The September Club

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I’m not sure exactly when September became the unofficial deadline for Congress to make up its mind about Iraq. The White House might have moved the first down marker to September at some point — they move it so much it’s hard to keep up. Or, it might have been the report from Andrea Mitchell last April that “the moderate center of the Republican caucus” had decided to give the President until Labor Day to show some progress. “After that, if it doesn’t work, they’re running.”

Lots of people don’t believe September will matter, and they could be right. I think some Republicans will jump ship in September, but I have no idea if enough of them will jump ship to make a real difference. Reaching a veto-proof majority would require approximately a third of Republicans in the House and Senate to vote with the Dem majority against the war (if all the Dems in the House voted against the war it would take somewhat less than a third, but so far the House Dems haven’t been unanimous).

The claim that the decision to stay or go rests with Gen. Petraeus’ September report has never been anything other than a rhetorical device. The real “report” will be in the form of campaign poll numbers. As the 2008 election season approaches, all but the most reptilian-brained Republicans will be re-evaluating their positions in Iraq vis à vis their future political careers. As unpopular as the war is, however, it’s going to take a huge leap into the unknown for Republicans to abandon the President and the Faux Snooze team and vote against the war.

We do make fun of Democrats for being spineless wonders. But both parties are like old dogs still doing the few tricks they learned when they were puppies. Democrats are “spineless” because they don’t work together to throw their collective weight around. But Republicans for years have been powerful because they’ve been monolithic. They’re a tightly packed herd always moving in the same direction, stomping everything in its path. This has been true for so long that most (if not all) Republicans now serving in Congress don’t comprehend any other way to be a congressional Republican. So you’ve got a whole generation of Republicans whose only tricks are to recite GOP talking points and vote as the party tells them to vote.

In other words, although the GOP herd is mighty, as individuals Republicans probably are just as spineless as the Dems. So most of ’em will stampede off the cliff with the rest of the herd. Conversely, if enough Republicans do split from the herd — and I have no idea what number “enough” is — more may choose to follow.

And if the herd breaks with Bush over the immigration issue, which it seems to be doing, would that not make it easier for it to break with him on Iraq, also?

The bottom line is that many things are possible these days. Our political situation is more fluid than it has been in years. All that’s holding the old status quo together is a failure of nerve, and a refusal to understand changing realities, among politicians of both parties.

In the past few days it has become obvious even to war supporters that the situation in Iraq won’t be better by September. If anything, it will be worse. So now they’re frantically shoving the goal posts as far into the distance as they can; clear out of the stadium and into another zip code, if possible.

Around the beginning of June the Great New Talking Point trickling out of the White House and dutifully repeated by Bushie operatives everywhere was “the Korea model.” David Sanger reported for the New York Times on June 3:

For the first time, the Bush administration is beginning publicly to discuss basing U.S. troops in Iraq for years, even decades to come, a subject so fraught with political land mines that officials are tiptoeing around the inevitable questions about what the long-term mission would be there.

President George W. Bush has long talked about the need to maintain a U.S. military presence in the region, without saying exactly where. Several visitors to the White House say that in private, he has sounded intrigued by what he calls the “Korea model,” a reference to the large U.S. presence in South Korea for the 54 years since the armistice that ended open hostilities between North and South Korea.

But it was not until Wednesday that Bush’s spokesman, Tony Snow, publicly reached for the Korea example in talking about Iraq – setting off an analogy war between the White House and critics who charged that the administration was again disconnected from the realities of Iraq.

Snow said Korea was one way to think about how the mission could evolve into an “over-the-horizon support role” whenever U.S. troops are no longer patrolling the streets of Baghdad.

The next day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates also mentioned Korea, saying that establishing a long-term garrison was a lot smarter than how the United States handled its departure from Vietnam, “where we just left lock, stock and barrel.”

Bush must really, really like “the Korea model,” because the Bushies are sticking with it. Never mind that the Iraq situation resembles the Korean situation about as much as soap resembles spinach. With righties, rhetoric is reality, and a catchy talking point is worth a thousand pages of policy.

But you know they’re desperate, because many of the arguments they had hoped to postpone until after the August brush harvest at Crawford are already being argued. Arianna Huffington writes that “The battle for September has already begun.” Gen. Petraeus himself is already saying there will be no progress by September.

