Why So Few Conservatives in Academia?

The answer is presented here with wit and sense.

The fundamental problem here is that good intellectual exercise of any kind doesn’t mean including all the viewpoints available; it means including the good viewpoints. When I get a headache, I don’t equally weigh the taking aspirin option with the putting leeches on my head option even though many people, including several major founding fathers, have been adamantly pro head-leech. Similarly, when a news program has scientists on to talk about global warming, it doesn’t make sense to invite one who believes in it and one who doesn’t. It makes sense to invite two good scientists, even though they will probably agree. I don’t care about “unbiased” reporting; I want accurate reporting. I also want good scholarship, whether or not it has a balanced political perspective. If your idea gets left out, it’s your fault for having a dumb idea.

The obvious question, of course, is who decides which opinions are good. It’s a tricky issue that requires a lot of thought, but one place to start might be with people who know what they’re talking about. We all know this on some level, but we’re bad at applying it to politics. If you want to know what’s wrong with your car, for example, you don’t poll your neighbors; you ask a mechanic. If most of your neighbors disagree with the mechanic, you ignore them, even if they quote the Bible. For the same reason, it doesn’t really matter what most of the country thinks about global warming or evolution, because the people who know actual facts about those things have pretty much formed a consensus. Yes, you can dig up a scientist who disagrees, just like the tobacco industry has found doctors who think Marlboros make fun Halloween treats, but consensus among experts is really what matters here.

Not Out of the Woods

Joe Galloway points out something I haven't seen in our dumb-ass, chicken press, but the Bushies are not out of the woods with Mukasey to cover their torturing butts. They will answer one day, or at the very least, they will be trapped on US soil for fear of being arrested under international law if they venture overseas.

Waterboarding is torture in the eyes of all civilized peoples, no matter how desperately President George W. Bush tries to rewrite the English language, with which he has only a passing familiarity, anyway. No matter how desperately his entire administration tries to redefine the word "torture" to cover the fact that not only have they acquiesced in its use, but they also have ordered its use.

The president, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their cronies and legal mouthpieces such as David Addington, John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales are doing all they can to avoid one day facing the bar of justice, at home or in The Hague, and being called to account for crimes against humanity.

They want a blank check pardon, and they'll continue searching for attorneys general and judges and justices and senators and members of Congress who'll hand them their stay-out-of-jail-free cards.

As they squirm and wriggle and lie and quibble and cut deals with senators, they claim that "harsh interrogation methods" are necessary to prevent another 9/11. But as terrified as they are by terrorists, they also fear that one day they may be treated no better than some fallen South American dictator or Cambodian despot or hapless Texas sheriff; that they might not be able to leave a guarded, gated compounds in Dallas or Crawford, a ranch in New Mexico or the shores of Chesapeake Bay for fear of arrest and extradition.

No more shopping trips to Paris. No vacations on the Costa Brava. No interludes on some billionaire buddy's yacht in the Caribbean. No jetting around the world making speeches to fat cats at $1 million a pop like other former presidents. Even Canada would be off-limits.

This Could Be Big

Sid Blumenthal has looked more deeply into the Dan Rather suit against CBS and sees something I had been wondering about. Rather doesn't want the money, the first too-obvious interpretation many in our lap dog press have been mouthing. He wants vindication that the story about Bush's National Guard service was essentially correct and that the CBS management team sandbagged the story, and Rather, to ingratiate themselves with the Bush White House. Rather is a bulldog and he sees the chance to not only recover his reputation, but also to use the subpoena power of the suit to expose the whole rotten mess from the Bushies to CBS and Viacom. Watch for this one.

If the court accepts his suit, however, launching the adjudication of legal issues such as breach of fiduciary duty and tortious interference with contract, it will set in motion an inexorable mechanism that will grind out answers to other questions as well. Then Rather's suit will become an extraordinary commission of inquiry into a major news organization's intimidation, complicity and corruption under the Bush administration. No congressional committee would be able to penetrate into the sanctum of any news organization to divulge its inner workings. But intent on vindicating his reputation, capable of financing an expensive legal challenge, and armed with the power of subpoena, Rather will charge his attorneys to interrogate news executives and perhaps administration officials under oath on a secret and sordid chapter of the Bush presidency.

In making his case, Rather will certainly establish beyond reasonable doubt that George W. Bush never completed his required service in the Texas Air National Guard. Moreover, Rather's suit will seek to demonstrate that the documents used in his "60 Minutes II" piece were not inauthentic and that he and his producers acted responsibly in presenting them and the information they contained -- and that that information is true. Indeed, no credible source has refuted the essential facts of the story.

The Brisbane Times Looks at the Bush Entourage

I saw this link and am embarrassed for the arrogance and wastefulness of our boy preznit. I am sure the no-nonsense Aussies are shaking their heads. 700 people!! Everything about these people is shameful and disgusting.

The US President is bringing to Sydney with him not one Jumbo jet, but three, as well as another two aircraft that carry aircraft.

The president's Jumbo has a back-up, and the back-up has a back-up.

Air Force One is a specially converted 747-200B costing $400 million.

Its electronic gadgetry can jam enemy radar, and radar-guided missiles, and is equipped with flares to avoid heat-seeking missiles.

It can withstand electromagnetic shock waves from a nuclear blast.

The Jumbos are carrying 700 of the president's closest friends.

They include a doctor, nurse, personal chef and four cooks.

They are also carrying advisers, and it is clear the president will not be short of advice.

His entourage includes 50 White House political aides, 150 national security advisers and 200 specialists from other government departments.

POTUS, as he is known in Secret Service jargon (President Of The United States), is getting by with a mere 250 protective agents.

NOLA and the Bushies Explained

This is a very important post by Digby that really pulls together some threads on what is really going on in NOLA. It boils down to the fact that, with the utmost cynicism, the Bushies are letting NOLA die so that they can turn Louisiana into a Red state -- and it's happening. The Democratic Senator , Mary Landrieu, is expected to lose next year because one third of the blacks originally living in NOLA are not returning to the state. Just unbelievable. Nothing is more important than Republicans defeating Democrats. See if you agree after reading this.

Louisiana has been a swing state for some time, in which Democrats were dependent on the black majority in the state's largest city to win. It was not lost on Rove that all of those poor New Orleans African Americans --- and their children --- being dispersed throughout the nation could only be good for Republicans. As of now, only about 66% have returned, not enough to keep the state swinging (in more ways than one.) It looks very likely that the state will have a Republican Governor and two Republican Senators in 2008. Experts in the area estimate that the congressional delegation advantage for Republicans will be five to one by 2012. There is little doubt that the Katrina diaspora finally turned the state blood red.

Boy George's Vietnam Speech

Bush gave a widely observed speech to the VFW last Wednesday that contained an extended comparison of Iraq to Vietnam. Two things about it have been gnawing at me. The argument itself is preposterous and has been lambasted in many place, none better than here. The other bothersome point is: how did this weird speech ever get put in bushie's hands? Clearly, george has no knowledge or ability to put together any ideas, even thoroughly off-base ones. But his staff, or Cheney's people, put this together which tells me that they are all in a bubble. These people are radically nuts. What else can you conclude?

Suppose that a President invaded another country, and adopted the unusual tactic of sending our troops in unarmed and unprotected, one platoon at a time, holding signs that said: We want to take over your country! Please surrender! And suppose that, unsurprisingly, the result of this was that those troops were all killed, one after the other. Suppose that the President was urged to adopt a different strategy, but refused, on the grounds that admitting mistakes would give comfort to our enemies; and that when some people began to mutter: not as much comfort as making those mistakes in the first place, he accused them of being defeatists. Finally, suppose that after several thousand troops had been killed in this way, the American people stopped supporting this President and his war. It would be beyond galling for the President to lecture them on their lack of will, or their insufficient concern for the people of the invaded country, when the reason for their lack of support was that his own idiocy had made any good outcome impossible.

