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.

Don't Mess with Glenn

Glenn Greenwald is the hardest working guy in blogdom. Not only does he write devastatingly researched posts daily, he does so while now cranking out books -- two in the last year.

In this post, he takes apart ABC news on their blown coverage of the 2001 anthrax scare, and Iraq's connection to it. ABC made the mistake of taking Glenn on. Read the whole thing to savor the complete take down.

A Classic

You would think that shame and embarrassment would kick in at some point. Wouldn't YOU be embarrassed if you said something one day that was so shown to be completely wrong the very next day by your own people? Oy.

What a Foreign Policy

Digby works himself into a fine rant here, starting out with a comment on a particulary silly op-ed ("The propaganda value Iran gained from its lone female hostage, the mother of a 3-year-old, was incalculable." Huh?) by one of the winger ladies (Kathleen Parker, a Chris Matthews talking head). But the best, most concisely insightful stuff follows later on in his post:

I agree that it's entirely possible that the Iranians and al-Qaeda and all sorts of unsavory types around the world have become emboldened by American (and British) military policy, but I doubt that it has much to do with women in combat. The problem is that our president, in his ignorance and hubris, has just proved to the entire world that the United States has no earthly clue what it is doing. The administration even insists to everyone who will listen that the US intelligence services couldn't find water if they fell off a boat.

Any administration that really cared about national security would not have lied about something so obvious as Saddam's mythic weapons cache with such assuredness and then blamed the entire US intelligence service when they were not found. If you want to make a country look weak and inept, that's one excellent way to do it.

And then there is the fact that the Iraq occupation itself is in total chaos. The North Koreans went right ahead a built a bomb while John Bolton was swinging his ineffectual little stick around. Guanatanamo is an immoral embarrassment that nobody on earth sees as anything more than an unsophisticated propaganda ploy that blew up in our faces. And after almost seven years we have no idea where Osama bin Laden is.

Let's just say that those, among many more, might be the bigger propaganda victories with "incalculable" value to the enemy than some British sailor in a headscarf.

Parker is parroting the Dick Cheney fifth grade schoolyard school of foreign policy. The entire world rests on whether the United States out trash-talks the enemies of our nation, who are lurking everywhere, throwing rhetorical zingers about our national manhood. Failure on the ground is meaningless in any substantial sense. What matters is if we keep swaggering around like we know what we are doing even when its patently obvious that we don't.

The problem, you see, is that up until now they haven't taken us seriously. Only by repeatedly making threats, giving bellicose speeches and invading countries willy nilly will they realize that we can't be defeated. To the Schoolyard School, Ahmadinejad is, therefore, a very serious foe even though he's actually a sort of circus clown who doesn't wield any real power. He is a first class insult artist. Indeed, Parker's instinct to capitulate to his taunts by banning women from the military is testament to how formidable he is to these people. One off-hand comment about British manhood and she starts shrieking like a ninny that he's right.

Cheney knows that the way to win his GWOT has nothing to do with better intelligence, competent leadership, sophisticated diplomacy or even superior military might. What we must do is psych the terrorists out with our patented Hollywood macho style (and that doesn't include wimminfolk on the boat.) As Parker says in her column, it's all about how we are perceived.

Pay no attention to all the actual dead people lying around. They're just extras in our rhetorical battle of wills.

I like Digby at Hullaboo for the most part. He sometimes goes over the top, but often his writing is just too good.

The Rathole

Thomas Ricks is the military correspondent for the Washington Post who wrote one of the best books so far about Iraq, Fiasco. Today he has an update on the situation in Iraq in the Post and he pulls few punches. He is especially good on describing the viewpoint of the military where he has many contacts and sources.

The main point of the article is the disconnect between the time required to "win" in Iraq (years at best) and the time left in the political tolerance of the American people to continue to pour lives and treasure into Iraq (12-18 months at best). The conclusion is obvious if unstated: get the hell out now. Why sacrifice one more life for something that more and more American people are losing commitment to every day? The effort can't be sustained politically or militarily. We're sending National Guardsmen in for their second tours for god's sake. The Iraqis don't want us there now either since we have become occupiers and not liberators. Pull the plug NOW.

An official in Iraq warned that executing the new approach will take time -- perhaps more than Washington is willing to give. "Early signs are very encouraging -- huge drop in sectarian killings in Baghdad, return of thousands of refugee families," he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity so that he could be candid. "But there is no way we can defeat this insurgency by summer. I believe we can begin to turn the tide by then, and have an idea if we are doing it. To defeat it completely is a five-to-10-year project, minimum -- and rushing it along to meet a D.C. timeline is rushing to failure."