Meaning, the Bushies are pulling out all the stops to defuse the notion that September represents some kind of deadline. That’s a good enough reason for Democrats to continue to talk about a September deadline. Dems should be getting in front of cameras and microphones every bleeping day between now and Labor Day quoting every Republican who said anything about making a decision in September. Club Republicans over the head vigorously with the September deadline. And if Republicans wimp out, club them some more. Real hard.

See also: Steven Simon and Ray Takeyh, “We’ve Lost. Here’s How to Handle It“; and Andrew J. Bacevich, “More Troops, More Troubles.”

Heresies

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This morning I heard a Buddhist teacher give a talk that referred to a teisho (something like a sermon) on the Beatitudes given by Taizan Maezumi Roshi. So when I got home I looked for the teisho on the Web; here it is. You probably know (because you are smarter than three-fourths of the nation’s population) that the Beatitudes are from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Maezumi was an old-school Japanese Zen master. So it’s interesting (to me, anyway) to see what Maezumi did with the Beatitudes. He treated them very respectfully, and (while acknowleding that Christians might understand them differently) compared them to nearly identical Buddhist teachings. They’d make good koans, the roshi said.

As a human being, what is the difference between you and me, or between Buddhist and Christian? Even among Buddhists and among Christians there are different ways of approaching it. But what we appreciate should not be different — however, we say it — being one with God, or saved by God, or liberated by God, or even condemned by God. If we can really selfless feel the existence of that, I am sure we will know the savior.

By “savior” Maezumi did not mean Jesus, although he also did not not mean Jesus. And there’s another koan for you.

In today’s Seattle Times, Janet I. Tu writes about an Episcopal priest who recently converted to Islam, although she is also still an Episcopal priest. This is causing a certain amount of consternation among some righties. Scott Johnson of Power Tools sniffs that the priest couldn’t have been “a believing Christian” before the conversion, even though she has been a priest for 20 years and the conversion happened just 15 months ago.

I used to be what Mr. Johnson calls “a believing Christian,” and now I’m not. It’s not an unusual phenomenon. Sometimes as people grow and mature they find they need to move on to other things. And yet I don’t say that Christians are wrong. We religious people are all thrashing around trying to comprehend the incomprehensible in our own imperfect way. Religion itself is just an interface.

The Rev. Ann Holmes Redding, the Muslim-Episcopalian priest, says,

Redding doesn’t feel she has to resolve all the contradictions. People within one religion can’t even agree on all the details, she said. “So why would I spend time to try to reconcile all of Christian belief with all of Islam?

“At the most basic level, I understand the two religions to be compatible. That’s all I need.”

She says she felt an inexplicable call to become Muslim, and to surrender to God — the meaning of the word “Islam.”

“It wasn’t about intellect,” she said. “All I know is the calling of my heart to Islam was very much something about my identity and who I am supposed to be.

“I could not not be a Muslim.”

Zen generally takes a dim view of religion-as-identity and any sentence that includes the phrase “who I am supposed to be,” but even so I can relate to what she says. I’ve known people in a conversion process to keep a toe in both pools for a time. It’s common to meet people in formal Zen training who still considered themselves to be Christians or Jews and who practice a kind of fusion religion. Eventually some might experience an epiphany-kensho and choose to take just one seat or the other. Some might not. In any event, all such people I have known have been incredibly sincere, and they thought and worked deeply at their religious practices.

They didn’t just believe what they were supposed to believe out of tribal loyalty, in other words.

Yesterday I found a fascinating article at the Guardian Comment Is Free site. Chris Duggan writes,

In a world dominated by Middle East conflicts, it is more urgent than ever that words and creeds emerge from the trenches and dare to divest themselves of the armour that is designed to shore up a reassuring sense of identity, under the guise of religious faith. This process has always been a central concern of the mystical tradition of all the world religions: those who penetrate to the heart of their faith invite their coreligionists to go beyond words and concepts to a level of experience that escapes definition.

Exactly. And I recommend reading all of Chris Duggan’s article.

