Justice in the Wood Chipper

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Following up the last post, on the politicization of justice — speaking at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, Karl Rove addressed the recent purge of U.S. attorneys.

“My view is this is unfortunately a very big attempt by some in the Congress to make a political stink about it,” he said. “The question is, did they have the same reaction if they were in the Congress in the ’90s or did they have the same reaction if they were in the ’80s? Every president comes in and appoints U.S. attorneys and then makes changes over the course of their time.”

Funny he should say that. In fact, the Republicans made a big stink when Bill Clinton replaced U.S. attorneys at the beginning of his first term. Shortly after her confirmation, Attorney General Janet Reno asked for the resignations of U.S. attorneys that had been appointed by Reagan and Bush I. As I explained here and here, this is standard practice for a president at the beginning of his first term. I believe Bush II replaced all of Bill Clinton’s appointees, and no one complained.

But in 1993 the GOP Noise Machine made the replacing of U.S. attorneys by Clinton into a big scandal. Wingnuts alleged that Clinton was trying to impede the investigation of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski. (Rostenkowski was indicted the following year; I assume the indictment was brought by a Clinton appointee.)

It is extremely unusual, however, for U.S. attorneys to be replaced in mid-term except for cases of gross misconduct, which doesn’t seem to be the case with the eight who have been purged so far.

As Paul Krugman wrote this morning,

For now, the nation’s focus is on the eight federal prosecutors fired by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In January, Mr. Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that he “would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney for political reasons.” But it’s already clear that he did indeed dismiss all eight prosecutors for political reasons — some because they wouldn’t use their offices to provide electoral help to the G.O.P., and the others probably because they refused to soft-pedal investigations of corrupt Republicans.

In the last few days we’ve also learned that Republican members of Congress called prosecutors to pressure them on politically charged cases, even though doing so seems unethical and possibly illegal.

See also this editorial in yesterday’s New York Times:

The [congressional] hearings left little doubt that the Bush administration had all eight — an unprecedented number — ousted for political reasons. But it points to even wider abuse; prosecutors suggest that three Republican members of Congress may have tried to pressure the attorneys into doing their political bidding.

… Two of the fired prosecutors testified that they had been dismissed after resisting what they suspected were importunings to use their offices to help Republicans win elections. A third described what may have been a threat of retaliation if he talked publicly about his firing.

David Iglesias, who was removed as the United States attorney in Albuquerque, said that he was first contacted before last fall’s election by Representative Heather Wilson, Republican of New Mexico. Ms. Wilson, who was in a tough re-election fight, asked about sealed indictments — criminal charges that are not public.

Two weeks later, he said, he got a call from Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, asking whether he intended to indict Democrats before the election in a high-profile corruption case. When Mr. Iglesias said no, he said, Mr. Domenici replied that he was very sorry to hear it, and the line went dead. Mr. Iglesias said he’d felt “sick.” Within six weeks, he was fired. Ms. Wilson and Mr. Domenici both deny that they had tried to exert pressure.

John McKay of Seattle testified that the chief of staff for Representative Doc Hastings, Republican of Washington, called to ask whether he intended to investigate the 2004 governor’s race, which a Democrat won after two recounts. Mr. McKay says that when he went to the White House later to discuss a possible judicial nomination (which he did not get), he was told of concerns about how he’d handled the election. H. E. Cummins, a fired prosecutor from Arkansas, said that a Justice Department official, in what appeared to be a warning, said that if he kept talking about his firing, the department would release negative information about him.

At Raw Story you can watch (or read a transcript of) an interview with George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley from Wednesday night’s Countdown. Be sure to watch (or read) this if you haven’t already. Here’s just a bit —

TURLEY: … First of all, it is very uncommon for U.S. attorneys to be fired or asked to resign. To have eight of them put in this position is truly unprecedented. It does send a very chilling message to other U.S. attorneys that, but for the grace of god, go you. These are very successful U.S. attorneys.

And what they‘re reporting about these phone calls is extremely unusual and extremely unsettling.

ALISON STEWART: The attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, told Congress the firings were not political at all. Now, has he backed himself into a corner, if it is proven in some way that they were fired for simply not toeing a political line?

