This is not a blog post

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo)

Another day, another McCain advisor thrown under the bus for accidentally telling the truth about his candidate's indifference to the struggles of ordinary Americans. John Goodman "said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance."

"So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime," Mr. Goodman said. "The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American -- even illegal aliens -- as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.

"So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved."

This is nothing new, of course. Just a year ago, Bush made the same argument:

The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.

Ronald Reagan pioneered this art when he justified his lack of decent funding for school lunches by redefining ketchup as a vegetable.

Still, before Bush became president, the idea you could solve problems simply by calling them victories was a concept reserved for satirists. Or something only a governor would get away with.

George Bush and his sidekick, John McCain, have really taken it to a new level. They redefined "hunger" as "very low food security" in order to salvage their domestic record. They redefined squirting guacamole at Taco Bell as a "manufacturing job" to salvage their jobs record. They are trying to redefine contraception as abortion.

They redefined what a stream is in order to open them up to the coal industry. They've tried to redefine carbon dioxide in order to allow more pollution. They redefined "privacy." They redefined "overtime." They tried to redefine toxic sludge to justify defunding Superfund. They redefined the Vice President as a fourth branch of government. They redefined "organic." They redefined "torture" and the Geneva Conventions.

They prevented NASA from talking about global warming or even mentioning the Big Bang. They don't want irradiated food labelled. They even fought to prevent meatpackers from testing their own cattle for Mad Cow disease.

And I haven't even started on all the people who were kicked to the curb for predicting the costs of the Iraq War would be tremendous. Or the way they hid the real costs of the GOP's health care bill.

That's how they solve problems. Two plus two equals four? No problem! "Two plus [redacted] equals five!"

McCain's plan is to deliver the exact same prescriptions for the "whiners" in a "mental recession:" Out of sight, out of mind.

I'm sure you all may be getting speeched out this week (with so many more to come), but if you get a chance and you haven't read it before, check out Mark Danner's 2007 commencement address to a group of Department of Rhetoric graduates at UC Berkely.

There will be no honeymoon

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo)

On the eve of the Democratic Convention, I think it might be a good idea to remind ourselves what happened after the last one and prepare ourselves for how quickly the Republicans will try to change the subject.

On Thursday, July 29, 2004, John Kerry had a modest lead in the polls and Democrats were energized as the convention came to a close. Delegates, activists and party leaders returned home, ready to re-engage with their communities. But before Monday rolled around and anybody had a chance to gather at the water cooler, Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge emerged with an important announcement:

Secretary Ridge: Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman. President Bush has told you, and I have reiterated the promise, that when we have specific credible information, that we will share it. Now this afternoon, we do have new and unusually specific information about where al-Qaeda would like to attack. And as a result, today, the United States Government is raising the threat level to Code Orange for the financial services sector in New York City, Northern New Jersey and Washington, DC.

Since September 11th, 2001, leaders of our commercial financial institutions have demonstrated exceptional leadership in improving its security. However, in light of new intelligence information, we have made the decision to raise the threat level for this sector, in these communities, to bring protective resources to an even higher level.

Code Orange!

It was still 2004, so millions of Americans who know now that the Bush Administration will tell them absolutely anything were still willing to accept that there was a legitimate threat and action needed to be taken immediately. It wasn't just Republicans, after all. When crazy Howard Dean suggested there may be politics involved (YEARGHH!), George Bush's favorite Democrat took to the airwaves with outrage:

SEN. JOE LIEBERMAN (D), CONNECTICUT: I don't think anybody who has any fairness or is in their right mind would think that the president or the secretary of Homeland Security would raise an alert level and scare people for political reasons.

Perish the thought. This was "specific credible information" and Sec. Ridge had no choice but to come right out that particular Sunday and deliver the grim news. After all, the information they had was, uh, three years old.

Ridge hadn't exactly divulged that the information was in their possession for a long time and was more along the lines of surveillance notes rather than attack plans. But any reporter -- or citizen -- with the ability to think rationally when the government screamed "TERROR!" might have noticed that this is a strange thing to see when you bring your camera to a building that's about to be attacked by al-Qaeda:




Naturally, when there is "specific credible information" that a building is about to be attacked, the Presidential Playbook instructs him to send his wife and children to the target for a photo op with the mayor and governor. Bush's decision was textbook.

It is as clear in retrospect as it should have been to any observer back then: The Bush/Cheney/Rove operation would play on America's fears to win the election. Keith Olbermann has documented this strategy well with his Nexus Of Politics And Terror.

It's also important to note that there is a steep cost to us all when this happens. Not just the psychological damage that comes with an electorate whose judgment is clouded by fear and not just the damage done to our nation when a population ceases to trust a government that cries wolf. According to the American Public Transportation Association, "[e]very day on Orange Alert costs transit systems at least $900,000 a day."

In 2003, New York Governor George Pataki explained that Code Orange isn't free:

GOV. GEORGE PATAKI (R), NEW YORK: Well, there's no question that being at this heightened level of alert has cost New York State hundreds of millions of dollars.

MESERVE: Neighboring New Jersey says maintaining threat level orange costs $125,000 a day. And the city of Baltimore estimates its costs at $300,000 a week.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors in 2003 (PDF) wrote:

[W]we estimate that cities nationwide are spending nearly $70 million per week in additional homeland security costs due to the war and heightened threat alert level. If the war and/or threat alert level continue for six months, cities would incur nearly $2 billion in additional costs.

We stress that these costs come ON TOP OF existing homeland security spending already underway or planned since 9/11. In addition, this survey only asked cities about DIRECT costs, new money that had to be allocated for homeland security because of the war or threat alert. These figures do NOT account for the huge INDIRECT costs cities are experiencing.

In the case of this "limited" Orange Alert in New York, many of those indirect costs were paid by ordinary citizens:

''Anything that slows down the city in general has economic impact, and anything that affects the financial institutions that are still our most important industry also has an impact,'' said Ronnie Lowenstein, an economist who is director of the city's Independent Budget Office. ''It is hard to imagine that these kinds of warnings don't have any impact.''

Rob Kotch, who runs Breakaway Courier Systems, a business that like much of New York's economy depends on speed and mobility, put it another way.

''The cost of all this security is friction to the economy,'' Mr. Kotch said. ''You consider the cost of a driver is $45 an hour. Do the math. If you put a dollar amount on waiting time sitting in traffic for security checks, it can be huge.''

Millions of dollars for the First Lady and Twins to "reassure" the people working in one building. Millions of dollars to make everybody in America afraid. Mostly taxpayer dollars. That Aug. 1 Orange Alert remained in effect for 102 days, through the RNC in New York City and until after the election.

And the cost was actually much steeper. It wasn't simply a financial loss America took to change the subject away from John Kerry's convention:

But what's more disturbing, perhaps even more than the new details of al-Qaida's twisted plotting, is the Bush administration's outing of an undercover al-Qaida agent in its rush to justify raising the terror alert. This move, whether politically motivated or rooted in incompetence has terrorism and security experts shocked and dismayed for the harm inflicted on intelligence operations against al-Qaida. CNN reports today that the administration "may have shut down an important source of information that has already led to a series of al-Qaida arrests" when officials revealed Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan's identity to journalists last week (Khan is the computer expert who "flipped" last month and was operating as a double-agent for the Pakistani government). Do we have so many plugged-in al-Qaida double agents that we can afford to lose one and with him all of his connections and leads? Of course not.

Juan Cole looks at the consequences: British intelligence agents scrambled last week to arrest 13 members of a London al-Qaida cell before they fled after learning  from the Bush administration!  that Khan had been arrested. "The British do not, however, appear to have finished gathering enough evidence to prosecute the 13 in the courts successfully," Cole writes. And even worse: 5 got away. "If this is true," Cole says. "It is likely that the 5 went underground on hearing that Khan was in custody. That is, the loose lips of the Bush administration enabled them to flee arrest. Of the 13 taken into custody on Aug. 3, two were released for lack of evidence and two others were 'no longer being questioned on suspicion of terrorism offences.'"

