Spare Me the Ravers, But...

By Deborah Newell Tornello a.k.a. litbrit

Damn.  Just...damn.  Go read this (I've linked to Common Dreams, since the source article in Britain's The Independent seems to be, er, not available; the article was first published in The Independent, now with a working link):

My final argument - a clincher, in my view - is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything - militarily, politically diplomatically - it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?

Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim - as the Americans did two days ago - that al-Qa’ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. “We disrupted al-Qa’ida, causing them to run,” Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named “Operation Lightning Hammer” in Iraq’s Diyala province. “Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them.” And more of the same, all of it untrue.

Within hours, al-Qa’ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas - which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush’s more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.

But - here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It’s not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93’s debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I’m not talking about the crazed “research” of David Icke’s Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster - which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers - whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C - would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower - the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon [sic] Brothers Building) - which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering - very definitely not in the “raver” bracket - are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be “fraudulent or deceptive”.

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11.

What is to be done?

By Kathy G.

What are we going to do about these people?

By “these people” I mean the Bush administration. How are we as a nation going to come to terms with the crimes and abuses of this President and his cronies? You know, the illegal (by international standards) war they started. The torture. The spying on political enemies. The unlawful detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The lying to Congress. The criminal negligence during Katrina. The outing of an undercover intelligence agent for petty political revenge. The politically motivated firings of state attorneys general U.S. attorneys. The clearly unconstitutional claims of executive power. The corrupt deals with war profiteer contractors in Iraq. And on and on and on, the whole sickening mess.

One thing I feel certain we ought to do is to impeach this assclown ASAP. I see no political downside to that one whatsoever.

But beyond that, I’m stuck. Bush, Cheney et al. certainly ought to have their sorry asses hauled before an international tribunal and be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. But sadly -- na ga ha pen.

And have there ever been a President and Vice President more deserving of impeachment? But that probably won’t happen either, and I’m not sure it would even be politically productive. If successful, it would remove Bush and Cheney from office, which of course would be a blessing. But even impeachment and conviction would not necessarily establish a clear standard as to what are and are not acceptable actions by the chief executive. And what if, as seems likely, the effort to impeach failed?

I’m agnostic about the impeachment question (except for impeaching Gonzales, which to me is a no-brainer), but I believe it’s vital for the health of our democracy that Bush and company be held accountable in some meaningful way. Otherwise their behavior in office will set a horrible new precedent – “defining deviancy down” is the phrase, I believe. And next time out those sons of bitches will push the boundaries even further.

We’ve seen it happen in our lifetime. Every two-term Republican President we’ve had from Nixon on has provoked a constitutional crisis: Watergate, Iran-contra, and now the Bush scandals. We seem to have learned nothing from any of these crises – except that the Republicans have learned to be a lot smarter about covering up their crimes. Worse, you see the same people who were discredited in previous Republican criminal regimes coming back again and again. Karl Rove, for example, got his start as a teenage dirty trickster during the Nixon administration. Even people like John Poindexter and Elliot Abrams, who were convicted of crimes connected to the Iran-contra scandal, came back to serve in high-level positions in the Bush administration!

That is seriously fucked up. And I’m sickened by the idea of these bastards once again getting away with it. It reminds me of the lines from that great Watergate-era Bob Dylan song, “Hurricane” – “All the criminals in their coats and their ties / Are free to drink martinis, and watch the sun rise.” Jesus, what a bitter and depressing image. But you just know it’s going to happen.

And the Democrats, unfortunately, are not helping things. They haven’t exactly been profiles in courage on this issue, and that’s putting it mildly. I haven’t heard a single major Democratic presidential candidate even acknowledge that the Bush regime has provoked a constitutional crisis and that we need to find a way to resolve it. They seem as if they just desperately want this problem to disappear.

There is, however, an alternative to head-in-the-sand denial on the one hand, and impeachment on the other. In a post from a few weeks back that did not get nearly the attention it deserved, Mark Schmitt made a novel suggestion as to how we should deal with this mess: transitional justice, a process that would be modeled on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Tribunal. He explains:

A post-Bush Truth Commission would have as its goal to discover as much as possible about the full range of conduct during the recent period, not only violations of law but other practices that had the effect of impeding democracy, and making recommendations about preventing them in the future, which might include everything from constitutional amendment to changes in oversight to suggestions for the press. The idea would be to find the boundaries within which democracy can work – lines which should not be crossed. The commission would not be empowered to indict anybody, but should be delegated subpoena power (this is legally complicated) along with a limited power to grant immunity to witnesses, as well as a complete commitment of cooperation from the next administration.

As they say, read the whole thing.

What do you all think? I’d be especially interested in hearing from anyone who has knowledge of or experience with transitional justice processes. What are the strengths and weaknesses of such a system? Would it be a good fit for the crimes and abuses of the Bush administration? What would the obstacles be to setting up such a commission and making sure it would be effective?

I’m dead serious about this. This is one of the most important conversations that those of us who care about the future of our democracy could be having.

I Was Wrong

Alright, unpleasant post to write, but I was wrong: The Bush administration's health plan is a trap. I'd counsel Democrats to oppose it, but that'll hardly be necessary. The surprising outcome would be if they even notice it. And this comes, I hasten to underscore, from someone who was willing, eager even, to give the Bush administration a chance, to believe the Democratic majority had spurred them towards more pragmatic, constructive policy-making. Fool me once...

What the early reports either didn't make clear or didn't know was that the plan's changes to health care deductibility don't set limits, they're creating, instead, a standard deduction of $7,500 for individuals and $15,000 for families. My initial understanding was that those were caps: Above them, you couldn't deduct anything further. Below them, you simply deducted what you spent. That was incorrect. Instead, everyone will get precisely those deductions no matter what they spend. If you're 23 and your health care costs $2,000 a year, you still deduct $7,500, pocketing the difference. It would, in that situation, be economically foolish of you to purchase high quality, comprehensive coverage. And that goes all the way up the line. The intent here is clear: To incentivize the purchase of low-quality, high-deductible care, particularly among the healthy, young, and/or rich. To degrade the risk pool, and encourage HSAs. To reduce coverage, costs, and health security.

It's almost laughably wrongheaded, and won't survive an instant in Congress. Pete Stark, chair of the House Health Subcommittee, has already dismissed the idea of hearings. Other Democrats, I expect, will react much the same. Bush is responding to America's fears of high health costs, inadequate coverage, and increased risks with a proposal that promises to further weaken their coverage, heighten their risk and, when they get sick, increase their costs. It's a wonder he's even bothering. As for me, I made the mistake of extending good-faith to an administration that, time and again, has proven it deserves none. The optimist in me has been grounded for a week, and won't get dessert for two.