TURLEY: Well, this is not the first time that Attorney General Gonzales has been challenged in terms of sworn testimony. He really had to say they were not fired for political reasons. He can hardly say we really needed to use the spot for some kid Karl Rove likes. That would not have gone over very well. What is really getting to a serious point, are the allegations that some of these U.S. attorneys seem to be threatened or thought they were being threatened about speaking to the media or the public.

Also, these calls from politicians really took me back. I have to tell you, I‘m a criminal defense attorney. I have been around the city in the criminal defense system for a long time. I find it shocking that politicians today would feel comfortable picking up a phone and calling the U.S. attorney about sealed indictments. It is other-worldly. …

… U.S. attorneys are supposed to retain an element of independence. They‘re not supposed to be constantly looking over their shoulder to see if Karl Rove is coming on them with a wood chipper.

One part of the U.S. attorney scandal has allegedly been resolved. Laurie Kellman reports for the Associated Press:

Slapped even by GOP allies, the Bush administration is beating an abrupt retreat on eight federal prosecutors it fired and then publicly pilloried.

Just hours after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales dismissed the hubbub as an “overblown personnel matter,” a Republican senator Thursday mused into a microphone that Gonzales might soon suffer the same fate as the canned U.S. attorneys.

“One day there will be a new attorney general, maybe sooner rather than later,” Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said during a Judiciary Committee meeting.

A short time later, Gonzales and his security detail shuttled to the Capitol for a private meeting on Democratic turf, bearing two offerings:

— President Bush would not stand in the way of a Democratic-sponsored bill that would cancel the attorney general’s power to appoint federal prosecutors without Senate confirmation. Gonzales’ Justice Department had previously dismissed the legislation as unreasonable.

— There would be no need for subpoenas to compel testimony by five of Gonzales’ aides involved in the firings, as the Democrats had threatened. Cloistered in the stately hideaway of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, D-Vt., the attorney general assured those present that he would permit the aides to tell their stories.

The Justice Department is shifting from offense to accommodation.

Regarding the item about appointments without Senate confirmation — this refers to a clause in the Patriot Act that allows the Attorney General to appoint “interim” attorneys who can serve indefinitely without Senate confirmation. Jonathan Turley said of this provision:

According to Turley, the provision in the Patriot Act that allowed such firings was no accident. “When you see an administration trying to try to put into legislation something this specific, this tailored, it does not come out of nowhere,” said Turley.

“It did not come out of the head of Zeus,” Turley said. “It came out of the head of someone at the White House who wanted to use it. I think there are serious questions there and this is a scandal that is getting worse by the day.”

Now President Bush will not stand in the way of a Dem bill to revoke this little privilege. Just wait for the signing statement.

Politicization of Justice

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Paul Krugman:

For those of us living in the Garden State, the growing scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors immediately brought to mind the subpoenas that Chris Christie, the former Bush “Pioneer” who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, issued two months before the 2006 election — and the way news of the subpoenas was quickly leaked to local news media.

The subpoenas were issued in connection with allegations of corruption on the part of Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who seemed to be facing a close race at the time. Those allegations appeared, on their face, to be convoluted and unconvincing, and Mr. Menendez claimed that both the investigation and the leaks were politically motivated.

You might recall The Narrative about last fall’s Senate race in New Jersey — voters were being forced to choose between a corrupt politician (Menendez) versus a pure and clean Republican who agreed with Bush’s policy on Iraq. This is from an October 2006 Washington Times story:

Political observers say the outcome depends on whether voters here get angrier about Mr. Bush and the Iraq war or about state corruption.

“Is this going to be a national referendum or is it going to be a statewide referendum on state corruption?” said New Jersey Republican political consultant Mark Campbell. “If this is national, Menendez wins; if this is a statewide election on the need for reform … Tom Kean Jr. wins.”

“People deserve to know if their senator is the only senator under federal criminal investigation,” Mr. Kean said as he took a break Oct. 8 from shaking hands with the tailgating crowd at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.

Kean Junior, whose father had been a popular New Jersey governor, ran a one-note campaign on the Menendez corruption charges. Menendez won, 53 percent to 45 percent. Whether there was any substance to the allegations against Menendez I do not know. What I do know is that the news stories about the alleged corruption dried up after the election.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written about the U.S. Attorney scandal, and I plan to catch up on the most recent developments later today. But for now I want to focus on Krugman’s point —

The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.

