers had voted to block an administration measure watering down overtime-pay protections for workers, the provision was tacked onto a must-pass bill in conference. The official summary of House procedures, written by the (Republican-appointed) House parliamentarian and updated in June 2003, notes: "The House conferees are strictly limited in their consideration to matters in disagreement between the two Houses. Consequently, they may not strike out or amend any portion of the bill that was not amended by the other House. Furthermore, they may not insert new matter that is not germane to or that is beyond the scope of the differences between the two Houses." Like the rights guaranteed in the Soviet constitution, these rules are routinely waived.
Appropriations Abuses. Appropriations bills are must-pass affairs, otherwise the government eventually shuts down. Traditionally, substantive legislation is enacted in the usual way, then the appropriations process approves all or part of the funding. There has long been modest abuse in the form of earmarked money for pet pork-barrel projects and substantive riders being tacked onto appropriations bills. But since Gingrich, a lot of substantive bill drafting has been centralized in House leadership task forces appointed by the majority leader. And under DeLay, Appropriations subcommittee chairs must now be approved by the leadership, as well as by the Appropriations chairman.

The figures presented above are absolutely inexcusable. Democracy is a sport, and one that needs everyone to participate for it to work properly. Based on these figures, it's barely functioning at all. I'd call it Democracy on Auto-Pilot (catchy, huh?). Sure, I understand people have their day-to-day worries about their jobs, children, and making ends meet, but what they don't realize is that the system that allows them to concentrate on such selfish things is literally crumbling under their feet.

The "Pros" point out:

Why focus on young people? Actuarial tables tell us that Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation,” or Harvard professor Robert Putnam’s “long civic generation”—that is, people born around 1920 who tend to be among America’s most politically engaged and knowledgeable today—won’t be with us much longer. Today’s young will, and their apathy and political ignorance do not bode well for the future of democracy.

Dude, you're such a bummer. Well, yes I am, but here are some solutions: (from the study, and some of mine)

- The taboo about talking politics among family must be broken. Even if disagreements can't be bridged, raising awareness is the key.
- Engage your friends. Where do they stand?
- We should encourage more civics classes in school curriculums, all the way through twelfth grade.
- Disagree with someone? Finish the conversation by encouraging them to vote.

Encourage them to vote.

Linky

2006-09-01T15:46:00.000-05:00

If you ever need a good laugh, head on over to tbogg's site. He wades through the deep excrement that makes up Right's web presence so we don't have to. For that, we're very thankful.

You can start here and work your way down: I will crush my enemies and hear the lamentations of their wome--oooo pretty shells! And tiny fish!

Newsflash: America is Not Israel

2006-08-24T21:28:00.000-05:00

I just read this quote from John McCain over at Digby's joint:

"The greatest single threat that we are facing right now to our national security is Iran," he said. "If they get that weapon, and they have the capability to deliver it, put yourself in the position of the government of the state of Israel. This could be one of the most unsettling and difficult challenges that we have ever faced."

But we're not the state of Israel. And this isn't a challenge "we" face. The challenges the U.S. and Israel face are distinctly seperate. Have the two nations' security now become permanently coupled to one another? As if they're one in the same? Someone needs to start calling politicians and talking heads on this. Yes, we should support Israel in the many ways that we already do, but as the blogger Billmon coined it, that country really has become our 51st state. I would add that I don't think the fact that we supply them with an enormous amount of military goodies gets lost on the Arab world. Trust me, when Al-Jazeera shows American-made M1A1 Abrams tanks rolling into both Bahgdad and Lebanon, it doesn't get lost on their audience. They get it (nevermind the supply of Blackhawk and Apache helicopters, and nuclear weapons).

I was watching Meet the Press a couple of weeks ago, and Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, had this to say (question included):

MR. GREGORY: It is very clear that this is going to be topic A in the midterm election. This is what another prominent Democrat, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller, had to say about the legacy of the Bush years, particularly the war in Iraq. He said the following: “I fear many of our policies over the past five years have done more to inflame extremism than to diminish it. I believe the war in Iraq has diverted resources and undercut the Bush Administration’s ability to protect our people against a terrorist attack.” A view echoed in terms of money spent in the Iraq war by the 9/11 Commission’s co-chairman.