The Rev. Ms. Redding’s bishop is wise enough to give her space to follow her bliss and let whatever process she is going through play itself out. It’s true that there are some essential doctrinal conflicts between Christianity and Islam, and eventually she may choose one or the other. That’s something she needs to work out for herself. That kind of work is the essence of what religion actually is. Adopting a belief system dictated to you by a religious institution is something that passes for religion, but IMO that’s a tepid and watered-down imitation of the real thing.

I read in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy about Saint Anselm of Canterbury. Saint Anselm was “the outstanding Christian philosopher and theologian of the eleventh century,” it says.

Anselm’s motto is “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum). … Faith for Anselm is more a volitional state than an epistemic state: it is love for God and a drive to act as God wills. In fact, Anselm describes the sort of faith that “merely believes what it ought to believe” as “dead.” … So “faith seeking understanding” means something like “an active love of God seeking a deeper knowledge of God.”

I admit that the word epistemic gives me a headache, but it has to do with the validity of knowledge and belief. So Anselm’s approach to faith is not about trying to get his belief system validated. Beliefs by themselves have no purpose. Faith is not an end in itself. Rather, Anselm says, faith is a means for seeking a deeper knowledge of God (or the Dharmakaya, or the Great Absolute Whatever). A religion that isn’t looking past the dogmas to a deeper truth is a dead religion. And I say people with dead religions shouldn’t throw stones.

Ways and Wills

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A commenter to the last post wrote “If there is a will to stop illegal immigration, then there is a way to do it. The trouble is that there is no will to do it.” For the record, I don’t buy into the “if there’s a will, there’s a way” notion. It may be that illegal immigration can be much reduced, but when you are dealing with human behaviors absolute control is never possible. As long as there’s a will to enter the U.S. illegally, someone will find a way.

Seems to me the key to reducing illegal immigration is to focus on the “will” part of the equation. As long as illegals can get jobs more easily here than they can at home, they’ll have the will. Ah, but that’s the rub. Money is being made on the backs of illegals, m’dears, and where money is involved all that homeland, mother, God and flag stuff flies out the window.

Illegal labor is not some rogue thing outside the system. Illegal labor is built into the system. “The System” has decided we need those people to pick fruit and watch the kids. “The System” turned a blind eye when federal contractors recruited illegal aliens to do the dirty work in New Orleans for slave wages.

Paul Krugman wrote in his March 27 column —

…many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration — especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren’t for Mexican immigration.

That’s why it’s intellectually dishonest to say, as President Bush does, that immigrants do ”jobs that Americans will not do.” The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays — and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants.

And we’re all complicit in this, y’know. I remember a few months ago, during a crackdown on illegal aliens, there were news stories about fruit orchard owners watching their lovely crop rot, unpicked, because there were no illegal aliens to pick the fruit. I assume if they’d rounded up legal workers and paid them minimum wage, the orchard owners would have suffered a net loss. This is basic Wal Mart economics; you offer lower prices in exchange for lower wages.

Howard Fineman made an interesting observation last week. No, really. He wrote,

Though I’ve never heard him use the term, my guess is that George W. Bush sees himself as a hacendado, an estate owner in Old Mexico.

That would give him a sense of Southwestern noblesse, duty-bound not just to work “his” people, but to protect them as well.

His advisor, Carlo Rove, has explained that a system called “democracy” now gives peasants something called “the vote.” It would be shrewd, Rove said, for hacendados to grant their workers’ citizenship.

That’s the best explanation I have for why Bush is in the midst of what may be a suicide mission on immigration policy—embarrassing for him and ruinous for his party.

I suspect there’s something to that. For all his affected folksiness, Dubya is the child of privilege. He sees illegal immigrants as a resource to be exploited, not as competition for his wages. He probably doesn’t comprehend why the base is so up in arms about illegal immigration.

But for many, many years — going back at least to the 1960s and the revolt of white southern Democrats against the Civil Rights movement — the Republican Party has oh, so carefully nurtured its base by cultivating racism and xenophobia. And you can’t feed something for fifty years and then expect it to turn off like an electric lamp. Digby wrote,

All the gains that Bush made over the years to securing the Latino population with appeals to traditional values are being wiped out by the racist id of the Republican base.