Righties will probably argue that Democrats are seven times more likely to be corrupt; to which I say, I doubt that.

And let’s not forget that Karl Rove’s candidates have a history of benefiting from conveniently timed federal investigations. Last year Molly Ivins reminded her readers of a curious pattern during Mr. Rove’s time in Texas: “In election years, there always seemed to be an F.B.I. investigation of some sitting Democrat either announced or leaked to the press. After the election was over, the allegations often vanished.”

It’s not just Democratic candidates. You might remember that at the beginning of 2003, Scott Ritter was trying to warn the world that the Bush Administration was cooking up phony evidence as a pretext for war. Out of the blue, a sealed court record about Scott Ritter was leaked to the press; details here.

“…it’s becoming clear that the politicization of the Justice Department was a key component of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a permanent Republican lock on power,” Krugman writes. Ya think?

Dems: 120 Days?

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This afternoon Dems in the House and the Senate announced an Iraq redeployment plans.

David Stout writes in the New York Times,

House Democratic leaders intensified their debate with President Bush over Iraq today as they announced legislation that would pull American combat troops out of Iraq before the fall of 2008.

“Only then can we refocus our military efforts on Afghanistan to the extent that we must,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. She said the Iraq withdrawal deadline would be attached to legislation providing nearly $100 billion requested by the Bush administration for the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns and money to expand health care for veterans.

Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said the leadership’s proposal “will essentially redirect more of our resources to the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, fighting the right war in the right place against the people who attacked us and who are giving Al Qaeda sanctuary.”

Sounds good to me, although I suspect the GOP will find some way to make the attachment to the veteran health care appropriation seem unethical, somehow. Watch for it.

Stout goes on to say the provision has little hope of passage, since Republicans are united against it.

Indeed, the Republican minority leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, practically invited his Democratic colleagues to bring the measure to the floor.

“Can you defeat this bill?” Mr. Boehner was asked at a Capitol news conference.

“Oh, we can,” he replied.

Fine. Bring it on, Boehner. I would like the provision enacted. But if there’s no hope, It’s good to see the Dems put forth a tangible, workable plan, even if the Republicans knock it down. Then they can go to the American people and say, look, we have a plan, but the Republicans block it.

Stout writes that Dems are split on the provision, because conservative Dems say it goes too far and liberal Dems say it doesn’t go far enough.

Ms. Pelosi refused to concede that the proposal’s chances are dim, even as a questioner noted that as many as 70 House Democrats want the United States out of Iraq by the end of 2007. “We will come together and find our common ground,” she said.

I firmly believe in not allowing perfect to become the enemy of good. At the moment, it seems more important for the Dems to present as much of a united front as possible.

Now for the Senate — this is from a news release —

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today joined Assistant Democratic Leader Dick Durbin, Democratic Conference Vice Chairman Charles Schumer, Democratic Conference Secretary Patty Murray, Senator Russ Feingold, and Senator Evan Bayh to announce a new Joint Resolution to revise U.S. policy on Iraq. Iraq has fallen into a bloody civil war, and as conditions on the ground have changed so must U.S. policy change to meet them.

The Reid Joint Resolution builds on the longstanding Democratic position on Iraq and the Levin-Reed Amendment: the current conflict in Iraq requires a political solution, Iraq must take responsibility for its own future, and our troops should not be policing a civil war. It contains binding language to direct the President to transition the mission for U.S. forces in Iraq and begin their phased redeployment within one-hundred twenty days with a goal of redeploying all combat forces by March 31, 2008. A limited number of troops would remain for the purposes of force protection, training and equipping Iraqi troops, and targeted counter-terror options.

Sen. Russ Feingold released this statement:

“Senator Reid has worked hard to rally the caucus in support of binding legislation to reject the President’s failed policies in Iraq and require redeployment of most U.S. troops from Iraq. While the legislation doesn’t go as far as I would like, it is a strong step toward ending our involvement in this misguided war. I will continue to push for Congress to use its power of the purse to end our involvement in this war.”

If Russ can live with it, so can I. Other opinions?