An Army officer who has served in Iraq and is now back in the United States summed up the situation by saying that "we are witnessing the throes . . . of a very messy divorce" between the politics of the war and the way it is being fought. The "kids" scarred by the breakup, he predicted, will be the Iraqi people and the U.S. Army and Marine Corps....

Yet, with a new approach underway in Baghdad, the Washington debate is largely irrelevant to the concerns of the soldier on the ground, said the Army officer who recently returned from Baghdad. "All the talk about pullouts, votes and budgets really doesn't mean much to that 18-year-old with his body armor driving across Iraq worried about IEDs," he said, referring to roadside bombs. "For him, life consists of trying to survive for 365 days to get back home -- only to know he'll have to come back again."

Where Is the Professionalism?

This post from Firedoglake hits on a point that has been gnawing at me, but Christy covers it much better than I could. The shenanigans at the Justice Department is usually framed in terms of the legalities and politics of the policies and decisions of the Bushies. But aren't these people accredited lawyers, members of the bar, and sworn employees of our government? What about ethical and professional standards and behaviors? Why wouldn't Monica Goodling be disbarred for refusing, as an officer of the court and a member of the bar, to testify to anything before congress? Read Christy to get your blood boiling.

...he could be talking about any number of career prosecutors or law enforcement types around the country — people who have put their time, their intellect, sometimes even their lives on the line to make their communities a safer, better place. Most of these folks want to do the right thing in terms of enforcing the law while balancing a commitment to the constitution, to civil liberties and to justice.

The Bush Administration's attempt to put a heavy thumb on the scales of justice that emphasizes political loyalty above all else perverts the system, and endangers our commitment to the rule of law. Political fealty and electoral mathematics are not, nor should they ever be, the primary considerations in prosecutorial decisions. And respect for the hard-earned wisdom of actually doing the work — day in and day out, long hour after long hour, autopsy photo after autopsy photo, brief after brief after brief after argument after brief…the fact that these dedicated public servants were being judged by wet-behind-the-ears political loyalists who were interested solely in the Rule of Karl makes me beyond angry.

How to Become a Jerk: Become Powerful!

This one is fun and may even be true. It is my observation that it is at least somewhat true that "getting power causes people to focus so keenly on the potential rewards, like money, sex, public acclaim or an extra chocolate-chip cookie — not necessarily in that order, or frankly, any order at all, but preferably all at once — that they become oblivious to the people around them." I post the whole thing here because I am not sure for how long the NYT will have this up online.

The Rich Are More Oblivious Than You and Me

By RICHARD CONNIFF
Old Lyme, Conn.

THE other day at a Los Angeles race track, a comedian named Eddie Griffin took a meeting with a concrete barrier and left a borrowed bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo looking like bad origami. Just to be clear, this was a different bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo from the one a Swedish businessman crumpled up and threw away last year on the Pacific Coast Highway. I mention this only because it’s easy to get confused by the vast and highly repetitious category “Rich and Famous People Acting Like Total Idiots.” Mr. Griffin walked away uninjured, and everybody offered wise counsel about how this wasn’t really such a bad day after all.

So what exactly constitutes a bad day in this rarefied little world? Did the casino owner Steve Wynn cross the mark when he put his elbow through a Picasso he was about to sell for $139 million? Did Mel (“I Own Malibu”) Gibson sense bad-day emanations when he started on a bigoted tirade while seated drunk in the back of a sheriff’s car? And if dumb stuff like this comes so easy to these people, how is it that they’re the ones with all the money?

Modern science has the answer, with a little help from the poet Hilaire Belloc.

Let’s begin with what I call the “Cookie Monster Experiment,” devised to test the hypothesis that power makes people stupid and insensitive — or, as the scientists at the University of California at Berkeley put it, “disinhibited.”

Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey. Then a researcher came in and left a plateful of precisely five cookies. Care to guess which volunteer typically grabbed an extra cookie? The volunteer who had randomly been assigned the power role was also more likely to eat it with his mouth open, spew crumbs on partners and get cookie detritus on his face and on the table.

It reminded the researchers of powerful people they had known in real life. One of them, for instance, had attended meetings with a magazine mogul who ate raw onions and slugged vodka from the bottle, but failed to share these amuse-bouches with his guests. Another had been through an oral exam for his doctorate at which one faculty member not only picked his ear wax, but held it up to dandle lovingly in the light.