Also at Tapped

New Day, New Poll

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Yesterday, lots of my fellow bloggers were getting nervous about the Washington Post poll that showed 63-35 support for the NSA spying program.  Today's a happier day, with a poll out from Newsweek that has Americans opposing the program 53-41.  Americans' minds still aren't made up on this issue, and while I'm concerned by the fact that the Republican sound-bite ("We need this to save your life from terrorists!") is much more easily transmitted by the media than our arguments, nobody should rely too heavily on yesterday's numbers. 

Another result from the poll (copied by Atrios), shows John Edwards' favorability rating towering over the other Democrats.  His 49% favorables and 24% unfavorables put him at +25, while Hillary stands at +11, Dean at -3, Gore at +6, Ted Kennedy at -2, and Kerry at +9. 

Spying is Juicy, Legality is Dry

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

I agreed with Nicholas when he said that the warrantless wiretapping scandal isn't the thing to run on, and I think the headline of this article -- "Feingold Wants Bush Censured for Spying" -- shows part of the reason why.  The word "warrant" doesn't appear once in the entire text of the article, and the legal issues driving the case for censure are largely obscured. 

The real problem isn't just that Bush was eavesdropping.  Most people don't mind eavesdropping, if you follow the law and get a warrant.  The real problem is that Bush was eavesdropping without following the law and getting a warrant.  Illegal behavior of this kind is something that most people oppose.  But since spying is much juicier than mere matters of legality, the media will pitch the debate as one about spying.

Perhaps a legal case for impeachment could be built out of the warrantless wiretapping scandal.  But especially given the media coverage we're likely to get, other things are far more likely to move public opinion. 

Who's Leaking Now?

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Via Pam of Pandagon, here's the first picture of Cheney's shooting victim!

Let's Talk About Watergate

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

The mainstream Democratic position -- and my position -- on the NSA scandal is that wiretapping people reasonably suspected of terrorism is a good thing, but that (1) There needs to be oversight so that the President isn't misusing his power and (2) Bush broke the law in not going through the super-easy FISA court that can even give a retroactive warrant.  So if one of our readers happens to be charged with brewing up the official list of Democratic talking points, let me ask you to make some explicit or implicit mention of Watergate. I'm guessing that "We want Bush to wiretap terrorists too -- we just want somebody to make sure he isn't bugging our headquarters" will seem reasonable to ordinary folks.  After all, a recent and reviled Republican president did try something like that.  It allows us to segue into how easy we made the oversight procedures and how Bush didn't follow them anyway, and it would do wonders in clearing up an issue where confusion (as exemplified in the awful poll question from a week ago) is rampant.  It also sets us up pretty nicely in case he did send the spies to snoop on some Democrats. 

Tax and Spend Republicans

As the Carpetbagger notes, the tax plan floated by Bush's reform commission isn't getting half the fire from Democrats that it's getting from Republicans. It's like a level of Contra over there. And not one of those early, wimpy levels, we're talking scattershots and screen slowdown and epileptic seizures from all the tiny balls of death darting across the screen.

Ahem.

We've yet to see what the official document says, and we've no idea what Bush's ultimate recommendations will be, but assuming the President remains in the neighborhood of his commission's report, we're looking at a crack-up that splits right down the center of the conservative coalition. Taxes are the lifeblood of modern conservatism, this is Howard Jarvis stuff. You can't have apostasy there. And post-Miers, if Bush tries, the disappointment and head-shaking sadness we're seeing from Kristol and Frum will give way to a primal scream and war paint from the more, uh, energetic members of the conservative coalition.

Mystery Pollster, today, argued that Bush's numbers really can't fall further till his base deserts him. On Miers, that wasn't happening. But Miers is an elite issue, a disappointment in the upper echelons of the Republican punditocracy -- the base has remained fairly trusting on her. But if the President tells them he's about to take their health and home deductions and the antitax coalition tells them they're getting screwed, that'll change real quick.

Generally, when you need your base, you pander to them. Whether it's incidental or intentional, Bush seems to have gone in the other direction. That's making for better policy, to be sure, but it's putting the Republican coalition in real danger. It's like having my cake and eating it too.

The Impulse Towards Hackery

Daniel Gross on the hunt for the next Fed chairman:

the biggest danger for Bush is not that the next Fed chairman will be lax when it comes to fighting inflation. It's that he will use his Congressional testimony or his public speeches to speak honestly about the implications of the fiscal policy, to note that the pledges to reduce deficits and make tax cuts permanent are mutually exclusive, or to argue that the stock market can't magically cure Social Security's long-term imbalance.

Thus considered, it behooves Bush to choose the candidate least likely to speak out. Someone who, when push comes to shove, will go with partisan instincts over academic leanings and whose willingness to speak truth to power goes only so far.
[...]
If you're Bush, you need someone who has a first-rate economic mind but the soul of a political hack. You need someone who was intimately involved in the selling of the fiscal policy in the first place and who will go to great lengths to defend it. You need someone who can argue in a textbook that deficits influence interest rates and then argue as a White House adviser that they don't—and still maintain an academic reputation. You need someone who campaigned hard for you in 2004. In other words, you need the guy Chris Suellentrop dubbed a "first-rate economist, tax-cut champion, presidential Yes Man." President Bush, you need Glenn Hubbard.

Comforting, no?

Bleeding-Heart Bush

Some days, you look at our government run by plutocrats, our media populated by faux-centrist hacks, and our agencies led by college-era cronies of campaign contributors and liberalism really does look dead. And then, some days you hear the President's animatronic press secretary justifying union-busting on grounds of affirmative action and you realize, no, it's not dead, it just went to a Republican kegger and ended up really, really, cracked out:

MR. McCLELLAN: The Davis-Bacon. Well, what --
Q Which is a wage cut.
MR. McCLELLAN: We suspended that act for the reasons that we stated previously. This will open up access to more business -- small businesses, including women-owned and minority-owned businesses. It cuts through the red tape and helps us move forward quickly to address the needs of the people in the region and to provide substantial savings. We're talking about savings here in terms of spending. That's an important part of that, too.
Q But how does lowering people's wages help with rebuilding the economy?
[...]
Q Was it a good idea?
MR. McCLELLAN: We actually talked about this last week. You might want to look back. Claude Allen briefed on this and talked about our position on this and why this was another important area to cut through some of the red tape that prevents us from moving forward as quickly as possible. And it opens it up to more people, so that women-owned and minority-owned businesses can participate more fully in that, as well.

What this country needs is the suspension and eventual repeal of all laws that impede affirmative action in federal contracting! So glad the Bush administration, after filing contrary brief in the Michigan cases, has flipped their position. I guess when you end up on the right side, being against the policy before being for it is no great crime.

Now With 50% More Cronyness!

This piece by Noam Scheiber on Bush's extended cronyism makes a very good point:

It's the second kind of cronyism--call it "outer-circle cronyism"--that's truly destructive. The focus here isn't so much on handing out jobs to dubiously qualified friends and associates--that is, to one's own cronies. It's on handing out jobs to cronies of cronies, which increases the scale of the cronyism exponentially.

