A friend of mine posted this article in the forums: Why Americans Hate this Immigration Debate
I found the article interesting but slightly unsettling.. I couldn't put my finger on it, then I read more about the author. He is the author of this DVD: Siege of Western Civilization
After reading his bullet list on what are the biggest threats to "our Judeo-Christian heritage"I understood what it was that had been troubling me about his essay: it's completely full of shit.
He says:
The problem is the second group of Hispanics. They aren't immigrants - which is what neither the Democratic or Republican leadership seems to understand, or wants to acknowledge. They have come here solely for jobs, which isn't the same thing at all.
REALLY? You mean that the Chinese, Italians, Poles, Czechs, etc. all came here with a BURNING DESIRE to be integrated into the static, monolithic "Western Judeo-Christian culture"? That must explain why the Statue of Liberty says, "Give me your culturally inchoate... morally confused... easily baptized..."
The *only* problem with the current wave of immigrants is that they did not come via traditional immigration processes. This needs to be rectified, by allowing more folks in. I thought all the free-market Reagan conservatives would understand this:
1. there is a DEMAND for cheap goods and services in this country;
2. the goods are coming in from China via Wal-Mart
3. the services have got to come from somewhere
4. there is a SUPPLY of cheap labor right across the Rio Grande.
I think "the immigration problem" that no one wants to talk about is not that they are here illegally - since when have the vast majority of Americans cared about the law? (c.f. speeding; government wiretapping; Guitanamo Bay; torture; etc.) No, the problem is that just when we have a major spike in demand for cheap services, the influx of cheap servants meeting that demand have the GALL to try and preserve their own culture.
Strike that - the influxes of cheap servants throughout history have *always* attempted to preserve their own culture. Chinatown, Little Italy, even the Wurstfest/Oktoberfests held around the country are all remnants of this. The Noble Patricians of the Judeo-Christian Western Civilization (North American chapter) don't have a problem with any of these things because they are all Disneyland renditions - we can leave our safe, white suburbs, drive to them in our shiny Hummers, have lots of "authentic" food, then come back to American McReality. The problem with the Hispanic "guest workers" is that there are so many of them coming here that they are actually managing to - gasp! - form a *viable subculture*! Where they speak Spanish! And not in a cute "Moo Shu"/"Chicken Flied Pohk" sort of way like those adorable Chinese; they are speaking Spanish *for real*. And teaching it to their kids. And forming communities that are so self-contained that their kids can grow to adulthood without having a reasonable grasp of English.
Sound the alarm! The Chinese, Vietnamese, Cubans - they were all just ice cubes in our melting pot, and the only long-term effect will be that McDonald's will have to start serving pho sometime soon. But this flood of Hispanics... how do you say "thermos" in Spanish?
...and the SEC investigation into his insider trading received hardly any news coverage. His connections to the HCA and the sort of Enron-style antics those guys were up to is just appalling:
Meantime, an investigation of HCA was going on. It turned into the largest medical fraud case in history. HCA had defrauded Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare, the military’s health care program. They kept two sets of books. They paid kick backs. They engaged in “upcoding,” billing for more expensive procedures than what they actually performed. They charged their advertising to the government as “community education.”
I wonder how much of the existing wealth in this country is due to our markets being free of anything remotely resembling perfect law enforcement, and how much has been created by the market's legitimate "freedom to innovate".
Today's must-read: a eulogy for an Iraqi journalist, killed by US soldiers at a checkpoint.
When you string together all the rhetorical marketing one-liners that Bush has used to justify the war in Iraq, it really sinks beyond pathetic. The only one they haven't used yet (but which I'm expecting any day now) is "because they're brown."
I saw a quote from Theodore Roosevelt today:
"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."
As I read this Maureen Dowd editorial about Bush's visit to New Orleans and the props and lighting effort that went into last Thursday's speech to the nation, I was struck by this paragraph:
As Elisabeth Bumiller, the White House reporter for The Times, noted in a pool report, the image wizards had put up a large swath of military camouflage netting, held in place by bags of rocks and strung on poles, to hide the president from the deserted and desolate streets of the French Quarter ghost town.
I am reminded of how Chinese Communist Party higher-ups used to ship steel by rail from factory to factory in advance of Chairman Mao's visits, so that he wouldn't get mad about the dismal state of China's iron refineries. They would also truck around tons of rice and grains so that he would be shielded from the true disaster of his Great Leap Forward program, which killed well over 20 million people by starvation.
Such men, who command fear and command by fear, are not leaders. They are ignorant, dangerous despots.
This was on AndrewSullivan.com, and I'm reproducing the text here in full. It pretty much sums it up. I don't care who you voted for in November, the current state of events in New Orleans is inexcusable.
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"I've considered myself a socially libertarian, fiscally conservative Republican for a very long time. I got along with the idea that I wasn't going to get a whole lot of help. College wouldn't be free. Job training would cost money and time. And I'm probably a decent example of up-from-not-much.
But after watching what's happening in New Orleans-an American city that I've loved, visited and have always wanted to return to - I can't ever vote for these people again.
Being a Republican means that you expect the government to do just a couple things for you and nothing else. Build a road. Defend us from enemies, foreign and domestic. Stuff that would be a lot less organized if we all had to do it ourselves. Everything else is just gravy.
And as we poured money into Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, I thought, "Right on," because some of that money's bound to fall on my head.
Well, something else would fall on my head first.
I work for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. And that means that if something really catastrophic happens in MY city, and they ask me to stick around, that's the job. We have A and B teams and I'm a disaster recovery specialist on Team A. I've drawn up plans with names like Drawbridge and Smoldering Crater.
Here's what these people would do for me.
They would leave me there to die.
Look at the facts. There's no coordination on the ground right now. The city has no fresh water, no electricity, no services. The floodwater has so much oil and toxins in it that it's flammable.
In psychology they have what is called a fight-or-flight response. When faced with danger, do you subdue it or do you flee? Some of it has to do with risk assessment, but in this case, there is no flight. There is nowhere to run. So flight means die. If my choice was to pull a pistol on a truck driver or Nat, Jarren, Jayson, or any of you dies, that's no choice at all.
I'm not talking about the looters grabbing big-screen televisions and basketball hoops. I'm talking about the ones that are chest-deep in water carrying bottled water and diapers. You can't tell me for three days to be patient, the bus is coming, and they're piling up bodies in the street median.
We have known that this sort of disaster could occur for a century. Hell, the tour bus driver told me about it on the plantation tour. This means that we have been able to envision the stark reality of this occurring for a week-the newspapers all said the storm would hit New Orleans last Thursday.
A week to get buses? A week to get fishing boats? Trucks? This is the United States! I read someone who said, "All the people who weren't bedridden, or had money, or had cars left. The people that are left had none of those things."
There are people tonight who are going to sleep on overpasses for the fourth straight night. There are prisoners who will do the same. There are people dying at a convention center because no one will tell them that no one is coming for them, and the National Guard is protecting the kitchens. There are police officers who are turning in their badges because they've lost everything, have no guidance, and don't want to be shot by a looter.
There are people tonight inside a concrete domed stadium with holes in the roof and no air conditioning who were told the buses are coming today, and they might, or they might not. There is no food. There is no water. There are bodies floating through the neighborhoods.
In the UNITED STATES.
Some people say that you can't hold the President responsible for this. Oh, yes you can. Because when he looked over at John Ashcroft after the jets hit the towers and said, "I want you to make sure this never happens again," it was not meant to be specific to "no more planes hitting large buildings on the East Coast, right, boss." It was meant that no American should have to run for his life through an American city. While Americans may perish in a senseless, unforeseen disaster, we'd save the ones we could.
And the Cabinet appointees were mushwits and he could barely speak a complete sentence and we're sending people overseas for God knows how long to help people who are indifferent at worst and hostile at best, but they were going to protect us. In 2004, that's all a lot of us needed. Well right now, it's obvious that they can't.
Ask yourself this: What if Al-Qaeda blew up the levees instead of the hurricane? Would the response have been any different?
No. It wouldn't. That city flooded in a day. And if it were Las Vegas, I would have been in some operations center watching people try to decide who gets to starve to death and who gets to get on a bus to Los Angeles or Phoenix. And there would be no certainty that I'd be on that bus in time to protect my wife and kids.
But one thing sure would have been different.
They wouldn't have had a whole week to sort it out and know what's coming. They were supposed to KNOW this already. It will have been FOUR YEARS next weekend since someone probably said, "Hey, what if..."
And for that, the whole stack of them should be fired.
I've had it. I'm done. And if the other bunch of assholes can't figure out that what's important is that babies don't starve to death here (and I'm not talking some metaphorical goo-goo thing with school lunches and welfare, but real, actual starving) and we get people out of harm's way, we'll get rid of them too. And so on.
Because this is about leadership, not about bitching on CNN how no one's in charge, or listening to Peggy Noonan furrow her brow at the Governor's performance, or bragging that we've sent in one National Guardsman for every 200 people, or actually having the audacity to say that "we had no idea the levees would break."
Today, I saw my country favorably compared to Indonesia and Thailand, (always our traditional benchmarks of infrastructural success) while the elderly die of thirst in the street. We sneered at France when this happened during a heat wave.
No more."
Despite what you may have heard about liberals being a bunch of homo-loving, Christ-hating, potheaded punks, some of them are actually nice people. The group Made With Love By a Liberal knits clothing for people in need.
Of course, if you are a homo-loving, Christ-hating, potheaded punk, you can also get your wonderful WTF stickers here.
A timeline of the recent history of FEMA
As you read this, recall Bush's statement, "No one thought the levees would be breached." Also recall White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's statement, "Flood management has been a priority of this administration."
If they were in elementary school, we'd give them time out in the corner for lying. Since they're politicians, we call it "spin" and "damage control".
A group of mothers with sons in the war in Iraq have been sending personalized quilts to the next of kin of those killed in action. They started when the dead numbered around 250, but now they've got a 500+ backlog. They just can't quilt fast enough.
But as of yesterday, with 1,874 names on the rolls of the dead, Mrs. Lang and the Marine Comfort Quilt volunteer group are struggling to keep their promise. "Never did I think that, 2 1/2 years later, I'd still be doing this," says Mrs. Lang, the group's founder, who sometimes finds herself in a panic at the thought she might have sent the wrong quilt to a grieving family.
The group has finished 1,313 quilts but faces a backlog of more than 550. Complicating their project, the volunteers have been unable to identify and locate the next of kin for at least 282 of the dead.
Paul Hoffman, who was appointed in 2002 to oversea the Park Service, has proposed a series of changes to the underlying vision of the Park Service which many critics say fundamentally undermines and threatens the pristine nature of our national parks.
"They are changing the whole nature of who we are and what we have been," said J.T. Reynolds, superintendent of Death Valley National Park. "I hope the public understands that this is a threat to their heritage. It threatens the past, the present and the future. It's painful to see this."
The potential changes would allow cellphone towers and low-flying tour planes and would liberalize rules that prohibited mining, according to Bill Wade, former superintendent at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.
Larry Whalon, chief of resource management at Mojave National Preserve, said the changes would take away managers' ability to use laws such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act to oppose new developments in parks.
Hoffman apparently was also behind the Creationist book in the Grand Canyon gift shop:
Last year, he overruled the decision of the superintendent at Grand Canyon National Park to remove religious plaques on display near the South Rim. And he instructed the park to allow a book that espoused a creationist view of the canyon's formation, which runs counter to the park's own scientific-based approach and had been criticized by the park's scientific staff.
Just disovered this site: Inequality.org. Their facts page has some really interesting graphs, showing the differences in income growth in the different income brackets. It also has some interesting numbers on cross-generational class mobility.
The bottom line on the site, literally and figuratively, is that they draw attention to these numbers because class stratification is a real, undeniable phenomenon, with far-reaching ramifications:
These multi-dimensional effects and feedback loops are important for what they reveal about the nature, severity, and scope of economic inequality in America. In addition, they underscore the issue's relevance to those focused on more policy-specific problems. Your first concern may be education, health, poverty, racial justice, the workplace, the environment, or the preservation of democratic government and a strong civil society. In all these realms, recent history has taught us that the fulfillment of broadly shared ideals is going to be immensely difficult in a world of highly concentrated wealth, income, and economic power.
I think there has been a serious misunderestimatating of Cindy Sheehan. This woman is eloquent, she is pissed, and she has a Gold Star immunity to mud slinging. Even Bill O'Reilly is afraid to say anything bad about her directly, and has to discredit her by slamming all sorts of right-wing bogeymen that are associated with the anti-war movement.
She just wrote an essay about the current state of the "Camp Casey" phenomenon and how the right-wing attack machine has been going after her. It's awesome.
"I got an e-mail the other day and it said, 'Cindy if you didn't use so much profanity '. There's people on the fence that get offended.'
And you know what I said? 'You know what? You know what, god damn it? How in the world is anybody still sitting on that fence?'
"If you fall on the side that is pro-George and pro-war, you get your ass over to Iraq, and take the place of somebody who wants to come home. And if you fall on the side that is against this war and against George Bush, stand up and speak out."
Go read it. It's awesome.
A comparison of Strom Thurmond to a British centagenarian statesman, Lord Shawcross.
An excellent editorial by the father of a Marine about the economics and psychology of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I'm always a bit bemused by those who oppose the idea of compulsory service, or requiring that children of legislators be pressed into service. "But... but.. that will make us reluctant to go to war!"
Well, that's the WHOLE POINT. What such chickenhawks are admitting is that not only are they willing to send somebody else's kids onto the battleground, but they wish to do so while maintaining less of a stake in the outcome and in whose lives are lost. What they are forgetting is that unless they feel so strongly about an issue of national defense that they are willing to put their own necks on the line, then they have no right to ask others to do the same. (When others *do*, however, we should lavish rewards and praise on them, not cut their health benefits and salaries and foreclose on their houses.)
The bottom line is: put up or shut up. If you're not willing to grab a rifle and go dodge bullets, then what right do you have to tell someone else to?
The New Yorker has an interpretation of the significance of the Administration's renaming of "The Global War on Terror" to "The Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism".
Nice to see them calling a spade a spade. Nice to see them admitting that "War on Terror" is about as meaningless as "War on Drugs". Nice to see them admitting that fighting terrorism is a small piece of a much larger effort that must involve policy, diplomacy, and hearts & minds.
An article about the formal launch of the bi-partisan Partnership for a Secure America.
As US President George W Bush announced the unprecedented recess appointment of ultra-nationalist John Bolton as his next ambassador to the United Nations, a group of diplomatic heavyweights was preparing to launch a bipartisan coalition to promote a return to a more moderate and multilateral foreign policy.
...
The group includes top officials who served in the administrations of presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, such as the two presidents' most durable national security advisers - Samuel Berger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, respectively - as well as former secretary of state Warren Christopher; Clinton's first national security adviser, Anthony Lake; former defense secretary William Perry, and former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke.
But it also includes leading Republican moderates, some of whom have even served under Bush. They include former senator Howard Baker, who served until last year as Bush's ambassador to Japan, and, even more significantly, his most recent UN ambassador, former senator John Danforth, who, since his resignation, has been uncharacteristically outspoken about his concerns that the Republican Party has increasingly come under the sway of the Christian Right.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0418-21.htm
In a letter to Joseph Milligan on April 6, 1816, Thomas Jefferson explicitly suggested that if individuals became so rich that their wealth could influence or challenge government, then their wealth should be decreased upon their death. He wrote, "If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree..."
In this, he was making the same argument that the Framers of Pennsylvania tried to make when writing their constitution in 1776. As Kevin Phillips notes in his masterpiece book "Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich," a Sixteenth Article to the Pennsylvania Bill of Rights (that was only "narrowly defeated") declared: "an enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness of mankind, and, therefore, every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property."
The Social Security and Medicare Trustees estimate that over the next 75 years, the Social Security shortfall will total $3.7 trillion dollars. (Pretty bad, but consider that in just the past 4 years, the president approved budgets that created a $2.2 trillion deficit.)
But $3.7 trillion is small compared to the 75-year costs of two of president Bush's biggest domestic policy initiatives:
Prescription Drug Benefit: $8.1 trillion
2001/2003 tax cuts, if made permanent: $11.6 trillion
The "looming Social Security iceberg" is a popsicle compared to the two icebergs the President created.
(These numbers are taken from a report at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The estimated Social Security shortfall is from the Social Security and Medicare Trustees (most of whom are members of the President's cabinet), and is actually twice what the Congressional Budget Office estimates the shortfall will be. The Prescription Drug Benefit cost is from the Trustees as well. The tax cut costs are from the Congressional Budget Office.)