MR. MEHLMAN: I would say, with all due respect to Mr. Rockefeller, tell that to the families of the 241 people who were killed in 1983 by Hezbollah, the people that were in the East African Embassies that were bombed in the 1990s. The fact is, for a generation terrorists have made war on America. From the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich to Mogadishu to Beirut to the East African bombings, to the USS Cole...

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold it right there Kenny. Let's be clear here: no Americans were attacked at the Munich games in 1972. Not one. Yes, a Palestinian terrorist group did attack the Olympic compound, and they did kill athletes and take hostages. But they were Israelis, not Americans. I feel like I'm writing for a fifth grader here, and maybe Ken can get his ears around that, but Jeebus, this is common historic knowledge.

I keep hearing this more and more from prominent conservative figures, and not only is this faulty rhetoric, but it leads to bad policy. From the time Bush came into office, for decades America was seen as an honest broker in the Middle East. All to easily, the Bush administration, and conservatves in general, are throwing that notion out the window. If you listen to William Kristol enough, he'd have you believe America is Israel.

This is not good for American or Israeli security. There are many times when the interests of both nations converge, and where cooperation and support is necessary, but both countries need to draw a clear line when they don't. That line is quickly disappearing, and to the detriment of both nations. Here's the rub though; the Israelis have been paying the price for their national survival since their nation's birth, and as horrific as that's been, there's no reason to make it America's permanent problem. Dragging America into a seemingly intractable, endless, low-level war in the Middle East is a horrible drain on the U.S.'s long term security (Iraq being a different story, and a horrible one).

Given the Bush administration's reaction to the 33 day war, I'm not very hopeful. Maybe someday the neoconservatives will remember that Israel was the U.N.'s idea, and not solely born from some inkling of an endless tie to America.

[update: edited for spelling errors]

Listening to the Generals

2006-08-23T18:21:00.000-05:00

Or, put another way: In stating we will not leave Iraq during his presidency, will George W. Bush stand by while our military degrades into "not combat ready" status? Here's why I ask, from Think Progress:

The President has called up 2,500 inactive Marine reservists for involuntary duty to make up for manpower shortages. Even though many Marines have already served three tours in Iraq, the Marine Corps came up 1,200 volunteers short of its requirements. Defense commentator Fred Kagan from the conservative American Enterprise Institute put it bluntly:
It is one of an avalanche of symptoms that the ground forces are overstretched by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. … This administration needs to understand this is not a short-term problem, and it really needs a systemic fix in the size of the ground forces.

But the Marines are not just short manpower. A report released today by the Center for American Progress shows that the war in Iraq is increasingly taking its toll on the equipment of the Marine Corps. Vehicles like the Humvee and M1A1 tanks built to last for 15 years or more are wearing out in less than five. The cost to replace and repair the equipment damaged and destroyed is enormous – more than $5 billion a year.

To make up for the equipment shortfalls, the Marines have been taking equipment from units outside of Iraq and from their strategic reserves. Unable to train with the equipment that they will be using in combat, the readiness of Marine Corps units outside of Iraq are suffering.

If it comes to a point when the Generals tell Bush, "we can no longer sustain the occupation of Iraq militarily", assuming one of them who is not retired would step forward and say such a thing, would Bush shift his stance, or hang onto his daft vision that we must hang on until his mission really is "accomplished"? I'd bet on the latter. Let's grab a little more from the article from someone who actually served in Iraq:

"You can send Marines back for a third or fourth time, but you have to understand you are destroying their lives," said Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "It is not what they intended the all-volunteer military to look like."

I'd like to believe that Bush would not destroy our nation's military in order to say, "see, I told you so", but I'm losing confidence every day.