He goes on to list examples, which you should go on to read. But rather than recondemning Bush for Michael Brown, fun as that may be, the point to be made here is different. Brown's appointment and Bush's cronyism shouldn't surprise, they should be expected, and the fact that so many are gaping in open-mouthed awe at Bush's cavalier attitude towards appointments just shows that America has some serious dissonance between what they elect and who they think they're voting for.

Assume you have a hostile relationship with a corporation. You've long railed against their inefficiency, their waste, their very legitimacy as an institution dedicated to doing whatever it is they may do. And then, one day, they hire you as CEO.

Huh.

How're you going to staff the place? You're entering an enemy nest, a lion's den you've long derided. You going to begin filling spots with career professionals from this institution you don't respect and have spent much of your career antagonizing? Or are you going to first install your guys, and then, when you run out of them, let them start installing their guys?

It'll be the latter, because you need to make this company your company, and you can't do that with the same folks you've spent the last few years inveighing against. So it may not even have anything to do with cronyism, but rather a fear, a discomfort with the federal bureaucracy, which many Republicans assume to be liberal, and a desire to make sure the (mostly) guys heading up your agencies are their to institute your vision for government, not the agency's vision for itself. And since your vision of government is almost certain to be destructive towards their agency, you're probably right.

This is, again, what happens when you ask folks who don't like government to head up government. And there's a point where it stops being their fault and starts being ours. To quote the aphorism Bush famously mangled, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

All The President's Men

And the scandals come marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah...

A senior White House budget official who resigned abruptly last week was arrested Monday on charges of lying to investigators and obstructing a federal inquiry involving Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist who has been under scrutiny by the Justice Department for more than a year.

The arrest of the official, David H. Safavian, head of procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget, was the first to result from the wide-ranging corruption investigation of Mr. Abramoff, once among the most powerful and best-paid lobbyists in Washington and a close friend of Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader.
[...]
The F.B.I. affidavit, which was dated Friday and made public on Monday, said that Mr. Safavian had provided extensive, secret assistance to Mr. Abramoff in 2002, when the lobbyist wanted help on behalf of a client to arrange a lease on favorable terms for the Old Post Office Building, which was controlled by the General Services Administration. The affidavit said the client was one of several Indian tribes that Mr. Abramoff has represented.

But that's not my favorite part. No, not even close. This, this is my favorite part:

Mr. Safavian had recently been working on developing contracting policies for the multibillion-dollar relief effort after Hurricane Katrina.

While we're on the subject of wholly corrupt officials running massive reconstruction projects, I would like to save The Note the trouble and, here and now, publicly rebuke myself for questioning Mr. Safavian's fitness to oversee the contracting policies for Katrina's rebuilding. He is, after all, a career professional with extensive experience in steering public assets and money towards well-connected, politically helpful friends. He's perfect for the job!

Budget Tragedies, Budget Statistics

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

As Democrats know and Republicans try to forget, this Administration has turned the record budget surpluses of the late 1990s into unprecedented budget deficits. We've gone from a surplus of $236 billion in 2000 to a $412 billion deficit in 2004. Among the causes are tax cuts, the Iraq War, corporate welfare, and general mismanagement.

The Bush Administration hasn't paid any serious political price for its fiscal nihilism. When there's a war on, nobody can be brought to care about bloodless matters like deficits. Furthermore, there's a level at which you pay no additional political price for pushing the deficits higher. You'll have the fiscal conservatives (all five of them, perhaps!) against you with the same intensity whether you run deficits of $112 billion or $412 billion. So once you've stuck yourself with deficits, there's no reason not to let them run out of control.

Trailer Sweet Trailer

By Pepper

In his big Katrina speech, it looked like George II would pull a magic trick and fade his blue torso right into a blue background. But it seems like he really does want to whip up a magic trick by rebuilding the Gulf Coast into a bigger, better place without having to pay for it.

Bush and economics have had an uneasy relationship. Now, the nation has three choices when it comes to paying for the Katrina disaster: 1. Raise taxes; 2. Go into increased debt; or 3. Do the job on the cheap. Bush has clearly does not like the first option and is in denial regarding the second: "[Rebuilding is] going to mean that we're going to have to make sure we cut unnecessary spending. It's going to mean we've got to maintain economic growth, and therefore we should not raise taxes."

Therefore, the third option is the way to go for Bush and Co. And the solution is the trailer park, for why have a home when you can have a trailer?

The LA Times writes:

FEMA is barreling ahead with plans to create huge trailer-park cities — complete with schools and security. "This may not be on the scale of building the pyramids, but it's close," said Brad Gair, FEMA's disaster-area housing chief.

As many as 200,000 people — most of them in Louisiana — would be housed in the giant trailer parks for up to five years. The sites, scattered around the state, would vary in size from 5,000 to 25,000 people. About 6,000 FEMA-owned trailers are in Louisiana, and hundreds more are arriving daily, Gair said. In the next few days, FEMA plans to break ground on a 15,000-unit trailer city in the Baton Rouge area, and evacuees could start moving in within 10 days.

Trailers - quick and cheap! Bush even made the trailer shipment a focal point of his Big Katrina Speech. Those evacuees will have "homes" in no time, complete with "Trailer Sweet Trailer" cross-stitches on the walls!

Some are having second thoughts about this trailer business. Last night's "Washington Week" panel was horrified at the prospect, labeling the tent/trailer cities "Hoovervilles" and calling them "a social disaster waiting to happen."

No, that's not because journalists have an aversion to the trailer park. But the trailer-park solution smacks of "let's just put them somewhere" instead of sitting down and thinking out a long-term solution to the problem. And a trailer is decidedly NOT long-term housing. And doesn't it strike anyone as odd that, after a region has been destroyed by a natural disaster, the administration seeks to replace evacuee homes with even more vulnerable trailers? (Insert jokes about trailers and tornados here.)

Coming Soon to a Board of Directors Near You

CNN's saying Mike Brown's resigned and stressing that he wasn't fired.

Get that? He experienced a sudden, overwhelming, and totally random desire to spend more time with the horses. Bush is not admitting that his political patronage contributed to a massive disaster.

I have to admit, I don't understand the Bush administration's peculiar resistance to firing folks. Wouldn't the axing of Brown make Bush look decisive, in charge, willing to hold underlings accountable, aware of how poor a job FEMA had done? I know the Bushies are severely allergic to the slightest whiff of admitting fault, but you'd think they'd swallow that for short-term political gain. Weird place to pile your principles.

The Calmer In Chief

By Ezra

I don't even know what to say about this one:

Bush does not appear to tap sources deep inside his government for information, the way his father or Bill Clinton did, preferring to get reports through channels. A highly screened information chain is fine when everything is going well, but in a crisis it can hinder. Louisiana officials say it took hours for Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco to reach Bush (although when she did, he talked to her soothingly, according to White House officials).