Better Than Churchill

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The beginning of this Sidney Blumenthal column is jaw-dropping:

As witnesses were trooping to the stand in the federal courthouse in Washington to testify in the case of United States v. I. Lewis Libby, and the Washington Post was publishing its series on the squalid conditions that wounded Iraq war veterans suffer at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center while thousands more soldiers were surging into Baghdad, President Bush held one of his private book club sessions that Karl Rove organizes for him at the White House. Rove picks the book, invites the author and a few neoconservative intellectual luminaries, and conducts the discussions. For this Bush book club meeting, the guest was Andrew Roberts, an English conservative historian and columnist and the author of “The Churchillians” and, most recently, “A History of the English-Speaking People Since 1900.”

The subject of Winston Churchill inspired Bush’s self-reflection. The president confided to Roberts that he believes he has an advantage over Churchill, a reliable source with access to the conversation told me. He has faith in God, Bush explained, but Churchill, an agnostic, did not. Because he believes in God, it is easier for him to make decisions and stick to them than it was for Churchill. Bush said he doesn’t worry, or feel alone, or care if he is unpopular. He has God.

Blumenthal doesn’t say how he knows what Bush said at the book salon, and I would like to know that. I would hate to think Blumenthal just made this up, à la Peggy Noonan.

But if Bush said it, what might one infer about Bush’s approach to religion? Does he think God is an almighty rabbit’s foot? Because he “has God” (which is troubling, theologically speaking, in itself) he can’t make mistakes?

Even as Scooter Libby sat at the defendant’s table silently wearing his fixed, forced smile, and Vice President Dick Cheney was revealed by witnesses as the conductor of the smear campaign against former ambassador Joseph Wilson, Bush and Rove felt free to hold forth in their salon, removed from anxiety. Rove had narrowly escaped the fate of Libby by changing his grand jury testimony just before he might have been indicted for perjury. Bush, who proclaimed that he would fire any leaker found in his administration, is apparently closer to Rove than ever. The night before the Libby verdict, the president had dinner at Rove’s house, and Rove sent to the reporters shivering outside a doggie bag filled with sausage and quail wings.

As I said in the last post, I would be extremely surprised if Libby is pardoned. Bush doesn’t do anything that doesn’t glorify Bush. I think he and Karl have already flushed Libby and moved on.

Pardon?

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I will be surprised if President Bush pardons Scooter Libby. As Ezra says, Bush’s famous “loyalty” only goes one way —

It’s long been his M.O to cut loose even the most faithful of servants after they outlive their usefulness. And Scooter Libby has definitely outlived his usefulness. To pardon him would refocus the blame onto the presidency, make it clear the administration felt indebted to an underling doing their bidding. That’s all true, of course, save for the indebted part. Libby was doing their bidding and now it is done. End of transaction.

Well, almost. Peter Baker and Carol D. Leonnig report for the Washington Post:

President Bush said yesterday that he is “pretty much going to stay out of” the case of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby until the legal process has run its course, deflecting pressure from supporters of the former White House aide to pardon him for perjury and obstruction of justice.

Scooter’s lawyers plan to seek a new trial. As long as there is even a possibility of more litigation, the White House can continue to use the “ongoing legal proceeding” excuse not to answer questions about Libby. That’s another reason I don’t believe we’ll see a pardon at least until after the 2008 elections.

Much is being made of Libby juror Ann Redington‘s desire to see Libby pardoned. I watched the Hardball segment in which she said this. My impression was that she was still thinking with Juror’s Mind, striving mightily to be fair and impartial. I’d be more interested in what she has to say about six months from now.

So Redington didn’t bother me nearly as much as Kate O’Beirne, sitting next to her, did. Kate thinks the jury tried its best but came up with the wrong verdict. Libby is, of course, innocent, no matter what the jury says. Just as Bill Clinton is guilty, even though Paula Jones lost her suit against him. See, courts are irrelevant. All you need to know to judge guilt or innocent are the political leanings of the accused. Anyone Kate judges to be one o’ hers must be innocent.

Hardball producers could save wear and tear on Kate if they just keep an inflatable Kate doll handy. Inflate it, stuff it into a chair, and play prerecorded talking points. ‘Twould be no better or worse than the real Kate. In fact, they might be doing that already.