I don't see any difference between that case and this one, except that the Iraqi people would have been a lot better off if the President had used my imaginary tactics. And that's why I find being lectured about my lack of will by this President laughable. There was a genuine failure of will when it came to Iraq, and while success was unlikely in any case, this failure made it impossible. But, as I have argued elsewhere, it was not our failure. It was Bush's.

Spin is Too Weak a Term for This

McClatchy has completely outclassed the MSM in its coverage of Iraq. They consistently report the plain and obvious facts, not the "message". Here, Joseph L. Galloway, their military correspondent simplyrecounts the continually shifting public rationales from the Cheney/Bushies on why we are pouring our national treasure down the Iraq rat hole. It is self-evidently pathetic and deceptive.
How can anyone not see this, especially our professional political reporters? There are pockets of sense out there: the NYT editorial page, Tom Ricks, Keith Olbermann, and very few others. It seems to me the Number 1 responsibility of any professional journalist is to examine closely the message/PR/spin that any powerful organization hires squads of wordsmiths to compose. It's what we all do as sophomores in college. The only explanation must be that their editors expect them not to perform even the most rudimentary fact-checking -- especially since these spoon-fed messages have been wrong time after time.

Year-by-year, month-by-month, now even day-to-day, we're treated to a different rationale for the Iraq war from a different President George W. Bush....

Promising Documentary on Iraq: No End in Sight

No End In Sight looks to be a powerful and devastating documentary about the Bush Administration's inept planning and implementation of the Iraq War. David Ansen of Newsweek says of the film, "Lucidly, and without partisan rhetoric, Charles Ferguson's not-to-be-missed documentary, "No End in Sight," lays out the disastrous missteps of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The magnitude of the errors perpetrated by the Bush administration—ignorance, incompetence, arrogance, bad or nonexistent planning, cronyism and naiveté—can make you weep with anger."

Here is the trailer.

Just Too Good

This video has been hot on YouTube since last week, but it is so revealing that I just had to post it. It's the one of Dick Cheney explaining in 1994 why Bush 41 didn't go on to Baghdad during the first Gulf War. It would have been a "quagmire". His comments then are right on for today's situation. Perhaps he did suffer brain damage during all those heart procedures.

Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?

A: No.

Q: Why not?

A: Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.

Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it -- eastern Iraq -- the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.

It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families -- it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?

Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

Spin vs. Reality

Juan Cole of Salon and his blog Informed Comment pretty much makes mincemeat out of all the "encouraging" news out of Iraq as pronounced by the Bushie spinners. Here, instead of cherry-picked factoids, you get a comprehensive run-down of many more measures, with important comparative data, and get a totally different picture. The situation truly is hopeless and this latest news out of Basra in the Post by Tom Ricks of Fiasco fame piles on and shows it is not getting better even in areas of "success". There must be a pony in here somewhere. This excerpt is about the US casualties. Read the article for similar analyses of the deteriorating political situation and the rising Iraqi casualties.

The troop escalation was intended to calm down Baghdad and to give the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki breathing room to pursue a political reconciliation, especially with the Sunni Arab population. But the political goals of the surge are simply not being accomplished -- and indeed, the political situation has deteriorated substantially.

Maliki has lost even the few Sunni Arab allies he began with; the Sunni Arab coalition, called the Iraqi Accord Front, that had actually been in his government has now had its cabinet ministers tender their resignations. He has not held further reconciliation talks with dissident Sunni Arab groups. The Sunni Arab guerrilla groups are thinking of forming an opposition political party in hopes of extending their efforts to topple his government into the political sphere. His relations with Sunni Arab neighbors are so bad that Saudi Arabia declined his request to visit Riyadh.

Developments on other fronts are equally grim. The Maliki government has lost the confidence of three other political parties, the Islamic Virtue Party (15 seats in parliament), the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr (30 seats), and just on Monday, the Iraqi National List led by former appointed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. All have pulled their ministers from his government. The government of the major province of Basra, source of Iraq's petroleum exports and its major port, has collapsed. The governor, from the Islamic Virtue Party, failed a vote of no confidence by the provincial council, spearheaded by a rival Shiite faction, but he refuses to resign even though Maliki backed his removal. And if Basra collapses socially and with regard to security, it is unlikely that the Baghdad government can survive.

Does This Make You Proud to Be an American?

Marty Lederman of the legal affairs blog Balkinization has this post on the new article in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer describing the treatment we have given those kidnap victims we have taken to the black hole sites. Don't read either piece unless you are prepared to be sickened and disgusted about what we have become in our sniveling fear and in our obedience to the criminals running this country. Just one snippet for a hint of the detail laid bare:

"The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. 'It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,' an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. 'At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.'"

Pumping Up the fear, Essential to the Repubs

Digby has put words to a sense I have had for a while about why the fear-mongoring by the Bushies et al is more manipulation of the masses than a huge, legitimate national security concern. How could it be more obvious that we have little to fear, really, from a bunch of sandal-footed radicals boxed in camped out in the deserts of the middle east. To compare the threat they pose to us with WWII or the Cold War, as has been done continuously by the ruling radical right, is ludicrous. But they try.

This captures it perfectly: "Bush is making strategy based on a delusional goal of his opponent, which is idiotic; or he's saying he believes his opponent has the capability of achieving this delusional goal, which is idiotic."

Greenwald Exposes the Petraeus Cultism

Glenn Greenwald must have read my last post (hah!) wherein I asked "how does Petraeus get to be the one reporting in September on his own progress? Do any of us get to fill out our own report cards? What a joke." Greenwald does his usual job of taking a point, researching the hell out of it, and blowing away the whole fetid, illogical, and corrupt fairy-tail.

Despite the Mandate Orthodoxy that Gen. Petraeus be treated as the Objective, Unassailably Credible Oracle for how we are doing in Iraq and whether we are winning, his track record of quite dubious claims over the last several years about the war strongly negates that view. It ought to go without saying that no military commander -- particularly in the midst of a disastrous four-year war -- is entitled to blind faith and to be placed above being questioned. It is not only proper, but critically necessary, to subject happy war claims from the military to great scrutiny.

In general, military commanders do not typically pronounce their own strategies to have failed; quite the opposite. The need for skepticism here is particularly acute given that there are plenty of Generals with equally impressive military pedigrees who disagree vigorously with Petraeus. War supporters -- who are attempting now to make criticisms of Petraeus off-limits -- long disputed the claims and views of Generals Casey and Abaziad, often quite vigorously, even insultingly. The statements about war from military commanders ought to be subjected to every bit as much scrutiny and skepticism as anyone else's.
But Petraeus in particular has demonstrated that his statements merit particularly potent scrutiny. So many of the misleading government claims over the past several years about The Great Victory we are Achieving in Iraq have been based upon optimistic claims from Petraeus that turned out to be highly questionable, to put it generously.

GG goes on to hang aroung the general's neck his own false and manipulative words from the past. And now we're supposed to believe what he says about his own work in September? Jeesh.

General Petraeus, the "New Jesus"

James Fallows is not necessarily a regular blogger although he now writes a blog-like column occasionally for The Atlantic Online. He writes excellent books and long articles on the defense industry, the press, foreign affairs, and technology. This posting makes a point that has been bugging me lately too -- the glorification of General Petraeus, the military figure who is going to save Iraq.

At his press conference last week, President Bush essentially answered every question about Iraq with the word "Petraeus." Actually, the word the President used was "David" -- before recovering himself and remembering to give his last name or say "General Petraeus." (Perhaps Bush realized that a president does no favor to an "independent" commander by portraying him in public as a buddy?) For instance, a reporter asked how long America should wait to see if the "surge" is working?

"How long does one wait? I will repeat, as the Commander-in-Chief of a great military who has supported this military and will continue to support this military, not only with my -- with insisting that we get resources to them, but with -- by respecting the command structure, I'm going to wait for David to come back -- David Petraeus to come back and give us the report on what he sees."