So White House officials thought it important to note that when the hysterical, emotional woman finally reached her emotionally distant president, he had the presence of mind to speak in "soothing" tones to her. Whew. I'm so glad that though FEMA fumbled and the National Guard was indisposed and Michael Chertoff was asleep on the job, Bush was in full control of his vocal modulation, and able to effectively deploy it against Mrs. Blanco's overwrought screeching.

Royal Family, Part I: The Brits

By Pepper

Americans, particularly the middle classes, have always had a certain fondness for British royalty.

We love them so much that we put them on our magazine covers, celebrate their second marriages on the cable-news channels, and worry about the state of society if they dress in offensive costumes.

We love Diana so much that Houston has devoted an entire exhibit to her - at their Museum of Natural Science.

We love the royals so much that some Americans felt we had to have a royal family of our own. And we've got one - right down to a president who has ears exactly like Charles'.

(Wondering why we let this happen after the jump ...)

Driftglass and Jurassic Pork have scathingly brilliant descriptions of the upper crust that we have allowed to form on our American Pie. They eloquently describe the ignorant cruelties of our overprivileged leaders.

Why have we let this happen? How did we wind up with a royal court? (I've been calling them the Court of George II for some time.) Why weren't we satisfied with ordering commemorative 'People's Princess' plates from the Franklin Mint?

I think that in some instances we want to be them. In all of us is the dream and desire to be successful without working for it. Why else are game shows and lotteries so popular? Why is the story of Lana Turner being discovered at the soda fountain still passed down from generation to generation? Royalty is the ultimate example of those who were lucky enough to be born with all the world's riches at their fingertips. We want our leaders to be successful precisely because they didn't have to work for it.

If you had to work for success, like Clinton did, like Carter did, like John Edwards did, that success is somehow tainted. Working for something isolates you because your achievement is more yours. Hard work indicates its limits. Royalty indicates endless possibility. It is an achievement that you can't really share with the people.

These leaders might have respect, but they don't have mystique, the type of glamour or luck that might rub off on the proles.

How Do They Sleep At Night?

You've probably heard this quote already, but Barbara Bush went on NPR tonight and really let one rip:

"What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality...And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."

Haha! The girls at the club must've loved that one! Barbara Bush is, as she's always been, a crack-up. But that should be assumed. This, after all, is brought to you by much of the same genetic material that went searching for promised WMD's under furniture to entertain journalists at a comedy dinner. I don't much remember Clinton using Waco as fodder for a laugh-in, but maybe I just missed it. The overwhelmed and under-armed have long had gallows humor, and now, it seems, the overcomfortable and underaffected have executioner's grins.

But I'm being too uncharitable. I'm glad Momma Dubbya unhinged her jaw and let that one slip. In humor there's truth, and considering all the bullshit obfuscating everything else this clan says, I'm grateful for every weakened, beaten bit of honesty that darts out. For this family, the poor exist in a fixed-state. They are what they are, and social policy should accept them as is. That's why blacks dying early doesn't require an initiative against blacks dying early, it's a potential wedge to aid social security privatization. And it's why Louisiana's poor, who were stranded and drowned because they lacked the resources to flee, merit nothing more than a crack at their living conditions. The poor aren't to be helped because they aren't to be changed, they just are, little bits of interstellar flotsam flitting through Barbara Bush's brilliant galaxy. A good person, a person with a bare minimum of empathy, would be appalled that Americans were satisfied being exiled to an overcrowded stadium. A person with a direct line to a son in Oval Office would beg their child to make it stop.

Barbara Bush joked about it on NPR.

The Nature of the Mission

Neil the Ethical Werewolf

In an email to his weekend blogging team, Ezra asked the following:

I'm interested in the idea that, if Bush asked for sacrifice, a one time tax increase, a something -- if he said he and his VP and his cabinet would lead it by foregoing salaries for the year -- his numbers would skyrocket. Why, then, doesn't he do that? Why is this admin so allergic to sacrifice, to tax increases, to all of it? I don't think it's ideology -- they're more craven, and have proved themselves to willing to contradict conviction for that. So what is it? Just an ethical failure?

There's a bunch of things to say here. The first is that once you've given over your soul to fiscal nihilism, you're not going to see any need for tax revenue of any kind to deal with the problem. More deficit spending will work just fine. In fact, if you're clever enough, you might be able to use Katrina as political cover for extra tax cuts, just like you used 9/11 to cover the tax cuts earlier in your presidency. When the higher deficit numbers come in, you just shrug and say "Of course the deficit is higher -- we got hit by a monster hurricane that reduced revenue and made us spend money!" It won't matter that your tax cuts are an even bigger source of the problem. Democrats will call you out on it and some people will be wise to the game, but the media will give it the usual lazy he said / she said coverage, and foolable people will be fooled.

The second thing to say is that the core principle of this Administration is that wealth must be redistributed towards today's rich people and large corporations. When have we ever seen the White House compromise on this principle? Every year brings a new tax cut, and where tax cuts are hard to do, there are increased corporate giveaways. The only time you'd see this Administration suggest a tax increase is if it was somehow useful in getting bigger tax cuts somewhere down the road. Maybe in the first term, if there was some tax that most Americans wanted to raise, Bush would've raised it to gain political support, so that he could win re-election and cut taxes more. But this situation comes from a possible world that we do not inhabit.

(My personal theory of the biggest motivation behind the Iraq war is that it was a big political stunt aimed at making Bush look war-heroic in time for re-election, so that people would be distracted from the bad economy and the failure to capture Osama. Sure, Wolfowitz got his neocon fantasy, Rumsfeld got a chance to swing with his light army, Cheney got pork for his Halliburton buddies, and Bush got to pound on Saddam, but Rove and the Mayberry Machiavellis who really control the White House wanted the domestic political advantages of war. In other words, the whole affair was instrumental to a deeper goal -- keeping Bush in office so that he could keep redistributing wealth up the income scale. Sure, it sounds like a freakishly expensive way to attain that goal, but once you're a fiscal nihilist who's capable of enormous wishful thinking about what will happen in Iraq, you don't really care.)

[Update]: As I look over Ezra's question more, it seems that I've addressed it the wrong way. He's asking why the Administration doesn't chase the political benefits of a shared-sacrifice tax increase. I suppose I have to say that I don't think the poll bounce for the Administration would be that high. As long as the suffering people are on TV and everyone agrees that the inital response to Katrina was woefully incompetent, Bush is in trouble. Calls for shared sacrifice, especially a somewhat disconnected sort of sacrifice involving extra revenue going into the Treasury, aren't going to help that much.

Incompetence 2.0

By Pepper

The terror in NOLA has taken incompetence to a new level. First, the response to the disaster is pathetically slow, and, second, the levees and pumps weren't strong enough to withstand a hurricane in the first place.