[On a personal note, it seems the military is accepting people up to the age of 42. Without revealing my age on this heavily trafficed website, I would actually qualify for service. In what I would think is sound judgement, I'm not going to sign up because I'm a smoker (and a geezer for Christ's sake) and would surely be more of a detriment than an asset. But that's just me. If I'm drafted, I'll serve.]

By the way, I'm really fucking pissed about what this is doing to our Marine Corps. Maybe I didn't make that clear...

A Glimpse into the Synagogue

2006-08-23T17:39:00.000-05:00

I don't go to Synagogue because I'm not Jewish, but Eric Alterman does, and he shares this with us today:

I saw a marvelous movie the other night at Synagogue called “The Syrian Bride.” It was an Israeli film, released in 2004, about a Druze family on the Golan who must say goodbye to their daughter forever because she is marrying a Syrian. Once she crosses the “security zone,” she can never come back. Everybody in the place identified with the shame and hardships inflicted on these brave and proud people by the occupation—even though there was never any violence in the film. And yet in the very same room, weeks earlier, I felt like I would have been run out of town had I mentioned that Israel was killing innocent civilians for no good purpose. This sort of thing drives me crazy. Anyway, see the film if you can.

It drives me crazy too. And this is why I believe religion is hooey. I'm not sure anyone can ever convince me that all the good that religion does in this world is worth all the violence and destruction it causes. I'm pretty sure I won't see it in my lifetime, but I hope my son will see The End of Faith in his.

Authoritarianism in America

2006-08-22T18:47:00.000-05:00

Where are the new Conservative thinkers in America? I can't find them. I believe the whole project should be declared dead.

The only way conservative policies get adapted is by deceiving the public about their true intent, and when these policies fail, conservatives yell to the high heavens, "see, government doesn't work!". That's a pretty neat trick: destroy policies that will actually help the American people, and then piss and moan about how the government is incapable of helping anyone. Nice work if you can get it (I must admit, this not original thought at all. The evidence, however, is overwhelming).

The point here is, go read John Dean's new book: Conservatives Without Conscience.

I hope to have much more on this soon...

Good for Israel?

2006-08-22T17:28:00.000-05:00

Over at TPM Cafe, Josh Marshall asked this question:

There are certainly a lot of other questions to ask about the invasion of Iraq. But because the 'Was It Good for Israel?' question is such a live on both for critics of Israel in the US and her staunchest defenders, I thought I'd return to it.

And basically along these lines, can any defender of this policy still claim with a straight face that the US invasion of Iraq hasn't been a pretty much unmitigated disaster for Israel?

I think the Israelis -- pretty much across the board -- understand that. Does the hawks in this country see that?

Here was my response:

I would argue that nothing the Bush administration has done from January 20th, 2001 on has been good for Israel.

From Day One, the anti-Clinton approach has yielded how many foreign policy successes in the Middle East (cue the crickets)?

If you look at where Cheney comes from, the whole approach seems to be: start all the wars and see who comes out clean on the other side. When you couple that with no understanding of the region whatsoever, then we're only right in the middle of this conflict. This Israel/Lebonan war is just a small blip in the "long war" Cheney keeps talking about.

I think it's pretty obvious where they think the end-game is, and that will only come with the resolution of many conflicts to come.

Isn't painfully obvious by now that it's war after war after war for this troupe, no matter how long it takes, and then things will magically shake out in America's favor? I can't discern any other way of thinking for this gang. And given that, isn't Israel's security just an afterthought?

We already know Cheney is contemplating air strikes on Iran. For me, hope of all hopes, that never comes to be. But if it does, do you think Cheney has Israel's security in mind? Or even the region's long-term stability?

When we all come to terms with the fact that when Cheney says he wants stability in the region, he actually means the opposite?

I've read all the hee-hee's and ha-ha's, and all the Orweillian comparisons, and guess what? I'm not fucking laughing anymore. Are you?

Yes, horrible form referencing my own writing, but I have a hard enough time posting stuff here.