At this point I don’t much care if Scooter sees jail time or not. If he were pardoned, it would not be like the pardons of Richard Nixon or Caspar Weinberger, whose pardons saw to it they were never tried. Avoiding those trials amounted to a cover up. But we’ve had Scooter’s trial; we know what happened. And Scooter’s just a factotum. It’s his masters I’m interested in.

Speaking of factotums (factoti?), David Brooks broods over the Libby trial today. He begins —

Three years ago I said some pessimistic things on TV about the war in Iraq. Scooter Libby called the next day. Methodically, though with a touch of wryness in his voice, he ran down a list of the hopeful developments he thought I was ignoring. Then as we were signing off, he interrupted himself and said: “Anyway, that’s the positive spin. I can do the negative spin just as well.”

Of course, Brooks was content with the positive spin.

Over the years, we had two lunches and about a half-dozen phone interviews, and he was more discreet each time. I would sit there — learning nothing — and think, We know the Bushies are not like us Jews because they’re willing to appear less knowledgeable than they really are, but can Scooter Libby be like this, too? [emphasis added]

Is that or is that not a damn weird thing to have written?

Yet it was hard not to like the guy — for his intelligence, his loyalty and his meticulous attention to ethical niceties. (At lunch he wouldn’t let me pick up the tab. He’d lay a $20 bill on the table to cover his half.)

Brooks goes around buying lunches for government officials? (I started to write “cheap lunches,” but I guess that shows I’ve lived in New York City too long.)

Yet that doesn’t begin to cover the sadness that this trial arouses, for the proceedings have revealed the arc of what the administration was and could have been.

Cue the violin music.

When you think back to the White House of 2003, the period the trial explores, you will discover a White House consumed by a feverish sense of mission.

Staff members in those days went to work wondering whether this would be the day they would die. There was a sense that any day a bomb might wipe out downtown Washington.

Hold that thought.

Senior officials were greeted each morning by intense intelligence briefings. On June 14, 2003, for example, Libby received a briefing with 27 items and 11 pages of terrorist threats. Someone once told me that going from the president’s daily briefing to the next event on Mr. Bush’s schedule, which might be a photo-op with a sports team, was like leaving “24” and stepping into “Sesame Street.” No wonder administration officials were corporate on the outside but frantic within.

The White House culture was also defined by the staff’s passionate devotion to the president. Bush’s speeches after 9/11 inspired a sense of intense connection, and the emotional bonds were kept perpetually aroused by the onset of war, by the fierce rivalries with the State Department and the C.I.A., and by the administration’s core creed, that everything it does must be transformational.

It was a time, in short, of grand goals but also of discombobulating and repressed emotion. [emphasis added]

But those intense emotions, especially the fear, not to mention a stew of underlying character pathologies, were driving the “grand goals.”

Today, the White House culture is less intense. The staff’s relationship to the president has simmered down, from devotion to mere admiration.

How precious.

Today, the White House staff is less disciplined but more attractive. There is no party line in private conversations. The trick now is to figure out what administration policy really is, because you can now talk to three different people and get three different versions on any topic. There’s more conversation and more modesty. The vice president has less gravitational pull, and there has been a talent upgrade in post after post: Josh Bolten as chief of staff, Henry Paulson at Treasury. If Bob Gates had been the first defense secretary, the world would be a much better place today. [emphasis added]

Then in the next paragraph, Brooks writes,

The administration has also lost its transformational mind-set. After cruel experience, there’s a greater tendency to match ends to means, and to actually think about executing a policy before you embark upon it.

Wow, thinking. Just imagine anyone in the White House actually thinking. But they can’t be thinking real hard, since no one has any idea in hell what Bush’s policies actually are.

There’s much more tolerance for serious freethinkers — the Johns Hopkins scholar Eliot Cohen was just hired at State.

In his book Fiasco, Thomas Ricks identified Eliot Cohen as a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz. (See p. 16.) He was one of the military experts assembled in December for the purpose of telling Bush the Iraq War is still “winnable” and that it was OK to ignore the Iraq Study Group recommendations. So much for serious freethinking. The Bushies are drawing the same tainted water from the same old well.

In short, this administration’s capacities have waxed as its power has waned. And you can’t help but feel that today’s White House would have been much better at handling the first stages of the war on terror. But that’s the perpetual tragedy of life: the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Wisdom comes from suffering and error, and when the passions die down and observation begins.