Now, if you know the tradition of the United States Army, one thing has been consistent and that is that we are aggressive and tough on the field of battle, but when you take prisoners they are treated humanely and with respect. That's the rule that was set by George Washington in the battle of Trenton on Dec. 25, 1776. The soldiers of the continental army took the Hessians and said these soldiers are mercenaries and we should take retribution on them. They wanted the Hessians to run the gauntlet and they would beat them with sticks. General Washington said we will not do this. He said these people will be treated with respect and dignity and they will suffer no abuse or torture, because to do otherwise would bring dishonor upon our sacred cause. That's one of the first orders given to the continental army and that antedates the United States. It has been military tradition for 240 years, and it was stopped by Donald Rumsfeld.
-- Scott Horton
What can I say? A reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog wrote in to say:
My gut feeling upon the realization that Kerry had lost? A deep, engulfing cynicism. People used to say that Bill Clinton's sexual abandon in the White House had made people cynical about politics and those who held office. And, older generations cite Richard Nixon as their reason for disillusionment. I'm to young for the latter and disagree with the former.
I feel that cynicism now, however, knowing, that leading a nation to war so arrogantly and bungling it so devastatingly can lead to reelection. Propagating hate--in the form of the Federal Marriage Amendment (while politically letting it slip that you are for civil unions) will win you office anew. Presiding over one of the most divisive administrations ever, will win you four more years. All of these things have made me lose faith in America's political process. And I feel very tired, and not just because I stayed up until 4 a.m., deludedly clinging to the hope of an upset in Ohio.
What can I say? Ditto.
Not sure whether to file this under "politics" or "tech", but the evil, free-speech threatening piece of legislation known as the DMCA has been severely defanged in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The DMCA was originally intended to protect copyrighted works transmitted or stored in digital form, but its wording is such that it had much broader applicability, stripping legitimate users of their fair use rights and giving legal firepower to anyone with enough money to hire a big legal department. For instance, the DMCA was used against a Princeton University computer science professor who discovered a security flaw in a piece of software and published it in an academic paper.
Lexmark, in addition to making shoddy low-end printers, recently engaged in shoddy legal disputes by suing SCC for making generic toner cartridges that were compatible with Lexmark printers. The basis of the suit? SCC apparently had to decode the verification signature on Lexmark's cartridges in order to make compatible replacement catridges; Lexmark claimed these signature codes were copyrighted and protected under the DMCA. Fortunately the Circuit Court judge saw through this frivolous abuse of the legal system, and not only ruled against Lexmark, but issued a much broader statement that re-interprets and clarifies the DMCA:
A monopolist could enforce its will against a smaller rival simply because the potential cost of extended litigation and discovery where the burden of proof shifts to the defendant is itself a deterrent to innovation and competition. Misreading the statute to shift the burden in this way could allow powerful manufacturers in practice to create monopolies where they are not in principle supported by law. Instead, a better reading of the statute is that it requires plaintiffs as part of their burden of pleading and persuasion to show a purpose to pirate on the part of defendants. Only then need the defendants invoke the statutory exceptions, such as the reverse engineering exception. In this case, even if the Toner Loading Program were protected by copyright, and even if the access to the Printer Engine Program were "effectively" controlled, there has been no showing that SCC circumvented the authentication sequence for the purpose of accessing these programs. Indeed, the proof so far shows that SCC had no interest in those programs other than ensuring that their own cartridges would work with Lexmark's printers.
A couple of good web sites set up by Republicans and conservatives who think Bush and the neo-conservative agenda have gone overboard:
Rhetoric & Reality: This site documents in great detail the condictions between Bush's rhetoric and his deeds, with many links to speeches and actions.
Here is a Democrats for Bush page: http://democrats.bushblog.us/.
Finally! Some Muslims angry at the hijacking of their religion and their culture by fundamentalists and jihadists. Here are some editorials and comments by Muslim columnists, specifically in response to Beslan.
Obviously not all Muslims are terrorists but, regrettably, the majority of the terrorists in the world are Muslims. The kidnappers of the students in Ossetia are Muslims. The kidnappers and killers of the Nepalese workers and cooks are also Muslims. Those who rape and murder in Darfour are Muslims, and their victims are Muslims as well. Those who blew up the residential complexes in Riyadh and Al-Khobar are Muslims. Those who kidnapped the two French journalists are Muslims. The two [women] who blew up the two planes [over Russia] a week ago are Muslims. Bin Laden is a Muslim and Al-Houthi [the head of a terrorist group in Yemen] is a Muslim. The majority of those who carried out suicide operations against buses, schools, houses, and buildings around the world in the last ten years are also Muslims.
What a terrible record. Does this not say something about us, about our society and our culture? If we put all of these pictures together in one day, we will see that these pictures are difficult, embarrassing, and humiliating for us. However, instead of avoiding them and justifying them it is incumbent upon us first of all to recognize their authenticity rather than to compose eloquent articles and speeches proclaiming our innocence
Islam has suffered an injustice at the hands of the new Muslims We will only be able to clear our reputation once we have admitted the clear and shameful fact that most of the terrorist acts in the world today are carried out by Muslims. We have to realize that we cannot correct the condition of our youth who carry out these disgraceful operations until we have treated the minds of our sheikhs who have turned themselves into pulpit revolutionaries who send the children of others to fight while they send their own children to European schools.
Andrew Sullivan's essay Smear and Pivot succinctly sums up a Bush-style political campaign:
In some ways, you have to hand it to president Bush. He has cojones. Most politicians who found a cushy domestic out during Vietnam might be leery of attacking the war record of a man who volunteered for duty, took shrapnel, and got Purple Hearts for his courage and heroism. But not Bush. Recall that in 2000, at a very similar juncture in a tight presidential race against John McCain, the Bush campaign also unleashed the hounds against a man who had been imprisoned and tortured at the hands of the Viet Cong. Flyers appeared throughout South Carolina claiming that McCain had a black child, that he was the "fag candidate," that his wife was a drug addict, that his experience under torture had made him unstable, that he had "betrayed" veterans, and on and on. None of this could be traced directly to Bush, but no one was under any illusions. In public, Bush said he honored McCain's service. But his surrogates smeared him relentlessly. And McCain told Bush to his face in a debate that he should be "ashamed" by his campaign tactics.
But shame is not something that comes easily to this president. He had used similar dirt-ball tactics against Ann Richards, the single female governor of Texas whom he defeated. Rumors emerged from East Texas in that race, as CBS News' Dick Meyer recalled last week, that Richards was a lesbian and that she had appointed "avowed homosexuals" to her administration. This year, Bush has played the anti-gay card by backing a constitutional amendment against marriage rights for gays and also the Vietnam card against Kerry. It's a two-fer: the summation of every Bush dirty trick of the past twenty years.
Call this strategy: smear and pivot. Get your low-life buddies to trash your rival and then appear above it all at your own convention. It worked for Papa Bush against Dukakis in 1988. It worked for W against Richards and McCain. It could work again against Kerry. But this time, of course, the opposition knows what this strategy is and might very well respond in kind. Everything is now "on the table," one Kerry adviser warned last week. Bush's past sex life? Drug use? Some other nasty smear? Mud-wrestling was never this sleazy. And it's still only August.
David Brooks wrote a great article for the New York Times magazine entitled How To Reinvent the GOP. He traces the history of the Republican party and the conservative movement - from Hamilton and Lincoln through Roosevelt and Reagan to today's party of Tom DeLay and Ashcroft, Cheney & Co. He then lays out a proposal for a conservative vision that, if implemented, would certainly win my vote. This is an extremely well-thought-out and well-argued essay. Conservatives/Republicans should certainly read it but I especially encourage liberals (especially moderates) to read it as well.
Democrats may imagine that the G.O.P. is an amalgam of fat cats and conservative ideologues, but things feel different inside Republican circles. Inside there are, beneath the cheering and the resolve, waves of anxiety, uncertainty and disagreement. You hang around Republicans, and you begin to hear all sorts of discordant things. Jesse Helms recently remarked he wouldn't have voted for the tax cut if he'd known how bad the deficit would become. Three of the senior right-wing columnists -- George F. Will, Robert Novak and William F. Buckley Jr. -- have come out, in their different ways, against the war in Iraq. I had lunch recently with a senior Republican official who said his party had succumbed; it was ''defeatist'' about reducing the size of government. As Will himself has observed, under President Bush, American conservatism is undergoing an identity crisis.
There used to be a spirit of solidarity binding all the embattled members of the conservative movement. But with conservatism ascendant, that spirit has eroded. Should Bush lose, it will be like a pack of wolves that suddenly turns on itself. The civil war over the future of the party will be ruthless and bloody. The foreign-policy realists will battle the democracy-promoting Reaganites. The immigrant-bashing nativists will battle the free marketeers. The tax-cutting growth wing will battle the fiscally prudent deficit hawks. The social conservatives will war with the social moderates, the biotech skeptics with the biotech enthusiasts, the K Street corporatists with the tariff-loving populists, the civil libertarians with the security-minded Ashcroftians. In short, the Republican Party is unstable.
Great article by a professed Republican on why Why George Bush isn't the kind of Republican Schwarzenegger described.
His blog of the RNC has the following bit:
Bush is taking the fight "to the terrorists," Franks keeps saying, whereas "some" (read: Kerry) would treat the war on terror as a "law enforcement" matter and "retreat into a defensive posture," hoping the terrorists won't attack us again.
I've heard this misrepresentation of Kerry's position so many times I hardly notice it anymore. The only offensive military effort Kerry objected toand it was only in mannerwas the war in Iraq. And Iraq wasn't a terrorist threat, so it's false to describe Kerry's objection there as having anything to do with the war on terror. The selling point for the Iraq war was weapons of mass destruction. What does Franks have to say about that? He applauds Bush for caring so much about American troops that he "made sure everything possible was done to protect our troops from the weapons of mass destruction we all expected."
And, hey, it worked. No American troops were injured by weapons of mass destruction.
And he's right-on about the GOP flaunting patriotism:
But the important thing isn't the falsity of the charges, which Republicans continue to repeat despite press reports debunking them. The important thing is that the GOP is trying to quash criticism of the president simply because it's criticism of the president. The election is becoming a referendum on democracy.
In a democracy, the commander in chief works for you. You hire him when you elect him. You watch him do the job. If he makes good decisions and serves your interests, you rehire him. If he doesn't, you fire him by voting for his opponent in the next election.
Not every country works this way. In some countries, the commander in chief builds a propaganda apparatus that equates him with the military and the nation. If you object that he's making bad decisions and disserving the national interest, you're accused of weakening the nation, undermining its security, sabotaging the commander in chief, and serving a foreign powerthe very charges Miller leveled tonight against Bush's critics.
Are you prepared to become one of those countries?
Paul Krugman of the NY Times slams the administration's policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. Registration is required to view the article, so I've pasted the contents below. Did you know that the Bush Administration initially forgot to put *any* money into its 2004 budget for Afghanistan?
The Martial Plan
By PAUL KRUGMAN
he Marshall Plan was America's finest hour. After World War I, the victors did what victors usually do: they demanded reparations from the vanquished. But after World War II America did something unprecedented: it provided huge amounts of aid, helping both its allies and its defeated enemies rebuild.
It wasn't selfless altruism, of course; it was farsighted, enlightened self-interest. America's leaders understood that fostering prosperity, stability and democracy was as important as building military might in the struggle against Communism.
But one suspects that our current leaders would have jeered at this exercise in "nation-building." And they are certainly following a very different strategy today.
It's not that the Bush administration is always stingy. In fact, right now it is offering handouts right and left. Most notably, it has offered the Turkish government $26 billion in grants and loans if it ignores popular opposition and supports the war.
Some observers also point out that the administration has turned the regular foreign aid budget into a tool of war diplomacy. Small countries that currently have seats on the U.N. Security Council have suddenly received favorable treatment for aid requests, in an obvious attempt to influence their votes. Cynics say that the "coalition of the willing" President Bush spoke of turns out to be a "coalition of the bought off" instead.
But it's clear that the generosity will end as soon as Baghdad falls.
After all, look at our behavior in Afghanistan. In the beginning, money was no object; victory over the Taliban was as much a matter of bribes to warlords as it was of Special Forces and smart bombs. But President Bush promised that our interest wouldn't end once the war was won; this time we wouldn't forget about Afghanistan, we would stay to help rebuild the country and secure the peace. So how much money for Afghan reconstruction did the administration put in its 2004 budget?
None. The Bush team forgot about it. Embarrassed Congressional staff members had to write in $300 million to cover the lapse. You can see why the Turks, in addition to demanding even more money, want guarantees in writing. Administration officials are insulted when the Turks say that a personal assurance from Mr. Bush isn't enough. But the Turks know what happened in Afghanistan, and they also know that fine words about support for New York City, the firefighters and so on didn't translate into actual money once the cameras stopped rolling.
And Iraq will receive the same treatment. On Tuesday Ari Fleischer declared that Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction even though experts warn that it may be years before the country's oil fields are producing at potential. Off the record, some officials have even described Iraqi oil as the "spoils of war."
So there you have it. This administration does martial plans, not Marshall Plans: billions for offense, not one cent for reconstruction.
Of course, postwar reconstruction in Europe and Japan wasn't just a matter of money; America can also be proud of the way it built democratic institutions. Alas, the Bush administration's postwar political plans are even more alarming than its economic nonchalance.
Turkey has reportedly been offered the right to occupy much of Iraqi Kurdistan. Yes, that's right: as we move to liberate the Iraqis, our first step may be to deliver people who have been effectively independent since 1991 into the hands of a hated foreign overlord. Moral clarity!
Meanwhile, outraged Iraqi exiles report that there won't be any equivalent of postwar de-Nazification, in which accomplices of the defeated regime were purged from public life. Instead the Bush administration intends to preserve most of the current regime: Saddam Hussein and a few top officials will be replaced with Americans, but the rest will stay. You don't have to be an Iraq expert to realize that many very nasty people will therefore remain in power more moral clarity! and that the U.S. will in effect take responsibility for maintaining the rule of the Sunni minority over the Shiite majority.
If this all sounds incredibly callous and shortsighted, that's because it is. But then what did you expect? This administration doesn't worry about long-term consequences just look at its fiscal policy. It wants its war; there's not the slightest indication that it's interested in the boring, expensive task of building a just and lasting peace.
Here are some great resources for Texans who disagree with the radical right-wing agenda of the current administration:
Texans for Truth
DriveDemocracy.org
Texas Freedom Network
Texas Faith Network (What?? Christians from Texas who loathe the Christian Coalition? There *is* a God!)
Texas Arts Community
Democracy for Texas
And here is yet another essay by a Texan about why he support Kerry, and why he disapproves of GW Bush.
What was our courageous President doing while Kerry was earning Purple Hearts in Vietnam? Why, Bush was pissing on cars and getting smashed in Alabama! (Free Salon.com link with partial article; to read the full article, read the rest of this entry.)
George W. Bush's missing year
The widow of a Bush family confidant says her husband gave the future president an Alabama Senate campaign job as a favor to his worried father. Did they see him do any National Guard service? "Good lord, no."
George W. Bush's missing year
By Mary Jacoby
Sept. 2, 2004 | NEW YORK -- Before there was Karl Rove, Lee Atwater or even James Baker, the Bush family's political guru was a gregarious newspaper owner and campaign consultant from Midland, Texas, named Jimmy Allison. In the spring of 1972, George H.W. Bush phoned his friend and asked a favor: Could Allison find a place on the Senate campaign he was managing in Alabama for his troublesome eldest son, the 25-year-old George W. Bush?
"The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy's wing," Allison's widow, Linda, told me. "And Jimmy said, 'Sure.' He was so loyal."
Linda Allison's story, never before published, contradicts the Bush campaign's assertion that George W. Bush transferred from the Texas Air National Guard to the Alabama National Guard in 1972 because he received an irresistible offer to gain high-level experience on the campaign of Bush family friend Winton "Red" Blount. In fact, according to what Allison says her late husband told her, the younger Bush had become a political liability for his father, who was then the United States ambassador to the United Nations, and the family wanted him out of Texas. "I think they wanted someone they trusted to keep an eye on him," Linda Allison said.
After more than three decades of silence, Allison spoke with Salon over several days before and during the Republican National Convention this week -- motivated, as she acknowledged, by a complex mixture of emotions. They include pride in her late husband's accomplishments, a desire to see him remembered, and concern about the apparent double standard in Bush surrogates attacking John Kerry's Vietnam War record while ignoring the president's irresponsible conduct during the war. She also admits to bewilderment and hurt over the rupture her husband experienced in his friendship with George and Barbara Bush. To this day, Allison is unsure what caused the break, though she suspects it had something to do with her husband's opposition to the elder Bush becoming chairman of the Republican National Committee under President Nixon.
"Something happened that I don't know about. But I do know that Jimmy didn't expect it, and it broke his heart," she said, describing a ruthless side to the genial Bush clan of which few outsiders are aware.
Personal history aside, Allison's recollections of the young George Bush in Alabama in 1972 are relevant as a contrast to the medals for valor and bravery that Kerry won in Vietnam in the same era. An apparent front group for the Bush campaign, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, has attacked Kerry in television ads as a liar and traitor to veterans for later opposing a war that cost 58,000 American lives. Bush, who has resisted calls from former Vietnam War POW John McCain, R-Ariz., to repudiate the Swift Boat ads, has said he served honorably in the National Guard.