Incompetence is the weak backbone of this story. If the levees hadn't burst, the damage would be significant, but not catastrophic. What went wrong? TPM Cafe has some answers, but there's a grand old tradition of shabby engineering in America. In a passage I've had highlighted for years, Paul Fussell writes,

The American achievement [in engineering] - I know it's bad taste to mention this - is the Challenger, brought to you by faulty manufacture, inept and dishonest quality control, and lying and evasion for the sake of big bucks.

Fussell continues: Bad design and construction, in fact, appear to the rest of the world to be something like American specialities. Recently the Army Corps of Engineers inspected almost 4,000 dams - those considered most in danger of coming apart. Of those, 988 proved "unsafe" and 58 "urgently unsafe" - that is, move if you don't live near one.

Fussell wrote this in 1991. Substitute New Orleans for the Challenger and levees for dams.

And then, after the levee broke, no one came.

I think of Doghouse Riley, who has socked it to the administration like no other in the past few days:

Bush lands in Mobile (more on that in a moment) and MSNBC chooses that oportunity to put up an elapsed time counter ( "4 Days 4 Hours 38 Minutes") on the right hand side of the screen. Somebody there has been paying attention and has a sense of humor I'd never seen in evidence before.

The waves of incompetence continue to wash over us, even after the president has gifted the Gulf Coast with his presence. Last night, "Nightline" focused on a group of people who had been evacuated from their rooftops and taken to an interstate underpass. They were left there. The camera crew showed people desperate and dehydrated, living in their own feces. Hardly a rescue.

One woman invited George W. Bush to sleep with them at the underpass. Then the camera crew found out that buses, buses that could have taken these people elsewhere, anywhere, were idling 15 MILES AWAY. And they had no plans to head to that underpass.

Koppel had on a representative from Baton Rouge who was complaining about the lack of emergency response. And you know what Koppel said?

"They're waiting to be asked!"

Excuse me? Koppel, is your head up your butt? WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED? This is red tape and bureaucracy in its worst form. This is the "big government" that the Republicans supposedly despise. (Hat tip to Nicholas writing on the same theme!) But, if its poor black people, then "big government" is in full effect. Kanye West is right. Shoot, even David Brooks, who can find the silver lining in anything this administration does, is disgusted. He said on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer":

I think it is a huge reaction we are about to see. I mean, first of all, they violated the social fabric, which is in the moments of crisis you take care of the poor first. That didn't happen; it's like leaving wounded on the battlefield. So there is just -- in 9/11 you had a great surge of public confidence. Now I think we are going to see a great decline in public confidence in our institutions. And so I just think this is sort of the anti-9/11 as one of the bloggers wrote.

I don't want to play the blame game and distract from the people who are stranded on their rooftops or who are trying to survive in a lawless state. But this incident doesn't mean that the USA is immune from natural disasters from now on, and it is time for the nation to take a cold, hard, realistic look at how we can handle these incidents in the future. This incompetence cannot be tolerated anymore.

On the bright side, people are mobilizing from far away. Poverty Barn is calling for donations of toiletries for the evacuees in Houston. (San Francisco bloggers are called on to drop off donations.) Feministe is calling for toys. Wherever you are, do something because no one else is, or, as Doghouse Riley and MSNBC reminded me, they're getting started four days late. What are you guys doing to help? Post in the comments, fill the glass, make it a little over half full.

Cross-posted at the Daily Pepper

I'm Beginning to Believe the Bush Administration Suffers From a Paucity of Imagination

Remember this?

On May 16, Rice held a press briefing; she insisted that no one could have envisioned the events of September 11. “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people…would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile,” Rice said.

And how we later learned this, from Bob Woodward and Dan Eggan?

But a 1999 report prepared for the National Intelligence Council, an affiliate of the CIA, warned that terrorists associated with bin Laden might hijack an airplane and crash it into the Pentagon, White House or CIA headquarters.

The report recounts well-known case studies of similar plots, including a 1995 plan by al Qaeda operatives to hijack and crash a dozen U.S. airliners in the South Pacific and pilot a light aircraft into Langley.

And now we have George Bush, on this morning's GMA:

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

But hey, funny thing:

In the event of a slow-moving Category 4 or Category 5 hurricane (with winds up to or exceeding 155 miles per hour), it's possible that only those crow's nests would remain above the water level. Such a storm, plowing over the lake, could generate a 20-foot surge that would easily overwhelm the levees of New Orleans, which only protect against a hybrid Category 2 or Category 3 storm (with winds up to about 110 miles per hour and a storm surge up to 12 feet).

This Administration needs a better imagination.

Another One Bites the Dust

You know, the most surprising thing about this is that it took so long:

The top Food and Drug Administration official in charge of women's health issues resigned today in protest against the agency's decision last week to further delay a final ruling on the whether the emergency contraceptive "morning-after pill" should be made more easily accessible.

Susan F. Wood, assistant FDA commissioner for women's health and director of the Office of Women's Health, said she was leaving her position after five years because Commissioner Lester Crawford's decision on Friday amounted to unwarranted interference in agency decision-making.

"I can no longer serve as staff when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended for approval by the professional staff here, has been overuled," she wrote in an e-mail to her staff and FDA colleagues.

This is not a good work situation for professionals. As Chris Mooney lovingly documents in his impressive new book, "The Republican War on Science", the Bush administration's attitude towards expert testimony mirrors their feelings towards protesters outside Bush's ranch. The only difference seems to be that Republicans can't understand why they let these reality-based naysayers into the building. Never mind, though, they're doing an excellent job driving such people out of the administration. Paul O'Neill couldn't take the deficit fantasies, Richard Clarke couldn't countenance the Iraq fictions, and much has been written on the veritable exodus of State Department officials and intelligence agents who decided that this would be an excellent time to explore fly-fishing. And now Susan Wood is out, another disillusioned expert whose testimony fell on bemused ears. Soon Karen Hughes will start her job, and anyone who thinks Bush appoint a seven foot tall white woman to aid our public face in the Islamic world should think about renewing their subscription to "Bridge Investments Quarterly". She's going to clean out State, long the Bush administration bureaucratic bete noire.

There's always the argument that these folks should hold on, that Woods should keep fighting and Clarke should keep pushing -- without them, who's left fighting the good fight? But the truth is, it doesn't much matter who's fighting the good fight if the American people aren't watching and the victories aren't coming. I hope Woods enjoys her next project -- God knows it'll bear more fruit than her last one.

Government By Babes

The LA Times throws a roundhouse of an editorial at John Bolton's first weeks fucking up the UN on the job. The consensus? Getting things done means gumming things up. The way to reduce bureaucracy is to paralyze it in proposed amendments. The way to encourage reform is to derail the process.

Now if that don't just tug on your mustache hairs!