I picture Brooks with a three-day beard, crying into a gin bottle in some seedy Washington watering hole. How tragic it is — the Bush White House, after six years of bleeping up the planet, is finally getting its act together, even though no two of them can agree on what the act is. If only they’d done it sooner. Like six years ago. But now that they have embarked on the serious mission of governing — thinking about it, even — it’s too late, and the owl of Minerva has flown off with the mouse of accomplishment in its beak. And Brooks has the sorry task of having to write a column about it. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?

Yes, so tragic. Pass the gin.

News from the Noise Machine, Item 2

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Ron Hutcheson writes for McClatchy Newspapers that the Bush Administration is losing spin control.

After six years of setting the national agenda, with help from a compliant Congress, Bush is losing control of events in Washington. The new reality hit home Tuesday on multiple fronts.

At the federal courthouse, a jury convicted former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice. On Capitol Hill, congressional committees demanded answers in separate investigations into the shoddy treatment of wounded soldiers and allegations of politically motivated firings at the Justice Department.

With Bush’s job-approval ratings already so low they threaten his political viability, the latest eruptions of bad news could weaken him further with 22 months left to go in his term.

“When each story comes out, it adds to perceptions of an administration that is potentially incompetent and potentially corrupt,” said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Boston University. “Second-term presidents always have trouble. On a scale of bad to worse for second-term presidents, he’s at worse.”

This is more than just a second-term slump. It’s more like all the chickens coming home to roost.

News from the Noise Machine, Item 1

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In today’s New York Times, Judith Warner weighs in on Ann Coulter (“Think Naughty, Think Small, Think Not.”).

Leaving the issue of not-so-latent homophobia aside — dwelling upon it, in this context, is a matter of shooting ducks in a barrel — what I found particularly shocking in Coulter’s comments was their studied juvenility, the sheer idiocy of their language. “Faggot” and “total fag,” like other political pearls of our time — such as “bring it on” and “girlie men” — are just epoch-making in their stupidity. …

…All this led me this week to think of Frank Luntz, the hot political consultant and wordsmith who wrote the lyrics for the 1994 Republican revolution. In his new book, “Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear,” Luntz puts forth the argument that using the “uplifting, ennobling tone” of famed political scribes like Ted Sorenson and Peggy Noonan is not the best way to capture the attention of Americans today. Instead, to communicate with the people — the real people of “small town, middle America” — and to speak straight to their hearts, minds and entrails, you’ve got to put “yourself right into your listener’s shoes.”

In other words, think small. “Use Small Words” is Rule 1 of his strategy for successful communication. Rule 2: “Use Short Sentences.”

This is the most interesting part, IMO:

Luntz has a doctorate from Oxford; Coulter has degrees from Cornell and the University of Michigan Law School. Conservatives generally like to run with the idea that liberals are elitists, living “in a world of only Malibu and East Hampton,” as Coulter’s recent blog posting on the “crock” of global warming put it. But isn’t there something elitist, if not wrong, I wondered aloud to Luntz, about condescending to — or coddling or enabling — the imagined verbal limitations of the less-educated “other”?

Luntz did not much appreciate the question.

“It’s not condescending — it’s pandering,” he said of Coulter’s most recent performance. “Everything about the book says what she did was not just wrong but reprehensible. Those aren’t words that work. She broke every rule.”

“God, I really hate it every time she speaks,” he fumed. And, he added, if I were to even think of mentioning him in the same breath as her, “I will really, seriously raise hell.”

At a Conservative Women’s Network lunch at the Heritage Foundation last week, a question was raised, over dessert, about how conservative women should deal, “as women,” if Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination for president. The guest speaker, Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer in Washington, hemmed and hawed, shared some thoughts about Wellesley College and Barbara Bush, blushed, then concluded, “We’ll let the redneck guys who just aren’t ready to vote for a female commander in chief take care of the woman thing.”

Sounds like a plan. Sounds to me, too, as if the Republican noise machine may just have a monkey wrench in its machinery.

That the professional pundit class (like Luntz) think they can teach other Washington GOP insiders how to talk to ordinary folks always struck me as weird, but they’ve been getting away with it for a long time. Go figure.