Allison's account corroborates a Washington Post investigation in February that found no credible witnesses to the service in the Alabama National Guard that Bush maintains he performed, despite a lack of documentary evidence. Asked if she'd ever seen Bush in a uniform, Allison said: "Good lord, no. I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in his life in any way." Allison also confirmed previously published accounts that Bush often showed up in the Blount campaign offices around noon, boasting about how much alcohol he had consumed the night before. (Bush has admitted that he was a heavy drinker in those years, but he has refused to say whether he also used drugs).
"After about a month I asked Jimmy what was Georgie's job, because I couldn't figure it out. I never saw him do anything. He told me it basically consisted of him contacting people who were impressed by his name and asking for contributions and support," Allison said.
C. Murphy Archibald, a nephew of Red Blount by marriage and a Vietnam veteran who volunteered on the campaign from September 1972 until election night, corroborated Allison's recollections, though he doesn't recall that the Bush name carried much cachet in Alabama at the time. "I say that because the scuttlebutt on the campaign was that Allison was very sharp and might actually be able to pull off this difficult race" against the incumbent Democrat, Sen. John Sparkman, Archibald said. "But then no one understood why he brought this young guy from Texas along. It was like, 'Who was this guy who comes in late and leaves early? And why would Jimmy Allison, who was so impressive, bring him on?'"
Bush, who had a paid slot as Allison's deputy in a campaign staffed largely by volunteers, sat in a little office next to Allison's, said Archibald, a workers compensation lawyer in Charlotte, N.C. Indeed, when Bush was actually there, he did make phone calls to county chairmen. But he neglected his other duty: the mundane but important task of mailing out campaign materials to the county campaign chairs. Archibald took up the slack, at Allison's request. "Jimmy didn't say anything about George. He just said, 'These materials are not getting out. It's causing the candidate problems. Will you take it over?'"
While Kerry earned a Silver Star and a Bronze Star after saving a crewmate's life under fire on the Mekong River in Vietnam, by contrast, the Georgie that Allison knew was a young man whose parents did not allow him to live with the consequences of his own mistakes. His powerful father -- whom the son seemed to both idolize and resent -- was a lifeline for Bush out of predicaments. After Bush graduated from Yale in 1968, his slot in the Texas Air National Guard allowed him to avoid active duty service in Vietnam. The former speaker of the Texas state House, Democrat Ben Barnes, now admits he pulled strings to get Bush his coveted guard slot, and says he's "ashamed" of the deed. "60 Minutes" will air an interview with Barnes next Wednesday, but George H.W. Bush denounced Barnes' claims in an interview aired on CBS. "They keep saying that and it's a lie, a total lie. Nobody's come up with any evidence, and yet it's repeated all the time," the former president said, in what could just as well describe the playbook for the Swift Boat Veterans ads.
Yet, after receiving unusual permission to transfer to the Alabama Guard from Texas, Bush has produced no evidence he showed up for service for anything other than a dental exam. Later, Bush would trade on his father's connections to enter the oil business, and when his ventures failed, trade on more connections to find investors to bail him out. Linda Allison's story fills in the details about a missing chapter in the story of how George Bush Sr.'s friends helped his wastrel son. The Bush campaign, decamped to New York for the convention, did not return a phone call by late Wednesday.
A graceful blonde with a Texas drawl, Linda Allison now lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in an apartment decorated in the dusky tones of Tuscany with a magnificent view of the high-rises framing Central Park. I visited her there Monday on the opening night of the Republican National Convention as she related publicly for the first time her long and ultimately painful history with the Bush family. On the table between us were two photographs of her late husband -- an elfin man with curly hair, shown in animated conversation. From her drawers she pulled out old letters and notes from Barbara Bush, George H.W. Bush and even one from George W. Bush, written to Jimmy in 1978 as he was dying of cancer.
Jimmy Allison's family owned the Midland Reporter-Telegram and other small-town newspapers, and they were part of the establishment in the West Texas oil town where Bush senior made his fortune and Bush junior grew up. Still, Allison has been almost completely forgotten in the semi-official stories of the Bush dynasty's rise; his role as political fixer and family friend has been airbrushed out of Barbara Bush's autobiography and other accounts. But he was one of the originators of what evolved into the GOP's "Southern strategy," helping George H.W. Bush win election to Congress in 1966 at a time when Republicans in Texas were virtually unheard of.
The Blount Senate campaign he ran against the Democrat, Sparkman, in 1972 was notable for a dirty racial trick: The Blount side edited a transcript of a radio interview Sparkman had given to make it appear he supported busing, a poison position at that time in the South. When Sparkman found an unedited script and exposed the trick, the Blount campaign was finished. But it was an early introduction for Bush to the kinds of tricks that later Republican strategists associated with the Bush political machine, from Lee Atwater to Karl Rove, would use against Democrats, often to victorious effect.
After Bush won a House seat in 1966, Allison followed his patron to Washington as the top staffer in his congressional office and served as deputy director of the Republican National Committee in 1969 and 1970 under President Nixon. It was Allison who advised George W. Bush to return to Midland after Harvard Business School to seek his business fortune in the booming oil industry, advice that Bush recalled fondly in a 2001 speech in Midland. When Allison died at age 46, after an agonizing battle with lymphoma, both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush served as pallbearers.
"Aide, confidant, campaign manager, source of joke material, alter ego -- Allison and Bush were bonded by an uncommon loyalty," former Reagan White House deputy press secretary Peter Roussel, who got his start in politics when Allison invited him to work for Bush's 1968 congressional reelection campaign, wrote in a 1988 newspaper column dedicated to Allison.
Linda, too, had a long, though not as close, relationship with the Bushes. She remembers watching Bush in 1964 at a campaign appearance at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, when she was 32 years old and he was running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. "He was so appealing to me. He said all the things that I believed in, and he wasn't like all the other Republicans running in Texas at that time, who were real right-wingers. He had a bigger vision of what the Republican Party could be. I volunteered for his campaign that day, and that's how I ended up being his Dallas County headquarters chairman." Over the years, Linda kept volunteering with the local Republican Party. "And they gave me bigger and bigger things to do. They appreciated me. And I felt like I belonged to something," she said.
But it was also this sense of being connected to a larger, more powerful force that seduced the Allisons -- a trap that many aides and friends of important politicians fall into. The dynamic allowed the Bushes -- Barbara especially, Allison said -- to manipulate the friends and supporters they needed to further their ambitions, a lesson she says could not have been lost on the young George. "They had a way of anointing you, then pushing you out," she said. "It was like a mind game. It was very subtle, very hard to describe. But when you were out, you wanted desperately to be let back in." It was how she and Jimmy felt when, in 1973, they experienced a strange and, to Allison, never fully explained rupture with the Bushes, which took place against the backdrop of boorish behavior by their son that persisted during the time he was nominally under the Allisons' care.
The break happened not long after a boozy election-night wake for Blount, who lost his Senate bid to the incumbent Democrat, John Sparkman. Leaving the election-night "celebration," Allison remembers encountering George W. Bush in the parking lot, urinating on a car, and hearing later about how he'd yelled obscenities at police officers that night. Bush left a house he'd rented in Montgomery trashed -- the furniture broken, walls damaged and a chandelier destroyed, the Birmingham News reported in February. "He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people's possessions," Mary Smith, a member of the family who rented the house, told the newspaper, adding that a bill sent to Bush for repairs was never paid. And a month later, in December, during a visit to his parents' home in Washington, Bush drunkenly challenged his father to go "mano a mano," as has often been reported.
Around the same time, for the 1972 Christmas holiday, the Allisons met up with the Bushes on vacation in Hobe Sound, Fla. Tension was still evident between Bush and his parents. Linda was a passenger in a car driven by Barbara Bush as they headed to lunch at the local beach club. Bush, who was 26 years old, got on a bicycle and rode in front of the car in a slow, serpentine manner, forcing his mother to crawl along. "He rode so slowly that he kept having to put his foot down to get his balance, and he kept in a weaving pattern so we couldn't get past," Allison recalled. "He was obviously furious with his mother about something, and she was furious at him, too."
Jimmy, meanwhile, had larger issues on his mind. According to Linda, he was hoping to use the visit in Florida to convince Bush to turn down the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee because he didn't trust Nixon or his palace guard. "He had been so appalled at the Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Colson group, and he thought they'd sacrifice George. He just wanted to warn him, as a friend," Allison told me.
Apparently, Jimmy Allison's advice was not appreciated. In Hobe Sound, Bush senior kept trying to avoid talking with Jimmy about the RNC, Allison said. Then later, as the Allisons took their leave, Barbara "thanked" them for their Christmas present with unexpected cruelty. "She said, 'I'm so sorry, but we've been so busy this year that we didn't have time to do anything for our political acquaintances.' I swear to God, I'll never forget those two words as long as I live. For her to say that was absolutely appalling. Mind you, Jimmy was an old, old friend. And I had stayed as a houseguest with the Bushes, been invited in my pajamas into their bedroom to read the papers and drink coffee while Bar rode her exercise bicycle.
"Big George was just stricken by this," Allison continued. "There was a wet bar in the hall on the way to the front door. He grabbed this moldy bottle of Mai Tai that he said had been given to him by the president of China, and he said we just had to have it. Then he plucked this ostrich egg in a beaded bag from a shelf that he said had been given to him by the ambassador to the U.N. from Nigeria or someplace, and gave it to us. Can you imagine how embarrassing that was?" (The alcohol was likely a bottle of Mao-Tai, a strong Chinese liquor.)
The Allisons found they were no longer being invited to the Sunday cookouts the Bushes held to chew over the week's political events. And though Jimmy had once been deputy chairman of the RNC, when Bush chaired the committee, he "couldn't even get invited to a cocktail party there," Allison said. The freeze-out was subtle and surgical. "It took us some time to realize we'd been lopped off," she said. At home, the Allisons once decided to try that dusty bottle of Mao Tai from China that Bush had thrust into their hands in Hobe Sound. They were unable to drink the liquor. "It was so foul. The smell that came out of that thing! We just looked at each other," Allison said.
By 1978, Jimmy was dying. Whether out of guilt, genuine affection for old times or a desire to maintain appearances with a revered member of the Midland establishment, the Bushes responded with warmth. Jimmy's heart soared, Allison said.
George W. Bush, then running unsuccessfully for Congress, wrote his old mentor a letter. "Every person I see in Midland asks about you and sends their regards," Bush wrote. "Like a younger brother, I have treasured your advice, your guidance and most importantly your never selfish friendship." And shortly before he died, George H.W. Bush - by then an executive at a bank in Houston after having served as head of the Central Intelligence Agency - invited Jimmy back to his home. Elated, Jimmy persuaded the doctors to discharge him for the visit, Linda said. But Linda, who was not consulted, was incensed. Though she drove him to the Bushes, she refused to go in. "I was so furious. I had no way to take care of him. He was so weak, and they had taken him off the morphine, and he was in great pain," she said.
In a letter to the editor of Allison's newspaper in Midland after his death, Bush recalled that day: "He swam and relaxed. He was very weak but the warm water soothed him. He gave us hope. 'I'm going to make it,' he said."
But soon after Linda picked him up, Jimmy crashed. "He was in so much pain. It was unreal." At the emergency room, he waited 10 hours for medical attention. "I begged them to do something. I begged," she said, wiping tears from her eyes. "He was in so much pain. I was so angry." Jimmy died about a week later.
More than a quarter century later, George W. Bush is running for reelection as a "war" president. At the Republican Convention, delegates pass out Purple Heart stickers mocking Kerry's Vietnam wounds as "a self-inflicted scratch," and George H.W. Bush, speaking on CNN, lauds the Swift Boat Veterans' claims against Kerry as "rather compelling." Karl Rove tells the Associated Press that Kerry's opposition to a war that Bush avoided had served to "tarnish the records and service of people who were defending our country and fighting communism." Barbara Bush tells USA Today: "I die over every untruth that I hear about George -- I mean, every one."
Linda Allison watches it all from her New York apartment. About George W. Bush's disputed sojourn in Alabama, she asks simply: "Can we all be lying?"
Dave has a great essay about the failures of this administration and why he feels Kerry is a good replacement.
Perhaps he has an Outlook plugin that turns emails into speeches/diatribes. Martini Republic points out that Zell Miller's rant about Kerry "voting against every military appropriate since 1988" is lifted from a mass email.
And, of course, the email is untrue! Urban Myth debunking site Snopes.com has an analysis.
From here on out there is going to be a lot more political stuff on this blog. The speeches given by Zell Miller and Dick Cheney at the RNC convention have shown me how low the GOP will stoop. Anyone who will stoop to outright lies deserves to be defeated with the harsh light of truth.
So for starters:
Dubya's House of Waffles
Did you know that President Bush ACTUALLY said the following about Osama bin Laden? "I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him... I truly am not that concerned about him."
Hooo boy. lots to read. Some of the latest entries to read (and these are a MUST READ) from http://buggieboy.blogspot.com/.
Kerry and the Anti-war movement: Transcript of pro-Bush General Tommy Franks being interviewed on Hannity & Colmes, and *defending* Kerry's anti-Vietnam War activism
Attacking Back: About GWB's texas air national guard service and video testimony of Ben Barnes, former texas speaker of the house, saying that he personally made a call to help GWB skip ahead of 100,000 applicants for the texas air national guard and get one of the last two open spots.
Patriotism: About scott ritter, UN weapons inspector, and what he said pre-Iraq war
Slate's William Saletan has a great editorial about Kerry's acceptance speech and how Bush wrote it for him:
The theory behind Bush's hard-line style of governance came from his chief political adviser, Karl Rove. Rove believed that Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 because millions of conservatives stayed home. He believed that Bush's father lost the 1992 election by alienating the right and creating a Republican primary challenge by Pat Buchanan. So, on issue after issue, the current President Bush has played to his base. On Rove's theory, every step to the right earns Bush another conservative vote.
...
In his determination to unite the right, Bush hasn't just united the left. He has lost the center. Look at last week's New York Times/CBS News poll of registered voters....
Andrew Sullivan's got a great weblog post about the un-conservativism of President Bush. A quote:
He junked decades of American foreign policy in the Middle East, abandoning attempts to manage Arab autocracies for the sake of a steady oil supply, and forged a new policy of radical democratization of the Middle East. He invaded two countries - one in the grip of a theocratic dictatorship, the other brutalized by a Stalinist kleptocracy - and is in the process of trying to convert them into modern democracies. Nothing this radical has been attempted in U.S. foreign policy for a very long time. And nothing so liberal. In the 2000 campaign, Bush mocked the idea of "nation-building" as liberal claptrap. Now it's the centerpiece of his own administration.
...
On the most fundamental matter, i.e. the war, I think Bush has been basically right: right to see the danger posed by Saddam and the nexus of weapons of mass destruction and Islamist terror; right to realize that the French would never have acquiesced to ridding the world of Saddam; right to endorse the notion of pre-emption in a world of new and grave dangers. But much of the hard work has now been done. No one seriously believes that Bush will start another war in the next four years. And in some ways, Kerry may be better suited to the difficult task of nation-building than Bush.
Domestically, moreover, Bush has done a huge amount to destroy the coherence of a conservative philosophy of American government; and he has been almost criminally reckless in his hubris in the conduct of the war. He and America will never live down the intelligence debacle of the missing Iraqi WMDs; and he and America will be hard put to regain the moral highground in world affairs after Abu Ghraib. The argument Kerry must make is that he can continue the substance of the war, but without Bush's polarizing recklessness.
My new man to despise: Bill O'Reilly. Actually I guess I've despised him for quite some time now, but here's a candid report of what happens in the "no-spin zone". Excerpt:
Prof. COLE: No, nobody should be surprised. But when he says sanctimoniously says, `We can't have spin; it's dividing the country; you know, the spin has got to stop,' and then he starts accusing another media outlet of engaging in that spin--all I was saying was, `Look, Bill, you're doing the exact same thing.' And as soon as I said that, he literally blew up. He screamed at me; he called me an SOB three times. He said, `We will not put this accusation on air when we show the thing, and you're never, ever going to be on this show again.' And sure enough, when the show aired...
Update: I've cut-and-pasted from the Google cache since the original link (http://www.cablenewser.com/original/cole_transcript_july1.htm) seems to be broken.
Transcript:
David Cole on CNBC's Capital Report:
ALAN MURRAY, co-host: All right, David Cole, give us the short version. What happened?
Professor DAVID COLE (Georgetown University): Well, the short version is I was invited to be on the show. I sit there as Bill O'Reilly is recording his intro, which is essentially that "The Factor" had established that there was a link between Iraq and al-Qaida. And then he says, `And Thomas Kean--here's what Thomas Kean of the 9-11 Commission said over the weekend.'