But Bolton's small fries, always has been. Appointing that walrus Ambassador to the United Nations was the Bush administration symbolically ascending to the top of Mt. International Community and pushing a shopping cart full of crap down it. What falls out is what they put in. Blaming Bolton is like condemning the shopping cart. It was the kids who loaded it up with arrogance, hypocrisy, self-contradiction, incompetence, ineffectiveness, and ignorance before sending it careening down the incline. They deserve the blame. But will they get it?

No. They never do. The Bush administration is the Enron of political organizations. A teetering pile of plausible deniability, front politicians, and diversions. Rove keeps George's hands clean, Cheney gets the rap of plutocratic grand vizier, Rumsfeld gets the blame for Iraq, Bolton is a loose cannon someone must've accidentally wheeled into the UN, DeLay is the theocrat, and so on and so forth. The bucks stop nowhere, they just twirl and dance in the wind, a bit of inadvertent political performance art. And there's George, an oasis of ignorance in a maelstrom of incompetence. Past administrations have dodged accountability, this one's made it into a zen art.

Republicans run on an ethic of honesty and responsibility, moral values and macho heuristics. But like most tough teenagers, they travel in posses and pick fights in packs. "Who hit you?" "I don't know, there were a lot of guys!" But Karl says it wasn't him, and Don says he didn't do it, and Dick claims he was at his grandmother's, and everyone agrees George has been a pacifist since time immemorial...

But Kerry's still beat, the government's still broke, Iraq is still fucked, the corporations are still served, the UN's still broke, the theocrats still believe, and the country is still a mess. Only problem? There's no one to blame. Bush was clearly mountain biking that day and Gingrich says it's liberal judges and DeLay says it's liberal congressmen and Rush blames the liberal media and it's all very confusing, I think I'll watch Friends.

Republicans have created government by static. They've learned that simply throwing enough crap into the media stream will cloud the water, and if people can't see anything, they'll stop looking. So blame is diffuse, stonewalls are everywhere, and everyone makes sure the figurehead looks innocent, and ignorant, as a newborn babe.

And so he does. And so he does...

Might As Well Just Scrap the Thing

District Judge Rosemary M. Collyers just exploded the union-busting new workplace rules the Bush administration attached onto the Dept. of Homeland Security. She said they left unions bargaining on quicksand, tied to a set of contracts and agreements the Bush administration could change at any time. She said that a contract that is not mutually binding is not a contract. She said the new scheme is illegal, and the Bush administration can't just contravene settled law because it wants to.

Wait, has anyone told that to the President!? (yuk, yuk, yuk)

But Bush and Rove don't care whether these worker rules are thrown out, they never gave a damn about firing flexibility anyway. The genesis of the new regulations was political: Joe Lieberman thought up this popular new department, George W. Bush stood in unpopular opposition for seven months, the 2002 midterm elections loomed, Rove decided to flip their position, they realized this was the sort of killer issue that they should put Democrats (most all of whom supported the Lieberman proposal) on the wrong side of, and so they concocted a new set of worker rules so blatantly offensive, and in fact illegal, that Democrats couldn't support the bill. That's how they beat us.

So Republicans won the 2002 midterm on the back of a cynical poison pill so vile it was just ruled illegal. Their mothers must be very proud. And now the Department of Homeland Security is going to have to remake its worker regulations from scratch: an endeavor that'll no doubt take time, manpower, and attention away from more pressing matters of, you know, homeland security. But then, Bush never wanted the DHS. He wanted victory in the 2002 midterms. And from that perspective, both the DHS and the illegal worker codes succeeded wildly. What they do now isn't really his concern.

Worse Than Good

I think Cindy Sheehan is proof that the White House's much-vaunted political operation isn't an ounce as savvy as we've been led to believe. If these guys were smart, they wouldn't let the grieving mother of an Iraq veteran camp out in a tent at the Crawford gates while fielding a thousand media interviews; it's a public relations disaster. They'd have gotten her cold drinks, a hotel room, and promised a meeting two days hence. Then they'd have had some freed Iraqis whose children Saddam had tortured and murdered as punishment for chewing bubble gum fly out. The Iraqi parents would be immediately shuttled to CIndy where, with quivering voices and many tears, they'd try to tell her that her son died so others could live, that her son died so others could live free.

But no, this stubborn group is just letting her roast in the Texas son, furious that the woman would dare invade Bush's vacation sanctum and try to force him into feeling personal pain over the loss of her son. Whether they judge her right or wrong, common sense would dictate they get her inside and away from cameras. But common sense is routinely trounced by Bush's truculence, and, in this case, political savvy got knocked out right along with it.

Where To Now?

This Business Week editorial is about the best thing I've yet read on Bush's upcoming tax reform (italics mine):

one of the mandates President Bush gave to the tax panel was that its recommendations should raise about the same $2 trillion that the feds currently collect annually. That means any changes will shift, not lift, the tax burden. So there will be winners and losers aplenty. Should we eliminate all taxes on capital assets like stocks or bonds, stimulating investment but giving the wealthy a windfall? Will Americans accept an easy-to-understand flat tax or consumption levy if the cost is the end of deductions for state and local taxes or home mortgage interest? And which business taxes may have to be increased by $600 billion over the next decade so the unpopular alternative minimum tax for individuals can be eliminated?

Such tough choices are sure to elicit howls of protest from the public and business, each eager to protect existing tax preferences. That's why the Bush Administration should be preparing a fallback plan of less ambitious tweaks to the current system, such as partial AMT relief, and moves to improve tax fairness, such as tilting savings incentives more toward lower-income groups. The Treasury should also launch a big effort toward tax simplification. There are myriad confusing, often overlapping tax policies -- for instance, there are currently more than a dozen tax-advantaged savings incentives -- so simply bringing some order to them would go a long way toward making Apr. 15 easier to stomach.

Ideologues will surely call this small thinking that misses an opportunity to impose some much-needed discipline on our runaway federal budget. But tax policy shouldn't be used as a backdoor means to effectively starve government. If Americans want smaller government, they should demand that their elected officials show fiscal discipline and curb spending. Taxes then can easily be lowered.

I'm a bit confused as to where he wants to go with this. Clearly, given the timing, Republicans want to focus the 2006 election on taxes, their strongest issue. But how? Assuming Bush really does pick from the menu his commission offers, all choices will be revenue-neutral. That means, as Business Week says, that he can shift the burden, but not change it. We know he's not going to ask the rich to shoulder more nor push it on the back of corporations, so where does it go, the middle class? If he eliminates loopholes in a simplification effort, won't he have have to raise tax rates? If he endorses a consumption scheme, won't he be slaughtered over the 20%-30% sales tax it'd mandate? Won't tiny changes be too small to act as an effective issue in 2006?