Middle East Analysis

2006-08-14T18:45:00.000-05:00

I'm no expert on the Middle East, but I have done quite a bit of reading on the subject. After all, I'm just a dummy with a blog. For some analysis I agree with, and I must say I don't agree with all of it, go check out Billmon and Juan Cole. Also, check out Eric Alterman's blog, Altercation, on MSNBC.

There's plenty of stuff to chew on there, and you couldn't read smarter people on the subject.

Of the reams of stuff I've read recently on the subject, both good and bad, nothing comes closer to my view than Alterman's writing from July, 31st, here:

It’s been a bad week for people —like George W. Bush— who seek to defend the Israeli invasion of Lebanon: an estimated 56 innocent people killed in one raid at Qana, most of them children, and then it refuses to hold to a mere 48 hour ceasefire allegedly hammered out by U.S. Secretary of State, demonstrating to the world that it will not be bound by its word, and that Bush is either a political weakling, a chump, or a liar. (“Why the false choice?” some might say?) The New York Times reported that Rice "wrung the first significant concession from Israel" but it was over before most people even picked up their paper off the sidewalk, here. That shouldn’t have surprised anyone, despite the credulous, pro-Bush reporting. "'There is no cease-fire,' a 'senior government source' told the newspaper Haaretz, adding, 'If they are associated with Hassan Nasrallah, we will hit them.'" And they weren’t kidding.
Meanwhile, in addition to being a public relations catastrophe everywhere but the White House, the war is strengthening Hezbollah politically, as was predictable. The Lebanese prime minister, who the LAT notes has been no friend of Hezbollah's in the past, "'thanked' the Islamic militant group for its 'sacrifices'" and said: "We scream out to the world community to stand united in the face of Israel's war criminals."
The thing is, however horrific, it’s not going to change many people’s minds. It’s my experience that precious few people are actually interested in examining events related to Israel with an eye toward making an honest judgment. I found myself oddly depressed after dropping by synagogue on Saturday morning when a woman stood to ask the rabbi what she could say to her teenage daughter, who was watching the carnage on TV and could not understand how the mass killing of innocents could be justified. The Rabbi answered with nothing but bluster and bul**hit. Refusing to even engage the question, he trolled for applause from the congregation with chauvinistic argument that because the world had treated the Jews so badly for so many years, Israel should not be criticized no matter what it did. He even used the word "disproportionate" to refer to Palestinian attacks on Jews, when everyone knows that Israel has killed many, many more Palestinians than vice-versa since the conflict began. [*] It was the same old lugubrious interpretation of Jewish history that connects Pope Pius with Adolf Hitler with Hezbollah. The idea that the Israeli government might actually be mistaken in its judgments or that American Jews had the right to think for themselves, or that this (absent) young woman might actually have the right to ask a tough moral question about the behavior of the Jewish state was effectively ruled out of order. Many in the audience applauded. Another woman complained that “even Fox’s” coverage was unfair to Israel. A third blamed Hezbollah for putting its weapons in civilian areas. Nobody offered an ounce of evidence and none was demanded. It made me so angry I couldn’t even stay for the free food afterward. And remember, this took place in one of the most progressive areas in America. If Jews like this will never question Israeli behavior—even in a supportive manner that draws on mainstream opinion in Israel—then you can pretty much forget about it.
But people who oppose the invasion, save for a small minority, are not all that interested in evidence either as far as I can tell. MJ Rosenberg writes about the phenomenon here. The thing for me, however, is that nobody on the pro-Palestinian side of the equation understands the essential realist fact of this problem. There is never going to be any genuine statehood, or dignity, or peace or prosperity or even the opportunity to earn a decent living for the Palestinians unless they convince the Israeli public that they want to live alongside Israel in peace. There is no military option for the Palestinians save suicide. There is no possibility that the United States will ever “force” Israel to make peace. In the first place, I don’t know how you’d do it. In the second place, the Israel lobby is too powerful to let it happen and unwilling to challenge Israeli political leadership (except to undermine peace, as it did under Barak). That’s why anybody who does not attend to this essential fact is not doing the Palestinians any favors. And as long as the Palestinians have their present dysfunctional leadership crisis, as evidenced by their election of Hamas, no Israeli government can even imagine negotiating a peace agreement. That’s just commonsensical.
So therefore I don’t think the advertisement that appears in today’s Times signed by a bunch of pro-peace Jews is all that useful, since it does not address the inability of any Israeli government to make peace with these Hamas fanatics and corrupt Fatah-ists, particularly when they cannot make peace with themselves. And though I would have liked to—because I found their previous intervention so useful, I could not bring myself to sign this version of the "Open Letter from American Jews." In the first place, referring to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon as a “crime” is going to shut down most conversations with most supporters of Israel, however much they may also value peace and justice. In the second, whereas I agree that “Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories and massive human rights abuses against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples are opposed by many Jews in Israel, the U.S., and throughout the world,” and that “attacks on civilians will not bring peace, security or justice to Palestinians, Israelis, or Jews anywhere,” every honest person must admit that these statements constitute at best, only half the story. The other, crucial half is that the Palestinians have given the Israeli public no indication at all that they are ready to live side by side with Israel. And if you ignore that, you’re ignoring the crux of the problem.