MURRAY: We've got that bite. Let's listen. Let's listen to that, and you can tell us what happened then.
Mr. THOMAS KEAN (9-11 Commission): (From "The O'Reilly Factor") ...we can find whatsoever that Iraq or Saddam Hussein participated in any way in attacks on the United States--in other words, on 9/11. What we do say, however, is there were contacts between Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Iraq--Saddam Hussein--excuse me, al-Qaida...
MURRAY: So what happened when he played that soundbite?
Prof. COLE: Well, so I'm impressed because he's playing a balanced soundbite. Maybe all the things Al Franken said about him were not true. But suddenly he interrupts; he says, `We can't use that. We've got to redo this.' Two minutes of silence, he comes back re-records the whole segment verbatim, except when he gets to Kean, he doesn't use the soundbite but instead paraphrases it to say that Kean had said that the 9-11 Commission has definitely found a connection between al-Qaeda...
MURRAY: And then you had the nerve to bring this up later on the show, when you...
Prof. COLE: I didn't bring it up right away. But we were talking about a New York Times article, and he kept mischaracterizing The New York Times article. And his whole thing was about how we can't have this spin from The New York Times; it's dividing the country. `The spin must stop; our lives depend on it,' he said. And he keeps mischaracterizing The New York Times article; I keep saying he's not. Finally I say to him, `Bill, it seems like the pot's calling the kettle black here, because I sat here five minutes ago and saw you re-record the intro to cut out a statement that you found'...
MURRAY: But here's the thing I've got to ask you about this. I mean, you know, going on Bill O--we all know; anybody who watches Bill O'Reilly's show for five minutes knows he has a strong point of view and knows what that point of view is. Why should anybody be surprised that he would edit out a soundbite that didn't fit the direction he's going in.
Prof. COLE: No, nobody should be surprised. But when he says sanctimoniously says, `We can't have spin; it's dividing the country; you know, the spin has got to stop,' and then he starts accusing another media outlet of engaging in that spin--all I was saying was, `Look, Bill, you're doing the exact same thing.' And as soon as I said that, he literally blew up. He screamed at me; he called me an SOB three times. He said, `We will not put this accusation on air when we show the thing, and you're never, ever going to be on this show again.' And sure enough, when the show aired...
MURRAY: It was gone.
Prof. COLE: ...he cut that out entirely, and there's no `Thank you--you know, thank you very much, Mr. Cole. Goodbye.'
MURRAY: But, look, I mean, O'Reilly obviously has conflicting viewpoints on his show. He invited you on. There's no secret that you're sort of a liberal critic of the Patriot Act and other anti-war--I'm sorry, anti-terror measures that the administration is taking. So what's the problem?
Prof. COLE: Well, I mean, the problem--there's no question he has a strong point of view. He's willing to argue. But when he does it in an underhanded way, he uses the editing room floor to cut out anything that contradicts his point of view, and then starts accusing other media outlets of spinning, you know, I just think it is the pot calling the kettle black. And you know, maybe everyone's spinning, but then he shouldn't be sanctimoniously saying, you know, `The spin's gotta stop; our lives depend on it.'
MURRAY: If there was any chance he was going to invite you back, it certainly went away after you took this public and started making cake batter.
Prof. COLE: Yeah, well, I...
MURRAY: What are you trying to accomplish here?
Prof. COLE: Well, when he said that, `I'm not going to invite you back,' I wasn't sure whether I should take that as a threat or a promise. You know, what I'm trying to accomplish is, you know, he used the power of the editing--the cutting-room floor to edit out my criticisms...
MURRAY: But don't you think everybody does that to some extent?
Prof. COLE: You know, to some extent, but I've been on lots of shows; this is the first time that I have been cut off because I made a comment that the interviewer was troubled by. I mean, you know, sometimes things are cut for time, etc., but this was not cut for time. This was cut because I had criticized him too sharply and he wasn't willing to let the viewers see that.
MURRAY: Well, maybe...
Prof. COLE: And I think the viewers should see that, and I'm glad you had me here to talk about it.
MURRAY: And we're not going to cut anything you said, and maybe in a future show, Bill O'Reilly will let us see you and him going at it on his show.
Prof. COLE: That'd be great.
MURRAY: Thanks very much for being on CAPITAL REPORT, David Cole.
Prof. COLE: Thank you.
CBS's Marketwatch talks about a recent report entitled "I Didn't Do It Alone: Society's Contribution to Individual Wealth and Success."
The report is published by Boston-based United for a Fair Economy, a nonprofit group that researches and raises awareness on issues related to wealth and power. It has signed more than 2,200 multimillionaires and billionaires to a petition to reform and keep the inheritance tax; the "I Didn't Do It Alone" report was gleaned from small sample of those petitioners.
"Pro-business economic policies and tax policies are often centered on the myth of the self-made man," the report says. But the myth of "self-made" wealth "is potentially destructive to the very infrastructure that enables wealth creation."
...
The myth of the self-made man is that he has "made it" alone.
Warren Buffett, founder of Berkshire Hathaway and the second-richest man in the world, says: "I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned."
Two tidbits In honor of today's failure to pass a gay-marriage ban. The first is a wikipedia article about the history of same-sex unions throughout mankind. (Not that this really matters to the religous right, as I'm sure they'll just move on to some other shoddy argument against gay marriage.) History of same-sex unions throughout the world
The second bit is a very concisely worded comment on Fark that summarizes my feelings on the matter:
I think that what it ultimately boils down to is that marriage, as far as the American government is (or should be) concerned, is simply a legal contract between two people detailing various completely nonreligous things, such as visitation rights, taxation, property distribution, etc. Denying two people the right to enter into a legal contract based upon their sexes is as ludicrous as saying that a black man can't sell a car to a white man, or Hispanics can only be business partners with other Hispanics, or only Baptists can get loans. Such things, as well as laws against same-sex marriage, are a blatant violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, and are just about as equally clear a violation of the 1st amendment's clause regarding the establishment of religion, since the only reasons against such a marriage are religious in nature.
Now, if the Catholic church or the Protestant church or whatever church decides that they do not want to allow the religious act of same-sex marriage, that it certainly within their rights to do so. In fact, I would prefer it if they didn't. But for the government, an instituion that is supposed to remain 100% secular and objective, to bar two people from marrying because of their sexes is reprehensible and antithetical to the nature of freedom upon which America was founded.
I missed this back in February: Bill O'Reilly apologizes to America for supporting pre-war claims that Iraq had WMD.
The anchor of his own show on Fox News said he was sorry he gave the U.S. government the benefit of the doubt that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's weapons program poised an imminent threat, the main reason cited for going to war.
"I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this," O'Reilly said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America."
If you recall from before, Bill O'Reilly promised to apologize to the American people should he be shown to be wrong about WMD.
Here is the transcript of Al Gore's speech at NYU. It's long but it's great. There are too many gems in there for me to quote them all, but here is one particularly concise one:
[Bush's] former Domestic Adviser on faith-based organizations, John Dilulio, who said, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
Moore is a genuine populist, but what he cant deal with is the unpleasant possibility that Bush, as people used to say of Nixon, has made a shrewd assessment of the lack of virtue and curiosity in the American public. A lot of Americans still admire the ignorant, smirking, chest-out, crotch-forward triumphalism. Michael Moore has become a sensational entertainer of the already converted, but his enduring problem as a political artist is that he has never known how to change anyones politics.
A scathing smackdown in Slate:
To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.
Cnn.com has an article about a bipartisan coalition of former diplomats and military leaders calling for the end of the Bush administration.
A statement from the group notes its more than two dozen members include Democrats and Republicans who have "served every president since Harry S. Truman."
They contend Bush's foreign policy has failed at "preserving national security and providing world leadership."
Members expressing their opposition in the statement are former senior diplomatic, national security and military officials.
Richard Cohen of the Washington Post has a tidy editorial regarding the Justice Department's latest revelations about its considerations of what types of torture are appropriate. My favorite bit from the column:
The Bush administration constantly reminds us that there's a war on. That's wrong. There are two. One is being fought by soldiers in combat, and the other is being fought for the hearts and minds of people who are not yet our enemies. However badly the administration has botched the first war -- where, oh where, is Osama bin Laden? -- it has done even worse with the second.
Another entry for the Quotable Bush journal that everyone's keeping: "We will secure our nation and defend the peace through the forward march of freedom."
Generally, marching proceeds in a forward fashion. Generally, people marching forwards (or backwards) are not really free - they are bound either by duty or by servitude to be in lockstep with their peers. Neither is freedom.
Nor is Iraq the same as World War II. It should be a whipping offense to compare this current ill-planned, ill-executed exercise in government deception with that noble struggle against hatred and totalitarianism. I'm surprised more people aren't taking Bush to task for it. (See the WashPost article "Bush Speech Ties Iraq War to WWII")
The following is an excerpt from an email sent by Moveon.org today regarding the prisoner abuse scandal and Rumsfeld not taking any heat for it:
General Anthony Zinni, former commander-in-chief of the United States
Central Command and Bush administration special envoy to the Middle
East said,
"I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon directly.
Because if they were given the responsibility, and if this was their
war, and by everything that I understand, they promoted it and
pushed it - certain elements in there certainly - even to the point
of creating their own intelligence to match their needs, then they
should bear the responsibility."
"But regardless of whose responsibility I think it is, somebody has
screwed up. And at this level and at this stage, it should be evident
to everybody that they've screwed up. And whose heads are rolling on
this? That's what bothers me most."
"Look, there is one statement that bothers me more than anything else.
And that's the idea that when the troops are in combat, everybody
has to shut up. Imagine if we put troops in combat with a faulty
rifle, and that rifle was malfunctioning, and troops were dying as a
result"
"I can't think anyone would allow that to happen, that would not
speak up. Well, what's the difference between a faulty plan and
strategy that's getting just as many troops killed?"
'Nuff said. Read the article about the $150,000,000,000 war in Iraq.
Excerpt:
Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a hawk on defense issues, said in an interview that his concern is that the administration has not been including the war's costs in the Defense Department's regular budget, but instead has been seeking special supplemental budgets, appropriations, which it has asked for as late as possible to delay the public release of financial information on the war.
Worse, he said, by providing funding so late, the administration has placed further stress on the military itself, which is having to scramble and transfer money from other accounts to temporarily cover some war costs.
"Somehow, they have come to think that it's politically embarrassing that they need more money to pay for this war," Weldon said of President Bush and his aides. "If they're doing this for political purposes, I think it's stupid. It's shortsighted."
The Washington Post has an article about various conservatives voicing pretty harsh criticism against the current administration. Click "Continue reading" to read the full article (WashPost requires registration.)
Conservatives Restive About Bush Policies
Fresh Initiatives Sought On Iraq, Domestic Issues
By Dana Milbank and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 10, 2004; Page A01
After three years of sweeping actions in both foreign and domestic affairs, the Bush administration is facing complaints from the conservative intelligentsia that it has lost its ability to produce fresh policies.
The centerpiece of President Bush's foreign policy -- the effort to transform Iraq into a peaceful democracy -- has been undermined by a deadly insurrection and broadcast photos of brutality by U.S. prison guards. On the domestic side, conservatives and former administration officials say the White House policy apparatus is moribund, with policies driven by political expediency or ideological pressure rather than by facts and expertise.
Conservatives have become unusually restive. Last Tuesday, columnist George F. Will sharply criticized the administration's Iraq policy, writing: "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts." Two days earlier, Robert Kagan, a neoconservative supporter of the Iraq war, wrote: "All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now."
The complaints about Bush's Iraq policy are relatively new, but they are in some ways similar to long-standing criticism about Bush's domestic policies. In a book released earlier this year, former Bush Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill described Bush as "a blind man in a room full of deaf people" and said policymakers put politics before sound policy judgments.
Echoing a criticism leveled by former Bush aide John J. DiIulio Jr., who famously described "Mayberry Machiavellis" running the White House, O'Neill said "the biggest difference" between his time in government in the 1970s and in the Bush administration "is that our group was mostly about evidence and analysis, and Karl [Rove], Dick [Cheney], [Bush communications strategist] Karen [Hughes] and the gang seemed to be mostly about politics."
Michael Franc, vice president of the Heritage Foundation, said the criticism by O'Neill, Will and Kagan has a common thread: a concern that the administration is "using an old playbook" and not coming up with bold enough ideas, whether the subject is entitlement reform or pacifying Iraq. Conservative intellectuals "are saying, 'Don't do things half way,' " he said.
"It's the exhaustion of power," said a veteran of conservative think tanks who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Ideology has confronted reality, and ideology has bent. On the domestic side, it has bent in terms of the expansion of the government embodied in the Medicare prescription-drug law. On the foreign policy side, it has bent because of what has transpired in the last few weeks in Fallujah."
A Bush spokesman quarreled with that notion, saying there has been no let-up in Bush's policymaking. "We are marching ahead," said the spokesman, Trent Duffy, pointing to Bush's plans for community-college-based job training, space exploration and modernizing health records. "He's continuing to push the policies that have made the country better and stronger."
Part of the current perception of policy fatigue in the White House is a reflection of the political calendar: With a presidential election approaching, there is little possibility that the closely split Congress will enact serious legislation this year regardless of what the White House proposes. "It's a combination of how very challenging it is to move anything in the Senate these days, and it is an election year," said one former Bush aide, who like some of the conservatives interviewed for this article declined to be identified to avoid offending the White House.
But conservative policy experts and a number of former Bush administration officials say there are more systemic reasons for the policy sclerosis. For three years, the president pushed policies conceived during his 2000 campaign for the White House, but with most of those ideas either enacted or stalled, policymaking has run out of steam, they said.
Bush has also discouraged the sort of free-wheeling policy debates that characterized previous administrations, and he relies on a top-down management style that has little use for "wonks" in the federal bureaucracy. At the same time, many of the top domestic policy experts in the Bush White House have moved on to other jobs; in many cases they have been replaced by subordinates with much less experience in governing.
Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist with the National Center for Policy Analysis, said policy ideas typically bubble up from experts deep inside federal agencies, who put together working groups, draft white papers, sell their wares in the marketplace of ideas and hope White House officials act on their suggestions. In this case, ideas are hatched in the White House, for political or ideological reasons, then are thrust on the bureaucracy, "not for analysis, but for sale," Bartlett said.
The result is a White House that has become unimaginative with domestic policy and, in foreign policy, has struggled to develop new policies to adapt to changing circumstances in Iraq, according to several conservatives.
"In Iraq, you don't see the thinking, 'Things have not happened as we had planned. What do we do now?' " said David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, who last week organized a Cato forum entitled "The Triumph of the Hacks?"
Richard W. Rahn, a prominent Republican economist, excoriated the administration's telecommunications, antitrust and international economic policies in a Washington Times column April 30 along similar lines. "From the beginning of the Bush administration, sympathetic, experienced economists have warned its officials about the need to avoid some obvious mistakes," he wrote. "Unfortunately, these warnings have gone unheeded."
In an interview, Rahn said he has grown concerned over what he sees as "a lack of vision and policy consistency" in the Bush administration. "I mean, we knew where [President Ronald] Reagan was heading; at times there were deviations from the path, but we knew what it was all about," he said. In contrast, he said, now "there doesn't seem to be a clear policy vision."
Some attribute the policy lethargy to personnel changes, particularly on the domestic side. For example, three veterans of previous White Houses with lengthy experience in Washington have left their policymaking roles; their successors, though capable, have significantly less policymaking experience.
Joshua B. Bolten, the deputy chief of staff for policy, has been replaced by Harriet Miers, a Texas lawyer and former chairman of the Texas Lottery Commission. Jay Lefkowitz, director of the Domestic Policy Council, has been replaced by Kristen Silverberg, who was a young aide to Bolten. And Lawrence B. Lindsey was replaced as top economic adviser by investment banker Stephen Friedman.
Likewise, John Bridgeland, a former director of the Domestic Policy Council, was replaced as director of Bush's USA Freedom Corps initiative by Desiree Sayle, the former director of correspondence in the White House. And public-policy professor DiIulio was replaced as chief of Bush's "faith-based" initiative by Jim Towey, who had ties to the president's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Leading experts in welfare and health policy have left the White House and been replaced by less experienced hands.
"It would be fair to say the policy shop is less policy-oriented in its apparatus and more administratively managed," said a Republican with close ties to the White House.
In interviews, former officials of the current and three previous administrations described Bush's domestic policy team as unusually green -- particularly compared with Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove. At the Cato forum last week, former Bush speechwriter David Frum said Rove is "the top hack and the top wonk" in the White House.
"I don't think he should be the most important wonk in the White House," said Bruce Reed, former domestic policy chief to Bill Clinton and author of an article about how policy "wonks" had been bested by political "hacks" in the current White House. "Every White House takes on the enthusiasms and the interests of the president, and most of the time this president seems to take more joy in the politics than in the policy."