He could, of course, ignore his commission, but that'd be a strange move too, and with deficits as they are, congressional and public appetite for tax cuts don't make for a straight shot. So where are the politics of this? According to polls, they're in raising rates on the rich. But that doesn't help Bush at all. He may, in the end, follow the Homeland Security Strategy and endorse something broadly popular with a single provision that Democrats can't swallow, thus destroying their support and putting them on the wrong side of a key issue. But tax theatre ain't nearly so compelling as terrorist theatre, and I can't imagine the weakened Bush we see now could make it work.

So where does he go?

Torture

The Washington Post has an extraordinary five-page report on torture today.  In this case, it's not just the crime, but the cover-up:

Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush was being stubborn with his American captors, and a series of intense beatings and creative interrogation tactics were not enough to break his will. On the morning of Nov. 26, 2003, a U.S. Army interrogator and a military guard grabbed a green sleeping bag, stuffed Mowhoush inside, wrapped him in an electrical cord, laid him on the floor and began to go to work. Again.

It was inside the sleeping bag that the 56-year-old detainee took his last breath through broken ribs, lying on the floor beneath a U.S. soldier in Interrogation Room 6 in the western Iraqi desert. Two days before, a secret CIA-sponsored group of Iraqi paramilitaries, working with Army interrogators, had beaten Mowhoush nearly senseless, using fists, a club and a rubber hose, according to classified documents.

...
Hours after Mowhoush's death in U.S. custody on Nov. 26, 2003, military officials issued a news release stating that the prisoner had died of natural causes after complaining of feeling sick. Army psychological-operations officers quickly distributed leaflets designed to convince locals that the general had cooperated and outed key insurgents.

The U.S. military initially told reporters that Mowhoush had been captured during a raid. In reality, he had walked into the Forward Operating Base "Tiger" in Qaim on Nov. 10, 2003, hoping to speak with U.S. commanders to secure the release of his sons, who had been arrested in raids 11 days earlier.

Unfortunately, our President is objectively pro-torture, and after this week's showdown on Capitol Hill, there's no longer any way to pretend otherwise:

The Senate's Republican leader Tuesday derailed a bipartisan effort to set rules for the treatment of enemy prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other military detention camps by abruptly stopping debate on a $491 billion defense bill.

The unusual move came after senators, including several leading Republicans, beat back an effort by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to block amendments setting standards for military-prisoner interrogations and delaying base closings scheduled for approval later this year.

The White House had threatened to veto the defense-spending legislation if it contained either of those provisions.
...
McCain had been working with Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Warner of Virginia, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, to respond to widely publicized cases of prisoner abuse.

They proposed to set specific standards for the treatment of foreign detainees. Vice President Dick Cheney, in a meeting Thursday, urged the three to back off.

But Monday, McCain, Graham and Warner submitted an amendment that would have required that the U.S. Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation cover prisoners in military custody.

The three, together with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, also introduced an amendment that would prohibit cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners and would require the United States to abide by the Geneva Convention and other international agreements on the treatment of prisoners.

The two amendments likely would have received substantial Democratic support and had a strong chance of passing in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Last Thursday, in a statement of policy, the White House said: "The administration strongly opposes such amendments, which would interfere with the protection of Americans from terrorism by diverting resources from the war to answer unnecessary or duplicative inquiry or by restricting the president's ability to conduct the war effectively under existing law.

Make no mistake about this.  This administration wants to torture.  They've decided to use it as a tool in the War on Terror.  And if a few innocents who wander into US bases to find their sons, like Mowhoush, get viciously beaten, thrown into a sleeping bag, and whipped to death, then so be it.  Back during the election, Abu Aardvark said the election was really a simple choice. 

Go read what he said the choice was between.  Then think about what we chose.

Mushy Moderates and Timid Traditionalists

Interesting article in the Washington Post:

Under President Bill Clinton, multiple clashes with Congress, the judiciary and independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr chipped away at attorney-client and executive privileges on sensitive documents and conversations. But since coming to power, Bush has doggedly reclaimed turf that eroded under Clinton, asserting the power of his office to shield everything from energy policy deliberations to the papers of past presidents.
...
In a showdown with the Senate opposition over something like the Roberts papers, Klain recalled, a politically and legally weakened Clinton White House often would find a compromise to end the dispute.

"I have no doubt that if that had been us, we would have turned over the papers," Klain said. "I'm not saying that's a good thing; I'm not saying that's a bad thing. But whenever we walked up to the brink, we blinked. And these guys don't, and they're prepared to pay the price for it."

What's interesting, though, isn't Bush's obsessive attempts to retain executive privilege, it's the Senate's willingness to allow them. As the myth goes, the place is dotted by traditionalists fiercely committed to the institution's independence and totally unwilling to be pushed around by snot-nosed executives who'll be out of office in a blink of the historical eye. And yet these same guys -- Warner, Roberts, and so forth -- have shown no qualms about ceding power if it could lead to partisan advantage, or even partisan unity. Tension with the White House simply wasn't worth the cost of a strong Senate.

In the American Prospect, Matt and Mark wrote a piece puncturing the myth of Republican moderates. Moderation without the courage to buck the party and vote moderately is no virtue. But so too is it time to give up on Senate traditionalists. Save for Robert Byrd, there's no longer a contingent up there committed to protecting the institution, to keeping the president in check, to keeping the Senate independent. The WaPo's right: Clinton would have folded. But he would've folded because Republican Senators would've fiercely decried his secrecy, abuses of power, and disrespect for the office. In the end, it's not that Bush is doing anything different, it's just that the actors holding Clinton in check have quietly crept from the stage. They didn't want to protect the theatre, they just hated the play.

On Bolton, On Blitzer, On Cheney and Condi

Bolton, as you no doubt know, just got himself a recess appointment. I tend to think this is excellent news for our effectiveness at the UN: not only will other countries look at our deranged ambassador with the loathing and hostility his comments so richly deserve, but they'll know he was such an extremist that our own Senate, nutty though it may be, never approved him. I'm sure he'll be plenty listened to.

You know, or ignored, patronized, and sabotaged.

Over on the right, James Joyner doesn't think this is such a hot idea either:

This strikes me as a big mistake.

For one thing, U.N. Ambassador is hardly of sufficient importance to justify thumbing Senate Democrats in the eye this way. For another, John Bolton is hardly Robert Bork. Indeed, Bolton may be a case that epitimizes why the filibuster is sometimes a good thing.

One undertold story about Bush is that he sports a profound lack of respect for the autonomy and judgment of the institutions that comprise our government. Other presidents have been frustrated by Congress, stymied by the Supreme Court, furious at the bureaucracy, but most have carried a recognition that this was all part of the country and, aggravating though it may be, it had to be respected. Not Bush. Bolton goes in on recess, as has a past judge. Medicare and CAFTA get passed through illegal arm-twisting and deal-making while the intelligence agencies are brought under the purview of a loyalist. The guy wants government to work on his whim and he actively reshapes the place when it rebuffs him. Not the best quality in the official entrusted with strengthening and leading our Republic.

Lame Duck?