For me, the last point he makes is crucial. I'm going on retained writings here, but it's pretty well known that if Yassir Arafat had made any agreements with Israel while the Clinton administration was making their drive towards a permanent solution, the Palestinian extremists would have murdered him as soon as he returned home. That points to an endless cycle of martyrdom and victimhood, of which there's always been plenty to spread around in that region of the world. Who is Israel supposed to negotiate with if that person, whomever that Palestinian may be, has an instant price on their head as soon as they touch down at home? And from their own people? I guess I just wanted to emphasize that portion of Eric's post. As for the rest, I couldn't agree more, and he's ten times the writer I'll ever be.

(As an aside, these are the same issues that brought war and tradgedy to Catholics and Protestants in Ireland and England for centuries. Thankfully that waking nightmare is nearly over. I really can't see that being the case in the Middle East. In my son's lifetime, maybe.)

While I've never met Eric Alterman, he is an acclaimed author, scholar, journalist, and professor, and his writings paint the picture of a concerned and decent man, and man with a keen nose for bullshit and spin. I mention all this because he's been called some really vile and despicable names, and he's often misquoted and lumped in with other people that don't reflect any of his views. We as a nation ignore his words at our own peril.

A Nightmare Indeed

2006-08-05T18:55:00.000-05:00

Via Josh Marshall, there's a great op-ed from Ha'aretz today:

Ending the neoconservative nightmare
By Daniel Levy

Here's some snips to give you a taste:

In 1996 a group of then opposition U.S. policy agitators, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, presented a paper entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" to incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The "clean break" was from the prevailing peace process, advocating that Israel pursue a combination of roll-back, destabilization and containment in the region, including striking at Syria and removing Saddam Hussein from power in favor of "Hashemite control in Iraq." The Israeli horse they backed then was not up to the task.

I've read the piece he notes here, and it's quite something. You can read a copy of it, here. More from Levy:

The key neocon protagonists, their think tanks and publications may be unfamiliar to many Israelis, but they are redefining the region we live in. This tight-knit group of "defense intellectuals" - centered around Bill Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Elliott Abrams, Perle, Feith and others - were considered somewhat off-beat until they teamed up with hawkish well-connected Republicans like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Newt Gingrich, and with the emerging powerhouse of the Christian right. Their agenda was an aggressive unilateralist U.S. global supremacy, a radical vision of transformative regime-change democratization, with a fixation on the Middle East, an obsession with Iraq and an affinity to "old Likud" politics in Israel. Their extended moment in the sun arrived after 9/11.

Finding themselves somewhat bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, the neoconservatives are reveling in the latest crisis, displaying their customary hubris in re-seizing the initiative. The U.S. press and blogosphere is awash with neocon-inspired calls for indefinite shooting, no talking and extension of hostilities to Syria and Iran, with Gingrich calling this a third world war to "defend civilization."