But what did he expect? That they would sit still for his “compassionate” outreach to a bunch of brown people just because the corporations want cheap labor? Of course not. Live by racism, die by racism. But they had no choice, really. Karl Rove knows that without being able to carry at least a large minority of Latino votes, they cannot cobble together a majority. As Florida goes … well, let’s just say they have a problem. George Bush is not desperately pushing this bill just because of big agriculture or the restaurant lobby. He’s pushing it on behalf of all big business — his real base — because if the neanderthals in the GOP base are successful at seriously alienating the Latino vote, the ship is going down

And if the GOP loses the knee jerk loyalty of racists and xenophobes, the ship also is going down. In short, the GOP is wedging itself.

Give Up

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Congress is going to take another shot at a comprehensive immigration bill next week. This is mostly because President Bush wants them to. But no good will come of this, unless it’s a total revolt of the Right against Bush.

No sensible immigration bill can be written in the current political climate. There is way too much hysteria coming from the Right. As it says in an editorial in today’s New York Times:

Congress’s struggle with immigration reform has been a horror movie, with one false ending after another, and there is still no telling what the monster will look like when the lights finally come up. People who have been watching through their fingers are right to be worried; the bill was harsh and has gotten harsher, a reflection of the rigidity of those who have vowed to kill any reform they consider amnesty.

Republicans are playing immigration bill poker, upping the ante by tossing harsher and harsher amendment proposals into the pot.

Lindsey Graham, who has spoken movingly about the need for reasonable, decent treatment of immigrants, especially immigrant families, has been trying to take the debate back to the dark days of Representative Jim Sensenbrenner’s anti-immigrant bill, with an amendment that would turn people who overstay their visas into criminals subject to minimum 60-day prison sentences.

It seems likely that Mr. Graham, who is one of the “grand bargainers” and is up for re-election next year, has been burned by the uproar on the hard right and feels the need to act tough, lest he be saddled — as Representative Steve King of Iowa has urged — with the scarlet letter A, for amnesty.

Any comprehensive immigration bill written by the current Congress is likely to be a monstrosity that future congresses will have dismantle.

CNN reports that rightie bloggers are in maximum snit mode, which of course we all knew. Some of them are asking Congress to secure the borders first, before going on to other immigration measures. That might not be a bad idea. Although normally I’d advocate tackling an issue comprehensively, if that’s not possible now (and it isn’t) it would be better to bite of whatever piece of the bill Congress is able to chew. And rightie fantasies about the Open Borders Lobby aside, securing the borders is, in principle, something both parties can agree on.

How to secure the borders is another matter, of course. But even a stupid border security bill would be less damaging to the nation, long-term, than whatever legislative atrocity the comprehensive immigration bill is likely to become now.

Then, we can hope, in a little while the hysteria will die down and Dems will have a larger majority in Congress. And then maybe it will be possible to create an immigration policy that is not a reflection of our worst xenophobic impulses.

The White House Jive

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Yesterday we learned the “surge” isn’t working. Big surprise. Today, Eugene Robinson says the White House is pulling a bait-and-switch.

White House spokesman Tony Snow was purposeful on Wednesday in stomping, trampling, tap-dancing upon and otherwise giving a definitive beat-down to any expectations of a serious, fact-based reassessment of Iraq policy in the fall. Never mind that the White House raised those expectations in the first place.

The September scenario has been a rhetorical mainstay for the administration and its supporters, a major argument for ignoring all the bad news from Iraq and giving Bush’s troop escalation a chance to work. Let’s wait for Gen. David H. Petraeus, the man who’s now running the war, to submit his progress report. At that point, went the White House argument, the “way forward” would become clear.

The fog of war seems to have closed back in. “I have warned from the very beginning about expecting some sort of magical thing to happen in September,” Snow told the White House press corps, whose collective recollection was somewhat different. “What I’m saying is, in September you’ll have an opportunity to have metrics.”

Just doin’ the White House jive.

This is not about what’s good for America, or for Iraq. It’s not about bringing Democracy to anyone. It’s not about victory. It’s not even about defeating terrorism.

It’s about Bush’s ego. It’s about keeping troops in Iraq as long as he is President so he doesn’t have to admit he has failed.