It may be another election, but George Bush is still president, Dick Cheney is still VP. Karl Rove's team is advising John McCain. Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge are on television every day as McCain surrogates and potential VP picks. The polls are close and all the talking heads believe (as does McCain, evidenced by his reaction to events in Georgia) that anything involving threats to America will help the GOP.

I'm glad Barack Obama already had a week to have fun in Hawaii. There will be no honeymoon after this convention.

UPDATE: By popular demand, here is a 2005 USA Today story about the source of Ridge's announcements:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.

Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.

His comments at a Washington forum describe spirited debates over terrorist intelligence and provide rare insight into the inner workings of the nation's homeland security apparatus.

Ridge said he wanted to "debunk the myth" that his agency was responsible for repeatedly raising the alert under a color-coded system he unveiled in 2002.

"More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge told reporters. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on (alert). ... There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?' "

For the record, I'm not predicting that there will be a terror alert next week. I'm merely pointing out that this crew will go to serious lengths to change the subject and we might as well prevent the element of surprise from being a factor (and bust out the popcorn).

Presidential

I think it's important to remember what a real president looks like when standing next to a foreign leader in Europe:

Imploding

Another outstanding result of Republican rule:

The federal firefighting system is "imploding" in California, due to poor spending decisions and high job vacancy rates, as the region struggles to keep pace with what looks to be a historic fire season, a firefighters' advocacy group charges.

As a result, the firefighters say, small fires have exploded into extended, multimillion-dollar conflagrations because the U.S. Forest Service has been unable to contain them during the early "initial attack" stage.

"The federal fire system is imploding in California. They are crossing their fingers and just hoping they get through the season without a disaster," said Casey Judd, who represents government firefighters from five agencies through the Federal Wildland Fire Service Association.

[...]

Of all the agencies battling California wildland fires — including the region's two largest, the Indians and Basin fires in Monterey County's Los Padres National Forest — it is U.S. Forest Service crews that suffer the highest vacancy rates, entering this year's season with an estimated shortage of 500 firefighters, Judd said. Fully staffed, the region has authorized a force of 4,432 firefighters for the season.

Last year, the Forest Service's Southern California region lost 47 percent of its newly hired firefighting work force, according to a Forest Service report.

"We acknowledge some national forests areas in California have retention challenges, but we believe these situations are manageable," Forest Service overseer Mark Rey said in testimony before a Senate committee on wildfire preparedness last month.

[...]

Judd's group maintains that investing more in prevention and suppression would pay for itself with faster fire containment and lower outsourcing costs. He and others have speculated that under Rey — a Bush appointee with a long career in the timber industry — the Forest Service appears to want to get out of the firefighting business altogether by simply outsourcing more fire contracts to states and cities.

UPDATE: More here

Ownership Society?

Now that the entire blog-o-sphere is buzzing about the Chris Matthews-Erin Burnett encounter that was blogged here first (DB notes in an unseemly, self-congratulatory way since nobody else noted it), I've gotten over the bulk on my sympathy for Burnett and the shock of her insane comments about the bargain China is giving us on poisonous food.

What I've been thinking about mostly since then is this comment:

BURNETT: You know, Chris, just to throw it out there and be provocative, but also ask a fair question, you know, maybe not everybody is able to own a home. We like to think of owning a home as a right in this country.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

BURNETT: It might not be.

This is, apparently, the new meme. That people are entirely responsible for kidding themselves into thinking they could own a home when, clearly, they're deadbeats.

I want to make it clear up front that people who took out loans they could not afford absolutely own some responsibility for the hole they dug for themselves. But this did not happen in a vacuum. What about the responsibility of the lenders, who certainly should have understood the repercussions more than anybody? What about Alan Greenspan?

But really, as Bush's brain steps down today, can there really be a greater repudiation of his vision for an "Ownership Society," the foundation of Bush's domestic agenda, his plan to follow the New Deal, Great Society, etc... His mark on history, than this?

Here's how Rove characterized it:

We will build an ownership society by expanding the ownership of homes and businesses, retirement savings and health insurance, and preparing Americans for the challenges of life in a free society. We are putting government on the side of reform and progress, modernization and greater freedom, more personal choice and greater prosperity. The great goal of modern-day conservatism is to make our society more prosperous and more just.

The think-tankers loved it. But if Americans can't partake in the Ownership Society, what good is it? If Americans prove not to be infallible, what does that say about the Bush efforts to take away the safety net? If creditors cannot be trusted to give loans responsibly, why give them protection with legislation like the bankruptcy bill?

The answers have always been the same. But if conservatives are going to start placing the blame entirely on the shoulders of the people losing their homes, they're going to have to take a long, hard look at their own dogmatic efforts to reshape America.

Deadly potential

Kagro X read my last post and added an excellent point, that Congress is kidding themselves if they think that "(d) Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize or otherwise speak to the use of Armed Forces against Iran" will make the administration think twice about proceeding any way they see fit. This is an administration that doesn't think they require any authorization, anyway.

I also forgot a key point I intended to make... One that RJ Eskow briefly touched on in his outstanding essay:

The amendment doesn't just ask for intelligence on Iranian activity. It requires ongoing reports on proactive U.S. efforts against alleged Iranian efforts, placing political pressure on our military to become more active against Iran. Word in Washington is that top military leaders are resisting an attack on Iran, saying we lack the resources. This is a great way to lean on the generals to change their minds.

The way Sen. Feingold put it, "it basically just required a report on Iran's role in Iraq and any responses by the US government" as if this were a passive transaction, like requesting a PDF from the Government Printing Office. Of course, this assignment is a perfect job for whatever Department of Making Stuff Up is currently killing trees and collecting taxpayer dime in the vice president's office.

But, as Eskow writes, this is an "active" role for our military. The amendment doesn't limit in any way the scope or methods of the intelligence-gathering operation. Did Congress essentially justify an incursion into Iran for the purposes of obtaining information for this ongoing reporting? The intelligence has to come from somewhere and, technically, wandering over the border to gather information isn't the same thing as the "use of Armed Forces against Iran."

Not only could the Congressionally-mandated increase in intelligence result in less reluctance on behalf of high-ranking military leaders (or, as I'm sure Cheney and Lieberman dream, the production of some justification for preemption), it also radically increases the potential for armed conflict.

As I mentioned in my last post, when the 15 British sailors were captured in ambiguously-close-to-Iranian waters in March, the Bush administration allegedly offered military options to Tony Blair, who declined. Tony Blair was basically given the power to decide whether or not the United States would go to war with Iran. I cannot understand for a minute how that doesn't infuriate any senators as much as it infuriates me.

But think how disappointed the neocons must have been when Blair didn't allow his sailors to become pawns in Bush's desired war with Iran. Now imagine American soldiers, seeking information for Congress and crossing the border into enemy lines to get it. What happens if a few are captured?

Tony Blair [or Gordon Brown] won't be able to say "no, thanks" when Cheney offers the menu of options next time.

Closer

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo)

Revisiting Digby's post on the Lieberman Amendment, some Senators are explaining themselves and it looks like they've lost the thread, too. Here's Sen. Russ Feingold explaining why he voted for the amendment:

While I don't agree with Senator Lieberman when it comes to Iraq, his amendment having to do with Iran offered yesterday was not controversial because it basically just required a report on Iran's role in Iraq and any responses by the US government.

I'm stunned by this response, and not just because it's from Feingold. Apparently, the addition of this clause has convinced senators like Harry Reid that the bill is benign:

(d) Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize or otherwise speak to the use of Armed Forces against Iran.