Disentangling Israeli interests from the rubble of neocon "creative destruction" in the Middle East has become an urgent challenge for Israeli policy-makers. An America that seeks to reshape the region through an unsophisticated mixture of bombs and ballots, devoid of local contextual understanding, alliance-building or redressing of grievances, ultimately undermines both itself and Israel. The sight this week of Secretary of State Rice homeward bound, unable to touch down in any Arab capital, should have a sobering effect in Washington and Jerusalem.

Here's the main point (at least I think so):

Israel does have enemies, interests and security imperatives, but there is no logic in the country volunteering itself for the frontline of an ideologically misguided and avoidable war of civilizations.

No logic whatsoever. But that's what Kristol, Krauthammer, Kagan, Perle, Feith, Wurmser, and Abrams want (there are others as well). And by extension, so do Cheney and Rumsfeld. This insanity must end, and these neoconservatives must not only be stopped, but shown the door permanently. Go check out the rest...

Flowers For Algernon

2006-08-04T19:26:00.000-05:00

Or something.

Charlie Sausagepants, the resident neoconservative yarn-spinner at the Washington Post, wrote this today in his column titled "Isreal's Lost Moment":

America's green light for Israel to defend itself is seen as a favor to Israel. But that is a tendentious, misleadingly partial analysis. The green light -- indeed, the encouragement -- is also an act of clear self-interest. America wants, America needs, a decisive Hezbollah defeat.

See how easy that was? To Chuck it's always America=Israel, and Israel=America. He really meant "America's Lost Moment". More:

What have you done for me lately? There is fierce debate in the United States about whether, in the post-Sept. 11 world, Israel is a net asset or liability. Hezbollah's unprovoked attack on July 12 provided Israel the extraordinary opportunity to demonstrate its utility by making a major contribution to America's war on terrorism.

You could swap Israel for America in the text above and not lose any meaning, or steam, to chug Charlie's engine. They are one in the same, and by God, if the 51st State needs defending, Charlie's here to serve.

The respected Billmon snipped a different bit from Charlie's column. And I agree there too. As for me, the descendant of an original American settler, a humble Menonite Bishop, I feel I have sufficient station to tell Chuck to go fuck himself. It may come as a shock to his system, but the fact is the U.S. doesn't need Israel. For anything. Who's leading whom by the nose hairs here?

Let's check in with William Kristol from the Weekly Standard. He's the neoconservative on Fox News Sunday every week:

Anti-War, Anti-Israel, Anti-Joe

Really? So if I opposed the Iraq War, from the beginning, and I live in Connect-The-Dots, I'm Anti-Israel. Wow. That was news to me.

But at least we have a president who knows we are at war with jihadist Islam. And he is willing to stake his presidency on that fight, and to support others, like Israel, who are in the same fight.

For Charlie, and William Kristol and a host of others, Israel's emergencies are always America's. To them, action must be taken now. To wait is to "appease". Neoconservatives always view yesterday as "the lost moment", and it never matters which yesterday that might be. Ask Andrew Bacevich.

Israel shouldn't be a client state of the U.S., but it sure as fuck is, and it's about time to cut the ties. Americans piss and moan about the amount of foreign aid that goes out every year in the form of taxpayer dollars, but 3 billion a year to Israel sure isn't buying us much security. The path to peace and security for Jerusalem runs through Baghdad? I don't fucking think so...

Ignorance & Idiocy

2006-07-26T20:57:00.000-05:00

Should we expect any less from the civilian tier of the Pentagon and the White House?

If this comes to fruition:

According to the former [CIA] official, Israel and the United States are currently discussing a large American role in exactly such a “multinational” deployment [in Lebanon], and some top administration officials, along with senior civilians at the Pentagon, are receptive to the idea.

The uniformed military, however, is ardently opposed to sending American soldiers to the region, according to my source. “They are saying 'What the fuck?'” he told me. “Most of our combat-ready divisions are in Iraq or Afghanistan, or on their way, or coming back. The generals don't like it because we're already way overstretched.”