I’ve said many times that the whole point of the “surge” was to short-circuit support on Capitol Hill for the Baker Iraq Study Group plan. The ISG plan, tepid as it was, might very well have been supported by a veto-proof majority in Congress. If it had, it would have meant that Bush no longer had total control of the U.S. military action in Iraq. And that’s the one and only reason the ISG was kneecapped by the White House.

Now, my suspicion is that at least some Democrats in Congress realize this. I can’t prove it, but I believe it to be so. They just don’t think they have the political capital to come out and say “the President of the United States is a psychopath.” So they keep making speeches about how they hope the President will see reason and start playing well with others, knowing full well he’s not capable of either. These speeches are not for Bush, but for the media and the constituents.

There’s not much else the White House can do to postpone the inevitable except kick the can down the road, and they hope they can keep kicking that can until January 2009. You might recall that less than a month ago the White House was talking about a “post-surge” strategy. And this “new” strategy, as explained by David Ignatius, sounded remarkably like the same shit that was in the old “Strategy for Victory” they trotted out in December 2005. And that strategy was just the same old talking points, warmed over, that they’d been repeating since, oh, about summer of 2003, as I recall.

But this most recent “new” strategy was run up a flagpole just about three weeks ago, and I guess no one saluted. It was so lame even the hawks didn’t pay much attention to it. The terminally clueless David Ignatius wrote on May 22, 2007 (this year, note):

The post-surge policy would, in many ways, track the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report, which senior administration officials say the president now supports. It also reflects the administration’s recognition that, given political realities in Washington, some policy adjustments must be made. The goal is an approach that would have sufficient bipartisan support so it could be sustained even after the Bush administration leaves office in early 2009.

Notice they even tried to package the “post-surge” plan as something like ISG Lite (less filling! tastes great!) just to increase its marketing appeal, even though it resembled the Baker-Hamilton report about as much as a table resembles a horse.

Senior officials discussed the outlines of a “post-surge” policy late last week in what they said was an effort to build bipartisan support from Congress and the American public. Their comments appeared to be a trial balloon aimed at testing whether a Baker-Hamilton approach could gain traction in Washington. The description of a post-surge policy focused on elements that Democrats say they would continue to support, such as training the Iraqi military and hunting al-Qaeda, even as they set a timetable for withdrawing combat forces.

As I said, it was so lame, and so obviously just the same old hash in a new can, that even Republicans in Congress brushed it off. So now in less than three weeks the White House has gone from talking “post-surge” to kicking the surge can further down the road. It’s all they’ve got left.

Every now and then someone will demand to know what Petraeus could possibly say in September that will make a dime’s worth of difference to anybody. And the answer is, nothing. The “September strategy” never had anything to do with what Patraeus might say. It’s all just theater.

Waiting for General Petraeus’s September report is a bit like watching the first act of Il barbiere di Siviglia and waiting for the bass/baritone playing Figaro to trot out and sing “Largo al factotum.” Except without the orchestra, of course. You know exactly when he’s supposed to enter and every note he’s supposed to sing. The only question is whether he can get through all the “Pronto prontissimo” stuff without tying his tongue up in knots. It’s just a role, in other words.

I see that Arianna Huffington is writing about Petraeus ex machina. I think it’s closer to say the role was originally envisioned to be ex machina, but the script is already in rewrite. Whatever he says, Bush supporters will spin it as “preliminary” and the detractors will say enough is enough. Harry Reid is already calling Petraeus “out of touch.”

I say the real drama is doing on in the head’s of Republicans in Congress. Will they stand by Bush, or cut him loose? They’ve got the summer to think it over and make up their minds. The bloodshed, of course, continues.

Quagmires and Impasses

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A Pentagon report released yesterday says that overall violence in Iraq has not diminished since the troop buildup began. Ann Scott Tyson writes in today’s Washington Post:

Three months into the new U.S. military strategy that has sent tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq, overall levels of violence in the country have not decreased, as attacks have shifted away from Baghdad and Anbar, where American forces are concentrated, only to rise in most other provinces, according to a Pentagon report released yesterday.

Writing about the same Pentagon report, Peter Spiegel says this in the Los Angeles Times:

Violence in Iraq rose slightly in the three months ended in May because of increased attacks in cities and provinces that had been relatively peaceful before the Bush administration’s troop buildup, the Pentagon reported Wednesday.