Defenders of the Bush policymaking apparatus agree that the volume of policymaking has diminished significantly from 2001 and 2002, when the White House was fighting for passage of policies developed during the presidential campaign, such as tax cuts and education accountability. But they say the cause is outside the administration.
Frum said much of the policy energy has been channeled into fighting terrorism at home and abroad because of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "On the most critical issue of our time, they have been bold, creative, and in some cases, they have shocked the intelligentsia with their assertiveness," he said.
Whatever the cause, conservatives say the remedy to policy malaise won't come until the election. Conservative strategist Jeffrey Bell said the big items on the policy agenda -- such as an overhaul of Social Security -- are necessarily on hold as Bush fights for reelection. "He's having to defend the forward motion he's already had," Bell said. "Reagan in '84 was the same way. People who thought Reagan's creative period was going to end after '83 were wrong. I think Bush will be the same way."
It took me a little time to find a comprehensive collection of the photos of the Iraqi prisoners. The Memory Hole has a pretty comprehensive collection of the images released thus far.
Experts: Bush Leads By Instinct
Insights gleaned from "insider" accounts show a leader with "bias for action," analyst says.
By Maura Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON - President Bush styles himself as the first CEO president, applying the rigor and authority of his MBA education to the job of chief executive of the nation.
But that's not the picture that emerges from three recent "insider" accounts of the workings of the Bush administration, experts in decision making and presidential management say. On the contrary, they say, the president appears to have a highly personal working style, with little emphasis on systematic analysis of major decisions.
"There seems to be almost an absence of any analytical or deliberative process for mapping the problem or exploring alternatives or estimating consequences," said Graham Allison, a professor of government at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Bush appears to give greater weight to his own instincts than to experts or other sources of advice and information. The president has a "bias for action," said Roderick Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graudate School of Business. "I've been struck by (how) Bush's sense of personal identity as a leader shapes his decisions," he said.
For the past three years, experts on the presidency have largely withheld judgment about how the Bush White House - connsidered the most secretive since President Nixon's - makes major decisions. The experts said they had inadequate information to reach general conclusions.
That has changed. Scholars of management and government have begun to pore through this spring's crop of insider books to draw preliminary assessments of how Bush operates as president. Their main conclusion is that he makes decisions primarily on instinct, not analysis.
The three insider books are as different as the insiders who wrote them. The first, "The Price of Loyalty", reflects the experience of former Treasury Secretary PaulO'Neill, the former Alcoa chief executive who was forced out for dissenting over economic policy. The second, "Against All Enemies," was written by former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, who thought that the administration was inattentive to the dangers of terrorism before Sept. 11, 2001. And the third, "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, is a journalist's account of the war on Iraq based on interviews with the president and his top advisers.
In addition, two books by Bush loyalists, adviser Karen Hughes' "Ten minutes From Normal" and former speechwriter David Frum's "The Right Man" are also insider accounts, although they shed less light on the White House decision-making process. Frum left the White House early in the administration, and Hughes offers only a few, unfailingly flattering glimpses of her boss in action.
The O'Neill, Clarke and Woodward accounts have strengths and weaknesses, reflecting the experience, access, or bias of the authors, scholars say. But by looking at all the books, they say they can begin to overcome the inadequacies of any single account.
"Triangulate is an excellent image," said Fred Greenstein, a presidential historian at Princeton University. "These books certainly tell you things."
Greenstein said one striking thing about all three books is what they don't show. There are few examples, for instance, of Bush presiding over meetings in which subordinates presented problems, weighed evidence and aired differing views.
"I think a lot of policy is made on the fly," he said. "It isn't a process in which people assemble and go back and forth in a rigorous way."
Another thing largely missing from the books is any indication that documents or memos weighing policy alternatives are circulated and discussed. Allison said one of the few documents the administration did prepare in advance of the Iraq war - the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iraq probably had weapons of mass destruction - was quickly compiled and not very well done.
"The contrast with the textbook conception of informed decision making is distressing," Allison said.
Without a framework for analysis, many important policy discussions appeared to have been disorganized at best, the management specialists said. O'Neill was scatching in his depiction of a meeting Bush held to decide whether to push for a second round of tax cuts, describing the discussion as haphazard as "June bugs hopping around on a lake."
Sometimes, policy discussions seem not to have taken place at all.
In the Woodward book, Secretary of State colin Powell is depicted as attending an National Security Council war planning meeting on August 5, 2002, and realizing that the president and his top advisers were discussing details such as trooop deployments and targets in Iraq without ever having held a meeting on the question of whether to go to war in the first place.
Kramer said that though Bush showed little interest in the kind of number-crunching analysis taught in business school, his style of management does conform to the popular image of chief executives as forceful and decisive. "There seems to be a lot of value attached to showing resolve and demonstrating resolve," he said.
Jay Lorsch, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of "Decision Making at the Top," said the decision-making techniques taught at Harvard, where Bush received his master's degree in business administration, focus on understanding the intricate nature of decisions, not simplifying them.
"What we teach around here is that you've got to understand the complexity of the territory you're trying to affect," he said. "You don't make a decision until you've surveyed all the possible ramifications. The binary idea that you're either right or wrong is just foolishness."
Another critical part of MBA-style analysis is understanding and compensating for your own assumptions, Lorsch said.
Decision makers who are inadequately aware of their assumptions leave themselves vulnerable to two errors: First, subordinates learn to tell them what they want to hear. Second, they are less rigorous in processing data and gauging its validity.
"Whether it's O'Neill or Clarke or Woodward, the theme that runs through all of them is that there was an obsession with Iraq," Lorsch said. "They were probably interpreting the data in a way consistent with their beliefs."
Richard Betts, director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, said that Bush's style is similar to President Reagan's but that he seems to rely on a narrower circle of advisers.
"Bush appears to rest confidence in a few people whose judgment corresponds to his gut instincts, and his faith is not shaken by surprising events that contradict their expectations," he said. "He seems to be obsessive about being decisive, but willing to make hard and fast decisions on the basis of ideology more than evidence."
I came across an artile in the Austin Chronicle from June 22, 2001 about the shutdown of Radio Free Ausin. I must admit that I hadn't thought about the impact of truly local radio (aside from the usual bitching about Clear Channel and bad teeny bopper music), but the political and community ramifications are pretty drastic. It seems the FCC is trying to offer low-power broadcasters an alternative via the LPFM license, but here is Radio Free Austin's rationale for rejecting that license. At first, some of the arguments seem a little disengenuous to me, but I guess if you look at the lengths that advertisers are willing to go through to reach any share of captive audiences, it's not hard to imagine provisions for corporate underwriting eventually transforming the LPFM scene into just another venue for advertisements.
GQ magazine has an interview with Colin Powell. I've mirrored the entire text below. If you want to see some real insights into this administration - from none other than their very own Secretary of State - you need to read this. You also get low-down comments on various figures in the administration from people like Harlan Ullman, who was Powell's mentor at the National War College.
[Side note: Colin Powell is someone I've always had respect for, and I felt more than a little betrayed when I found out about the forged documents in his speech to the UN.]
------------------
Casualty of War
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Four years into an embattled Bush administration, Colin Powell is hard at work at something he's never had to worry about before: salvaging his legacy.
By Wil S. Hylton
A few weeks ago, I went to see Colin Powell in his office. The room was tiny and the light dim. An Asian lamp on his desk cast a faint glow onto the walls, and the shades of his windows were drawn, giving the room a padded, womblike feel. Everything was in earth tones. When I commented on the warm ambience, Powell shrugged his considerable shoulders and said, "Yeah, because I have stuff lying all over the place." It was true. He was surrounded by a jumble of paperwork and clutter. The bookshelves behind his desk were jammed with old photographs and volumes of world history, some upright on the shelves, others crooked and diagonal, halfway to falling off. In one corner, a podium was pressed against a window, as if he had been practicing a speech to the drapes, while in another corner his suit jacket was slung over a cherry valet stand, hovering above the floor like a ghost. In place of the jacket, Powell wore a dark blue windbreaker with the words BOYS & GIRLS club on the breast. He sat behind his desk with a calm, curious look.
I had come to see Powell because, for several weeks, his closest friends and colleagues had been telegraphing a story to me. Powell was finished, they'd said. Exhausted. Frustrated. Bitter. He was uncomfortable with the president's agenda and fatigued from his battles with the Pentagon. His reputation had been stained by his speech at the U.N. in February 2003, when he insisted that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and as the journalist Bob Woodward has noted in Plan of Attack, he was despondent about being cut out of the war plan in Iraq. In the months since those humiliations, as the body count mounted and the WMDs never appeared, his enthusiasm for the job had waned. His enthusiasm for the whole administration had waned. As his mentor from the National War College, Harlan Ullman, described it, "This is, in many ways, the most ideological administration Powell's ever had to work for. Not only is it very ideological, but they have a vision. And I think Powell is inherently uncomfortable with grand visions like that." Or as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said of Powell's disastrous speech at the U.N. last year, "It's a source of great distress for the secretary." Or as Powell's chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, put it, "He's tired. Mentally and physically."
None of Powell's friends had made any pretense of speculating about or guessing at his feelings. They spoke for him, openly and on the record. Some even went so far as to alert me when something they said was not coming from Powell or had not been expressed by him. And now, at the tail end of my reporting, I was going to hear from Powell himself. He had invited me in for a rare one-hour chat. Not to the formal sitting room, where he entertains state visitorsthe room he calls "the funeral parlor"but the dark, private cubbyhole where he actually spends his day. As I settled into my chair, I couldn't help wondering what he wanted to say. I knew from his staff that he had been briefed on my interviews with his friends and knew exactly what I had been told, in detail. But I also knew that however disenchanted and humiliated he may have felt, however severe his disillusionment and frustration, he was a soldier, unlikely to speak out against a sitting president or discuss his battles with the administration. It seemed unlikely he would even admit the urge to retire. So where, exactly, did that leave us?
+ + + + +
It is rare for a member of any president's cabinet to stand alone, in public, on purpose, about a subject of any significance. In the warped logic of presidential politics, consensus equals clarity, and dissent is pure treason. But even within this arid intellectual landscape, the show of solidarity put on by the Bush administration for the past three years must rank among the greatest pieces of performance art in the last half century. Even as senior members of this administration have brawled in private, feuding over nearly every major piece of American foreign policy, not just the war in Iraq and the reconstruction of Afghanistan but also U.S. policy in China, Russia, Taiwan, Korea, Iran, Syria, and Libya, even as neoconservative firebrands like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle have struggled against traditional conservatives like Colin Powell to export American democracy around the globe, even as the schism between the State Department and the Pentagon has become increasingly venomous and personal, the White House has been scrambling to keep the whole mess under wraps, to maintain the illusion that the president's "dream team" is still very dreamyor, at the very least, a team.
To some degree, this performance has been a success. Buffered by an unskeptical media and a largely uninterested public, the administration has contrived a quivering chorus line that almost has the sound of music. Photographers are invited into Don Rumsfeld's office on the outer ring of the Pentagon to shoot cheerful B-roll images of the SecDef chatting on the phone with his old pal the SecState, while books like The Rise of the Vulcans portray a glimmering backstory of the Bush war cabinet as a cordial gang of old friends, dating back to the Nixon administration, who work so well together because they have worked together for so long. In the clutch, even the most senior White House officials are trotted out to perform this elaborate song and dance, singing the praises of, well, themselves.
I got a small but precious glimpse of the show when, shortly after I interviewed Colin Powell, I met with Condoleezza Rice in her office at the White House, a bright and white and airy room that looked like a wedding cake turned inside out, where Rice sat prim and pretty beneath an Impressionist painting in a black business suit and bright red lipstick, smiling politely as she lied through her teeth about the war between the State Department and the Pentagon, as though no such conflict could possibly exist, not in her immaculate White House, and the century-long battle between the two agencies had, in fact, come to a screeching halt on January 20, 2001, when she and the Texan came to town.
I asked, for example, about the internal debate over Taiwan, an area of rising tension in the cabinet. For decades the Taiwanese government has been agitating for independence from China, and in recent years the Pentagon has been feeding its fire, assuring Taiwan that the United States will support it against Chinaa situation that the former director of policy and planning at the State Department, Richard Haas, described to me as "the one issue that could actually, if things ever got out of hand, light a fuse leading to any sort of direct military confrontation between the United States and China." Meanwhile, to avoid such a crisis, the State Department has been trying to put the fire out, to muzzle Taiwan and tone down its rhetoric. But when I broached the subject with Rice, she insisted that the whole struggle for power was a myth. No such drama existed.
"There isn't some kind of little DOD [Department of Defense] cabal out there," she snapped, "saying things to Taiwan that the rest of the government isn't saying."
On the basis of her indignation, Rice may have sounded convincing, except that a few days earlier, Powell's chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, had told me just the opposite. As he put it, Taiwan is "another place where you get a lot of tension, because there are literally people from the Defense Department on that island every week. Every week. And have been for three years. And many of those peopleI know, because some of them are my former colleagues and friendsare delivering messages to Taiwan that Taiwan needn't worry. Meanwhile, we're trying to maintain a more balanced attitude."
And yet even after I had read Wilkerson's quote aloud to Rice, she refused to budge from her script. "As a government," she said weakly, "we use all of the elements together in order to effect policy. They're working always in concert."
Of course, this was even more absurd. The notion that the departments of State and Defense are "always in concert" is not only false; it has never been true and isn't supposed to be. If anything, a certain level of tension between the two departments is a good sign, a reflection of a working government, of the push and pull between diverging interests, the balance of power between military might and diplomatic maneuvering. The idea that the departments of State and Defense are "always in concert" is actually somewhat scary and Orwellian. Fortunately, it's a lie. Unfortunately, the truth is scarier than the lie.
In reality, the chasm that has emerged between State and Defense over the past three years is wider than it has been at any point in recent history, a division that transcends anything remotely healthy or useful. It is no longer just a difference of strategy and logistics but of fundamental values, principles, and philosophy. As Powell's friend and mentor, Harlan Ullmanthe man who coined the phrase shock and awetold me, "There's an ideological core to Bush, and I think it's hard for Powell to penetrate that." When asked about Powell's relationship with Vice President Cheney Woodward's book described the two as barely on speaking terms; Rice then claimed that they are "more than on speaking terms: They're friendly...very friendly" Ullman said, "I can tell you firsthand that there is a tremendous barrier between Cheney and Powell, and there has been for a long time. It's like McCain saying that his relations with the president are 'congenial,' meaning McCain doesn't tell the president to go fuck himself every time." Then he added, "Condi's a jerk." Or as Larry Wilkerson described his boss's role in the cabinet, "He has spent as much time doing damage control and, shall we say, apologizing around the world for some less-than-graceful actions as he has anything else."
+ + + + +
To be fair, the impression of Powell as odd man out has never been exactly right. Although it is true that during his tenure at the State Department, Powell has stood apart from the rest of the administration, providing a voice of moderation and restraint to a cabinet known for neither, his isolation has not always been a hindrance. While he may have been an "odd man" during most of the Bush presidency, he has not always been "out." In fact, what is most intriguing about Powell is not his distinctness from the rest of the Bush team but the way he has leveraged it to his advantage.
When he first came into officeand remember that this was back in the old world, a time of prosperity and peace, of surplus and security, before Donald Rumsfeld moved into your TV and the neocons ran off with policy, before the president had a foreign policy, back when Powell was still the great and solitary behemoth of the administrationhis distinction seemed more of an asset than an obstacle. He was not only the most famous member of the new cabinet, a man many voters would have picked for president, who had practically been begged to run in '96, who was rich and famous and black, and whose presence on the Bush ticket was a deciding factor for many votersbut he was also, in a less dramatic way, simply the best prepared for his job. He had seen the world from both sides and had earned his stripes from each, had led wars and fought them and fought against them, too. He was a kid from the Bronx, not a product of West Point but of the ROTC program at City College of New York, an army infantryman who served voluntarily through the Vietnam War, and over the years his experience as a grunt had only enhanced his commitment to diplomacy.
In the early 1980s, as the military assistant to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, he glimpsed the world of diplomacy for the first time, traveling to the State Department every other Wednesday morning with Weinberger and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage. They would all sit down across the breakfast table from Secretary of State George Shultz and his two assistants, and the two secretaries would go to war.
"They would say hello to each other," remembers Armitage with a chuckle, "and Powell and I would put our heads down, and the two would begin to argue about the breakfast menu, and it continued for an hour, and then we'd leave. So this is not a new tennis game!"
As Ronald Reagan's national-security adviser near the end of the decade, Powell had witnessed the same battle from the president's side, listening as each agency jockeyed for the president's attention. Returning to active duty under the first President Bush as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his political experience had made an unmistakable mark: He became the leading voice against the gulf war, stretching the boundaries of his position and sometimes even working against his own boss, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, to push for a diplomatic solution.