This phenomenon has been noted -- in particular by Thomas Ricks and Matthew Yglesias here and here -- but it is worth emphasizing how fundamental "New Jesus" thinking has become to the entire case for the Administration's strategy. In his appearance with Sen. Jim Webb this weekend on Meet the Press, Sen. Lindsay Graham sounded as if the all-knowing Petraeus could see past obstacles that blocked ordinary men:

"I will not vote for anything until generous—General Petraeus passes on it. No senator, no congressman—no matter how much I respect you—you’re not going to be able, in my opinion, to give the advice that General Petraeus can give, and I’m going to wait till he comes back and listen to his advice and not some politician."

And another point: how does Petraeus get to be the one reporting in September on his own progress? Do any of us get to fill out our own report cards? What a joke. Petraeus is headed for a big failure because he has been given, in effect, sole responsibility to solve an impossible problem. I'm seeing "fall guy" written all over him. I can visualize now the boy king expressing how disappointed he is with the poor results achieved by the general: "I gave him everything he asked for."

The REAL Mission in Iraq

This post lays it out for all to see -- the US mission in Iraq keeps changing because NONE of the purported "missions"is the real mission. All along, the real mission, as testified to by the politicization of EVERYTHING to the Bushies, is to use the Iraq War to establish permanent Republican control of government (dictatorship anyone?). Karl Rove has said this explicitly many times. Power, some use the weak synonym "politics", is everything to them.

In June 2005, ThinkProgress noted the Bush was constantly revising the definition of our “mission” in Iraq.

Reporting on his escalation strategy this week, President Bush claimed “satisfactory” progress in many areas of the “new mission” in Iraq. Bush has changed the definition of our “mission” in Iraq so many times, he has made it impossible for the American public, U.S. forces, and the Iraqi population to have any confidence that the mission will be ever completed.

THE PRE-WAR MISSION WAS TO RID IRAQ OF WMD

Bush: “Our mission is clear in Iraq. Should we have to go in, our mission is very clear: disarmament.” [3/6/03]

AFTER THE WAR BEGAN, THE MISSION EXPANDED

Bush: “Our cause is just, the security of the nations we serve and the peace of the world. And our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” [3/22/03]

Bush: “Our forces have been given a clear mission: to end a regime that threatened its neighbors and the world with weapons of mass destruction and to free a people that had suffered far too long.” [4/14/03]

THEN THE MISSION WAS COMPLETE

Bush: “On Thursday, I visited the USS Abraham Lincoln, now headed home after the longest carrier deployment in recent history. I delivered good news to the men and women who fought in the cause of freedom: Their mission is complete, and major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” [5/3/03]

BUT THEN IT CONTINUED AGAIN

Bush: “The United States and our allies will complete our mission in Iraq.” [7/30/03]

THEN THE MISSION WAS TO DEVELOP A FREE IRAQ

Bush: “That has been our mission all along, to develop the conditions such that a free Iraq will emerge, run by the Iraqi citizens.” [11/4/03]

Bush: “We will see that Iraq is free and self-governing and democratic. We will accomplish our mission.” [5/4/04]

AND TO TRAIN THE IRAQI TROOPS

Bush: “And our mission is clear there, as well, and that is to train the Iraqis so they can do the fighting; make sure they can stand up to defend their freedoms, which they want to do.” [6/2/05]

Bush: “We’re making progress toward the goal, which is, on the one hand, a political process moving forward in Iraq, and on the other hand, the Iraqis capable of defending themselves. And we will — we will complete this mission for the sake of world peace.” [6/20/05]

THEN IT SHIFTED TO ADVANCING DEMOCRACY

Bush: “We will stay as long as necessary to complete the mission. … Advancing the ideal of democracy and self-government is the mission that created our nation — and now it is the calling of a new generation of Americans.” [11/30/05]

AND PROTECTING AMERICA FROM TERRORISTS

Bush: “In the coming days, there will be considerable reflection on the removal of Saddam Hussein from power and our remaining mission in Iraq…By helping the Iraqi people build a free and representative government, we will deny the terrorists a safe haven to plan attacks against America.” [3/11/06]

Bush: “We will finish the mission. By defeating the terrorists in Iraq, we will bring greater security to our own country. And when victory is achieved, our troops will return home with the honor they have earned.” [3/18/06]

THEN THE MISSION WAS PROVIDING SECURITY FOR THE IRAQI POPULATION

Bush: “In fact, we have a new strategy with a new mission: helping secure the population, especially in Baghdad. Our plan puts Iraqis in the lead.” [1/13/07]

Bush: “[I]t’s the combination of providing security in neighborhoods through these joint security stations, and training that is the current mission we’re going through, with a heavy emphasis on security in Baghdad.” [4/10/07]

AND NOW?

Bush: “It’s a new mission. And David Petraeus is in Iraq carrying it out. Its goal is to help the Iraqis make progress toward reconciliation — to build a free nation that respects the rights of its people, upholds the rule of law, and is an ally against the extremists in this war.” [6/28/07]

Neatly Exposing the Press's Lame Coverage of the Bushies

Eric Boehlert, the press essayist for Media Matters, does a great job going back and documenting how weak the press coerverage has been of the Libby commutation outrage. I hadn't realized it was quite that lame.

The media's performance simply highlighted scores of unflattering newsroom deficiencies that have become calcified during the Bush years.

For instance, on July 4, The New York Times tried to shed some light on how Bush came to the decision to wave off a convicted felon's jail time. The news article was headlined "Bush Is Said to Have Held Long Debate on Decision," and in it readers learned that a deliberative Bush had "delved deeply into the evidence" of the Libby trial, consulted with aides, and oversaw "almost clinical" dissection "with a detailed focus on the facts of the case" that had stretched out over several weeks. How did the Times reporters know that Bush had done his due diligence? Because anonymous Bush aides and Republican sources told them so.

Let's put a very fine point on this: The New York Times has no idea how Bush came to his decision to commute Libby's sentence. None. The decision was arguably the most momentous political verdict of Bush's second term and Times reporters were absolutely clueless -- lacking a single independent source -- as to how Bush came to it, and what went into the White House deliberations.

Their only insight was provided by obviously partisan aides who painted for the Times a portrait of a serious and thoughtful Bush poring over his legal options, which the Times gladly printed as fact. (Read Newsweek's similarly lame, anonymous-only, "behind the scenes" account, featuring a deeply "conflicted" Bush.)

It's getting serious: Conservative Calls for Impeachment of Cheney

A prominent conservative, Bruce Fein, calls for the impeachment of Cheney. He is an attorney with expertise in constitutional law. Here are his credentials.

Bruce Fein Biography

"Mr. Fein has been an adjunct scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a resident scholar at the Heritage Foundation, a lecturer at the Bookings Institute, and an adjunct professor at George Washington University. He has also been executive editor of World Intelligence Review, a periodical devoted to national security and intelligence issues. He regularly lectures to foreign guests and dignitaries visiting the United States on behalf of the State Department."

Here is a sampling of what he argues:

"The vice president initiated kidnappings, secret detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international terrorists. This lawlessness has been answered in Germany and Italy with criminal charges against CIA operatives or agents. The legal precedent set by Cheney would justify a decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to kidnap American tourists in Paris and to dispatch them to dungeons in Belarus if they were suspected of Chechen sympathies."

America was founded to prevent people like Cheney from gaining power. Why isn't our system working anymore?

The Puppet-Master and the Sock

Marty Lederman, one of the lawyer contributors to the legal blog Balkinization, dissects the organizational meaning of the series the Washington Post just completed on Angler, aka Dick Cheney. It comes back to the simple fact that Bush is so out of his league as POTUS that he has stepped back and allowed himself to be ruthlessly manipulated by Cheney and his office. In the process, the top levels of government have foregone the normal cross-functional reviews and debate that must be behind all major policy decisions with disastrous results in policy after policy. The inmates have literally taken over the asylum. I don't think we, the American people and certainly our supposed watchdogs the press, realize yet how much the very character of our nation has been damaged and even destroyed by these zealots.