As stupid behaviors go, none of this is in a class with slamming somebody else’s Ferrari into a concrete wall. But science advances by tiny steps.

The researchers went on to theorize that getting power causes people to focus so keenly on the potential rewards, like money, sex, public acclaim or an extra chocolate-chip cookie — not necessarily in that order, or frankly, any order at all, but preferably all at once — that they become oblivious to the people around them.

Indeed, the people around them may abet this process, since they are often subordinates intent on keeping the boss happy. So for the boss, it starts to look like a world in which the traffic lights are always green (and damn the pedestrians). Professor Keltner and his fellow researchers describe it as an instance of “approach/inhibition theory” in action: As power increases, it fires up the behavioral approach system and shuts down behavioral inhibition.

And thus the Fast Forward Personality is born and put on the path to the concrete barrier.

The corollary is that as the rich and powerful increasingly focus on potential rewards, powerless types notice the likely costs and become more inhibited. I happen to know the feeling because I once had my own Los Angeles Ferrari experience. It was a bright-red F355 Spider (and with a mere $150,000 sticker price, not exactly top shelf), which I rented for a television documentary about rich people. It came with a $10,000 deductible, and the first time I drove it into a Bel-Air estate, the low-slung front end hit the apron of the driveway with a horrible grating sound that caused my soul to shrink. I proceeded up the driveway at five miles an hour, and everyone in sight turned away thinking, “Rental.”

The bottom line: Without power, people tend to play it safe. Given power, even you and I would soon end up living large and acting like idiots. So pity the rich — and protect yourself. This is where Hilaire Belloc comes in.

He once wrote a poem about a Lord Finchley, who “tried to mend the Electric Light/Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!” Belloc wasn’t tiresomely suggesting that the gentry all deserve a first-hand acquaintance with the third rail, as it were, but merely that they would be smart to depend on hired help. In social psychology terms, disinhibited Fast Forward types need ordinary cautious mortals to remind them that the traffic lights do in fact occasionally turn yellow or even, sometimes, red.

So, Eddie Griffin: next time you borrow a pal’s car, borrow his driver, too. The world will be a safer place for the rest of us.

Richard Conniff is the author of “The Natural History of the Rich.”

Up Is Still Down in Bushland

I have been meaning to get this posted for a few days now. I caught up with it last week in the New Yorker from about a month ago -- the article by Seymour Hersh wherein he "explains" the redirection of the Bush Administration's strategy in the Middle East. It is quite literally unbelievable. The shallowness, fickleness, shortsightedness, and dumbass-ness of these guys is breath-taking. There is nothing to hope for now but the clock running out on these guys. Things cannot not improve under the Bushies.

The essay is rather long but lays out the change in strategy resulting from the slowly dawning realization that over-throwing Saddam benefited Iran the most. To fix that, we are now going to support Iran's enemies, who, it so happens, also support the Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Got it?

Given the mess we have created, it may be the real strategy is to keep things in a stalemated, destructive mess so nobody "wins" -- except our troops (and mercenaries) are in the middle of it. Nice job. Oh, on and top of that, we may be illegally funding these enemies of Iran as well.

Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Administration National Security Council official, told me that “there is nothing coincidental or ironic” about the new strategy with regard to Iraq. “The Administration is trying to make a case that Iran is more dangerous and more provocative than the Sunni insurgents to American interests in Iraq, when—if you look at the actual casualty numbers—the punishment inflicted on America by the Sunnis is greater by an order of magnitude,” Leverett said. “This is all part of the campaign of provocative steps to increase the pressure on Iran. The idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond and then the Administration will have an open door to strike at them.”

Jeesh. Read it all if you can take it.

Cheney's obliviousness to the facts, to this day

More evidence, from the Pentagon itself, that Cheney and the Administration deceived us in the buildup to the Iraq War. Further, Cheney CONTINUES to outright contradict the Pentagon's own reports. No wonder he had to set up the Feith intelligence group to find evidence to confirm his own prior suspicions. Any intelligence gathering worth its own salt should be just as vigorous in looking for evidence that contradicts suspicions. One wonders what kind of evidence one needs to convince this man that Al Qaeda and Iraq had NO working relationship.