The Times has a piece lauding the enormous efficiency of the Bush machine on Capitol Hill. CAFTA, the transportation bill, the energy boondoggle -- all are passing and this duck, once thought to be lame, is soaring with the eagles.

Of course, this is really like being impressed that a waterfowl with a jetpack is able to get airborn. The media, much of the time, does not quite seem to comprehend the importance and legislative power of Bush's party controlling the House and the Senate. It's rather hard to imagine how, save for a major intraparty schism, Bush could become a lame duck in this legislative situation, at least on relatively uncontroversial issues.

And save for CAFTA, Bush's accomplishments have been relatively uncontroversial. Democrats won on the energy bill. What stopped passage last year was DeLay's amendment to retroactively shield MTBE manufacturers from lawsuits. This year, it got dropped. The transportation bill was so loaded with pork that everyone wanted it to go through. And CAFTA? A midnight vote, extended almost an hour beyond its schedule, where the GOP leadership may have broken the law because they were so desperate to buy "ayes".

Bush isn't a lame duck. How could he be? But he's sure not flying very high.

Good Work Harry

In the wake of the Rove scandal, Senate Democrats are introducing a bill to deny security clearances to officials who blow the cover of secret agents.  This shouldn't be an especially controversial issue, and I'm glad to see our people doing things that call the Republicans on compromising national security for political gain. 

--Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Rove Knows...

It may not be bigger news than O'Connor, but it's certainly better:

I revealed in yesterday's taping of the McLaughlin Group that Time magazine's emails will reveal that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper's source. I have known this for months but didn't want to say it at a time that would risk me getting dragged into the grand jury.
...
Since I revealed the big scoop, I have had it reconfirmed by yet another highly authoritative source. Too many people know this. It should break wide open this week. I know Newsweek is working on an 'It's Rove!' story and will probably break it tomorrow.

That's Lawrence O'Donnell talking, and he's plugged in enough to break something like this. I wish it wasn't coming over 4th of July weekend and right on the heels of a Supreme Court vacancy, but what can you do? Moreover, if the timing is bad for us, it's worse for Rove. Having a story about his vindictive deshrouding of a CIA agent hit at a time when all news organizations will still introduce him as, "Karl Rove, who was just in the news for questioning Democrats' on their behavior in the War on Terror" is probably not his optimal scenario. And getting tried for perjury, the same "crime" that, when applied to mere adultery got Clinton impeached, will prove particularly hard to worm out of:

As the Wapo article suggests, the investigation has moved from one involving the identity of the White House official to one involving perjury - i.e., a cover-up. The source may have been questioned in front of the grand jury and lied.

Knowing the identity of the source is not enough for a perjury conviction. There must be two witnesses to the perjurious statement. Telephone records would not be enough, because they only provide the number dialed, not the identity of the person speaking. Matthew Cooper's and Judith Miller's e-mails and notes may provide that corroboration.

Man, all these fireworks and it's only July 2nd. Gonna be an interesting Summer...

What A Rove Wants

It's been nice to see Democrats respond to Rove's remarks in much the same way Republicans responded to Durbin's. That Rove unleashed a smear with treasonous implications certainly helps, but the bulk of the credit has to go to a party newly uninterested in being smacked around. This, however, was not all our idea. It was Rove's. Ann Coulter would have to snort a bucket-full of Adderall and spend a few hours focusing her mind in order to compose a speech so perfectly aimed to offend. The question, then, is why Rove wanted this.

Shortly after the 2004 election finished, Newsweek released a special issue filled with an 80-some page narrative from inside the campaigns. There was little of note within the Bush camp, save for one tidbit from the race's beginning. Early on, the Bush campaign released a commercial with 9/11 firefighters in it and quickly came under fire for exploiting the day. Democrats were pretty pleased, it seemed an amateurish move. But so, according to Newsweek's moles, was Rove. He was ecstatic over the ad, which had forced 9/11 back in front of the public eye, something he figured an electoral plus no matter the context.

Assuming Rove wasn't putting on a show for the reporters, he's clearly made the calculation that terrorism and 9/11, no matter how they're discussed, benefit Republicans. No news there. And since there are no more color levels to raise and little focus on the issue itself, Rove decided to turn heads from the Social Security car wreck by forcing Democrats to talk about 9/11. The only way to do that was insult them over it. And it worked. The question is whether or not Bush still enjoys the same towering advantage on terrorism that renders its very mention an unadulterated good for him. Some Democrats think so and are begging for us to ignore the comments and refocus. Looking back over the past few years, their feelings are understandable. They're also wrong. Divisiveness polls badly among independents. Bush's advantage on terrorism has evaporated. And we have to prove we're not afraid of this conversation. So far, we're doing a damn good job.

Time for Another Flight Suit Photo-Op?

This graphic from the latest Washington Post poll is the hardest evidence yet that Bush is in decline.  Forgetting Iraq, which has traditionally had a  capricious relationship with the polls, look at terrorism.  So far as I know, Bush has never, ever, not in a single survey, faced public disapproval on terrorism.  That wasn't a reflection of the job he was doing but of the image he projects.  After all, Americans can't see what's happening in the War on Terror, but they can see the War President swaggering across their televisions and looking, for all the world, like a man who can't be bothered to make sense on domestic policy, so focused is he on ripping Osama bin-Laden's throat out. 

If his ratings are nosediving on terrorism, we're seeing a direct rejection of the Bush persona.  Nothing has happened recently to publicly signal a change in fortunes in our fight against al-Qaeda, so this means that, in the eyes of America, Bush himself is becoming smaller, less threatening, less impressive, less equal to the task.  By injecting himself into piddling partisan fights and arguments over Senate procedures -- and losing -- Bush has destroyed confidence in his single, seeming unshakeable strong point.  Till now, terrorism was endlessly salient and blissfully intangible; no matter how many other issues Bush lost their confidence on Americans always believed in his leadership against terror, and so they always overlooked the rest.  Without terror, however, Bush is a lame duck, much like he was before the Towers were struck.

As for the Democrats, they finally have an opening and they better be prepared to use it.  Happily for them, the Center for American Progress released something of a How-To this morning, their National Security Strategy for the 21st Century.  I'm only 20 pages in, so I'll withhold substantive comment, but it is, so far, a good guide as to how Democrats could press the advantage on homeland security, nuclear proliferation, military issues, diplomacy, and global resentment.  My guess is that, as a short-term strategy, the best approach is to keep the focus on domestic policy, where Bush seems eternally ham-handed and politically obtuse.  As the poll shows, his screw-ups there are bleeding into all other areas and dismantling the myth of the Warrior-King that carried him through the last election.  Nevertheless, a weakened Bush will eventually refocus on foreign affairs -- right in time for 2006, unless I miss my guess -- and this time, with these numbers, Democrats had better be ready.

Today's McClellan Moment

In response to a question asking if the president would condemn Hugo Chavez by name, Scott