This excerpt is long but its conclusions are inescapable:

As the Post's Becker/Gellman series continues to describe tomorrow with respect to Cheney's dominance of even environmental policymaking, for all practical purposes the OVP is the Bush Administration, and its views become the official views of the Administration, no matter what others in the Administration think. Call it the Unitary Shadow-Executive.

A couple of days ago, I asked the befuddling question left unanswered by Gellman and Becker: Why? After all, there are extremists and hard-liners in every Administration, and they are often at the table, and even influential. But the internal Executive branch process is designed to ensure that multiple perspectives are considered, and therefore the most extreme and most uncompromising positions rarely prevail. In this Administration, the OVP almost invariably wins. Indeed, the VP wins after cutting everyone else out of the loop altogether. And everyone else is incredulous at this radical departure from the ordinary modes of decision making. (I know from experience that this was so at OLC early in the Administration, and not only among us Clinton holdovers -- and we know from Becker/Gellman and others that it was also true at DoD, State, CIA, NSC, etc.) And yet the pattern continues apace, even to this very day, with David Addington apparently feeling free to simply ignore the ordinary methods by which an Administration typically arives at a legal interpretation.

Part of the explanation is, of course, that Addington and Cheney win because they are unrelenting. Everyone else in D.C., i.e., the other players in the Executive branch, have gotten to where they are today by learning to compromise and negotiate, to play the give and take of institutional decision making. These guys, however, don't give an inch, while everyone else is still in the reality-based community that they know and love. In most institutions, such stubborness and unwillingness to compromise would lead to marginalization. But in this one, the Vice President and Addington simply wear people out -- no one relishes the fight, and so they simply give up. Victory by attrition and intimidation. (It also helps, of course, that Rumsfeld, Cambone, Gonzales, Flannigan and Miers were complicit . . . .)

But a larger part of the explanation is simply that Cheney always wins because, for some reason, the President has decided that that is how it should be. Which only clarifies that the real question is why the President allows this to happen.

In a great series of posts, all linked here, Hilzoy concludes that the Becker/Gellman story can only be explained by a bunch of cabinet officials who are dysfunctional, allowing an "insane" process to continue unabated. She focuses on the astonishing fact that Colin Powell and Condi Rice only found out about the August 2002 Torture memo from newspaper accounts two years after the fact:
Stop and think about that for a moment. A memo making an absolutely radical, 180 degree change in US detention and interrogation policy in ways that will predictably have an enormous impact on our standing in the world is signed, and neither the Secretary of State nor the National Security Advisor finds out about it until two years later? From a newspaper article?

Similarly, Powell and Rice did not find out about the President's military commission order until after it was issued . . . as to which Hilzoy writes:
Again, a major policy decision is made, one that will have huge effects on our relations with other countries, and Powell and Rice find out about it after the fact, from CNN.

This is insane.

***

Here's a reflection that is not exactly rocket science: it's much, much better to find out what's wrong with an idea before you adopt it, not afterwards. The way you try to maximize the chance of finding out what's wrong with your ideas before you adopt them is to make sure that your policy proposals are vigorously debated beforehand. Sometimes you can do a long policy vetting process involving zillions of people and inter-agency confabs and all that; sometimes you only have time for a vigorous brainstorming session among principals; but you should never, never make decisions without serious debate if you can possibly avoid it.

* * * *

There is simply no way in which Dick Cheney could have operated as he did in an organization that was not utterly dysfunctional. None. And at least part of that dysfunction has to be put down to the astonishing passivity of his co-workers. . . .

[Rice and Powell] are the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State. . . . [T]hey should have gone to the President the first time something like this happened and said: we refuse to work in an environment in which we have to find out about things like this from the newspapers. Trust us or we're out of here.

* * * *

These articles should be assigned to management classes as studies in what not to do. They describe the exact sort of decision-making process that reliably leads to disaster, and the kinds of personal dynamics that enable it. It's a model of complete organizational breakdown, and it should be studied for generations to come, so that it is never repeated

I agree with much of this. But as today's Post story explains, resignation doesn't ususally have much of an effect, other than to strengthen the VP's hand, and his portfolio. Christine Todd Whitman did resign, because she was unable to convince the President to reject Cheney's extreme views on environmental issues. That was the right thing to do -- but notice that it barely caused a blip in the Imperial Vice Presidency.

Hilzoy's co-blogger Publius offers an even more comprehensive indictment -- of all of us: "The reason Cheney’s Office got to dominate the executive branch is because we -- America -- elected a neophyte who lacked the experience, knowledge, and judgment to be president. . . . Our nation’s political machinery elevated a grossly inexperienced and ignorant man to the Oval Office. The entirely predictable result is that he would be forced to rely on someone else to make the decisions he wasn’t able or willing to make."

I'm not sure about this. Even if Bush didn't have the chops to make decisions himself -- and in that respect, he wouldn't be alone among Presidents -- what explains his constant deference to Cheney, and his refusal to listen to any of his other trusted advisers? Publius surmises that Bush was simply rolled by Cheney and Rumsfeld, because they were more savvy than their competitors for the President's approval. I don't know, but it's a point worth considering:
It’s pretty simple. When you elect someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing, you’re essentially electing someone else to be president. Kerry and Gore had their flaws, but they would have been the Deciders. They certainly would not have tolerated a lawless, out-of-control operation such as Cheney’s Office. At the very least, they would have, you know, been aware of the debates and had some pre-existing knowledge to inform their judgment. Bush, by contrast, was simply no match for Cheney and Rumsfeld’s decades of experience. Thus, the failure that is Cheney is not merely an individual failure on the part of Bush. Cheney is an institutional failure -- a failure of our political system. That’s the key to understand. The rise of Cheney is itself an indictment of our political institutions and culture.

In Case You Haven't Noticed...

In case you haven't noticed, several sites have pointed out that the description of the insurgents in Iraq has morphed. They are all, it seems, Al Quada now, which is, of course, ridiculous. The credulous press dutifully copies down the name-change claims from the military spokespersons and Bushies though. This is in the face of the by now well-known and often cited confusion in the minds of the American puble about Iraqi involvement in 9/11.; most Americans still incorrectly make the connection. Glenn summarizes and calls bullshit:

That the Bush administration, and specifically its military commanders, decided to begin using the term "Al Qaeda" to designate "anyone and everyeone we fight against or kill in Iraq" is obvious. All of a sudden, every time one of the top military commanders describes our latest operations or quantifies how many we killed, the enemy is referred to, almost exclusively now, as "Al Qaeda."
But what is even more notable is that the establishment press has followed right along, just as enthusiastically. I don't think the New York Times has published a story about Iraq in the last two weeks without stating that we are killing "Al Qaeda fighters," capturing "Al Qaeda leaders," and every new operation is against "Al Qaeda."

What is so amazing about this new rhetorical development -- not only from our military, but also from our "journalists" -- is that, for years, it was too shameless and false even for the Bush administration to use. Even at the height of their propaganda offensives about the war, the furthest Bush officials were willing to go was to use the generic term "terrorists" for everyone we are fighting in Iraq, as in: "we cannot surrender to the terrorists by withdrawing" and "we must stay on the offensive against terrorists."

Why can't the press, even the NYT, get this right? It's important and clearly the result of just another concerted PR effort from the Bushies (or is it Cheneys). Aren't the titans and experts of the MSM tired and ashamed of being manipulated and being made fools? And if not, why not?

Crooks, Crooks, Crooks

If anyone still has any doubt as the the integrity and honor of the current administration, read this. No one should ever again vote for anyone associated with these sleazy, power-mongering, manipulative people. this proves beyond a doubt they will use any ruse, loophole, or obfuscation to aggrandize their power and control. They are fascists, pure and simple.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) revealed today that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had once again bypassed the Senate and used an obscure Patriot Act provision to appoint an interim U.S. attorney in California. The authority Gonzales used was at the heart of the U.S. attorney scandal, and was banned in a bill that passed both chambers of Congress with strong bipartisan support earlier this year. The legislation was sent to the President for his signature on June 4.