And, you combine it with this kind of hostility:

America is totally alone on this. And more than most Americans might realize, America is being blamed for Israel's actions. The shift in Arab public discourse over the last week has been palpable. For the first few days, [there was a] split between the Saudi media and the "al-Jazeera public" which I wrote about at the time. Then for a few days, horror at the humanitarian situation, fury with the Arab states for their impotence, speculation about the endgame, and full-throated condemnation of Israeli aggression. But for the last few days, the main trend has been unmistakable: an increasing focus on the United States as the villain of the piece. (That the Israeli bombing of Beirut stopped just long enough for Condoleezza Rice's photo op certainly didn't help.)

You have the makings of the kind of PR and military disaster never before seen by America. Let's hope (and pray, if you want,) that this never comes true. It's obvious many of the top civilian leaders in the Pentagon should have been sacked long ago, but if this kind of thinking is going on, everyone should question whether they have any regard for American security whatsoever. Nevermind the regional political implications, where do the troops come from? Do we pull them out of Baghdad? While we're sending more troops in?

You could stack adjectives on top of each other trying to describe the lameness of the response coming from the Bush administration, but why even bother at this point? Israel is calling the shots. America's stance will be Israel's stance.

Riddle me this, by the way: Israel wants the Lebanese military to take decisive action against Hezbollah to quell the rocket attacks against northern Isreal while the Israeli AF deliberately bombs Lebanese military forces. Huh? What the Fuck are you people thinking?

I want someone to describe to me one policy objective that's being served here. One that might improve America's standing in the region. In Iraq, or the larger Middle East. I can't see it. Maybe I'm missing something.

I read Bush is shortening his annual month-long vacation in Texas a bit this year.

Burt Bacherat Was Right

2006-07-24T18:36:00.000-05:00

Breaking up is hard. It's hard to do. It's hard work. This kind of break up would be historic:

The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, meets Tony Blair in London today as violence in Iraq reaches a new crescendo and senior Iraqi officials say the break up of the country is inevitable.

[...] (20 people dead, 70 wounded, blah, blah, blah, same shit.)

Funny how we can only learn about these developments from a British newspaper. Carrying quotes like this one would be unforgivable in an American newspaper, because then it might lead to charges of that dreaded "liberal bias":

"Iraq as a political project is finished," a senior government official was quoted as saying, adding: "The parties have moved to plan B." He said that the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties were now looking at ways to divide Iraq between them and to decide the future of Baghdad, where there is a mixed population. "There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into [Shia] east and [Sunni] west," he said.

"Finished". I wonder if anyone bothered to notify the president. Not that he'd care, or that it would matter. And the carnage rolls on:

In the past two weeks, at a time when Lebanon has dominated the international news, the sectarian civil war in central Iraq has taken a decisive turn for the worse. There have been regular tit-for-tat massacres and the death toll for July is likely to far exceed the 3,149 civilians killed in June.

Here's the tie-in with the fresh violence going on in Lebanon and Isreal:

"The government is all in the Green Zone like the previous one and they have left the streets to the terrorists," said Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi politician. He said the situation would be made worse by the war in Lebanon because it would intensify the struggle between Iran and the US being staged in Iraq. The Iraqi crisis would now receive much reduced international attention.

This Iraq Project is over. To call it a war anymore is farce. The "war" lasted about four weeks, and then the forces of ignorance, ineptitude, and corruption took hold and doomed the whole thing to utter failure. Maybe a three state solution was the answer in the first place. Maybe Hussein's brutal tactics were the only way to hold these factions together. Either way, when Iraqi politicians start talking about dividing up Bahgdad, it's time for U.S. forces to pack their bags and move on. Or better yet, head home. There's nothing more for them to achieve. Could things get this bad? Losing our Army? Doubtful, but possible.

Admitting loss is a hard thing to do, but it's the only we as a nation can move on and form a better order; one that we'll have to wait for. Let's say, January 21st, 2009.