"Colin was very good that way," remembers Brent Scowcroft, who was national-security adviser at the time. "I never heard him contradict Dick Cheney directly, but by the end of the meeting, you always knew where Colin stood. He was very deft at things like that. Colin kept thinkinglonger than I did or Dick Cheney did, and probably longer than the presidentthat there might be a diplomatic ending to it. He was very cautious, was not so sure how deep our interests were, not so sure that we couldn't get Saddam Hussein to pull out. It was just a different perspective."
Arriving at the State Department in 2001, Powell was no stranger to the political battlefield; if it seemed inevitable that he would clash with neocons at the Pentagonmen like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who had never been in uniform but were often eager to deploy troopsit seemed equally inevitable that Powell would squash such adversaries under the broad thumb of his experience.
Oh, he would say, it's easy to talk about "ending states" when you've never been sent to end one, when you've never watched a man split apart in a rain of shrapnel. But for an old grunt who's been on the front lines, who tromped through the elephant grass in Vietnam, who took a punji stake through the foot and saw ears cut off as trophies, who had slept beneath the aching odor of a fifty-five-gallon oil drum stuffed with burning human feces, for a man like Colin Powell, the path of diplomacy had a battle-born allure that no draft-dodging neocon could possibly comprehend, and he meant for them to know it.
Sure enough, from the early days of the Bush term, Powell cut a wide swath. When an American spy plane went down in China just two months into his tenure, when the air crew was taken into custody and the neocons at the Pentagon went ballistic, acting as if it were proof positive that China was the next Soviet Union, it was Powell who worked the phones night and day, negotiating, soothing, nudging, assuring the Chinese that although the United States would not formally apologize for the spies or the plane, he was willing to use the word sorry in a formal statement, and when that wasn't good enough, offered the words very sorry, which, almost unbelievably, worked, becoming the key to the lock that opened the door and brought the prisoners home eleven days after the crash. Powell kept on. By August his stature was difficult to deny; you could measure his influence in direct proportion to that of his counterpart in the Defense Department, a geezer named Rumsfeld whose last significant job in government had been under Gerald Ford and who had spent the first eight months of the new administration fading into oblivion, harping about the need for a missile-defense shield. Rummy was on the outs, everybody knew it, a relic of the Cold War, out of favor, out of touch, out of steam. As Rumsfeld's close friend Frank Gaffney told me in the fall of 2001, "The prognoses of his imminent demise were very much in evidence before September 11."
And then it came. Like a political earthquake, September 11 shifted everything, and Colin Powell found himself on new groundon the far side of American policy, gazing across the Potomac at the Pentagon, at Rumsfeld strutting across the Parade Grounds with his granite jaw thrust skyward, Cheney and Wolfowitz tagging behind. Suddenly, the president, who had campaigned to reduce the U.S. military presence overseas, planted his feet firmly in the war department and began hurling verbal hand grenades around the globe: "axis" of this, "evildoer" that, drawing lines in the sand and preparing for combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, branding Syria and Iran and North Korea as potential targets, severing the lines of communication with some of our oldest European allies.
As Powell's dominance evaporated, his alienation intensified. Far from the commanding figure he had struck in the summer, towering above the rest of the cabinet, now his isolation was real. Now he struggled just to be heard, to be in the loop, to stay connected to the president's inner circle. As the gears of war rolled on without him, as it became clear that the issue was not if but when, Powell found himself pressing for the administration to pause and consider, to make some gesture, however small, toward the world community before attacking a sovereign nation unprovoked; but even in this, the tables turned on him. He was sent to do the job himself, to carry the administration's water before a skeptical United Nations, the man who had argued against the invasion now making the case for it. In what would become the lowest point of his career, an event that will taint his legacy forever, that will be written into his obituary one day, Colin Powell leaned forward in his chair at the General Assembly on February 5, 2003, with the world listeningand listening precisely because it was he, not some old hawk like Don Rumsfeld or some ideologue like Paul Wolfowitz but Colin Powell, a man whose word actually meant somethingsitting there in front of those preposterous PowerPoint presentations and blurry satellite images, he raised his voice in outrage and said things that simply were not true: that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical weapons, that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat, that the Baath Party was linked to Al Qaeda, that these were "not assertions" but "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence," and that the evidence of it all was clear when he knew that it probably wasn't.
"The trade-off," says Harlan Ullman, "was 'Go to the U.N., go to Congress, slow this thing down; it's not going to be regime change, it's going to be weapons of mass destruction.' And for that, Powell stayed a loyal member of the administration."
But if Powell's capitulation seemed complete that day, if his U.N. speech had the aura of pure surrender, then like so many things in the Bush administration, it was only an illusion. Because since then, without much fanfare or publicity, Powell has scratched and clawed his way back to a position of some significance in the White House. He has pulled the reins on Taiwan, quelling its tensions with China, has used that leverage to gain China's assistance on the escalating North Korean crisis, has opened the first real line of diplomacy with Libya in more than thirty years (and, in the process, has begun a real disarmament there, as opposed to the artificial disarming of Iraq), has helped persuade Russia to engage the Iranian nuclear crisis, and has kept American troops out of Syria and Iran, all against the fervent objections of his adversaries in the Pentagon.
"The focus on Iraq gave Powell some flexibility that he might not have had," says Ullman. "There was a lot of reluctance to do a lot of things that he wanted to do. Some in the administration wanted a much tougher position vis--vis North Korea and Iran. And he prevailed. Some wanted a tougher position vis--vis China. He prevailed. The fact of the matter is that Powell has been able to prevail over foreign policy in much of the world, and Iraq has been kind of an odd man out."
+ + + + +
When I met with Powell in his office, he had the bearing of an old lion content in his den, an easy confidence that almost seemed to escape the boundaries of his physical presence, wafting through the air around him like a silver cloud. Colin Powell is, in a word, gigantic. Not in any particular way; he is not especially tall or muscular or thick, does not stand especially upright in his shoes, does not lean into your personal space to impose himself the way some military men do. He is simply big. When he shakes your hand, his palm wraps around yours like a baseball glove fielding a penny, and when he smiles, his eyes are alight as if the world were lit from within.
I confess to being somewhat charmed when he began regaling me with colorful behind-the-scenes storieseven if, in retrospect, it became clear to me that his stories were fraught with all the geopolitical import of a turnip. However much influence he may have regained in the past year, it became clear that he can no longer afford to enjoy it. He can tout his own accomplishments, but he cannot claim them as his own or reveal the struggle behind them. His capitulation on Iraq may have secured his footing in the administration, but to keep that footing he must not overstep. He holds his dissent close to the vest, careful to appear loyal before the public while working his channels of dissent in private. His position in the cabinet, then, is more tenuous and less tenable than ever. In order to keep his power, he cannot seem to have it. This became apparent from the moment I hit my seat. With a great sigh, Powell launched into a meandering soliloquy, and for the next hour he scarcely paused, speaking endlessly and yet saying very little, drowning out questions, pausing only to inflect his tone upward for a moment, allowing me short opportunities to grunt or nod or say little more than "Yeah" or "Uh-huh" before he would steamroll onward, eyes twinkling.
He started with a long, wandering meditation on chicken exports to Russia and slid from there into a glowing assessment of America's role in the world, saying, "We're trusted not to want anybody's land, not to want to exercise dominion over any other peoples," and then without pause dived into a story about "this little stupid island that I had to deal with about a year and a half ago, off the coast of Morocco, which is as big as two soccer fields. Nobody lives on it. And for some reason, the Moroccans went aboard and claimed dominion over the islandnot even an island, it's a rock. It's 200 yards off the Moroccan coast. It belongs to Spain."
"Why would they want it?" I asked.
Powell winked. "Because it belonged to Spain, and it's 200 yards off the Moroccan coast. And they've been arguing about it for a couple hundred years. Next thing we knew, it was an international crisis. The European Union immediately said, 'Spain is right,' and the Organization of Islamic Conferencethe fifty or so Muslim nations in the worldsaid, 'No, Morocco's right.' So there you have it. Well, what are you going to do? Take it to the U.N.? No. What are we going to do?" He paused for effect. "Call the U.S. secretary of state on a Thursday night.
"And so the brand-new Spanish foreign minister, who is now one of my best girlfriends, Ana, calls me. She calls me and says, 'I have a problem,' and she explains this rock. And she gets finished and I say, 'Why are you calling me?'
"And she says, 'You need to fix my problem.'
" 'Ma'am, what's this got to do with me?'
"Well, over the next forty-eight hours, I did nothing but work this rock problem. I must have made, oh, I think we counted it one day, thirty-eight or forty phone calls to her, the prime minister of Spain, and the king of Morocco. And the only way both sides would agree to the outcome is if I would write a letter to both of them telling them what they agreed to do to each other and if I would sign the letter. Not each of themI would sign the letter. If I would cosign this deal!
"So I wrote the letter at home," he continued. "I shipped it out to the two of them. They both started arguing about the letter. It was a major problem in that the name of the island on the part of the Moroccans was one name, and the Spanish called it something else. And this wasn't going to work. So what to do, what to do? I say, 'Can't I just call it "the island"?'
" 'No, it's got to be more than that.'
"So I went to the State Department cartographer, and I got the exact coordinates of the island, and we put into the letter 'the island located at da-da-da.' Okay, that'll do it. And then, when the deal was about done, the Spanish agreed to it thirty minutes before darkness. Couldn't find the king of Morocco. He'd gone off in his car to go to another city. I tried to reach him, and they said he doesn't take calls in his car. I said, 'Well, you need to find him in ten minutes, because I'm going to go play with my grandchildren, and the Spanish won't leave the island. So he needs to pull over somewhere.' And he did. They caught him. He pulled over, called me from somebody's house. The king got on the phone. I said, 'We got the deal, but you've got to approve the letter.'
"He said, 'But the letter isn't here. It's back in Rabat.'
"I said, 'I've got to have you approve the letter now, Your Majesty.'
"And he said, 'But I only saw an early draft. What does it say now?'
"I finally said, 'Your Majesty, the letter does what I told you it would do. Trust me.'
"And he said, 'Mr. Secretary, I trust you.' And he got in his car and went off where he was going. I signed two copies of the letter, faxed one to Spain and one to Rabat. The Spanish left, and they've been buddies ever since."
He paused for a second. "Now, that's a silly story," he said, "but it illustrates so much. They come to the United States. It takes diplomacy. It got almost no attention in the press. Why would it? I mean, it's not terribly exciting. But that's what diplomacy is about."
Soon Powell was offering advice on how to attack the flank in battle, providing a glimpse of the exclusive club made up of the world's foreign ministers, and all the while brushing aside my questions, such as when I asked about whether he wanted to quit the administration and he snapped, "I never speculate on that," careening into a five-minute dissertation on China. When it was finally over, he stood up to say good-bye, flashed me a sly smile, and said, "You didn't get as much substance as you might have wanted."
+ + + + +
The portrait of a great man putzing around with trivia, tidying up messes on "stupid little islands," was one that Condoleezza Rice also tried to impress upon me, though not for the same reasons. With Powell, it seemed clear, the idea was to avoid controversy, to keep our interview on comfortable ground, controlling the dialogue as much as possible and leaving little room for questions about awkward issues.
With Rice, the idea was different. Rather than steering the conversation away from my questions, she set out to rewrite the questions themselves, couching her answers in phrases like the right way to think about it or the right paradigm or the right point. On the subject of Colin Powell, the right point was apparently that the general had been absorbed into the cabinet, a loyal functionary saddled with a long list of arcane minutiae that kept him out of the way.
"You have no idea how many issues end up on the desk of the secretary of state of the United States," she said.
"Little things?" I asked.
"Yeah," she said. "There is no issue that people honestly believe is not an American problem, and I would say 90 percent of those end up on Colin's desk. And so he will find himself resolving small issues, border issues between small countries that most of us can barely find on a map."
The only time Rice became truly animated was when I asked about Powell's appearance at the U.N. last year. At first she insisted that Powell had not been sent to the U.N. per se, since the secretary of state was the only person who could have made such a presentation (despite an exhaustive history to the contrary, including appeals to the U.N. by presidents, vice presidents, and U.N. ambassadors like Adlai Stevenson, who famously brought evidence of the Cuban missile buildup to the attention of the U.N. in 1962). When pressed, Rice acknowledged that it might have been possible for U.N. ambassador John Negroponte to have made the speech, but insisted, "There's really nobody else that can do it." When I pressed a little further, asking, "So there was never a discussion?" she spat out, "No. Everybody said it would have to be Colin," adding a moment later, "We wanted to have enough of a profile. It was an important presentation. Extremely important presentation. So we wanted to have enough profile."
Rice even described Powell as enthusiastic about the presentation, spending four days and nights at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, just before the speech, munching on delivery pizza and scouring the evidence against Saddam for ways to punch it up. In her words, "He wanted to be sure that we put in the best, strongest aerials we had, both from the point of view of the ones that were best documented but also the ones that were going to be punchiest."
By contrast, members of Powell's staff, including his two closest advisers, Richard Armitage and Larry Wilkerson, described Powell's four-day immersion at the CIA in very different termsnot punching up the evidence but breaking it down, frantically sifting through droves of poor intelligence and false claims that the Pentagon, the intelligence services, and the vice president's office had slipped into his presentation, throwing out hype in an effort to preserve his reputation and avoid the kind of humiliation that he wound up with anyway.
"Four days!" Armitage practically shouted when I mentioned Powell's visit to the CIA. "Four days! And three nights! The secretary is a man of honor! He values being credible. To be credible, you have to be able to stand behind what you say. That's why he fieldstripped it. Just like, you ever heard of fieldstripping cigarettes back in Nam?" He was referring to the process of tearing up smoked cigarettes so they will decompose quickly and leave no trace for the enemy. "That means tear it up and shake the tobacco that's left to the wind," Armitage said. "He fieldstripped it."
"On the last day and night [at the CIA], the secretary called me, and he said, 'I need a little extra reinforcement.' So I went out there and spent Sunday and Sunday night with him. He needed someone. He was the voice throwing everything out, and he wanted another loud voice at the table."
Powell's chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, described those four days at the CIA as a battle, with Powell's team scrambling in the final hours to save the general from humiliation. "I was down at the agency as his task-force leader," Wilkerson said. "And we fought tooth and nail with other members of the administration to scrub it and get the crap out."
+ + + + +
It is worth noting that I found Larry Wilkerson in his well-appointed wood-paneled office in the State Department not through any great journalistic dexterity of my own but through the good graces of Powell's staff, and in particular one of his media advisers, who had been indispensable in helping me contact Powell's close friends and advisers, telling me whom to call and precisely when they'd be available. For Wilkerson in particular, she had been persistent, telling me on no less than four separate occasions that the relationship between Powell and his chief of staff was like "mind meld," and that after fifteen years of working together, they were of a single brain.
I arrived at Wilkerson's office on a sunny winter morning, hoping he could shed light on Powell's undercover influence and the assortment of successes he has managed lately, against the odds, beneath his veneer of irrelevance. I hoped, for example, that Wilkerson would be able to illuminate Powell's efforts in Libya, where he began a diplomatic process, long before the war in Iraq, to open dialogue with Qaddafi, something that Armitage told me "required us to beat down the protestations of those in the administration who did not want any discussions with Libya." (Asked about the same thing, Rice had said, "Um, I don't remember it really that way.")
I was also interested in Powell's friendship with the president of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf. During normal conversations, the two men refer to one another as "Mr. Secretary" and "Mr. President," but in more serious moments one will sometimes say, "General, we need to do this general-to-general," and the other will say, "Okay, General, what is it?" and they will use the designation "General" until the issue is resolved, at which point they will resume calling each other "Mr. Secretary" and "Mr. President." Preposterous as that may sound, it is difficult to deny that the closeness between Powell and Musharraf has helped balance the scales between Pakistan and India and has helped avert war in Kashmir for the past two years, not to mention giving American troops access to Pakistani bases for the war in Afghanistan.
What I didn't expect from Wilkerson was the rest of the picture, a glimpse of the venom with which Powell and his staff have come to regard their adversaries in the Pentagon. But almost as soon as I asked about the relationship between Powell and the neocons, Wilkerson crouched forward in his chair and said, "I make no bones about it. I have some reservations about people who have never been in the face of battle, so to speak, who are making cavalier decisions about sending men and women out to die. A person who comes immediately to mind in that regard is Richard Perle, who, thank God, tendered his resignation and no longer will be even a semiofficial person in this administration. Richard Perle's cavalier remarks about doing this or doing that with regard to military force always, always troubled me. Because it just showed me that he didn't have the appreciation, for example, that Colin Powell has for what it means."
"I call them utopians," he said. "I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians, I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it."
"It's politically incorrect for me to say so," he added, "but when all you use is a stick, you're not going to get very far." He used the example of Pakistan. "The problem is, you sanction Pakistan, you lay all this stuff on Pakistan, the Pressler Amendment, and so forth, and then all of a sudden Pakistan does a nuclear test in '98. But if you stay involved with them and you keep working on them and you keep at it, over and over and over again, keep seeing what's successful and what's a failure and emphasizing what's successful, doing more of it, and quit doing what's a failure, then you can make more progress than if you just sanction somebody and walk off and say, 'That's it, I'm not dealing with you anymore.' "
"It hasn't worked in Cuba for forty years," I said.