He delayed signing the bill, knowing it was the obvious intent of the representatives of the people, to use the provision one more time.

Go Get'em Paul

Paul Krugman almost always hits the nail on the head and does it again in yesterday's column. I copy the whole piece here because of the NYT firewall. Note especially his sharp point about how the mainstream press seems to have learned nothing about wrongfully focusing on presidential horse race and personality issues at the expense of reasoned and factual reporting on the substance of issues. The bolds are mine.

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.

You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.

Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies — for example, when he declared of his tax cut that “the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.” That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.

But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates’ acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes — failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush’s dishonesty. And that’s how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.

Now fast forward to last Tuesday. Asked whether we should have invaded Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” He dismissed this as an “unreasonable hypothetical.”

Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney’s remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday’s debate. But it wasn’t.

There wasn’t anything comparable to Mr. Romney’s rewritten history in the Democratic debate two days earlier, which was altogether on a higher plane. Still, someone should have called Hillary Clinton on her declaration that on health care, “we’re all talking pretty much about the same things.” While the other two leading candidates have come out with plans for universal (John Edwards) or near-universal (Barack Obama) health coverage, Mrs. Clinton has so far evaded the issue. But again, this went unmentioned in most reports.

By the way, one reason I want health care specifics from Mrs. Clinton is that she’s received large contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Will that deter her from taking those industries on?

Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”

Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate, because she did the best job of delivering sound bites — including her Bush-talking-point declaration that we’re safer now than we were on 9/11, a claim her advisers later tried to explain away as not meaning what it seemed to mean.

Similarly, many analysts gave the G.O.P. debate to Rudy Giuliani not because he made sense — he didn’t — but because he sounded tough saying things like, “It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror.” (Why?)

Look, debates involving 10 people are, inevitably, short on extended discussion. But news organizations should fight the shallowness of the format by providing the facts — not embrace it by reporting on a presidential race as if it were a high-school popularity contest.

For if there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned from the calamity of the last six and a half years, it’s that it matters who becomes president — and that listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush’s tax lies, not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern.

And I don’t know if this country can survive another four years of Bush-quality leadership.

Glenn Dismantles the New "Tough Guy" Candidate

When Glenn Greenwald gets on a roll, he is a thing to behold. He goes back and gets the goods, the documentation. Nobody is better at using Google and Nexis to dig out what actually happened and what people actually said. In this case, Fred Thompson's posturing persona gets ripped... and Chris Matthews, the drooling clown, and the fawning Howard Fineman get baked too. It's fun.

Though Thompson does not mention it, he also has been -- for two decades -- what a 1996 profile in The Washington Monthly described as "a high-paid Washington lobbyist for both foreign and domestic interests." This folksy, down-home, regular guy has spent his entire adult life as a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, except when he was an actor in Hollywood.

And -- like the vast, vast majority of Republican "tough guys" who play-act the role so arousingly for our media stars, from Rudy Giuliani to Newt Gingrich -- Thompson has no military service despite having been of prime fighting age during the Vietnam War (Thompson turned 20 in 1962, Gingrich in 1963, Giuliani in 1964). He was active in Republican politics as early as the mid-1960s, which means he almost certainly supported the war in which he did not fight.

Just Unbelievable

When you first read this, you think, no, this has got to be a gag out of The Onion. This is what happens when the executive branch is staffed by lobbyists and executives from the very industries being regulated. This example is especially ballsy and transparnet, but it also is excruciatingly anti-consumer. What consumer would support less testing for mad cow disease? Christy of Firedoglake (still the best blog name) unloads on this one. I have seldom been so disgusted with the Bushies as over this one.

The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture tests less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. But Arkansas City-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive test, too.

A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. The ruling was to take effect Friday, but the Agriculture Department said Tuesday it would appeal -- effectively delaying the testing until the court challenge plays out.

Regarding Lowering Expectations for Lifetime Earnings

This posting by the WSJ On-line lays out what we all have been sensing about the generation in their thirties being less well off than their parents' generation. Here are the bad news factoids:

American men in their 30s today are worse off than their fathers' generation, a reversal from just a decade ago, when sons generally were better off than their fathers, a new study finds.

In 2004, the median income for a man in his 30s, a good predictor of his lifetime earnings, was $35,010, the study says, 12% less than for men in their 30s in 1974 -- their fathers' generation -- adjusted for inflation. A decade ago, median income for men in their 30s was $32,901, 5% higher than 30 years earlier.

And the kicker, of course, affecting all is the direct result of the Bushie's policies to reward the rich and punish the poor:

The study, the first in a series on economic mobility undertaken by several prominent think tanks, also says the typical American family's income has lagged far behind productivity growth since 2000, a departure from most of the post-World War II period.

Of Course They're Not Going to Follow Us

This is the best and most comprehensive analysis I have seen to put the lie to Bush's lame, and eye-roll prompting, insistence that Al Qaida is going to follow our troops here if we pull out of Iraq. The argument is so manipulative and fact-free on its face that it hardly requires rebuttal, but he keeps saying it. It has become his mantra because no can prove the negative, that they will not follow us.

The topper, which he has recited several times before, is that if we fail in Iraq, the terrorists will follow us home. He uttered a few variations of the line this morning: "If we were to fail, they'd come and get us. … If we let up, we'll be attacked. … It's better to fight them there than here."

Clearly, this is nonsense, on three levels.

First, the vast majority of the insurgents have nothing to do with al-Qaida or its ideology. They're combatants in a sectarian conflict for power in Iraq, and they have neither the means nor the desire to threaten North America.

Second, to the extent that the true global terrorists could attack us at home, they could do so whether or not U.S. troops stay or win in Iraq. The one issue has nothing to do with the other.

Third, what kind of thing is this to say in front of the allies? If our main goal in bombing, strafing, and stomping through Iraq is to make sure we don't have to do so on our own territory, will any needy nation ever again seek our aid and cover? Or will they seek out a less blatantly selfish protector?

Hitchins RIPs Falwell

Christopher Hitchins used to be one of my favorite writers, but he has gone off the deep end at times in recent years, particularly in his support for the Iraq War. This video, however is classic, old-time Hitchins. He has remained a staunch secularist, never letting a chance go buy to excoriate the pious. He gets on a roll and is unstoppable by poor Anderson Cooper, who doesn't know how to dam the flood of damnation. It's really entertaining.

Lighten Up a Little

I came across a link to this scene from Boston Legal wherein the James Spader character has some sarcastic fun with the painfully criminal actions of our own government. I don't think he quite means it when he says, "Lighten up a little. We're in a war." It's only three minutes. Check it out.

An Obvious, but Disregarded, Point of Logic

This column in the Scientific American makes a couple of points about the illogic and psychological underpinnings of the sries of decisions that have painted us into a corner in Iraq. How many times have we heard Commander Guy say this:

As Bush explained in a speech delivered on July 4, 2006, at Fort Bragg, N.C.: "I'm not going to allow the sacrifice of 2,527 troops who have died in Iraq to be in vain by pulling out before the job is done."

We all make similarly irrational arguments about decisions in our lives: we hang on to losing stocks, unprofitable investments, failing businesses and unsuccessful relationships. If we were rational, we would just compute the odds of succeeding from this point forward and then decide if the investment warrants the potential payoff. But we are not rational--not in love or war or business--and this particular irrationality is what economists call the "sunk-cost fallacy."

Ignoring the fact that history cannot be changed (as in "throwing good money after bad") is a form of self-justification, as Schermer, the author, goes on to point out :

The psychology underneath this and other cognitive fallacies is brilliantly illuminated by psychologist Carol Tavris and University of California, Santa Cruz, psychology professor Elliot Aronson in their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (Harcourt, 2007). Tavris and Aronson focus on so-called self-justification, which "allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they could have done." The passive voice of the telling phrase "mistakes were made" shows the rationalization process at work. "Mistakes were quite possibly made by the administrations in which I served," confessed Henry Kissinger about Vietnam, Cambodia and South America.