The intense focus on Baghdad and western Iraq by newly arriving U.S. troops pushed insurgent groups into other regions, causing a rise in violence in northern and eastern provinces such as Diyala and Nineveh, the Pentagon said in a quarterly report to Congress on Iraqi security.

And then there’s the headline in USA Today: “Petraeus says security crackdown working.” Of course.

So a Pentagon report says the “surge” is not working, and Petraeus says it is. Who is telling the truth? And what is truth, anyway?

Reading these headlines reminds me of Joseph Campbell, who said that all religions are true. You just have to understand what they are true of. When General Petraeus says the troop buildup is “working,” he’s talking just about Baghdad. And he’s talking about “signs of normalcy.”

“I’m talking about professional soccer leagues with real grass field stadiums, several amusement parks — big ones, markets that are very vibrant,” says Petraeus, commander of the roughly 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The scenes provide a sign that the new strategy in Iraq is working, although many problems remain, he told USA TODAY in an interview Wednesday.

Five months after President Bush ordered an increase of 20,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, data suggest that sectarian violence in Baghdad has declined. Other tentative signs of progress have included a rise in Iraqi army enlistments and some quality-of-life improvements such as fewer electricity blackouts in the capital.

See? I’m sure that what General Petraeus says is true. You just have to be clear what it is true of. And nothing he says refutes the larger truth, that the surge is not working.

As soon as word of the Pentagon report hit the web, righties grabbed their shovels and went to work looking for the pony. I don’t believe they found one, exactly, but they did turn up some horseshoe nails and something that might have been part of a bridle. For example:

So, is the surge working? Yes, because violence once centrally located in baghdad has moved to other areas, and this again is an expected dispersal. It matches exactly what the administration has been saying over the last few months, that we can expect to see rises in casualties – both civilian and military due to the enemy redoubling their efforts.

This increase will eventually decrease when we get more boots on the ground those additional areas and as we continue preparing the Iraqi military and paramilitary units to take control. Again, takes time to build a country and this report shows that – while slow – there is progress.

And, y’know, if you disregard the fact that our army is broken, the Iraqi military isn’t getting any better, and we’ve already been in the bleeping country for more than four bleeping years, you can sorta kinda say that’s true.

Jules Crittendon, who for various reasons is quickly becoming my choice for biggest asshole on the planet, is unable to discern the relativity of things.

Apparently it’s not only supposed to be impossible to stabilize Iraq, it’s also supposed to easy and immediate. Pentagon report cites no overall drop in violence.

Wait a minute, if its failing, then how come it’s working [he says, linking to the USA Today article about General Petraeus]?

Such a shame no one ever explained critical thinking to Mr. Crittendon. But seems to me that if Righties are so easily satisfied with relative truth; why not relative victory? I’m sure the White House speech writers could come up with one. Then we could bring the troops home.

Getting back to what is truth — Joseph Campbell said that “Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.” This is pretty much what has happened to us politically as well. When George W. Bush started talking about his “war on terror,” most of us assumed he meant this metaphorically, as in “war on cancer.” But we were wrong, weren’t we? He and the Right don’t think metaphorically. A war is something you do with armies and tanks and artillery, so that’s how we went after terror.

Just this morning I ran into another rightie blogger sneering about “surrender monkeys” and people who “don’t want to win.” But win what? Let’s be clear. Is the ultimate objective a military victory, or a significant reduction in international terrorism? Because the terrible paradox righties lack the moral courage to face is that by winning one we must lose the other. The difference between most of us against the war and most people for it is not that one side wants to win and the other doesn’t. The difference is that we have a completely different understanding of what it is we want to win.

All manner of military and intelligence experts have tried to explain that chasing a military victory in Iraq is actually counterproductive to reducing terrorism and making America more secure. General Odom tried to explain it. A National Intelligence Estimate of April 2006 tried to explain it. Numerous security experts have tried to explain it. But to explain these things to a rightie is a futile as explaining rocket science to a hamster. They tap their toes impatiently through the explanation — if they allow one to speak at all — and then say, yeah, you people are just surrender monkeys. You don’t want to win.