Oooo, That Smell

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It’s terribly sad that this sorry-ass editorial was published in the Washington Post. A snip:

The fall of this skilled and long-respected public servant is particularly sobering because it arose from a Washington scandal remarkable for its lack of substance. It was propelled not by actual wrongdoing but by inflated and frequently false claims, and by the aggressive and occasionally reckless response of senior Bush administration officials — culminating in Mr. Libby’s perjury.

Yu can read a rebuttal to the editorial here.

The irony is that the Washington Post was the newspaper that broke the Watergate scandal. And in those days, Nixon supporters dismissed the Post as a partisan rag just trying to stir up trouble, and the whole scandal as much ado about nothing. You can still find recent comments calling Watergate a “second-rate burglary” (which is an upgrade from third rate).

But the burglary by itself was not the scandal. There was a lot more to it, including illegal campaign contributions, wiretapping of reporters, and cover-ups.

Just so, the Libby verdicts by themselves are only a clue, not the whole picture. It’s a shame the Post can’t see that.

Reactions to the verdict all splitting along partisan lines — the wingnut Right versus everybody else. I submit three samples for the honor of Dumbest Wingnut Editorial on The Verdict — from American Thinker, the Opinion Journal, and the New York Post. I’m not even going to comment.

Dan Froomkin writes,

It’s time for President Bush and Vice President Cheney to come clean about their roles in the White House’s outing of a CIA agent and the ensuing cover-up.

It’s actually long past time. But with former vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby’s conviction on charges of perjury and obstruction yesterday, the stench of corruption has taken formal residence at the White House.

Please read the whole thing; it’s excellent. I should note that Froomkin writes for Washingtonpost.com.

See also:

“Libby Lied, Troops Died” by Sidney Blumenthal

“Is Libby Taking a Fall for the White House?” by John Dickerson

“Lies About Crimes” from The Guardian

“The Cloud Over Cheney,” The Boston Globe

“A Libby Verdict,” The New York Times

Flexible Lives

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Following up this post from Sunday — Harold Meyerson has a must-read column about The Decade That Destroyed Family Values in the Washington Post:

As conservatives tell the tale, the decline of the American family, the rise in divorce rates, the number of children born out of wedlock all can be traced to the pernicious influence of one decade in American history: the ’60s.

The conservatives are right that one decade, at least in its metaphoric significance, can encapsulate the causes for the family’s decline. But they’ve misidentified the decade. It’s not the permissive ’60s. It’s the Reagan ’80s.

(I am reminded, once again, of the definition of pseudo conservative — “The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.” — Theodore W. Adorno)

In Saturday’s Post, reporter Blaine Harden took a hard look at the erosion of what we have long taken to be the model American family — married couples with children — and discovered that while this decline hasn’t really afflicted college-educated professionals, it is the curse of the working class. The percentage of households that are married couples with children has hit an all-time low (at least, the lowest since the Census Bureau started measuring such things): 23.7 percent. That’s about half the level that marrieds-with-children constituted at the end of the Ozzie-and-Harriet ’50s. …

… Over the past 35 years, the massive changes in the U.S. economy have largely condemned American workers to lives of economic insecurity. No longer can the worker count on a steady job for a single employer who provides a paycheck and health and retirement benefits, too. Over the past three decades, workers’ individual annual income fluctuations have consistently increased, while their aggregate income has stagnated. In the brave new economy of outsourced jobs and short-term gigs and on-again, off-again health coverage, American workers cannot rationally plan their economic futures. And with each passing year, as their level of economic security declines, so does their entry into marriage.

Yet the very conservatives who marvel at the efficiency of our new, more mobile economy and extol the “flexibility” of our workforce decry the flexibility of the personal lives of American workers. The right-wing ideologues who have championed outsourcing, offshoring and union-busting, who have celebrated the same changes that have condemned American workers to lives of financial instability, piously lament the decline of family stability that has followed these economic changes as the night the day.

American conservatism is a house divided against itself. It applauds the radicalism of the economic changes of the past four decades — the dismantling, say, of the American steel industry (and the job and income security that it once provided) in the cause of greater efficiency. It decries the decline of social and familial stability over that time — the traditional, married working-class families, say, that once filled all those churches in the hills and hollows in what is now the smaller, post-working-class Pittsburgh.

Problem is, disperse a vibrant working-class community in America and you disperse the vibrant working-class family.