The engine driving self-justification is cognitive dissonance: "a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent," Tavris and Aronson explain. "Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don't rest easy until they find a way to reduce it."

John Brady Kiesling is More Deserving of the Medal of Honor than George Tenet.

Perhaps I'm late to this, but I just read US Diplomat John Brady Kiesling's letter of resignation to Colin Powell in protest of the the buildup and promotion of the Iraq war. It reads like a prophetic, lone voice of sanity, particularly today. It is also a stark reminder of how far the US's moral standing and credibility has fallen.

Quote (note this was written in Feb. 2003): "Have we indeed become blind, as Russia is blind in Chechnya, as Israel is blind in the Occupied Territories, to our own advice, that overwhelming military power is not the answer to terrorism? After the shambles of post-war Iraq joins the shambles in Grozny and Ramallah, it will be a brave foreigner who forms ranks with Micronesia to follow where we lead."

And who gets the million dollar book deal and medal of honor...?

Food for Thought

One of the bloggers from Firedoglake has put together "7 Tips to Build a Blog Community". It is more applicable to the blogs I link to than to this one because this blog has a much less grandiose purpose. I like the emphasis on brand (a point of view) and good writing. Check it out. By the way the purpose of this blog, and Eric, I think, would agree is to note particularly insightful or well-done posts or articles and to get off my chest the occasional rant against dishonor, lies, and willful ignorance.

Funny and Nutty

Mitt Romney is supposed to be the sane one out of the GOP presidential lineup, I believe. Check this out. He is nuttily wrong on so many counts here as to be completely laughable. Is he trying to earn his cred as a fact-free wingnut?

French-bashing has been so much fun so I don't know what Romney and the GOP will do now that the right wing Sarkozy has been elected president. Over the weekend Romney spoke at Regent university, aka Pat Robertson U., and used it as another opportunity play to bizarrely attack France.

"It seems that Europe leads Americans in this way of thinking," Romney told the crowd of more than 5,000. "In France, for instance, I'm told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past."

Yes, it's so frequent that I've never heard of it nor has anyone I know who is either married or has a PACS. At a minimum it's the best kept secret in France despite being "frequently contracted" though in reality it's just another lie by Romney who is so desperate to win he will say anything. I'm very curious how his religion views lies because he so often struggles with the truth.

Worthy of Another Smirk

The Bushies had this report in their hands when they came up with the ridiculous surge strategy. They KNEW they were wrecking the Army and the lives of many of those in service. They just don't care about the volunteer Army -- nothing but cannon fodder. "Support our troops" my butt.

The detailed mental health survey of troops in Iraq released by the Pentagon on Friday highlights a growing worry for the United States as it struggles to bring order to Baghdad: the high level of combat stress suffered during lengthy and repeated tours.

The fourth in a continuing series, the report suggested that extended tours and multiple deployments, among other policy decisions, could escalate anger and increase the likelihood that soldiers or marines lash out at civilians, or defy military ethics.

That is no small concern since the United States’ counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizes the importance of winning the trust and support of the local population.

The report was provided in November to Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the senior American commander in Iraq.

Pentagon officials have not explained why the public release of the report was delayed, a move that kept the data out of the public debate as the Bush administration developed its plan to build up troops in Iraq and extend combat tours. Rear Adm. Richard R. Jeffries, a medical officer, told reporters on Friday that the timing was decided by civilian Pentagon officials.

The survey of 1,320 soldiers and 447 marines was conducted in August and September of 2006. The military’s report, which drew on that survey as well as interviews with commanders and focus groups, found that longer deployments increased the risk of psychological problems; that the levels of mental problems was highest — some 30 percent — among troops involved in close combat; that more than a third of troops endorsed torture in certain situations; and that most would not turn in fellow service members for mistreating a civilian.

“These are thoughts people are going to have when under this kind of stress, and soldiers will tell you that: you don’t know what’s it’s like until you’ve been there,” said Dr. Andy Morgan, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University who has worked extensively with regular and Special Operations troops. “The question is whether you act on them.”

The Pentagon’s analysis also identified sources of anger besides lengthy and repeated deployments that could lead to ethics violations, which would not be apparent from the outside: eight-day rest breaks that involved four days of transit; long lines to get into recreation facilities, especially for those who perform missions outside the relative safety of base camps; and inconsistent dress-code rules.

Most of all, there were uncertainties about deployment: 40 percent of soldiers rated uncertain redeployment dates as a top concern.

The military has evaluated the emotional state of soldiers in the past, from the cases of shaking and partial paralysis known as shell shock after World War I, to the numb exhaustion identified as combat fatigue in World War II. The flashbacks and irritability reported in the years after the Vietnam War came to define another diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder.

But since the Persian Gulf war in 1991 the Pentagon’s efforts to track mental health have become far more sophisticated, and now provide a deeper X-ray into the day-to-day realities of life on the ground, in real time — a glimpse of how the stresses of both combat, and policy decisions, can affect the behavior of troops.

When the administration decided in January to send more troops to Baghdad to try to reverse the spiraling sectarian violence in Iraq, it sought to ease the strain on the armed forces by announcing its intention to expand the active duty Army and Marine forces by 92,000 troops.

But it takes years to recruit, train and equipment an expanded ground force, and the decision to increase the size of the military was made too late to relieve the stress on the forces now in Iraq.

To sustain the current elevated troop levels, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced in April that the Army was increasing combat tours to 15 months, rather than the traditional one-year tour.

“The Army is spread very thin, and we need it to be a larger force for the number of missions that we were being asked to address for our nation,” said Maj. Gen. Gale S. Pollock, the Army’s acting surgeon general and head of the Army’s Medical Command, on Friday, as the report was released.

Bush on the Couch?

This op ed article in today's NYT offers an interesting "analysis" and parallel between Woodrow Wilson after WWI and Bush. Money Quote:

Wilson, Freud wrote, “repeatedly declared that mere facts had no significance for him.” “Noble intentions” were what counted. Thus, while Wilson came to France intent on bringing a “just and lasting peace” to Europe, he “put himself in the deplorable position of the benefactor who wishes to restore the eyesight of a patient but does not know the construction of the eye and has neglected to learn the necessary methods of operation.”

That "liberal" William F. Buckley is emboldening the enemy!

I guess the "kool aid" has worn off Mr. Buckley. A refreshing dose of authenticity from one of the father's of modern conservatism.

Bill Moyers's Coverage of the Press's Lickspittles

I saw Bill Moyer's PBS show last night and it was riveting, like watching a car wreck in slow motion. Very little was new or surprising, but to see the complicity of the press with the Bushie run-up to the war play out over time, incident upon incident, lick upon lick, was disgusting. Christy of Firedoglake has a great reaction piece to it. Go to it, but this is the money quote: "certainty of the evidence on something like this is a dead giveaway that someone is selling you a load of crap." Recall, also, that to Dick Cheney, a 1% chance of a WMD being used against us calls for us to take military action NOW. Think about how perverted that is, given that assessing something to have a 1% chance of happening is down in the mud of "knowability" and therefore a blank check to do ANYTHING.

Glenn Greenwald also weighs in on Moyers's treatment of the failure of the MSM.

The Dead-ender

Ron Brownstein, columnist for the LA Times, is the epitome of the centrist, wishy-washy, "on-the-other-hand", inside-the-beltway political commentator. However, he comes up with a good insight and tag for Bushie on global warming, stem cell research, and Iraq -- a dead-ender "who refuse[s] to acknowledge that the world around them ha[s] changed". I like it for being so accurate and concise: the dead-ender.