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

Chilling Evidence that the Case for the Iraq War was built on Purposeful Deception

This piece in today's Washington Post seems to provide damning evidence that the Bush Administration KNOWINGLY included discredited evidence that Iraq was pursuing nuclear technology as justification for a pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign country that was NOT an imminent threat to the US. The discredited evidence even made its way into the President's state of the union address just prior to the US invasion of Iraq. This is what the Libby cover up is all about, and why it's so important.

Here is a quote [the document is the discredited Niger-Iraq nuclear claim; Burba is an Italian an investigative reporter for the Italian newsweekly Panorama].

"As a result of the CIA's failure to firmly discredit the document text it received in February 2002, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was called in to investigate the claim. That decision eventually led to the special counsel's investigation that exposed inner workings of the White House and ended with the criminal conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was forced to resign as chief of staff to Vice President Cheney.

"You know I feel bad about it," Burba said later, discussing her frustrations about her role in giving the [fraudulent Niger] dossier to the Americans. "You know the fact is that my documents, with the documents I brought to them, they justified the war.""

Even if the invasion had "worked" or does "work" (and there's little evidence of that after 4 years) do the ends justify the means...?

The Sad Shame of John McCain

Professor Cole this morning compares the FACTS to the shiny objects described by John McCain and his entourage of fools yesterday in Baghdad. I just don't understand what McCain is doing, transforming himself and his reputation from semi-straight shooter (for a politician) to a deceiving shill for an obvious disaster THAT KILLS PEOPLE. All imaginable explanations for this change are ugly (senility, corruption, delusion, overweening ambition -- something).

For all those journalists and politicians who keep insisting that there are new "glimmers" of "hope" in Iraq because of the new security plan started 6 weeks ago, here is a sobering statistic from the Iraqi government. (I'm looking at you, John McCain. See below for more on McCain).

Iraqis killed in February: 1806 (64.5/day)
Iraqis killed in March: 2078 (67/day)

That is a 15% increase!

(Of course, the real numbers are much higher than these government statistics suggest, since passive information gathering on casualties only catches a fraction).

While 44 Iraqi soldiers died in action, the total for US troops in March was 85. AFP is suspicious about the disparity given that US and Iraqi authorities have said that Iraqi troops are leading the security crackdown. If that were true, they should have more casualties than the Americans.

Killings in Baghdad have declined a bit, and death squad murders at night have been impeded, so that fewer bodies are found on the streets in the morning. But car bombing casualties rose. And, some of the violence was displaced from the capital to other cities, such as Baqubah and Mosul, which explains why the total is up so much. The US withdrew some 3,000 troops from Mosul last summer to concentrate them in Baghdad, and since then Mosul seems to me to have become increasingly insecure. It is Iraq's second largest city.

So the over-all death toll has actually increased since the surge began.

Another cautionary note is that major attacks on Shiites in the capital and elsewhere seem to me to be way up. They may not take revenge immediately, but they will eventually. That the US has forced the Shiite militias off the street will be held against America, since Iraqis conclude that they are being killed because the Americans are not letting them defend themselves....

This grandstanding trip that John McCain took to Baghdad on Sunday is another occasion for propaganda to shore up his falling poll numbers in his presidential campaign. He said, "Things are better and there are encouraging signs. I've been here . . . many times over the years. Never have I been able to drive from the airport, never have I been able go out into the city as I was today...."

It makes my blood boil.

Because McCain, you see, knows exactly what I know about guerrilla wars and civil wars. Hell, people used to shop freely in Saigon in the early 1970s! And if he is saying what he is saying, it is because he is attempting to convey an overly optimistic picture with which to deceive the American public.

The deception will get even more of our young men and women in uniform blown up, at a time when their mission has become murky and undefined. If the American public sacrifices the lives of the troops with their eyes open, for what they see as the sake of the security of the United States, then the loss of life is regrettable but the mission is clear, defined, and has public support. But if the American public is lied to and only thinks a mission is being accomplished as a result, then the sacrifice of soldiers' lives is monstrous. The Iraq War has become monstrous in this way. And John McCain, whom I had long respected as a straight shooter, has now been seduced into playing illusionist with the lives of our troops.

Bushism vs. Liberty

Glenn Greenwald revisits today the theme that gets his ire up every time -- insistence of the ruling party that the president has the power to imprison ANYBODY, citizen or not, on his say-so only (no proof required). What is particularly striking this time is the quote he uses from Churchill, the icon of many of these same authoritarian Republicans:

The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgement by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments whether Nazi or Communist.

Is this not obvious? The Churchillian rhetoric renders the importance of liberty not only self-evident, but starkly names what it is called when the power of the executive trumps all.