"Dumbest policy on the face of the earth," he said. "It's crazy."
The more I spoke with Wilkerson, the more I understood why Powell's staff had gone to such lengths to set up my interview with him, reminding me that anything Wilkerson said was the same as hearing it from Powell. But if Wilkerson was going to be Powell's voice, if he was going to say the things that Powell wouldn't or couldn't, there was one question I still needed him to answer. Before I left, I wanted a sense of Powell's plans for the future. I was wary of how to phrase the question, though. It seemed safe to assume that Wilkerson had not been dispatched to announce the end of Powell's career in this article, at this particular moment, and if I asked him outright whether or not Powell was planning to quit, I could put him on the spot. He might wind up saying, as Powell did, "I never speculate on that" or "He hasn't announced a decision." So I phrased the question differently.
"Being inside the building," I said, "is there as much expectation that this will be the end of Powell's tenure as there is outside the building?"
Eight long seconds of silence.
"Um," Wilkerson said, "I've known him for fifteen years...."
I nodded.
"My considered opinion is that he is..." His voice trailed off. "He's tired. Mentally and physically. And if the president were to ask him to stay onif the president is reelected and the president were to ask him to stay on, he might for a transitional period, but I don't think he'd want to do another four years."
Wilkerson fell silent again.
"He seems tired," he said.
The New Republic has an interesting op-ed about the recent White House press conference and how Bush's perceived stubbornness and refusal to admit error may come to haunt him:
Hunting for a glimmer of presidential introspection, Time queried, "After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?"
Bush, of course, did not yield. No mistakes made. No apologies offered. No failures admitted. In the defining moment of the evening, Bush's response to the question from Time, the president simply stood silent at the podium. Inside the room, it felt like time had stopped. He looked down at his notes. No help there--clearly he hadn't practiced for this question. He shifted his weight. He smirked. He shook his head. He puffed his cheeks. But nothing. Finally, he nervously blurted out, "I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with answer, but it hadn't yet." It never did.
Americanprogress.org has a very succint list of bogus claims by Condoleeza Rice, countered by facts with references. It starts off good and gets better:
CLAIM: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 5/16/02
FACT: On August 6, 2001, the President personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane." In July 2001, the Administration was also told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles. [Source: NBC, 9/10/02; LA Times, 9/27/01]
I guess the GOP, tired of Democrats hogging all the scandal spotlight (with their Monicagate and Whitewatergate and uh.. all those others.. ), have succeeded at generating some scandals of their own, each leading to investigations or even formal criminal charges: the Carpetbagger Report is running a nice list..
Several of these items are so deplorable that I shudder to think at the rage Newt Gingrich would have incited had Democrats been guilty of them.
The Money Map is a nice visual representation of where funding for this year's presidential election is coming from. It's interesting to contrast the George W. Bush map with the John Kerry map; whereas Bush is getting much deeper contributions from all across the country, Kerry is getting shallower contributions in small, select areas.
<insert your own depressing conclusions here>
Was Iraq an "immediate threat"? Watch Donald Rumsfeld contradict himself on national TV:
http://www.electrictao.net/files/rumsfeld.swf (mirror of MoveOn.org's movie)
The Washington Post has an interesting write-up about bankers supporting Bush in a major way. Definitely worth a read. (And here I thought I was being generous by giving $50 to moveon.org!)
Top bankers and Wall Street executives have Rolodexes brimming with wealthy friends from every industry, people for whom writing a $2,000 check, the new limit for individual contributions to federal candidates, hardly requires a second thought.
Brokers and bankers in New York and across the country said in interviews that they had made dozens of calls on Bush's behalf, helping in part to explain the campaign's ability to raise $130 million in 2003, shattering the previous record for fundraising by a presidential candidate in a single year.
"I placed a cold call to Mercer Reynolds and asked if I could be supportive," said a top executive in a Midwestern office of one of Wall Street's biggest firms. He was referring to the Bush campaign finance director, himself a former banker with deep ties to Wall Street. "Mercer asked me to call clients and friends, and that's what I did."
But there is still hope:
Some Wall Street executives privately disagreed, noting that there are still Democrats at the big investment houses as well as economists who believe Bush's failure to reign in the deficit may lead to higher interest rates, hurting economic growth. "I have a number of good friends who are Rangers and Pioneers," said a Wall Street economist who declined to be identified by name or firm, for fear of angering the White House. "But there are plenty of us who differ from this administration both because of its foreign and economic policies."
I like how economists have to fear retribution from the White House. Lovely little game, this "democracy" thing.
AlterNet.org has an excerpt from the book "Five Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq":
In his eloquent February 27, 2003 letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell, diplomat John Brady Kiesling, who had served under four presidents, made a prescient warning about what lay beneath the White Houses hubris, as well as how it threatened the very United States leadership in global affairs it claimed to exemplify:
"The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to do to ourselves . . .
We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained Americas ability to defend its interests."
I found a new group blog today: OS Politics. There are some interesting articles there, including a weekly refutation of Ann Coulter's polemic. (Go to the archives and look for entries entitled "Banging my head against the wall".)
I am engaged in a discussion at ElectricMinds.org about our recent actions in Iraq and the administration's direction in pursuing the war on terror.
I am posting my next reply here on my blog because I feel it's a bit long for the format at ElectricMinds, and also I wanted a chance for other visitors here to read it and perhaps comment.
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The definition of winning a war is achieving your objectives and preventing your enemy from achieving his.
In this war against terror, our objectives are:
1. prevent the slaughter of innocents
2. preserve the American way of life
3. eradicate terrorism (defined as the unprovoked murder of non-combatants) as a political tool
Our enemy's objectives are a point-by-point negation of the above three, plus a fourth:
-1. slaughter innocents, American and otherwise
-2. destroy American culture and the American political system
-3. use terrorism as an effective tool for political manipulation
-4. incite a religious war between Islam and Judeo-Christianity. (This is really just a means to help achieve the above three.)
I used to be a student of Aikido, a Japanese martial art form whose every motion is geared towards deflecting, rather than countering, an attacker's energy, and letting his own inertia and the laws of physics bring him down. It is common practice to see diminuitive female students taking down well-built men twice their weight and nearly twice their size. The careful application of pressure to certain weak joints allows you to bring a 6'5" tall man down to the ground with the slightest of motions, but only if he attacks you in a fashion that leaves him vulnerable. (For instance, if a student of Aikido were to go on the offensive, they would not attack in any number of haphazard openings, and they pay attention to all of their vulnerabilities.) This is an obvious parable for war - if you can find your enemy's weakness, and exploit it just so, you may be able to transform his apparent strength into a massive liability, and if you are even more clever, you can keep him trapped with just a gentle flick of your wrist.
As we fight this war, we must be careful not to achieve the enemy's objectives for him.
Racial Profiling
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claunchs: "We can't even take a closer look at Saudi Arabian students at airports without the lefties screaming about what a horrible nature the American society has, ignoring any wrongdoing by, say, people who fly hijacked jetliners into office buildings."
This is a straw man. The "American Left", whoever they may be, despise the airline hijackers just as much as you do. In fact, they despise terrorists so much that they refuse to engage in explicit racial profiling, because it achieves objectives -2 and -4 for the enemy. Furthermore, it's not effective, and it gives a false sense of security.
Why? Because terrorists have already adapted their strategy to slipping explosive devices into the baggage of "normal" Americans, and because there are plenty of Caucasian nuts and wackos who can be bent to doing the terrorists' dirty work. Remember the British shoe bomber? What about Timothy McVeigh? Anyone who is psycho enough and has enough of a blind hatred can be turn to serving the purposes of terrorists. With the sheer amount of oil money pumping into the fundamenlist Islamic circles, they can quite a lot of damage without you ever seeing a turban.
People and Nations
------------------
claunchs: "They're against us already and will be regardless of what we do or don't do. No Arab or muslim nation has any intentions of doing anything to contribute to the vitality and health of America unless they themselves feel threatened, as in Pakistan and S.Arabia. They're already our enemies. We cannot make them less so by appeasing or massaging them, we can only embolden them by doing so."
Do we have any intention of doing anything to contribute to the vitality and health of those nations that we accuse of insensitivity towards our needs? You seem to support the idea of nations standing alone, given your dislike of the UN. So perhaps we should just nuke them? Seems a lot easier than negotiating, and there's nothing but sand there anyway.
Seriously, though - which "they" are you talking about, the governments or the people? The people are not "against us already". Their nations do not have the freedom of media or freedom of speech that we enjoy in ours; hence, the people's opinions are entirely determined by what they hear from the official news channels and through the rumor mill. Those people are not a lost cause; to write them off as simply the pawns of despotic theocracies would be counter to our objective #1. "They" do not hate you specifically, or me specifically, just as you do not really hate any particular Pakistani specifically. What you hate is the fact that they burn the US flag in the streets whenever they hear about an Israeli gunship attack in Gaza, or the fact that they are incomprehensibly sympathetic to Osama and his ilk. These are the products of their despotic governments. What we, as enlightened and freedom- and life-loving Americans, must realize is that the people themselves are not terrorists, at least, not yet. They are *not* Muslim fundamentalists. For the most part, they are just people stuck in a very crappy government that needs to be rectified or rebuilt, doing what any normal or sane person would do given the news they get and seeing the images they see, having been brought up in the circumstances of their lives.
I agree that no Muslim *governments* have any intention of helping us without coercion. (I reiterate the distinction between people and their governments, especially when those government are despotic, because this is an aspect of the same Enlightenment values that produced our Constitution and our Bill of Rights.) I agree with regime change in those nations, because fundamentally, I feel that to achieve objective #3, we must eradicate fundamentalism, starting with theocracies that tolerate it. I am of the opinion that a theocracy is necessarily evil, but I am also a realist, and I know that we cannot go uprooting all the sovereign nations of the Middle East in one shot. Hence, we have to use all the forces at our disposal, and use all the alliances we can forge, in changing those governments from within and rooting out the elements of despotism and fundamentalism.
This is why it matters a great deal that we do not alienate Islam and Muslims as people. Islam is theoretically a peaceful religion (then again, so is Christianity, and we have abortion clinic bombers, so I guess theory != reality). There are plenty of people in all those nations who can be swayed one way or another by our actions. The only reason to care what they think is a practical one: it eases our job of regime and policy change in those nations, and it also increases our ability to net terrorists.
Fighting Fundamentalism
-------------------------
clauchs: "The bloodletting coming from Islamic fundamentalists is going to get worse, rather than better. They believe that to die trying to destroy Americans is what their god wants them to do. Many who don't actively participate condone and support those who do - right here in our own country."
Yup - those who support and condone it are accomplices in the act, and should be treated as such. No one in his right mind (or worth listening to) is talking about supporting Islamic fundamentalism. There is, however, great debate about how to fight it.
Let's say there's a forest fire near some houses you wish to protect. Your method of firefighting depends on how you perceive the nature of the forest. If you believe that every tree in the forest is as dry as commercial-grade kindling and is going to burn no matter what you do, then you might as well write the whole thing off and start a controlled burn in the vicinity of the houses, then stand aside and let the entire forest go up in smoke. However, if you believe that your firefighting approach can affect the flammability of the wood, and you believe that it's possible to contain the spread of the fire, then you must take great pains to avoid solutions that make increasingly more trees susceptible to catching fire.
If we are true to the ideals in our Declaration of Independence - that each person is sacred and entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - then we must try to burn as few trees as possible. In any event, we should at least try to not presume the innocents are guilty. Your attitude of writing the entirety of the Muslim world off as a lost cause is counter to these ideals, and in a more pragmatic sense, counter to our objective #1 and directly in support of the enemy's objective #-4.
Other Miscellaneous points
---------------------------
clauchs: "The American left - which opposes the forceful defense of America or the enforcement of borders on any grounds - plays exactly into the plans of the terrorist trash."
Right... this is why Clinton launched 88 cruise missles against al Qaeda training camps back in 1996? This is why Wes Clark - a former general - is running on the Democratic ticket? Your overgeneralization is a bit too sweeping. (It's not unlike saying that the American Right wants to kill every last Muslim if they're not whistling the Star-Spangled Banner.)
boldface: "It's silly to be so self-centered as to believe that the rest of the world bases what it does on waht the US does or doesn't do. THey have their own axes to grind, and because most of the rest of the world is dictatorships, they need an external enemy - and the US provides an easy target becuase it's the big boy on the block, and a tenderhearted one at that, that can be made to feel guilty with ease."
I think you are mistaking me for someone who wants to appease despotic governments.
As I have stated before, I don't think we are in disagreement about objective; we do seem, however, to be in great disagreement about approach. I am advocating an approach that considers (1) the fact of our limited military resources, (2) our desire to limit civilian casualties (lest we become like our enemy), and (3) the practical utility of having sympathetic populations in the nations whose governments we wish to change. Many others seem to be bent on a "bomb-em-cause-we-can" approach.
Also, there is a consideration of time scale: I am still extremely concerned about our vulnerability to terrorist attack in the short term, and I am not comforted by the various grumblings about the ineffectual Department of Homeland Security as well as insiders quitting due to the administration's poor handling of intelligence. I feel that the war in Iraq cost a great deal more than it had to because we rushed it and lied to the world about our reasons for it, and those costs could have been much more effectively applied to rooting out terrorist cells in Africa and Southeast Asia to stem terror in the short term.
Oh, and please do not use the "well, we haven't been attacked again, have we?" argument. If you feel compelled to do so, Lisa Simpson has a tiger-warding rock she wants to sell you.
-Peter
The Miami Herald has an article about the current administration's attitude towards Syria, following Israel's recent strike at a base there.
Hawks at the Pentagon haven't given up on the idea of "regime change" in Damascus and recently asked the CIA to come up with a list of Syrian notables who might one day succeed Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to a U.S. official who requested anonymity.
...
Syria "is living on borrowed time," a State Department official said recently, referring to the mood in Washington. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
Woot! Let's look for WMD in Damascus, too!
The Guardian UK has an excerpt from Joseph Stiglitz's book about why so many people hate "Globalization" as implemented by the USA in the past decade. (Stiglitz served as an advisor during the Clinton administration.)
Very brief, and if you don't understand why people are always protesting the WTO and referring to our export of free trade as "hegemony" and "empire", this is definitely worth a read.
If you've read the news at all in the last two weeks, you've undoubtedly come across the story of the Alabama Supreme Court's Chief Justice Roy Moore. Moore, also known as the "Ten Commandments Judge," has created a bit of a stir by having a 2-ton granite monument to the Ten Commandments erected in the state Supreme Court's rotunda and refusing to remove it despite a federal court order to do so. Moore's actions reveal a simplistic understanding, not only of constitutional law, but also of the very scriptural tradition he claims to be defending.
It's obvious to most non-fundamentalists that Moore has it wrong on the law. He claims that the Ten Commandments belong in such a public space, because it is from God's law that human law derives its authority. Yet the Constitution begins with the words "We the People..." Under this constitution, which never once acknowledges God, ultimate authority for law begins with the people. The people, in their individual consciences, may hold themselves responsible to a higher authority, but as far as public affairs are concerned, the Constitution recognizes no deity. The bottom line: people can be "saved," the state can't.
This is as it should be. James Madison recognized this when he penned his "Remonstrance," arguing against a bill that would have lent state support to Christianity in Virginia. He argued, in essence, that religion is a matter of individual conscience. What is more, Madison uses an explictly theological justification, which all theists ought to accept: that God requires individuals to follow their conscience in matters of religion, and that this obligation supercedes any obligation to civil authority:
Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, "that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence." The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. ... It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.
If it were just a matter of the monument, it would be one matter, though still unconstitutional. But Roy Moore's has made statements to the effect that the authority of U.S. law flows from the Bible, and that therefore it is appropriate to decide cases on the basis of Biblical law. By privileging the [Judaeo-]Christian version of God's law, and by giving the state the right to impose and interpret that law, Roy Moore threatens to interpose the state between the individual and the object of that individual's religious convictions, be it some form of God, a philosophy, the eight-fold path, or what have you. This contravenes the American tradition of religious liberty as understood and articulated by the Founding Fathers, and it is all the more dangerous and unhelpful in a religiously pluralist society such as we inhabit today.