...on stem cells, global warming and Iraq, Bush seems intent on defending the decisions he's made already, even at the price of obstructing a new consensus attempting to form around him. If Bush continues to view standing alone as the highest form of principle, he will never escape the dead end into which he's steered his second term.

Some Wisdom from David Halberstam

Glenn Greenwald went back into some essays written by David Halberstam, the legendary journalist killed two days ago in a car wreck at the young and productive age of 73, for Vanity Fair in recent years. These selections from those articles are for heavy pondering.

The new post-A-bomb definition of patriotism was suddenly very different. The children of those who had volunteered immediately for World War II found no compelling reason to sign on for these new wars. Others could go in their place. This was true across the board politically, left and right. . . .

I cannot imagine this happening at another time: an assault on Kerry and his war record being orchestrated by men and women who did not go, who did not pay that terrible price physically and psychically. But this is clearly a different and more careless America. Reality is ever more fragile these days, placed as it is in the hands of the ever more skillful reality managers of both political parties.

Increasingly well financed, they excel at creating a reality that's better and more comforting than the old kind. How else could a president who did not fly in combat during a war when he had the chance choose to imitate a fighter pilot by landing on a carrier in full flight regalia to pose under a triumphant banner reading, mission accomplished? . . .

The collapse of the Soviet Union did not mean, ipso facto, we were a good society-because being better than a crude and brutal dictatorship is not good enough. But since we had won, we strutted.

We strut, all of us, too much. Our weaponry is so exceptional that our political leaders need no allies-they dictate our plans, and if the allies do not agree with us, they are called cowardly. Our businessmen are brittle, ever more sure of themselves and their deals and their right to prosper on an ever grander scale, whether or not they are competent at their jobs, even as they produce less and less in terms of real goods. Our celebrities, so loudly heralded in this entertainment age for what are often marginal talents, are more arrogant and more self-indulgent than ever. Our athletes, when they go overseas for international competition, are all too often an embarrassment in their personal behavior.

When did all this happen? What are the roots? As we achieved greater affluence in the 50 years after World War II, did we steadily become more arrogant than our parents and grandparents, more convinced that we were special and apart from other nations? Where is the country I thought I knew? Where did our modesty go?...

It's not about fame. By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are. Besides, fame does not last. At its best, it is about being paid to learn. For fifty years, I have been paid to go out and ask questions. What a great privilege to be a free reporter in a free society, to be someone whose job is a search for knowledge. What a rare chance to grow as a person. . . .

I want to leave you today with one bit of advice: never, never, never, let them intimidate you. People are always going to try in all kinds of ways. Sheriffs, generals, presidents of universities, presidents of countries, secretaries of defense. Don't let them do it. . . .

Did Gonzo Actually Do a Heckuva of a Job?

Dahlia Lithwick, legal affairs expert for Slate (which, by the way, has an excellent daily summary from the front pages of the major national newspapers up every day by 7 AM EST) posts an article that interprets Alberto Gonzalez's pathetic testimony before congress as a great success -- in representing the unitary executive approach to government espoused by the Bushies. She just may be correct.

For six impressive hours, the attorney general embodied the core principles that he is not beholden to Congress, that the Senate has no authority over him, and that he was only there as a favor to them in their funny little fact-finding mission....

This record reflects either a Harvard-trained lawyer—and former state Supreme Court judge—with absolutely no command of the facts or the law, or it reveals a proponent of the unitary executive theory with absolutely nothing to prove. Gonzales' failure to even mount a defense; his posture of barely tolerating congressional inquiries; his refusal to concede that he owed the Senate any explanation or any evidence; his refusal to even accept that he bore some burden of proof—all of it tots up to a masterful display of the perfect contempt felt by the Bush executive branch for this Congress and its pretensions of oversight. In the plainest sense, Gonzales elevated the Bush legal doctrine of "Because I said so" into a public spectacle.

Viewed in that light, Gonzales did exactly what he needed to do yesterday. He took a high, inside pitch to the head for the team (nobody wants to look like a dolt on national television) but hit a massive home run for the notion that at the end of the day, congressional oversight over the executive branch is little more than empty theatre.

Good Point!

Digby notes a comment from a reader of another blog (networking!) and underscores the very perceptive point that reader made. No lesson has been learned from Katrina about making sure that professionals and experts are in place to run the business of the government. Government exists under the Bushies only to advance Republican power. All the Justice Department "politicalization, privatization, and de-professionization" has taken place after the fiascos of Iraq governance and Katrina response exposed the disastrous consequences of their governing ideology. Very likely, in Bush's mind, he thinks he is accomplishing a lot:

In response to Steve Benen's post about Bush's rambling, incoherent answers at that Townhall yesterday, one of his commenters pithily replied:


Bush leveraged a national tragedy into reelection. He’s seeded the federal government with true believers, expanded executive authority while marginalizing Congress and appointing 2 radically conservative SC judges. He’s expanded government surveillance of our phones, e-mails, library borrowings, bank accounts and medicine cabinets. He’s stalled efforts to curb global warming, cut protections once provided by the EPA, FDA, and silenced scientists who dare refute the literal word of bible or the backward beliefs of those who claim to know the mind of the almighty. The US can now torture, imprison without providing cause and prosecute without allowing a reasonable defense. He’s built bases in the middle east, and fattened the bank accounts of those whose bank accounts were already obscene. The middle class — the masses — have not been so economically impotent in decades.

For such an idiot, this guy has been awfully successful.


That's worth thinking about. He's only been an epic failure in terms of keeping the nation secure, safeguarding our constitution and making America more prosperous and successful. When you look at it from Bush's perspective, however, he's done a heckuva job.

John Stewart's Got the Videos

Jon Stewart has the videos of the blatent nonsense and spinning I noted back on April 11. All you can do is shake your head in disbelief.

Canadian Health Care

I hear all the time from people how the Canadian health care system does not do as good of a job as the US system. "You have to wait for procedures in Canada" is the usual trope. Well, here's the data. Overall, the outcomes are better in Canada. The US system, for the money, basically sucks. And as one of the comments points out, huge swaths of Americans are not covered at all. It's a no-brainer, which is probably why we're stuck with the non-system we have.

Yet, of the 38 studies examined, 14 showed clear advantaged for Canadian patients, five suggested US care was superior, and the remainder were mixed. The studies showing the Canadian systems superiority found effects both on income -- low-income Americans with breast or prostate cancer do much worse than low-income Canadians with the same conditions -- and care effectiveness. For conditions like kidney failure or cystic fibrosis, Canadian care was simply better. You can pick through the tables with all the results here.

It's not that the data shows unbelievable advantages for Canada, to be sure. As the authors conclude, "although Canadian outcomes were more often superior to US outcomes than the reverse, neither the United States nor Canada can claim hegemony in terms of quality of medical care and the resultant patient-important outcomes." The question raised is slightly different: How can we possibly countenance a system that costs twice as much as the Canadian system but delivers slightly worse care? Even assuming diminishing returns, our expenditures should result in care outcomes at least 20% or 30% better than Canada's. Instead, they're about 5% worse, but cost around 187%. Does it sound like we're getting a good deal?

These Are Not Good People

The NYT Editorial Observer gets into the details of what happened in Wisconsin with the wrongly convicted state employee who was apparently victimized by the witch-hunting US Attorneys. I paste the whole essay here but note especially the sections I bold. How was she ever convicted on these flimsy, thrown out charges in the first place? Makes one wonder about the judge on the case as well.

Madison, Wis.

Opponents of Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin spent $4 million on ads last year trying to link the Democratic incumbent to a state employee who was sent to jail on corruption charges. The effort failed, and Mr. Doyle was re-elected — and now the state employee has been found to have been wrongly convicted. The entire affair is raising serious questions about why a United States attorney put an innocent woman in jail.