Sometime during the Reagan Recession, President Reagan made a flip remark about laid-off factory workers. In effect, he said they could “vote with their feet” and move to some other part of the country to find better jobs. He was, of course, oblivious to what “voting with their feet” would do to families and communities.

As I wrote last Sunday, an article by Sharon Lerner in the New York Times discussed declining birthrates in Europe. The European experience suggests that “conservative” social policies discourage women from having children. In a nutshell, “conservative” countries provide little public support for working mothers, so women postpone having children. By contrast, those “socialist” Scandinavian countries that provide subsidized day care and mandate generous maternity leave policies have higher birthrates, because Scandinavian women are less likely to feel they have to choose between work and babies.

The problem with conservatives is that they try to apply pre-industrial models onto an industrial (and post-industrial) world. The “Ozzie and Harriet” family we’ve come to think of as the norm — dad works outside the home, mom stays home and raises kids — is actually a creation of the industrial revolution. Before the industrial revolution, most men worked for themselves as craftsmen or farmers and were not separated from their families by jobs. If a man had sons, the sons probably started working with dad while they were very young and, thereby, spent a great deal of time with him. But the industrial revolution changed that; men left the home and family to work in jobs, and in effect the jobs separated them from their children.

(It speaks volumes, I think, that before the 20th century, when a married couple divorced the father automatically got custody of the children. Sometime in the 20th century the idea that children “belonged” primarily to mothers had taken hold, and the law preferred mothers over fathers. The move to revise divorce laws and favor joint custody in the 1970s was actually a by-product of the feminist movement. Most “Father’s Rights” advocates, of course, still complain that the courts favor women and blame feminism for this, but most of these creatures seem less interested in their children than they are in using their kids to bash their wives and gripe about women generally.)

By the 1950s the notion that raising kids was “women’s work” was firmly entrenched. In fact, I clearly remember that when one of the very early issues of Ms. magazine argued that raising kids was “men’s work,” too — the cover featured a smiling man holding a baby — conservatives of the time were actually outraged. Of course, 20 years later conservatives were wailing about how children needed fathers and complaining that “feminazis” were destroying the American family.

Anyway, shortly after World War II Joseph Campbell began to argue that this exclusion of fathers from family life was creating a faux masculinity, which I wrote about yesterday. For that matter, the faux femininity that Betty Friedan wrote about in The Feminine Mystique was mostly a post World War II phenomenon, you might recall.

The bottom line is that, over the last couple of centuries, the rise of capitalism as the way most money gets made has had profound effects on society in general and families in particular. We’re still trying to figure out how to blend capitalism with a healthy family life. In America and other “conservative” countries, the burden of making the capitalism-family equation work is put on individuals. And this is true even now that, in most families, both parents are separated from their children most of the day. But conservatives worship at the altar of capitalism and are blind to its pernicious side effects, even as families and marriage itself are literally breaking apart under the strain.

I think it ought to be possible to maintain private property rights and free enterprise and all that — well, in fact, it was possible before the Reagan Revolution began dismantling the New Deal. But to make it work, government must do a better job supporting workers and families. Teddy Roosevelt said almost a century ago,

The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.

The Right sees capitalism as the master and workers as capitalism’s servants. And for all their talk about family values, when they have to choose between children and money, money wins every time.

Scooted!

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Guilty on four counts. Merry Fitzmas!

Update: Media Matters has the counterspin.

Update update: Um, is this a threat?

I think it is wrong to prosecute someone when the underlying crime that supposedly occurred to set the entire investigation in motion has never been proved to have occurred. (I felt the same way about the Martha Stewart matter.) I think the people who will be cheering this verdict might want to step back and think about how this kind of precedent will be used against one of their own in the future.

And it will. Bet on it.

Precedent? This is hardly the first “obstruction of justice” verdict handed down by an American jury. Libby was also found guilty of perjury and giving a false statement.

As Patrick Fitzgerald explained when the indictments were announced, Libby’s obstructions prevented the prosecution from determining whether the alleged leak violated federal law. The rightie blogger quoted above seems to think that it’s OK if someone suspected of a crime is caught lies to law enforcement or a grand jury or otherwise obstructs the investigation. Huh?

I’m watching CNN, and apparently some of the jurors didn’t think the case went far enough. More when I find out about it.