I just don't see how anybody who's been paying attention can come to that conclusion. First of all, consider the source:

"I think we have to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," Lieberman said. Host Bob Schieffer followed-up: "Let's just stop right there. Because I think you probably made some news here, Senator Lieberman. You're saying that if the Iranians don't let up, that the United States should take military action?" "I am," Lieberman responded.

Lieberman added that "if there's any hope" of stopping Iran's nuclear program, "we can't just talk to them. ... We've got to use our force and to me that would include taking military action."

That was a month ago. While the extent of Lieberman's dementia on this issue is something altogether different than the text of this amendment and its legal implications, it would behoove anybody considering an amendment on this topic from this particular senator to be as skeptical as possible. A 97-0 vote doesn't indicate much skepticism.

Lieberman's motives don't exist in a vacuum, either. It's been clear for a long time that this administration is itching for a war with Iran. Josh Marshall wrote about the neocon fantasy of "spreading the chaos" way back in 2003. We know that the administration tried to get authorization to fight in Iran and Syria when the Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq was approved.

We have been told by The Guardian that Bush essentially gave Tony Blair a chance to pull the United States into a war with Iran when 15 British sailors were captured last March.

We also heard from Sy Hersh that the administration has been manipulating language in order to avoid Congressional oversight into their actions involving Iran:

The new mission for the combat troops is a product of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's long-standing interest in expanding the role of the military in covert operations, which was made official policy in the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, published in February. Such activities, if conducted by C.I.A. operatives, would need a Presidential Finding and would have to be reported to key members of Congress.

" 'Force protection' is the new buzzword," the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the Pentagon's position that clandestine activities that can be broadly classified as preparing the battlefield or protecting troops are military, not intelligence, operations, and are therefore not subject to congressional oversight. "The guys in the Joint Chiefs of Staff say there are a lot of uncertainties in Iran," he said. "We need to have more than what we had in Iraq. Now we have the green light to do everything we want."

In normal times, you might wonder if this assertion were true because it might be hard to accept, at least automatically, that the White House would stoop to such a level. In this case, you actually have to wonder if this administration would even waste time coming up with any justification whatsoever for evading any perceived-to-be-legitimate restrictions on its authority.

Back to the Lieberman Amendment... If "force protection" is the name of the game, Congress has just, despite their attempts to de-fang the bill, handed the administration a list of Congressional "findings" that support whatever Bush and Cheney decide to do in Iran (and in secret). The findings themselves attribute the allegations of Iranian involvment to military representatives, but there shouldn't be any doubt that the White House would argue that the Congress has accepted them through their acknowledgement.

Consider how the water-carriers for this administration have used the libelous "Additional Views" of three Republican senators to claim that the entire Senate concluded that Joe Wilson is a liar in the Select Intelligence Committee's Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Assessment on Iraq. Now, the White House has a 20-point list of reasons to justify anything Bush has already been doing without Congressional approval.

If that isn't enough of a reason to have voted this amendment to oblivion, consider what Zbigniew Brzezinski told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February:

If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Continues to be bogged down... Check. Iraqi failure to meet benchmarks... Check. Accusations of Iranian responsibility... Check, thanks to this amendment.

Where does that leave us? Waiting for George Bush to report back to Congress about whether there are any Iranian "provocations" in Iraq. What do you expect to hear in the next report? What do you think will happen next?

Sen. Webb introduced a bill back in March that would have required Bush to come back to Congress for approval before using force in Iran. That bill never got out of committee. It was determined that it wasn't "germane" to the toothless Iraq Supplemental Bill that passed in May. Congress has done nothing to assert its authority in lieu of that bill's rejection.

Is it possible that 97 voting senators all want a war with Iran? Seems hard to believe, but in the absence of any serious opposition to expanding this war, what else could they be thinking?

Weakest Link

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo)

The news about toothpaste made of antifreeze and dumplings made of cardboard have gotten quite a bit of attention on television lately (quite rightly). But odds are, the television you're watching was also imported. And on top of that, there's a pretty good chance the shows you enjoy first aired somewhere else. For example, The Office or American Idol, both of which originated in England.

The United States is also bringing in quite a few movies from other parts of the world. Last year's Oscar-winning Best Picture, The Departed was based on a film called Mou gaan dou. I can't tell you how upset I am that a remake is in the works of what is possibly my favorite film of all time, Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru.

I was visiting Steve Clemons' Washington Note and saw the show America absolutely must import from England:

The BBC has a must-listen show on radio tomorrow titled Called to Account (times noted further below) offering a theatrical version of Tony Blair's indictment for Iraq War-related crimes. This may inspire many on this side of the Atlantic pond to think about various strategies to hold America's current political leadership accountable for duplicity and mismanagement of America's national security portfolio -- and particularly for the Iraq War.

Democracy has become a term derided in much of the world today because for many beleaguered peoples it has come to mean Western duplicity, uneven standards between the mighty and the weak, an excuse for invasion and occupation, a code word for regime change, or obsessive focus on ballots rather than healthy civil society institutions like courts and a free media that help to keep power accountable.

If 'Democracy' is ever going to shed its bad name, accountability must be one of its fundamental pillars in any genuine system of checks and balances. There should be a price paid for serious errors by national leaders -- and an even higher price paid by those who wield power with impunity and who lie to their publics in so-called democracies.

Sounds like a good idea to me. If Congress won't hold Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Co. accountable, let Hollywood do it. They can do a better job scripting an indictment than any Senate or House committee. As compelling as C-Span has been since November 2006, the lack of coordination in these hearings is incredibly frustrating.

Who would you cast for the prosecution? It doesn't have to be an actor. Fred Thompson can try to defend his friends if he wants, though.

Let me count the ways

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo)

Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth's home run record in 1961, but that remarkable accomplishment wasn't enough to get him into the Hall of Fame. To get a plaque in Cooperstown, a player needs to be consistently spectacular for a long time.

Conversely, George W. Bush has been spectacularly bad at his job for most of the time he's been in office, and yet Congress is apparently waiting for a single, remarkable, odious act before seriously considering impeachment.

After posting on the president's outrageous comments about health care Tuesday, I joked that Bush has necessitated a version of the Ninth Amendment for bloggers:

The enumeration in the blog, of certain transgressions by the president, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others noted by the readers.

I simply could not list ways the president was wrong and possibly include all of them. Similarly, I couldn't possibly list, at this point, all the things Bush and Cheney have done that would, by themselves, make me vote for impeachment were I representing my district or state. The day the news broke about domestic wiretapping was the day Bush jumped from the "lousy president" to the "felon" category for this blogger.

Others could point to Katrina, Abu Ghraib, secret prisons... Again, what's the point of trying to list them all?

But for whatever reason, no singular event has been enough to convince Congress to put impeachment on the table, so to speak. More striking, though, is the failure of Bush's cumulative record to create any traction for impeachment. Not even with a majority of Americans supporting Cheney's impeachment and practically as many in favor of Bush getting the heave-ho as opposed the idea.

We're supposed to believe that Scooter Libby's probation is a serious consequence of his behavior because he can't lie to any more FBI agents for a while. It is tragic, however, that Bush was never placed on a form of probation when the opportunities presented themselves, repeatedly. For example, when Russ Feingold introduced his measure to censure Bush over the wiretapping, the Democrats responded with anonymous quotes by Senate aides:

"Feingold's grandstanding screwed the pooch and played into Bill Frist's hands," the aide said. "Thank God Dems punted this down the field. Frist was going to force Democrats to vote on a resolution Feingold had kept a big secret and he would've split the caucus on an issue that needed time to get the whole caucus to support. Russ Feingold had only one persons' interests in mind with his Sunday bombshell, and those were his own. He practically handed a victory to a Bush White House that desperately needs a win."

[...]