That’s why I don’t argue with them any more. There’s no point. All we can do is to take power away from them so they stop hurting America.

I wrote a few days ago about how our “strategy” (meaning tactics; Bushies have never figured out there’s a difference) in Iraq has gotten so convoluted it’s tripping over itself. Today Timothy Garton Ash writes on the Guardian blog about this.

You think you’ve reached bottom, then you hear knocking from underneath. As I follow the news from Iraq, and the American debate about it, I fear that the worst is still to come. Here’s the latest twist. In desperation, and since the surge is not having the desired effect, the US military is now arming and funding Sunni gangs to help them fight other Sunni gangs linked to al-Qaida. The enemy of my enemy is my friend – even if, until only yesterday, he was the enemy I had claimed to be defeating. But how will the US military know they are not supporting killers who have the blood of American soldiers on their hands? Ah, because they will use biometric tests – retina scans and fingerprinting – on those they are arming. How reassuring.

In the short term, this modern version of a 19th century British colonial technique may actually serve to beat back the al-Qaida-related bands, as it reportedly has in Anbar province. But in the medium term, it can only fuel the civil war that most observers expect to erupt with full fury as American and British forces pull back. And that’s in addition to arming the largely Shia forces of the Iraqi army. One way or another, Americans are giving Iraqis more weapons with which they can kill each other. After yesterday’s attack on the al-Askari mosque in Samara, another round of Sunni-Shia violence must be expected.

Mr. Ash goes on to suggest America should re-think its foreign policy. Indeed. His worry — and I admit it’s a legitimate worry — is that even if the next President is a Democrat, that person will just tweak the old policy instead of introducing a whole new one.

But we have a more immediate concern, which is that George W. Bush is still POTUS. And probably will be for almost 20 more months. Sidney Blumenthal writes at Salon that the whole world is watching the clock.

High officials of European governments describe U.S. influence as squandered and swiftly eroding (one minister went down a list of Bush administration officials, rating them according to their stupidity), the country’s moral authority nil. Lethal power vacuums are emerging from Lebanon to Pakistan, and Europeans are incapable on their own of quelling the fires that burn far closer to them than to the United States through their growing Muslim populations and proximity to the Middle East. They have no illusions that they will be treated seriously as real allies or that there will be a sudden about-face by the Bush administration. Their faint hope — and it is only a hope — is that they have already seen the worst and that it is not yet to come. Even worse than Bush, from their perspective, would be another Republican president who continued Bush policies and also appointed neoconservatives. That would toll, if not the end of days, then the decline and fall of the Western alliance except in name only, and an even more rapid acceleration of chaos in the world order. …

… Bush’s foreign policy has descended into a fugue state. Dissociated and unaware, the president and his administration are still capable of expressing themselves as if it all makes complete sense, only contributing to their bewilderment. A fugue state should not be confused with cognitive dissonance, the tension produced when irreconcilable ideas are held at the same time and their incompatibility is overcome by denial. In a fugue state, a trauma creates a kind of amnesia in which the sufferer is incapable of connecting to his past. The impairment of judgment comes in great part from a denial of distress. Bush’s fugue state involves the reiteration of a failed formula as though nothing has happened. So he proudly reasserts the essence of his Bush doctrine: Our acts are independent of other countries’ interests. And he adds new corollaries: Other nations must forgive our unacknowledged mistakes even if we threaten their national security. To this, Bush overlays cognitive dissonance: Our policy is working; it just needs more time. Thus the incoherent becomes coherent. …

… In Iraq, Bush’s policy is now to arm all sides in the sectarian civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. He claims to be devoted to nation building, which he previously dismissed, while he presides over a mass exodus of 2 million Iraqis, upholds law and order while holding tens of thousands of prisoners without due process, and conducts a “surge” of troops to secure the capital city of Baghdad whose main effect has been to facilitate its ethnic cleansing. The Iraqi government, for its part, has not met any of the benchmarks in reforming its laws demanded by the United States as the sine qua non of continuing support.

Here’s the punch line:

And where in the world is Condoleezza Rice? While Bush was in Europe, the secretary of state was at home. Instead of attending the summit, she delivered a speech at the Economic Club of New York, announcing that the new doctrine of the administration henceforth should be called “American realism.”

