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.]
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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 fru