"There were concerns that this would backfire on the Democrats just as they were beginning to get the upper hand or at least beefing up the playing field on homeland security credentials," the aide added. "The Dubai deal, the war in Iraq, the president's numbers heading south. Democrats have a long history of shooting themselves in the foot when the good things work and we've been known to do some things that end up hurting us rather than helping us."

That measure was unlikely to pass, anyway. But think how much easier it would be to hold Bush accountable if the Democrats had been nearly unanimous (thanks, Lieberman) in objecting to his dubious acts. Instead of a series of abstract and already internalized events, there would be a record of established abuses of power and failures of leadership. The same way the administration sold America on the 17 U.N. resolutions Saddam Hussein violated, the Democrats could point to the number of times Bush needed to be reprimanded for violating the trust of the people and his oath of office.

By failing to hold Bush accountable to even a minimal standard along the way, Congress not only encouraged more bad behavior from this administration, they made it incredibly difficult to ever reach a point where they could say "enough already."

No War Left Behind

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo)

On Monday, we learned that there has basically been no measurable progress in Iraq:

A draft report to Congress on the war will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Iraq has met none of its targets for political, economic and other reform, speeding up the Bush administration's reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday.

One likely result of the report will be a vastly accelerated debate among President Bush's top aides on withdrawing troops and scaling back the U.S. presence in Iraq.

Yes, we all held our breath waiting for the "likely" debate in the White House about a change in course. Today, the NY Times gives us the less likely, yet inevitable, actual outcome: Bush to Declare Gains in Iraq on Some Fronts:

The Bush administration will assert in the next few days that progress in carrying out the new American strategy in Iraq has been satisfactory on nearly half of the 18 benchmarks set by Congress, according to several administration officials.

But it will qualify some verdicts by saying that even when the political performance of the Iraqi government has been unsatisfactory, it is too early to make final judgments, the officials said.

The administration's decision to qualify many of the political benchmarks will enable it to present a more optimistic assessment than if it had provided the pass-fail judgment sought by Congress when it approved funding for the war this spring.

The administration officials who provided details of the draft report to The New York Times, insisting on anonymity, did so partly to rebut claims by members of Congress in recent days that almost no progress had been made in Iraq since President Bush altered course by ordering the deployment of about 30,000 additional troops earlier this year.

[...]

On the political front, none of the benchmarks that have been achieved include the high-profile legislation on which Congress asked to see progress. Debate has not yet begun in the Iraqi Parliament on the oil law or the revenue-sharing law, both of which are crucial to keeping Iraq united over the long term.

You read that right. Bush "altered course" by ordering more troops into this mess.

What a perfect example of the Bush administration's tactics. They ask the military to solve everything while our nation's top diplomat works hard "to raise awareness of golf as a sport."

Bush is like a superintendent with a large toolbox containing only a hammer. When he fails to solve a problem that cannot be fixed with a hammer, he either demands to know how anybody could suggest it's not the finest hammer ever manufactured, or he tries to obscure the view so only the nails are visible.

I thought this president believed in accountability and testing. His under-funded No Child Left Behind Act requires that 100 percent of students tested will pass. One hundred percent.

Bush made "accountability" the cornerstone of his sales pitch when NCLB was in front of Congress:

No longer is it acceptable to hide poor performance. No longer is it acceptable to keep results away from parents. One of the interesting things about this bill, it says that we're never going to give up on a school that's performing poorly; that when we find poor performance, a school will be given time and incentives and resources to correct their problems. A school will be given time to try other methodologies, perhaps other leadership, to make sure that people can succeed. If, however, schools don't perform, if, however, given the new resources, focused resources, they are unable to solve the problem of not educating their children, there must be real consequences. There must be a moment in which parents can say, I've had enough of this school. Parents must be given real options in the face of failure in order to make sure reform is meaningful.

It's unfortunate that Bush's funding isn't tied anything measurable. America could use some real options, too.

UPDATE: Over at Corrente, Shane-O spots this in Bush's speech today:

Economic development funds are critical to helping Iraq make this political progress. Today I'm exercising the waiver authority granted me by Congress to release a substantial portion of those funds.

That's the final chapter in the toothless Iraq Supplemental Bill that Congress passed after Bush's veto.

Bush: You're on your own, suckers

The audacity of George W. Bush hit another peak today as the president spoke at Cleveland Clinic. DB found this statement to be pretty galling:

The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.

Just go to an emergency room. I wonder if Bush has ever had an experience like this one in Los Angeles this summer:

In the 40 minutes before a woman's death last month at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, two separate callers pleaded with 911 dispatchers to send help because the hospital staff was ignoring her as she writhed on the floor, according to audio recordings of the calls.

"My wife is dying and the nurses don't want to help her out," Jose Prado, the woman's boyfriend, told the 911 dispatcher through an interpreter.

He was calling from a pay phone outside the hospital, his tone increasingly desperate as he described how his 43-year-old girlfriend was spitting up blood.

That's what's on the news out here. Well, sometimes you don't die on the floor in the emergency room. You might get dumped out of a van in Skid Row.

But Digby flagged an even more obscene remark the president made today:

I like the idea of people making decisions that are -- that will, one, enhance their health, and two, save money. The doc told me that -- we were looking at one of these brilliant heart guys working for him. You're not going to believe the technology in this hospital, by the way. If you're a Cleveland resident, you ought to be proud of this hospital. It's unbelievable. (Applause.)

He said something pretty wise, though. He said, you can have all the technology that man can conceivably create, but if you continue to smoke, we're going backwards. If you're not exercising, if you're not taking care of the body yourself, all the technology isn't going to save your life. In other words, there is a certain responsibility that we have as citizens to take care of ourselves.

Have we ever had a president who has been more of an obstacle to average Americans' ability to make informed decisions about the food and products they consume? Or a president who has been less interested in protecting average Americans from dangerous products and food?

He sure talks like he cares. Remember this, from the second 2004 Bush-Kerry debate?

HORSTMAN: Mr. President, why did you block the reimportation of safer and inexpensive drugs from Canada which would have cut 40 to 60 percent off of the cost?

BUSH: I haven't yet. Just want to make sure they're safe. When a drug comes in from Canada, I want to make sure it cures you and doesn't kill you.

And that's why the FDA and that's why the surgeon general are looking very carefully to make sure it can be done in a safe way. I've got an obligation to make sure our government does everything we can to protect you.

Despite his talk about personal responsibility, the president sure feels obligated to "protect" us when the drug companies' profits are a factor in the equation.

And what about the clear mandate his FDA and Surgeon General have to inform the public about risks? Just today we heard from former Surgeon General Richard Carmona:

[A]lthough most Americans believe that their Surgeon General has the ability to impact the course of public health as "the nation's doctor," the reality is that the nation's doctor has been marginalized and relegated to a position with no independent budget, and with supervisors who are political appointees with partisan agendas. Anything that doesn't fit into the political appointees' ideological, theological, or political agenda is ignored, marginalized, or simply buried.

Don't expect to learn anything about the health of the planet, either. In fact, don't expect the government to tell you anything pertinent about your health, even if you are trying to save lives after a terrorist attack.

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the White House instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available.

That finding is included in a report released Friday by the Office of the Inspector General of the EPA, "EPA's Response to the World Trade Center Collapse: Challenges, Successes and Areas for Improvement."

No, it's up to you to make informed decisions without the government telling you anything you need to know. That's not Bush's job. That's for the private sector to do.

Except the Bush administration is working harder than ever to rescue the private sector from having to act responsibly or tell you anything.

Chris Waldrop, Consumer Federation of America-Food Policy Institute, Deputy Director, appeared on C-Span's Washington Journal last week:

The FDA has been underfunded drastically over the past five years. They can't keep up with the amount of imports coming into this country.

[...]

