Gloom and Doom

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The pundits are brimming with advice and warnings for the Dems today. Let’s start with a warning. At the Los Angeles Times, Greg Grandin cautions Dems to remember Iran-Contra.

It was 20 years ago this Nov. 3 — the day after the Democrats regained control of the Senate in 1986 — that a Lebanese magazine revealed that the Reagan administration sold missiles to Iran. The sale (brokered by a National Security Council staffer named Oliver North) violated a U.S. arms embargo against Iran and contradicted President Reagan’s personal pledge never to deal with governments that sponsored terrorism. Soon after, it was revealed that profits from the missile sale went to the Nicaraguan Contras, breaking yet another law, this one banning military aid to the anti-Sandinista guerrillas.

The Democrats rejoiced. They had taken back the Senate after six years in the minority, and Reagan’s poll numbers plummeted as follow-up investigations uncovered that the National Security Council was waging an off-the-books foreign policy using rogue intelligence agents, neoconservative intellectuals, Arab sheiks, drug runners, anticommunist businessmen, even the Moonies.

The Democrats, now with majorities in both congressional chambers, gleefully convened multiple inquiries. From May to August 1987, televised congressional hearings offered a rare glimpse into the cabalistic world of spooks, bagmen and mercenaries. Fawn Hall, North’s secret shredder, told of smuggling evidence out of the Old Executive Office Building in her boots, and she lectured Rep. Thomas Foley that “sometimes you have to go above the written law.”

One year after the hearings, though, Iran-Contra was a dead issue. Reagan’s poll numbers rebounded, and his vice president, George H. W. Bush, won the White House despite being implicated in the scandal.

Grandin says the Dems were tripped up by Oliver North, who somehow came across as heroic and patriotic in spite of, well, the facts. I think there was more going on to squelch the investigation. However it happened, Iran-Contra slipped out of public consciousness without leaving a trace. Grandin continues,

Just last December, Vice President Dick Cheney pointed to the Republican “minority report” on Iran-Contra — written, not coincidentally, by Cheney’s current chief of staff, David Addington — to justify the White House’s insistence on the primacy of the executive branch in matters of national security. At the time, that report, which blamed the scandal on Congress for “legislative hostage-taking,” was considered out of the mainstream. Today, it reads like a run-of-the-mill memo from the Justice Department outlining the legal basis for any of the Bush administration’s wartime power grabs.

Cheney and Addington are not the only veterans of the scandal who have resurfaced to help President Bush fight the war on terror. So have Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Otto Reich, John Negroponte, John Poindexter, neoconservative Michael Ledeen and even Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian arms dealer who brokered one of the first missile sales to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s regime.

Iran-Contra, then, wasn’t just a Watergate-style crime and a coverup. It was, rather, another battle in the neoconservative campaign against Congress and in defense of the imperial presidency. Though Iran-Contra might have been a draw — the 11 convicted conspirators won on appeal or were pardoned by George H.W. Bush — the backlash has become the establishment.

Already there are reports that if the Democrats take over Congress in November, their agenda will have a 1986-ish look: hearings and calls for more congressional oversight of foreign policy.

But if they want to avoid again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, they must do what their counterparts 20 years ago failed to do. They must challenge the crusading ideology that justified the invasion of Iraq and has made war the option of first resort for this administration.

Otherwise, no matter how many probes they convene — or congressional seats they pick up — the Democrats will always be dancing to Ollie’s tune.

Even gloomier are Michael Lind’s projections for a post-Bush America:

But if the US extricates itself from Iraq and Afghanistan and stays out of other Muslim countries, then the already feeble incentive for American politicians to try to balance support for Israel with appeals to Arab and Muslim public opinion will be even weaker. The abandonment of the US attempt to be the hegemon of the middle east, and US withdrawal from Iraq, might actually empower those in the US who make the simple claim that the US and Israel are allies in world war four (Norman Podhoretz’s term; he considers the cold war to be world war three) against the hydra-headed menace of “Islamofascism.”

The strengthening of the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim right in the US following an inglorious retreat from Iraq would strain US-European ties even further. In the second decade of the 21st century, Europeans may be surprised to find themselves denounced by some liberal Democrats as well as by conservative Republicans as “Eurabian” appeasers.

In US domestic politics, the long-term beneficiaries of the Iraq war may be the Republicans who waged and lost it, rather than the Democrats who (mostly) opposed it. This is less paradoxical than it seems. Countries that win wars are relaxed about their security and more open to parties of the left—think of Clinton’s two terms after the cold war and before 9/11, or Britain’s rejection of Churchill after the second world war. Defeated countries tend to seek strong men on the right, as France did after Algeria and the US did after Vietnam, which was followed by a series of Republican presidencies.