“American realism”? Too bad Joseph Campbell is gone; we could put him to work finding the truth in that.

I Am Still Here.

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I’m sorry I’ve been a bit scarce the past couple of days. I got wrapped up in writing something that I will probably post as a series eventually, but I want to compose the whole long thing first to be sure it’s coherent.

I’m just about to launch into composition of a regular blog post, and I should have that up by this afternoon.

Flushed Away

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All kinds of shit is hitting the fans at the Department of Justice today. Nico at Think Progress reports:

Former White House counsel Harriet Miers and former top Karl Rove aide Sara Taylor, who served as White House political director before resigning last month, have been issued subpoenas over their connections to the U.S. attorney scandal. …

…These are the first subpoenas delivered to the White House regarding the attorney firings. The House Judiciary Committee issued the subpoena to Miers, and the Senate Judiciary Committee issued the subpoena to Taylor. Emails showing Taylor and Miers deeply involved in the Justice Department’s response to the scandal were released last night.

Nico goes on to say that the White House is claiming “executive privilege” and won’t let Miers and Taylor testify even if they want to. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) issued a statement that the subpoenas are not a request, but a demand.

As usual, emptywheel explains the fine print.

Related: Margaret Talev and Marisa Taylor write for McClatchy Newspapers:

The White House’s former political director was furious at Justice Department officials for disclosing to Congress that the administration had forced out the U.S. attorney in Little Rock, Ark., to make way for a protege of Karl Rove, President Bush’s political adviser, according to documents released late Tuesday.

Then-White House political affairs director Sara Taylor spelled out her frustrations in a Feb. 16 e-mail to Kyle Sampson, then the chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

She sent the message after Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty told the Senate that unlike other federal prosecutors, U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins wasn’t fired for performance reasons, but to make way for former Republican political operative Tim Griffin. Griffin, serving as the interim U.S. attorney, then announced that he wouldn’t seek confirmation to the Arkansas post, but would remain until the Senate confirmed someone else. Griffin has since resigned.

“Tim was put in a horrible position; hung out to dry w/ no heads up,” Taylor lashed out in the e-mail, which was sent from a Republican Party account rather than from her White House e-mail address. “This is not good for his long-term career.”

There are some former U.S. attorneys who didn’t think getting fired was good for their long-term careers, either, I believe.

The interesting question here is not what Bush will do about it, or even what Democrats will do about it. It’s what Republicans in Congress will do about it. Most people realized the emperor is naked a long time ago. However, the GOP and news media are holding up a fig leaf to maintain some semblance of dignity and respect for the Creature and his administration. Who will be first to drop the fig leaf? Yes, Senate Republicans defended Alberto Gonzales yesterday, but they were holding their noses as they did so.

Alexander Bolton reports for The Hill:

Financial projections for the President’s Dinner tonight confirm that Republican confidence in the president is in a state of collapse.

The National Republican Congressional Committee’s (NRCC) fundraising goal is $7.5 million, which is half what was raised last year. But to reach this lesser goal, each individual lawmaker has been asked to raise the same amount as 12 months ago. In other words, the NRCC is assuming lawmakers won’t be either willing or able to hit the targets they managed last year.

George W. Bush used to be the all-time champ at fundraising. Back in 2003 I used to keep tabs on his day-to-day activities, and I realized he spent most of his time doing GOP fundraising. And he was doing this at our expense. He’d get on Air Force One and fly somewhere to preside over a ceremonial public function — announce a new forest policy to the annual logging industry convention, for example — then by some coincidence there would be a black-tie zillion-dollar-a-plate GOP fundraising dinner in the same community that very evening. He raked in money hand over fist. Between the fundraising and the exercise biking he hardly had time to do much else. Nice job if you can get it.

But the times, they are a-changed.

Between immigration, Iraq, and everything else, I wonder at what point the GOP will cut him loose. I know it’s going to be a hard decision, because they’re all up to their eyeballs in the same muck. But I don’t believe the Republicans can afford to wait out the clock on this administration and pretend to support it for the next 18 months. The position they are in is too precarious. Action will have to be taken. Eventually.