As an example, since 2003, the people in the field have... Those numbers have been cut by 12 percent. The imports that have come in, starting in 2003, there were 45 billion for food imports. They're now up to 65 billion and the FDA hasn't even gotten the money that's allowed them to keep steady with inflation rates.

That's the FDA that Bush tasked to work with his muzzled Surgeon General to keep us safe. Is your dinner made in China? Are any ingredients from China? Who knows? Nobody required to tell you does. There are no requirements that anybody tell you where your food comes from.

Don't expect the Consumer Product Safety Commission to do much for your health, either. The three-person board has been paralyzed with a vacancy since January and the former lobbyist Bush tried to put there withdrew his nomination because we finally have a Democratic Congress. And if you expect the Bush administration to do anything at all, expect it to just make things worse. Kevin Drum today points out that Bush is trying to loosen regulations on lead. Lead, fer crying out loud.

So when Bush says it's up to us to make smart decisions about how we treat our bodies, it's really up to us. For example, you could buy organic food:

WASHINGTON, DC, June 25, 2007 (ENS) - The U.S. Department of Agriculture, USDA, has changed the rules governing organic foods to allow 38 non-organic, agricultural ingredients to be used in foods that bear the government's "USDA Organic" label.

[...]

The Organic Consumers Association, OCA, says the new rule means that Anheuser Busch will be allowed to sell its "Organic Wild Hops Beer" without using any organic hops at all.

Sausages, brats, and breakfast links labeled as "USDA Organic" are now allowed to contain intestines from factory farmed animals raised on chemically grown feed, synthetic hormones, and antibiotics, the OCA says.

"It's disheartening to see how profit motivated businesses like Kraft, Wal-Mart and Anheuser-Busch have more sway over the U.S. Department of Agriculture than family farmers, independent organic producers, and consumers," said OCA National Director Ronnie Cummins.

Ouch.

Or you could avoid buying some old meat that was given the equivalent of several million chest X-rays and put back on the shelf. Just look for the irradiation label:

WASHINGTON - The government proposed today relaxing its rules on labeling of irradiated foods and suggested it may allow some products zapped with radiation to be called “pasteurized.” The Food and Drug Administration said the proposed rule would require companies to label irradiated food only when the radiation treatment causes a material change to the product. Examples includes changes to the taste, texture, smell or shelf life of a food.

Ouch.

Well, what if the private sector actually wants to tell Americans their products are safe?

WASHINGTON - 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.

George Bush, handed everything in life, has some nerve telling America that "there is a certain responsibility that we have as citizens to take care of ourselves." That rotten son of privilege has done nothing but make it harder for Americans to actually lead healthier lives on a healthy planet.

UPDATE: Bush video here at Crooks & Liars.

Bad neighbors

Glenn Greenwald and a post he inspired from TRex both point to the worldwide Pew poll of public opinion, which indicates that, unsurprisingly, the rest of the world has a dim view of America after six-plus years of Bush at the helm.

I think I found the perfect analogy for the Bush administration and America with the GOP in full control: They are like the college kids in my mother's otherwise quiet neighborhood. They come, for the first time, into a little autonomy for four years or so, out from under father's thumb.

They've paid no dues, just a little rent, and they think they're entitled to whatever rights come with the title "grown up."

They'll park in her yard, vomit on her sidewalk, play the crappiest music at the highest decibel levels. They'll leave trash wherever they happen to finish whatever they were consuming.

They have no shame and don't care who witnesses their most brazen acts of gluttony. They don't have any commitment to the neighborhood, planning instead to jettison after their term expires. They have no respect for what came before or what follows. Apparent contempt for those they know will remain.

That they were there for a legitimate purpose strains credulity, yet they undoubtedly have some transcript to justify their brief and terrible visit to the area. It is impossible to believe they learned anything at all before leaving behind only their vapors and something once lovely, now broken.

I think it's a good metaphor, but it's only a metaphor. My mother's neighborhood is nothing like this.

Scooter, felon

What a coward the president truly is. I've got nothing to add right now, other than my sense of outrage. Another fine example of the Bush administration manipulating justice for political purposes.

Chief Justice George W. Bush

George Bush said he wanted Supreme Court justices like Thomas and Scalia. It would appear now that he got a Chief Justice just like himself -- a sloganeering promise-breaker, who campaigned for himself on a puffy cloud of unity, only to take his opportunistic victory and use it to further an extremist right-wing agenda by playing loose with facts and adhering to an inconsistent application of the law.

"[T]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race"

We might as well have Frank Luntz as Chief Justice. When I read this line, my blood began to boil. What a perfect example of a GOP bumper-sticker talking point. As Deborah Hellman writes, it's a "seeming truism" that appears on the surface to be perfectly logical, but isn't, and requires several hundred words to correctly refute. It's a Ken Mehlman Meet The Press Special, and it comes courtesy of the highest judge in the land. Clearly, telling kids that they cannot attend a school because of their race is a different kind of discrimination than identifying kids who have been discriminated against in that manner and providing them with opportunities they were denied. I suppose Roberts would stand in a scalding hot shower getting his skin burned off because the way to deal with an improper water temperature is to stop regulating the faucet.

It's no different than the president, who campaigned on a platform of Compassionate Conservatism and has been neither. Roberts pretended that he would respect precedent, but his court has overturned or mortally wounded precedents old and extremely young, proving that this court has no respect for where this country is now or how it got here. The only thing different from a few years ago is the personalities on the court, proving that the ideologies they carried with them are not just influencing their decisions, they are the sole mechanism behind the regression of the court.

Roberts had convinced even some of his biggest skeptics that he would work to build large consensus opinions, moving the court in a conservative direction, but only incrementally. Like our "uniter, not divider" president, that turned out to be hogwash. Just like the partisan 5-4 vote that put Bush in office, the slew of rotten decisions this court has vomited on the nation this term are tattooed with a 5-4 branding. Instead of reflecting the diversity of viewpoints in the country, Bush has sought to please only the narrowest and most extreme band of his base, the same segment of the nation cheering the court's rulings this week.

The radical U-turn the court has taken in the last term is the result of a GOP majority in both houses of Congress and a Republican president with "political capital." That temporary situation is toast. The GOP is the minority party in Congress and the president, it would seem, couldn't be more unpopular. Yet, the Supreme Court will set, for a generation or more, an agenda representing the most fervent views of that publicly-rejected government.

Like the president, Roberts can't even get his facts straight.

It may be useful to look at the facts the chief justice so remarkably overlooked or rearranged. In his very first sentence, Roberts wrongly said: "At a school-sanctioned and school-supervised event, a high school principal saw ..."

How's that again? At this public event, the high school sanctioned nothing and supervised very little. The parade was sponsored by the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Juneau and by several other private companies and private citizens. The school turned out a small band, but that was the beginning and end of the school's involvement.

The chief justice would not let it go. Eleven times he got it wrong. He said the torch-bearing parade was like a "class trip." This was palpable nonsense -- high-octane nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless. This was never a school function. The parade never touched school property.

One more point of fact: The chief justice said the Olympic torchbearers were to pass by the school "while school was in session." But this was not so. Not a single class was in session as the torch passed by. The students, including young Joe Frederick, were free to watch the parade, throw snowballs or stay home, as they wished.

Since it's too much to ask that the President of the United States base his decisions on reality, it's not much of a surprise that the Chief Justice is setting the bar so low. But nobody ever seriously considered Bush a brainiac. Roberts, on the other hand, was lauded by everybody with an office in D.C. as the most brilliant lawyer in the universe. Shouldn't this individual be able to discern the most simple facts presented to him? As with Bush, facts that have a "liberal bias" do not factor into his decision-making.