I have a bad case of brain mush because of a head cold, and I’m having trouble coming up with pithy commentary today. Silver linings, anyone?

Vulnerability Gap

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R.J. Eskow discusses a new book by Clark Kent Ervin:

Ervin’s book, “Open Target,” describes an Administration that’s all but indifferent to protecting the American people from further terrorism. Its sole concerns appear to be to use DHS to dole out political pork, create politically attractive news releases, and spin failure so that it looks like success.

This is not news. But notice who Clark Kent Ervin is:

Ervin is the conservative Texas Republican who came to Washington as a personal friend of the President’s after serving in his gubernatorial administration. He became Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and refused to look the other way at the Administration’s incompetence in fighting terrorism.

Yes, another former Bushie tells all. But what got my interest in Eskrow’s piece was Ervin’s use of the phrase vulnerability gap. Computer network security people have been using this phrase for a while. I think the Dems ought to pick it up and run with it.

Once upon a time, boys and girls, a Democrat named John Kennedy used the phrase “missile gap” to discredit Republicans on national security and win a presidential election. The Dems generously larded speeches with missile gap and drizzled the phrase liberally on the electorate. It reminded voters of an allegation — which was not true — that the Eisenhower Administration (including Vice President Richard Nixon, Kennedy’s opponent) had somehow allowed the Soviets to acquire more nuclear missiles than we had.

The phrase vulnerability gap ought to work nicely, too, and it has the advantage of describing truth. Eskow continues,

Ervin dissects the self-serving and misleading statements made by Bush, Ridge, and Michael Chertoff. He’s especially withering on their boasts that the fact we haven’t been attacked on US soil since 9/11 is proof that DHS is effective. He compares it to French confidence in the Maginot Line, the most foolish defense attempt in history, and points out that terrorists operate on a long line. Five years, as he observes, is not a long time to Al Qaeda.

He describes the TSA as a boondoggle gone awry, and his analysis of our ongoing vulnerability to nuclear attack is chilling. Equally frightening are his descriptions of the government’s drastic underfunding of our anti-terror defenses. (He quotes from Congressional testimony in which a DHS intelligence official admits he can’t hire more staff as required because there is no money to pay for their office space.)

Ervin also details the vulnerability of mass transit, schools, and other “soft targets.” He’s fair enough to admit that you can’t defend every possible target, but thorough enough to describe what could be done (and isn’t) to improve their safety.

Vulnerability gap, vulnerability gap, vulnerability gap. The connotations are all there; vulnerability conjures the sensation of being unprotected and exposed. Gap makes us visualize breach or broken, perhaps also left behind or separated from something. Vulnerability gap. While the Bush Administration sends our National Guard overseas and dumps $2 billion bleeping collars a week into Iraq, vital infrastructure and other soft targets are left unguarded here at home. Vulnerability gap.

If the Dems can’t club the Bushies to death with that, there’s no hope for ’em.

Cowards

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The fundamental question is this: Why would any American citizen support the “2006 Military Commission Act” that President Bush signed into law today?

Let’s review:

The Act empowers President Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S. citizens, “unlawful enemy combatants.” An American citizen who speaks out against Bush’s policies could be designated an “unlawful enemy combatant” by Bush. The Act empowers the President to round up and incarcerate anyone, citizen or non-citizen, who he determines has given “material support” to terrorists. The Act strips habeas corpus rights from detained aliens who have been declared enemy combatants. The U.S. will continue to round up innocent and guilty alike and hold them indefinitely without giving them a way to prove their innocence. For more on how the Act strips American citizens and others of basic rights, see Marjorie Cohn, “American Prison Camps Are on the Way.”

Regarding torture: Reasonable people might disagree over the distinction between “cruelty” and “torture.” For example, Stephen Rickard argues in today’s WaPo that the Act authorizes cruelty but not torture. I assume he refers to definitions of torture and cruelty in international law; personally, I don’t see a difference. But he also says,

[The CIA] reportedly was using waterboarding (a terrifying mock execution in which a prisoner is strapped to a board and convinced he is being drowned), dousing naked prisoners with water in 50-degree cold and forcing shackled prisoners to stand for 40 straight hours. …

…The United States has prosecuted every one of these techniques as a war crime. So when Congress passed the McCain amendment last fall banning cruel treatment, CIA interrogators reportedly stopped working. Vice President Cheney had sought an exemption for the CIA — but didn’t get one. The administration apparently pushed the interrogators hard to resume their tactics, saying these techniques were still legal, but the CIA refused.