The conviction of Georgia Thompson has become part of the furor over the firing of eight United States attorneys in what seems like a political purge. While the main focus of that scandal is on why the attorneys were fired, the Thompson case raises questions about why other prosecutors kept their jobs.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which heard Ms. Thompson’s case this month, did not discuss whether her prosecution was political — but it did make clear that it was wrong. And in an extraordinary move, it ordered her released immediately, without waiting to write a decision. “Your evidence is beyond thin,” Judge Diane Wood told the prosecutor. “I’m not sure what your actual theory in this case is.”

Members of Congress should ask whether it was by coincidence or design that Steven Biskupic, the United States attorney in Milwaukee, turned a flimsy case into a campaign issue that nearly helped Republicans win a pivotal governor’s race.

There was good reason for the appeals court to be shocked. Ms. Thompson, a 56-year-old single woman, seems to have lost her home and spent four months in prison simply for doing her job. Ms. Thompson, who spent years in the travel industry before becoming a state employee, was responsible for putting the state’s travel account up for competitive bid. Mr. Biskupic claimed that she awarded the contract to an agency called Adelman Travel because its C.E.O. contributed to Mr. Doyle’s campaign.

To charge her, Mr. Biskupic had to look past a mountain of evidence of innocence. Ms. Thompson was not a Doyle partisan. She was a civil servant, hired by a Republican governor, with no identifiable interest in politics. She was only one member of a seven-person committee that evaluated the bidders. She was not even aware of the Adelman campaign contributions. She also had a good explanation for her choice: of the 10 travel agencies that competed, Adelman submitted the lowest-cost bid.

While Ms. Thompson did her job conscientiously, that is less clear of Mr. Biskupic. The decision to award the contract — the supposed crime — occurred in Madison, in the jurisdiction of Wisconsin’s other United States attorney. But for reasons that are hard to understand, the Milwaukee-based Mr. Biskupic swept in and took the case.

While he was investigating, in the fall of 2005, Mr. Biskupic informed the media. Justice Department guidelines say federal prosecutors can publicly discuss investigations before an indictment only under extraordinary circumstances. This case hardly met that test.

The prosecution proceeded on a schedule that worked out perfectly for the Republican candidate for governor. Mr. Biskupic announced Ms. Thompson’s indictment in January 2006. She went to trial that summer, and was sentenced in late September, weeks before the election. Mr. Biskupic insisted in July, as he vowed to continue the investigation, that “the review is not going to be tied to the political calendar.”

But the Thompson case was “the No. 1 issue” in the governor’s race, says the Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman, Joe Wineke. In a barrage of commercials, Mr. Doyle’s opponents created an organizational chart that linked Ms. Thompson — misleadingly called a “Doyle aide” — to the governor. Ms. Thompson appeared in an unflattering picture, stamped “guilty,” and in another ad, her name was put on a graphic of jail-cell doors slamming shut.

Most of the eight dismissed prosecutors came from swing states, and Democrats suspect they may have been purged to make room for prosecutors who would help Republicans win close elections. If so, it might also mean that United States attorneys in all swing states were under unusual pressure.

Wisconsin may be the closest swing state of all. President Bush lost it in 2004 by about 12,000 votes, and in 2000, by about half that. According to some Wisconsin politicians, Karl Rove said that their state was his highest priority among governor’s races in 2006, because he believed a Republican governor could help the party win Wisconsin in the 2008 presidential election.

Mr. Biskupic insists that he prosecuted Ms. Thompson only because he believed a crime was committed, and that he did not discuss the political implications of the case or the timing with anyone in the Justice Department or the White House. Congress has asked the Justice Department for all e-mail messages about the case to help resolve the matter.

But even if there were no discussions, Mr. Biskupic may have known that his bosses in Washington expected him to use his position to help Republicans win elections, and then did what they wanted.

That would be ironic indeed. One of the biggest weaknesses in the case against Ms. Thompson was that to commit the crime she was charged with she had to have tried to gain personally from the contract, and there’s no credible evidence that she did. So Mr. Biskupic made the creative argument that she gained by obtaining “political advantage for her superiors” and that in pleasing them she “enhanced job security for herself.” Those motivations, of course, may well describe why Mr. Biskupic prosecuted Ms. Thompson.

Making Sense of Nonsense

This explanation of the American predicament in the Middle East is lucid and rings true -- a case study (that we are still living) on how to get into a mess that has no good solution. Patrick Healy is a Brit expert on the Middle East.

As is now plain for everyone to see, the war has been an unmitigated disaster for the United States, for Iraq, and for the whole Middle East. But it is only now, four years after the American seizure of Baghdad, that an official report has clearly pointed the finger at the men largely responsible.

Why did Feith and his neo-con associates do it? And how did they manage to get away with it?

Clearly, in pressing for war, they were primarily concerned to enhance Israel’s security by smashing a major Arab state, thereby removing any potential threat to Israel from the east. As they schemed to transform the region with America’s military power, they dreamed of defeating all of Israel’s enemies -- Arab nationalists, Islamic radicals and Palestinian militants -- at a single stroke. Overthrowing Saddam was to be only the first step in a thorough transformation of the region to the advantage of both Israel and the United States.

In the event, the United States has suffered a devastating blow to its political influence and moral authority, as well as to its finances and to the fighting ability of its armed services, while Israel, confronted by a resurgent Iran, is itself less secure than before the war.

The reckless enterprise of Feith and his fellow neo-cons would probably have had little chance of success had they not managed to team up with men like Dick Cheney and former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who were evidently seduced by the prospect of taking control of Iraq’s oil reserves, second-largest in the world after Saudi Arabia’s, and of turning a submissive Iraqi client state into a base for the projection of American power throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.

President George W. Bush himself bought their agenda -- a decision he must now bitterly regret, as he and his advisers seek desperately to find a way out of the Iraqi quagmire.

Fox Is Ridiculous

There are pages and pages of examples where Fox lies and propagandizes at MediaMatters. This is the worst so far.

Imus Isn't the Only One

It's not news to anyone that Imus hasn't been the only TV/radio personality to step well over the line in bigoted comments on air. This collection from MediaMatters documents some of the juicier blats from Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and friends. For your reference, read them and feel a little sick. And these are the big guys. The local and regional wannabes in this mold multiply the crap on the airwaves many times over.

The Heartbreaking Consequences of Fake Voter Fraud Prosecutions

One reads this post and thinks: NO, it can't be this bad. The Republican Party can't be so cynical and cruel AS A MATTER OF POLICY. But Joshua Micah Marshall is one of the most reliable and careful bloggers out there. In fact, he is a well regarded journalism professional. He also cites reporting done by the NYT to support the obvious conclusions he draws. Based on this issue alone, I will never vote for a Republican again.

Most of the examples, like these, are genuinely disgusting -- non-malicious errors for which people get serious punishment because federal prosecutors are under immense pressure to find someone to indict for voter fraud. But it's also easy to get lost in or distracted by the individual stories. The bigger picture is what you need to focus on. And the picture looks like this.

Republican party officials and elected officials use bogus claims of vote fraud to do three things: 1) to stymie voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts in poor and minority neighborhoods, 2) purge voter rolls of legitimate voters and 3) institute voter ID laws aimed at making it harder for low-income and minority voters to vote....


The tie-in with the US Attorney story is that the White House and the Republican National Committee have used the power of the Department of Justice to accomplish those three goals that I outlined above. Only most of the relatively non-partisan and professional US Attorneys simply didn't find any actual fraud. Choosing not to indict people on bogus charges got at least two of the US Attorneys (Iglesias and McKay) fired. And we are seeing evidence that others may have been nudged out less directly for the same reasons. In turn they've been replaced by a new crop of highly-political party operative prosecutors who, in the gentle wording of the Times, "may not be so reticent" about issuing indictments against people who have committed technical voting infractions with no intent to cast a fraudulent ballot. Along the way, the fever to find someone, anyone guilty of committing even a technical infraction has landed folks like Ms. Prude in the slammer. They are what you might call the prosecutorial road kill in the Rove Republican party's effort to ride roughshod over American citizens' voting rights to entrench the GOP as the country's permanent electoral majority.