George Bush points to his snowflake-children props to point out how America needs to "err on the side of life." The same president who is responsible for countless deaths in Iraq and who, as governor of Texas, mocked a woman he had executed. It would seem Roberts is content with such a flimsy attachment to consistency, as well, his court issuing a decision defending free speech for the wealthy and powerful, while issuing another denying a student his political speech based solely on the unpopularity of the opinion expressed.

We couldn't have been stuck with a worse president. Predictably (for anyone named Vinny in a bathrobe, at least), we are now stuck with a terrible Supreme Court, created in George W. Bush's own image.

UPDATE: Once again, I got distracted and a finer blogger has scooped me.

Time Is On My Side (Yes, It Is!)

Josh Marshall notes that President Bush, after the defeat of his immigration bill, looks "like someone has literally knocked the wind out of him."

I'm sure the wind won't stay out of him long, though. In no time, he'll be breaking it in the White House, since he's broken just about everything else (his promises, the army, the environment, the economy, our standing in the world...)

Don't think he'll remain sullen. You see, history is on his side:

Hersh also stated that Bush likes to compare himself to Winston Churchill. Sources close to the President have heard him "say things like, 'It'll be 20 years before they appreciate me. ... Yes, I may be at 30 percent in the polls, but in 20 or 30 years, they'll appreciate what I've done.'"

He's already looking better, isn't he? Katrina looked bad at first, but now that we've had some time to reflect on it, doesn't it look like a great example of effective government?

Bush knew it would. He warned us not to rush to judgment, just one year after the disaster:

BUSH: First of all, there's no such thing as short-term history as far as I'm concerned. I think that you can't judge a presidency based upon a moment's notice. I believe you have to take -- eventually my standing in history will be judged by people 30 or 40 years from now who will be able to take an objective look, at whether the decisions I made led to peace and prosperity. You know, this is a job where you make decisions. And you, you do what you think is right. And you let people recognize, and the people are gonna say what's on their mind at the moment. But I read three histories of George Washington last year. The first President of the United States is still being analyzed by historians, which oughtta say to this president and future president: "Do what you think is right and eventually historians will figure out whether it made sense or not."

He's right. America is coming around. It only took 200-plus years, but people are finally realizing that George Washington wasn't a complete failure. I doubt it will take until 2208 before people figure out just how lucky we've been over the past seven years. It is inevitable. Like Condi said, when she linked Saddam to 9/11, "this is a story that is unfolding, and it is getting clearer, and we're learning more."

Presidential Power

Thinking about how radical the Bush administration has been led me to pick up my dusty copy of Richard E. Neustadt's Presidential Power, one of the best books ever written about the executive branch. I just wanted to see how (my outdated copy of) the book holds up in light of the absurd nature of politics and the media in the early 21st Century. In some respects quite well, in others, not so much.

Interestingly, I found two opposite pages (164-165) that stuck out in my mind for different reasons, and both are bouncing around in my head today.

The first is this:

In 1898, two years before Wilson's apologia, a scholarly observer who may well have influenced him wrote a deeper book than Congressional Government. This was Henry Jones Ford, his book The Rise and Growth of American Politics. Correctly, in my view, he even then put the Presidency at the system's center:

The agency of the presidential office has been such a master force in shaping public policy that to give a detailed account of it would be equivalent to writing the political history of the United States.

The evidence... history affords seems conclusive of the tact that the only power which... define[s] issues in such a way that public opinion can pass upon them is that which emanates from presidential authority. ...

The rise of presidential authority cannot be accounted for by the intention of presidents; it is the product of political conditions which dominate all the departments of government, so that Congress itself shows an unconscious disposition to aggrandize the presidential office. ...

Eighty years later the trend seems the same.

Today, the talking heads are having a field day with the news that Congress has abysmal approval ratings. Lou Dobbs is reporting that fact as I type this.

In the comments to my posts this week at Hullabaloo, it was plenty clear to me that people have lost faith in Congress' ability to rein in this president. The failed Iraq Supplemental opportunity to end the war and the fact that Nancy Pelosi said impeachment is off the table seem to have crushed a great deal of whatever optimism voters had after last November's elections.

No doubt, it is true that the power this president has was ceded to him by the GOP-controlled Congress of the recent past, and has yet to be reclaimed by the thin majority the Democrats "enjoy" presently. Personally, I don't think they have the votes to change that much. The only real weapon they have is to continue investigating this reprehensible administration and hope that something comes out that is so egregious, even John Boehner and Mitch McConnell won't be able to save Bush.

What is incredibly gut-wrenching to so many of us is the previously unimaginable extent to which the GOP Congressional leadership and noise machine has been willing to defend the indefensible. Which brings me to the opposite page (165) of my copy of Presidential Power:

In the aftermath of Watergate, however, we have seen occasions where distinctions between reputation and prestige seemed to dissolve, where Washingtonians seemed quite like members of the general public, reacting to a President in almost the same terms, conducting themselves accordingly.' One such occasion was the "Saturday night massacre" of 1973 when Nixon fired the Watergate Prosecutor, forcing resignations from the Attorney General and his Deputy, all of whom responded on TV. This dramatic sequence-televised and thus "firsthand" in all parts of the country seemed so to contradict the President's contentions as to drain them of credibility, enlarging what we now label a credibility "gap," indeed extending it so wide as to cast doubt on his legitimacy and with it his authority as President. Nixon seemed to be engaging in a cover-up of criminal activity. He seemingly was fighting law enforcement. But he had sworn an oath of office encompassing the "take-care" clause. Hence the cloud on his legitimacy. The "massacre" tripped off impeachment proceedings. It is easy to see why.

What was striking then is that inside the government or near it, in the watchful circle of the Washington community, reactions against Nixon seemed to have so much in common with the popular impressions outside government. Citizens at large were swept into a "firestorm" of protest and suspicion. But so were commentators, congressmen, and civil servants. Apparently the President's behavior planted the same question in all minds. Some Washingtonians, waiting upon evidence, were slower than others to draw ultimate conclusions, and slower by far than some citizens, but he was treated henceforth with reserve throughout the Washington community. Diplomacy aside-there was a crisis in the Middle East-he turned away from governing and focused on the prospect of impeachment. Had Nixon tried to be assertive in domestic spheres, I take it that he would have been ignored or resisted. All over town officials shook themselves free of the White House, released by suspicion from deference, distancing their programs from his person. This occurred within one year of his triumphant re-election, three years before expiration of his term. For Washingtonians it was a most uncharacteristic reaction, especially so early in the term. Calculations about possible impeachment played a part, no doubt. But so did outraged feelings about Nixon's performance. There was precious little rallying around him. Instead, so far as I can judge, there was a widespread sense, even in some quarters of the White House, that he had compromised his right to be there and should go, impeached or not.

It is hard to imagine Washingtonians having less "in common with the popular impressions outside government" today (or during the Clinton impeachment proceedings.) As Digby correctly noted in her magnificent speech, the mainstream media -- the High Broderism and Meal Ticket Journalists -- have failed us completely.

Glenn Greenwald wrote today:

Only in the true fringe -- what Digby calls "the modern conservative movement of Newt and Grover and Karl and Rush," as well as their establishment media enablers -- does opposition to the Iraq War, or Guantanamo and torture, or the abolition of habeas corpus, or the grotesque deceit of the Limbaugh Right make one a "leftist" or fringe liberal, as those terms are used in their pejorative sense. The reality is that the views Digby identifies as the crux of the "progressive blogosphere" are entirely mainstream American views. "Extremism" is marked by those who reject those beliefs, not by those who embrace them.

Radicals and extremists are those who believe that we ought to invade and occupy foreign countries which have not attacked and cannot attack us, or that we ought to lock people away indefinitely with no process and/or torture them, or that the president has the power to ignore our duly enacted laws. As is true for any collection of large numbers of people, there surely are liberal bloggers who hold views that are shared only by a small minority. But objectively speaking, the defining views, the ones that its members hold almost unanimously in common, are anything but radical or "fringe."