As a Christian myself, moreover, I would argue that Roy Moore's understanding of scripture could go deeper than it does. The Ten Commandments, in both Biblical versions (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5), are grounded in the covenant (in Hebrew = "treaty," "alliance") that God makes with Israel: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." God freely chose to rescue a people, and in return God prescribes a code of law for them as a new nation. Basically, God is saying, "You've seen how I've had your back all this time. I'll continue to watch your back, if you follow my rules." Hermeneutically speaking (i.e., applying the text to the present day), Jews freely take on obedience to the commandments as a recognition that they, too, stand in the covenantal tradition. Christians interpret the rescue from "Egypt" metaphorically, representing salvation from the sin or brokenness that weighed down their lives, and they consider themselves to be adopted children of the covenant, standing alongside the Jews. In both cases, obedience to the law is grounded in the experience of salvation. There is no indication in Exodus or Deuteronomy that the commandments are moral absolutes, that is, that God requires obedience to the law by those outside of the covenant. When Roy Moore takes the Ten Commandments as a basis for American jurisprudence, he's missing a crucial element of the covenantal tradition: participation in the covenant family, enjoying its benefits and observing its rules, is a matter of choice in response to God's saving act experienced by the individual.
He's also missing much of the richness of what the Biblical tradition has to say about how people of the covenant can get along with others. The book of Jeremiah records a letter supposedly sent by the eponymous prophet to a community of Jews in Babylon, who had been forcibly relocated from their homeland. In it, he delivers a message in which God urges them to "seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare" (Jer. 29:7). Notice he does not say that they should subvert the city's traditions, or convert the city's leaders. Jeremiah urges the Babylonian Jews to settle in and be good citizens, taking the city on its own terms, while observing their faith. The historical evidence shows that these Jews took this advice to heart. (Indeed, until the founding of the modern Israeli state, there remained small communities of Jews in Iraq.) Speaking hermeneutically once again, I find here a justification for American Christians to take the Madisonian route, encouraging the state to leave matters of religion to individual conscience. It is not a necessary tenet of our faith that the civil power under which we live must be directed by the Bible. It is enough that we model covenantal faithfulness to our neighbors and make it clear that God offers everyone a road out of whatever "Egypt" has enslaved them.
In his new book, Pieces of Intelligence: the Existential Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, author Hart Seely has compiled a series of unwitting poems from this surprisingly lyrical administration official. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a brief review with some more examples. Perhaps we can expect a forthcoming volume, "The Te of W"?
Although this phrase has been used for many different causes, I just read an excerpt from an essay by Peter Hitchens in The Spectator. This was in the "Readings" section of Harper's Magazine. (Click "Continue reading" to read the full text.)
Not in Our Name
excerpt from an essay by Peter Hitchens (originall in The Spectator)
There is nothing conservative about war. For at least the last century, war has been the herald and handmaid of socialism and state control. It is the excuse for censorship, organised lying, regulation, and taxation. It is paradise for the busybody and the narc. It damages family life and wounds the Church, all the while polluting the minds of millions with scenes of horror and death. It is, in short, the ally of everything summed up by the ugly word "progress".
Before the great conflicts of the twentieth century, the average Englishman had no contact with the state unless it was to see the postman at his front door or the police constable walking by. After those conflicts, he could hardly exhale without having to sign a government form and queue to have it stamped. A conservative country of free individuals where everything was permitted unless specifically prohibited became a collectivist state where everything was prohibited unless specifically allowed.
So why did the Conservative Party support this left-wing war? It has missed a wonderful opportunity to be true to its principles, to be right, and to re-engage with the people of Britain. Those who have dismissed it for years as a callous pressure group motivated by nothing but money might have been forced to reconsider their view. But the Tories have so utterly lost the power of thought that they have become what their cruelest opponents pretend they are. Not since they endorsed the unhinged privatisation of the railways - after scouring the world for the worst possible form of ownership and imposing it on the half-ruied system - have the Conservatives acted so contrary to their own wisdom and so exactly as if they were the brainless destroyers that "alternative" comedians imagine them to be.
This war was always different from those that have gone before. Previous conflicts in the modern age, even if caused by failures of deterrence, and even if they extended the power of the state, did at least have the virtue of being in British interests in that if we had not fought them we would have been ruiined, subjugated, or fatally humbled. This one was so hard to justify that its supporters treated their own arguments with implied scorn, wanly grinding out cant phrases that long ago lost their meaning, trying to frighten us with bogeymen or pretending grotesquely that liberty and civilisation could be imposed on Mesopotamia with explosives.
Listening to educated, intelligent men regurgitating such expressions as "weapons of mass destruction" and "evil dictator" called to mind George Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," in which he wrote:
When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases - bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyrrany, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder - one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy; a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light cathces the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.
The idea that naked force can create human freedom is itself a left-wing idea. Even more radical were the war party's contempt for the sovereignty of nations and its unashamed belief that ends justify means. No wonder that the war's hottest-eyed supporters on both sides of the Atlantic are ex-Marxists who have lost their faith but have yet to lose their Leninist tendency to worship worldly power. Yet ranged alongside them are Tories, who are supposed to stand for the gentler and more modest cause of faith and nation, Church and King.
My affection for the U.S.A. and its people, and my readiness to defend them against mean-minded foes, are on record in plenty of places. During the Cold War, I believe that deterrence would create real peace while military weakness would bring war. The argument that those who really desire peace should prepare for war is not just an axiom but a proven policy, confirmed by all human history. In my case, the point is reinforced by an unfeigned loathing of war. In those days, leftwingers called me names. Now I find myself accused of anti-Americanism and even treachery because I was against this war. My fears for American liberties, following the grotesquely named Patriot Act and the founding of the Department of Homeland Security, are treated not as the warnings of a candid friend but as disloyalty.
There seems to be a new ideology of Americanism in which one is either totally loyal or one is a suspect. (Perhaps this, too, attracts those ex-Marxists.) It is based on an idea of America as a cause rather than on the good and decent nation which actually exists. I am reminded of the terrifying American messianic bore Hector Dexter, in Nancy Mitford's 1951 satire, The Blessing, who tells his English hosts that he wishes to see a bottle of Coca-Cola on every table in every country.
When I saw a buttle of Coca-Cola I mean it metaphorically speaking, I mean it as an outward and visible sign of something inward and spiritual, I mean it as if each Coca Cola bottle contained a djinn, and as if that djinn was our great American civilisation ready to spring out of each bottle and cover the whole global universe with its great wide wings. That is what I mean.
The same juvenile spirit was epitomized in March by the U.S. Navy's Vice Admiral Timothy Keating abord the USS Constellation. Vice Admiral Keating waves his arms and proclaimed, "It's hammer time!" to the accompaniment of Queen's "We Will Rock You" played at full blast to his ship's company. Adult cultures think war deserves reflection and seriousness of purpose. This war seems to have been imagined and designed by spiritual teenagers. Will the next begin to the rattle and boom of gangsta rap?
A human city was shaken and blasted by men pushing buttons in almost complete safety hundreds of miles away. Yes, most of the missiles hit their targets and the civilian casualties were few - though that was little comfort to those few. Yes, the bombs were directed at an ugly and despicable tyranny. Yes, the bombers believed they were doing good. But what if one day others are in a position to treat us as we have treated Baghdad, and it is our women giving premature birth because they are petrified by the "smart" explosions, and the ceilings of our expensive hospitals cracking and crumbling as the palaces and bunkers of our loathed elite are blasted?
Do I wish that our casualties had been higher? Of course not. But the ability to ruin someone else's capital city without risk to yourself reminds me of Robert E. Lee's truly conservative remark after the carnage of Frederiscksburg: "It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it." For some people, war is no longer terrible enough; they have grown too fond of it. They are not conservatives in any serious meaning of the word.
On Bushwatch, there is an excerpt of Retired General Wesley Clark's interview on Meet the Press. (I have included the full text below in case they update their page.)
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK (RETIRED), FORMER NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER: ...All of us in the community who read intelligence believe that Saddam wanted these capabilities and he had some. We struck very hard in December of '98, did everything we knew, all of his facilities. I think it was an effective set of strikes. Tony Zinni commanded that, called Operation Desert Fox, and I think that set them back a long ways. But we never believed that that was the end of the problem. I think there was a certain amount of hype in the intelligence, and I think the information that's come out thus far does indicate that there was a sort of selective reading of the intelligence in the sense of sort of building a case.
TIM RUSSERT: Hyped by whom?
GEN. CLARK: Well, I...
MR. RUSSERT: The CIA, or the president or vice president? Secretary of Defense, who?
GEN. CLARK: I think it was an effort to convince the American people to do something, and I think there was an immediate determination right after 9/11 that Saddam Hussein was one of the keys to winning the war on terror. Whether it was the need just to strike out or whether he was a linchpin in this, there was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001 starting immediately after 9/11 to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein.
MR. RUSSERT: By who? Who did that?
GEN. CLARK: Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, "You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein." I said, "But I'm willing to say it but what's your evidence?" And I never got any evidence. And these were people who had "Middle East think tanks" and people like this and it was a lot of pressure to connect this and there were a lot of assumptions made. But I never personally saw the evidence and didn't talk to anybody who had the evidence to make that connection.
MR. RUSSERT: We now know that -- and Condoleezza Rice on this program last week, acknowledged that the president said something in the State of the Union message which was untrue, about uranium being shipped from Africa to Iraq. Something like that found its way into the State of the Union message and delivered to the world by the president of the United States. Should there now be open hearings by the Senate Intelligence Committee into this matter?
GEN. CLARK: Well, I don't know if the hearings ought to be open or not because you're dealing with classified information. But I do think this. I do think there has to be an accounting for this. I think really it goes back to 9/11. We've got a set of hearings that need to be conducted to look at what happened that caused 9/11. That really hasn't been done yet. You know, a basic principle of military operations is you conduct an after-action review. When the action's over you bring people together. The commander, the subordinates, the staff members. You ask yourself what happened, why, and how do we fix it the next time? As far as I know, this has never been done about the essential failure at 9/11. Then moving beyond that, it needs to be looked at in terms of the whole intelligence effort and how it's connected to the policy effort. And these are matters that probably cannot be aired fully in public but I think that the American people and their representatives have to be involved in this. This is essential in terms of the legitimacy and trust in our elected leadership and our way of government.
MR. RUSSERT: The president said that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat based on the intelligence data he had seen. Did the president mislead the country?
GEN. CLARK: Well, I think that's to be determined. And there were many of us who said, "Where is the imminence of the threat?" We never saw the -- I got people calling me up and they would say, "Well, now, look, don't you think the president might know something you don't know?" And I certainly hoped he did. But it was never revealed what the imminence of the threat was. And I think now that the operation's over, it's been successful, I think we do need to go back and look at this issue. But as I say, I'm not sure it can all be done in public. " --MEET THE PRESS
A few links for all my disenfranchised left-wing friends:
Top 10 Conservative Idiots
Liberal Slant
Altercation: according to this article, 22% of Americans believe Iraq used chemical/biological weapons... WTF??
Here's a brief overview of Leo Strauss and all the hubbub surrounding him with the rise of the "neocons" Bush Administration.
Transcript of a speech given by Arundhati Roy. Depressing; worth a read.
This guy is rather pissed about the whole Iraq liberation thing. I rather think he's more pissed than I am! A nice excerpt:
And of course the capacity to be outraged and appalled has been entirely drained out of you, out of this nation, replaced by raging ennui and sad resentment and the new fall season on NBC. This is what they're counting on. Your short attention span. WMDs? That's so, like, last February. Hey look, the swimsuit model won "Survivor"!
Bush has apparently succeeded in branding Democratic criticism of his tax cut proposal as "class warfare." Polls show that statements like these have helped to raise support for his tax cut by 10% in the last two weeks.
Bush took another preemptive strike yesterday during a speech in Albuquerque when he told a small-business audience, "Oh, you'll hear the talk about how this plan only helps the rich people. That's just typical Washington, D.C., political rhetoric, is what that is. That's just empty rhetoric."
As for whose rhetoric is empty, take a look at the numbers from the Brookings Insitution, hardly a bastion of left-wing ideologues:
Those same middle-income households would receive a tax cut of $452 and an income boost of 1.1 percent, while millionaires would receive a cut of $93,537, enough to increase their after-tax income by 4.4 percent.
So if you're a millionaire, you can buy a couple of Lexuses with your tax cut. If you're a middle-income household, then hip-hip-hooray! that's just over half a month's worth of housing for a family of four. That's money your family will barely notice.
Anyway, I suppose my point is this: if you want to cut taxes for ideological reasons--for example, because you dogmatically believe in trickle-down economics, or because you want to bankrupt the government in order to limit the scope of its responsibility--then be up front about it. It's too bad that a president who makes so much of personal morality is so intellectually dishonest.
Warriors return
blue waves of blood and glory -
Small man on big ship.
Fortune has an article about Donald Rumsfeld's silence over his former company ABB's contract to build nuclear reactors in North Korea, despite the loud and almost unanimous uproar raised by fellow Republicans at the time.
The problem, say a number of nuclear energy experts, is that it's possible, though difficult, to extract weapons-grade material from light-water reactors. "Reprocessing the stuff is not a big deal," says Victor Gilinsky, who has held senior posts at the Atomic Energy Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "You don't even need special equipment. The KEDO people ignore this. And we're still building the damn things."
Given the Republican outcry over the reactor deal, Rumsfeld's public silence is nearly deafening. "Almost any Republican was complaining about it," says Winston Lord, President Clinton's assistant secretary of state for East Asian/Pacific Affairs.
This speech by Alan Greenspan is a cogent and beautifully stated case for revisiting the fundamentals behind the current Intellectual Property insanity that is pitting sellers against customers and improving things for no one (except for IP lawyers and patent clerks).
George Lakoff has written a piece entitled "Metaphor and War". Although it makes excellent points regarding the fallacy of turning the thoughts and fates of millions of people into one easy-to-grok abstraction, it misrepresents some of the motivations for the original Gulf War as well as downplays the ongoing concern regarding Saddam throughout all the presidencies of the past 12 years. (Just because something isn't brought to the attention of the American people does not mean it is not on the government's radar.)
The Leader of the British House of Commons resigned today over differences with British commitment in the war against Iraq. This guy is quite eloquent.
Allow me a minor rant about the current administration. Here is a brief news article about Bush and Ari Fleischer citing a non-existant economic study that supports his tax cut proposal. And they wonder why we don't trust them?
At least Clinton had the shame to lie about something worth lying about, and the decency to later apologize and admit wrongdoing. But with Powell spinning webs of vagueness about Iraq and al-Qaeda, and Bush lying about his economic plan, and the administration doing underhanded things in general, what sort of confidence can the citizen have that the Right Thing is being done in critical areas like Homeland Security where there is even less press review?
This administration has sucked. It has been presented arguably one of the most unifying events in national history and it has turned it into a shameful display of politics and not even had the competence to cover its own lies. Rather than bringing people together in this time of crisis - a crisis which in many respects can only be defeated through strengthening the national character - the Bush administration has created nothing short of chaos. The economy is in ruins (with a frighteningly large number of the middle class out of work), the stock market is barely keeping from tanking again, the citizenry is afraid and those who have risen above the apathy can do nothing but bicker, and the rest of the world, allies and detractors alike, are finding themselves growing decreasingly sympathetic towards our cause.
That's because we have no cause. The administration has stated no purpose. The Bush White House and its satellite offices on either side of Capitol Hill steamroller through the fabric of international relations, domestic policy, Constitutional Law! with impunity and disdain. And, most alarmingly, with no visible person at the helm. Yes, Virginia, there is a captain, but he's nowhere to be seen (and that monkey at the wheel sure ain't it).
My regard for the antics of the presidency has sunk so low that I have become desensitized. I am starting to slip into the legions of the apathetic - not out of weariness, but out of horror.
The Weekly Standard has a nice editorial refuting all the stupid claims made by the "antiwar types":
These arguments are all very nice, except that they don't argue for why we should go to war. Saddam is a dictator. Saddam sucks. Saddam has bad weapons. OK. But what has changed between this year and last? And the year before?
If taking out Saddam is the next logical step in the war against terror, why doesn't Bush just say so (and not just say so, but offer some reasons as well)? Are there no more efficient purposes to which $9 billion/month could be spent in combating terrorism?
I have great confidence in the intelligence of our national leaders - in all branches of government - so I have no doubt there is some ultimate, coherent, logical reason why we are pursing Saddam at this critical juncture, at great political and monetary cost. I would just really appreciate it if someone explained that reason to me.
Every time we have war nowadays, there are people who oppose the war on the grounds that war is unjust, and there are people who oppose the war on the grounds that the particular war in question does not make sense. On our current Iraq issue, I am staunchly in the latter camp, and I am starting to become increasingly annoyed at "tree-hugging hippies" in the former camp that make me look like an idiot by association.
It's the difference between Kyle saying "Kick the Baby!", Wendy going "No! Don't kick the baby! Don't kick anything!" and Stan saying "Don't kick the baby, kick Cartman first!" I'm Stan, and the Wendys make me want to puke.
Here and here are two people responding to the anti-war crowd (the former variety).
The second entry (politburo.com) makes the following excellent point - and one which is not made nearly enough (I suspect primarily because the hawks that should be making it are typically conservative repeaters re-transmitting their Rush or Hannity):
a political cartoon link from Brad: boondocks