It is not only our national character that has changed fundamentally over the last six years. So, too, has our political spectrum. As I've argued many times before, the term "liberal" or "the Left," as used most commonly, now denotes "opposition to Bush radicalism." Anyone who meaningfully deviates from the worldview of the Bush movement, who devotes themselves to opposing it, finds themselves -- for that reason alone -- described as "on the Left." Even the CIA, and Bush appointees such as Richard Armitage and James Comey, are so described that way. That is how profoundly these terms have been transformed.

Ideas that were always previously so radical as to be unthinkable are now routinely identified as "mainstream conservatism." Conversely, political principles that have been such an integral part of America's political identity as to be unquestionable are now the hallmarks of "fringe liberalism" (a "fringe" which, as our last election demonstrated, now includes an ever-growing majority of the population). Those whose views of "bloggers" are based upon the caricatures of Time Magazine and The Washington Post would undoubtedly be shocked to learn of just how unremarkable is the Platform of Beliefs of the "Progressive Blogosphere" as articulated by one of its leading and most admired commentators.

The litany of abuses of the public trust, to the point at which one of the highest ranking officials in the administration was convicted by a jury of obstructing the only significant criminal investigation of wrongdoing in the White House, has been so well-documented there's no reason to go through it here. When John Ashcroft was willing to resign to stop Bush and Cheney from hatching one of their schemes, we wondered what could have been so bad to make him say no.

What it will take to make the rest of today's Washingtonians to say no? What it will take -- beyond a veto-proof majority -- to hold Bush accountable for his misdeeds and get this country back? The simple answer to my simple question is probably "nothing."

Still, this member of the "fringe" will not relent.

Rejected

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo)

I was traveling last week and I'm still catching up on all the news I missed. Today, I read the Fourth Circuit's al-Marri opinion and is it a doozy (PDF).

If John Yoo and David Addington weren't done emptying out the liquor cabinet by p. 71, the conservative court's smackdown of the unitary executive theory here was probably enough alone to send them into a slurred-speech babble (emphasis mine):

In light of al-Marri’s due process rights under our Constitution and Congress’s express prohibition in the Patriot Act on the indefinite detention of those civilians arrested as "terrorist aliens" within this country, we can only conclude that in the case at hand, the President claims power that far exceeds that granted him by the Constitution. 17

We do not question the President’s war-time authority over enemy combatants; but absent suspension of the writ of habeas corpus or declaration of martial law, the Constitution simply does not provide the President the power to exercise military authority over civilians within the United States. See Toth, 350 U.S. at 14 ("[A]ssertion of military authority over civilians cannot rest on the President’s power as commander-in-chief, or on any theory of martial law."). The President cannot eliminate constitutional protections with the stroke of a pen by proclaiming a civilian, even a criminal civilian, an enemy combatant subject to indefinite military detention. Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them "enemy combatants."

A "well-established purpose of the Founders" was "to keep the military strictly within its proper sphere, subordinate to civil authority."

Marty Lederman had much more last week on the decision. TalkLeft had a series of posts on the case as well.

After the 2006 elections, the concern-troll Republicans warned the new majority they better not "overreach." Certainly, nobody will accuse them of doing that with a straight face.

But when future generations look back at the hubris and avarice of the Bush administration, the word "overreach" might be among the most appropriate. An overreaching view of authority. Overreaching in foreign policy. Overreaching in privatization. Overreaching in trying to control ideas and facts. Overreaching in expecting the military to fix everything.

Great news from the Fourth Circuit and incredible to see how roundly rejected the law-breaking of this president has been. After watching Congress abdicate their obligations for so long, the hearings these past few months have been nothing short of flabbergasting. Learning that the leaders of the Justice Department were, at one point, on the verge of resigning, and now seeing conservative courts saying "enough..." It makes me think this might be America, after all.

While we're on the subject of looking at Bush's place in history, I cannot wait to read Glenn Greenwald's new book, A Tragic Legacy, due to be released June 26.

Of course they knew

(cross-posted at Hullabaloo)

In one of the homework assignments Digby left for us all, The General's Report, Sy Hersh describes the willful ignorance of the pentagon leadership when confronted with the bitter fruit that Donald Rumsfeld's policies yielded. Rumsfeld refused to look at the photographs, even though he knew what horrible acts the photos depicted. Others made the same decision.

Christy finds in this transparent and cowardly act a theme for the administration at large:

Plausible deniability. If it sounds familiar, it is because it has been the constant refrain from Bush Administration officials — including AG Gonzales in the latest series of inquiries into Department of Justice improprieties. They are using what ought to be a solemn, ethical obligation as a shield for liability from wrongdoing, taking an obligation to not interfere with genuine fact-finding and twisting it into an excuse for not correcting an ongoing problem. This is not governing, it is CYA at the highest levels — and they should not be allowed to continue along this tactical path.

The thing is, for plausible deniability to work as a defense, it has to be, you know, plausible. I suppose you could argue, after witnessing the war that Rumsfeld designed for us in Iraq, that he has either no imagination whatsoever or the greatest imagination of all time. After all, he couldn't seem to fathom that even basic lawbreaking would occur after the government was toppled in Iraq. On the other hand, the entire affair persisted in appearing to Rumsfeld a smashing success until the day he was dismissed.

But no functional human lacks enough imagination to require a photo to picture this:

"Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!" Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, "I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting."

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. "Could you tell us what happened?" Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, "Is it abuse or torture?" At that point, Taguba recalled, "I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, 'That's not abuse. That's torture.' There was quiet."

[...]

I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba's report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their "extremely sensitive nature.") Taguba said that he saw "a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee." The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. "It's bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women's panties," Taguba said.

At this point, there are so many examples of dereliction on behalf of the administration and the "party of accountability" that it's simply not plausible that any group of people could be that oblivious. But the idea that they could avoid responsibility simply by closing their eyes... that's the stuff a normal person learns won't work by the end of second grade in elementary school.

Hersh explained to Wolf Blitzer what was done with these reports:

HERSH: Oh, my God, two months. Is it possible — you know, the question you have to ask about the president is this. No matter when he learned, and certainly he learned before it became public, and no matter how detailed it was, is there any evidence that the president of the United States said to Rumsfeld, what's going on there, Don? Let's get an investigation going.

Did he do anything? Did he ask for a — did he want to have the generals come in and talk to him about it? Did he want to change the rules? Did he want to improve the conditions?

BLITZER: And what's the answer?

HERSH: Nada. He did nothing.

It's actually worse than nothing. Of course, this entire sorry episode stemmed from the policies that Bush put in place, with his torture memo and the latitude he gave Rumsfeld. But Al Gore, in Assault on Reason, noted that the administration's fingerprints are all over the abuses:

The abhorrent acts at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were a direct consequence of the culture of impunity — encouraged, authorized, and instituted by Bush and Rumsfeld in their statements that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. These kinds of horrific abuses were the logical, inevitable outcome of policies and statements from the administration. To me, just as glaring as the evidence of the pictures themselves was the revelation that it was established practice for prisoners to be moved around during the visits of the International Committee of the Red Cross so they would not be available for interviews. No one can claim that was the act of a few bad apples. That was policy set from above with the direct intent to violate U.S. values that the administration was claiming to uphold.

There's another reason the deniability is simply implausible: There was never any doubt that abuse would take place in Iraqi prisons unless steps were taken proactively to stop them. These immoral acts didn't just happen; they were allowed to happen.

In 1971, psychology professor Philip G. Zimbardo conducted what are known as the Stanford Prison Experiments. Zimbardo set up a fake prison and randomly assigned roles to his students. Some were guards, others prisoners. The experiment ended abruptly when it became clear to Zimbardo that his students, the best and brightest this country had to offer, essentially turned into monsters in a matter of days.

Zimbardo discussed what happened in Alex Gibney's fantasic film The Human Behavior Experiments (video here), and how he saw, in Abu Ghraib, obvious parallels to his research:

PHILIP ZIMBARDO: Were there a few bad apples? No. The, what was bad was the barrel. Who made the barrel? This whole chain of command.

KEN DAVIS, ARMY RESERVIST: I feel terrible about what happened to these Iraqi detainees. They were in U.S. custody. Our country had an obligation to treat them right; to treat them as human beings. We didn't do that. [Uh] that was wrong.

NARRATOR: Prior to the Abu Ghraib scandal, Donald Rumsfeld had personally approved interrogation techniques, including dogs, stress positions, and nudity, that violated long-standing military rules.

DAVIS: When you follow an order, you gotta be held accountable as well. But the ones that hold the key to that door; the ones that ask you to walk through that door; hold a higher accountability, 'cause they know better.

ZIMBARDO: I know the situation very closely now, because I was an expert witness for one of those guards, Chip Frederick. Exemplary soldier. Nine medals. Model father. Husband. Uh, patriot, and you know, normal, healthy, no sadistic tendencies; nothing that would indicate he was anything other than [an] ordinary k-, good guy. And he gets into this place. And he is totally corrupted.

DAVIS: Sometimes you cross a line. And it's a thin line; that anytime, that can be crossed by anybody, if placed in certain conditions.

CHRISTINA MASLACH: I think it's a hard conclusion, from all of the research evidence, to sort of say, there's nothing inherent in who you are that would necessarily say, I'm safe, I will never cross the line. That research was done thirtysomething years ago. This is not news, you know. The, the lessons that we learned: it's been in textbooks; it's been taught in psychology courses. Other research — Milgram; all of these other studies — are pointing to those same conclusions.

Of course Bush knew. Of course Rumsfeld knew. Of course the pentagon leadership knew. It's been known for decades, perhaps centuries, what happens when a nation embraces the policies that this government has allowed to define us in the eyes of the world.

They all knew what was happening, their denials notwithstanding. It's time for some accountability already. Because we all know, too.

Pathological

One month ago, DB wrote a post about my fears over the logistics of an American withdrawal from Iraq:

But then, I'm afraid, it will get even uglier. Assuming he hasn't started anything with Iran by then, with a majority of Congress calling for withdrawal, Bush will have to start redeploying. It is important to realize that extracting ourselves from Iraq will be a complicated and dangerous operation.

Consider the incompetence of this administration for a moment. Now imagine this Commander in Chief presiding over that redeployment. It has the potential to be a disaster. And, as Pat Buchanan has been saying all week, they will blame every problem and death on the "party of defeat."

Philip Carter wrote an excellent piece about what the withdrawal will probably look like.

But then I reached a point in my post that caused me a great deal of anguish. I revised it three times, eventually toning it down. Here's what I wrote:

I'm not suggesting that they will deliberately make the exit a disaster. I will not enter "Republican Strategist" Ed Rogers' dwelling:

The clumsy politics that the Kerry campaign is playing on terrorism should be offensive to all Americans. And the media should blow the whistle on them. I think -- in my heart of hearts, I think that they're hoping for an attack, so that they can say, I told you so.

(I must say it makes me quite apprehensive to hear people with such a pathological lack of empathy and who are the embodiment of solipsism making comments like that.)

But, no, I will not go there. I will only go as far as asking how much this administration, which hasn't given a crap about the troops throughout the entire war, will care about them at this dangerous juncture?

Part of me wanted to "go there," but the thought of following Ed Rogers there -- even for the sole reason that he is already there -- was too much for me.

But I cannot deny that this administration and its mindless defenders scare the crap out of me. I truly believe they are pathological and have a disturbing lack of empathy. Consider how far removed from the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes you have to be to think Katrina survivors might think it's "kind of fun" to lose their houses and be forced to live in shelters. Or that the victims might actually be better off since they were so poor. Or that Iraq is not in that bad shape since it looks peaceful from 30,000 feet above. I mean, imagine how much you would have to be disconnected from the suffering to say, "And are people being killed? Yes. And is it unfortunate? Yes."

It's just disgusting. There's no way to account for the lack of compassion on behalf of the people running this country other than to say simply that they lack the fundamental ability to see things from other people's perspectives. And the conclusion that follows is that they are solipsistic and everything out of their mouths says more about them than the people they are trying to smear.

When they blame the media for being biased, I have always felt that clearly indicated that they themselves felt no obligation to speak honestly. I reasoned that if these people felt that the public forums provided by the modern era were fundamentally dishonest, then they would also feel that the proper way to play the game was to lie "just like everybody else." I still think this is true, but I realize now that it stems more from a projection of themselves than it does from any legitimate analysis of the environment they are in.

Which leads me back to Ed Rogers' horrible, horrible accusation. I really didn't want to write this a month ago, but I have a deep fear that when somebody like Rogers suggests that liberals want to see an attack on American soil, it's because he would think the same thing if he thought his party would benefit from such an attack. Perhaps he truly believes liberals think like that. He probably does. But he's wrong... and worse, he's projecting.

You know, I'm still not willing to believe that the Bush administration -- not even Cheney -- would deliberately allow the withdrawal to be a disaster so the Democrats could be blamed for ending the war. I still think they're incompetent enough to make it a disaster, but I won't say they'd be evil enough to make it a disaster deliberately.

But I revisit this topic today because I just read this, from Dennis Milligan, Chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party:

"At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001 ], and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country."

Unlike this important Republican, I pray we never have another attack on American soil. Unlike another important Republican, I won't even wish the next attack upon his family.

The modern GOP is the lowest assortment of cretins we've ever had at the helm of our nation.

A managed withdrawal

A quick post about an example of flawed logic on behalf of Bush supporters that DB feels like highlighting (one of a zillion.)

Last night on PBS’s NewsHour, New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that Congress acted “reasonably responsibly” in removing timelines from the Iraq supplemental.

Brooks incoherently argued, “The country wants to get out of Iraq, but they don’t want to get out precipitously. They want a managed withdrawal. The majority just isn’t there. So the majority in the Congress had to accede to those two realities.”

It’s unclear what point Brooks is trying to make. He either doesn’t understand what the American public wants or he doesn’t understand the timetable legislation.

Brooks’ own paper conducted a poll recently that found “sixty-three percent say the United States should set a date for withdrawing troops from Iraq sometime in 2008.” The bill that the Senate and House passed with bipartisan majorities — and Bush vetoed on the fourth anniversary of Mission Accomplished — set a goal for the phased withdrawal to be completed by April 2008.

In addition to the problems Think Progress noted above, there are two that bother DB, one a logical contradiction, the second a propaganda issue:

First, there will be and can be no "managed withdrawal" in a sense that is exclusive of a precipitous or quick exit from Iraq. Philip Carter wrote an excellent piece about the logistics last week for Slate. In short, if we get out before Iraq becomes completely stable (don't hold your breath), then the egress will have to be executed very quickly. Otherwise, it will be disastrous. The idea that there can be a prolonged exit is lacking any basis in reality. Quite frankly, the idea that this administration can "manage" anything is lacking a significant basis in reality, which is one of the reasons I've been afraid that it may be less costly to wait for another administration to do it.

Second, Bush and his supporters have been screeching about "micromanagement" ever since the Democrats took control of Congress. Now they are, in effect, embracing it.

"We can't have 535 members of Congress micromanaging the war," said Senator John Cornyn.

But millions of Americans dictating the speed of the operation is better? America saying simply "get us out of Iraq" is being rejected by Bush. America's reservations about the logistics of the exit are being touted as reasons for staying. Which sounds more like micromanagement to you?