It seems the agency had learned an important lesson from the infamous Justice Department “torture memo,” which claimed that to be deemed “torture” a procedure had to be capable of causing major organ failure or death. The administration repudiated the memo when it became public. The lesson? Secret, contorted legal opinions don’t provide any real protection to CIA officers.

So the CIA demanded “clarity” — from Congress. No wonder President Bush practically sprinted to the cameras to begin spinning his “compromise” with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on the Military Commissions Act. He needs to convince CIA interrogators that they now have congressional carte blanche.

So did the Act signed today do the trick? Rickard says it doesn’t, and that if the interrogators give in to White House pressure and resume brutal interrogations, they’ll be at greater legal risk than before.

The administration is trying to convince CIA officers that they won’t be indicted — or at least convicted. But the CIA demanded clarity, not more ambiguity and “plausible deniability.”

At the end of the day all the president can honestly tell CIA interrogators is this: “The law has some loose language. We’ll give you another memo. Don’t worry.”

Sure.

And torture doesn’t work, anyway. Bush wants us to believe that the “tough” techniques that may or may not be torture has yielded vital information that has saved American lives, but there is plenty of indication that’s not so.

Dan Froonkin writes,

The new law vaguely bans torture — but makes the administration the arbiter of what is torture and what isn’t. It allows the president to imprison indefinitely anyone he decides falls under a wide-ranging new definition of unlawful combatant. It suspends the Great Writ of habeas corpus for detainees. It allows coerced testimony at trial. It immunizes retroactively interrogators who may have engaged in torture.

Here’s what Bush had to say at his signing ceremony in the East Room: “The bill I sign today helps secure this country, and it sends a clear message: This nation is patient and decent and fair, and we will never back down from the threats to our freedom.”

But that may not be the “clear message” the new law sends most people.

Here’s the clear message the law sends to the world: America makes its own rules. The law would apparently subject terror suspects to some of the same sorts of brutal interrogation tactics that have historically been prosecuted as war crimes when committed against Americans.

Here’s the clear message to the voters: This Congress is willing to rubberstamp pretty much any White House initiative it sees as being in its short-term political interests. (And I don’t just mean the Republicans; 12 Senate Democrats and 32 House Democrats voted for the bill as well.)

Here’s the clear message to the Supreme Court: Review me.

I ask again: why would anyone support Bush’s position? Today righties are snarling and snapping like cornered animals at anyone who criticizes the torture bill. We nay-sayers are “whiny hippies” throwing a “moonbat hissy fit.”

A more temperate rightie declared “This is undeniably a victory for those of us that believe we need to aggressively wage the war against jihadism.” This and other rightie commenters continue to follow the White House in blind faith that the Bush Administration knows what it is doing and will use the unprecedented power it has gained wisely. Given the Bush Administration’s record — that’s insane.

Righties like to talk tough, but peel enough layers off ’em and you’ll find a sniveling little coward crouching and whimpering at their core. Deep down, they want Dear Leader to have dictatorial power so that he can protect them. Like any mob in the grip of hysteria, they have lost reason and inhibition, and they attack anyone who gets in their way.

They’re cowards, they’re out of control, and they must be stopped.

News That Isn’t News

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North Korea has plutonium. This is not news. North Korea has had plutonium for many years, enough for at least five or six nuclear weapons, probably more. They had it before Bill Clinton became president. From 1994 to 2003, the plutonium was stored in fuel rods in a concrete-lined pool of water in Yongbyon. In 2003, North Korea un-froze its plutonium weapons program and began working on making plutonium bombs.

The plutonium in the bombs North Korea is testing was processed since 2003. On Bush’s watch.

North Korea also has had uranium, and lots of it, for many years. In 2002 the Bush Administration stirred up an international whoop-dee-doo by claiming North Korea was processing uranium to make nuclear weapons. I do not believe there was ever any firm confirmation that NK was enriching uranium for military use and not industrial use. There is some question whether North Korea is capable of enriching uranium for military use — it takes a lot of time, energy, and technical whizbangs (such as 1,300 high-performance centrifuges) to get sufficient bomb material out of uranium. Worst-case, North Korea eventually might have made one or two uranium bombs.

In contrast to uranium, plutonium is nearly plug-and-play, so to speak. That’s why plutonium is a bigger worry than uranium. That’s why the 1994 Agreed Framework was negotiated — to get North Korea to freeze its plutonium program. And North Korea kept this agreement until the Bush Administration trashed it.


Robert Farley writes,

This is utterly unsurprising; the parallel uranium program that North Korea had developed in the 1990s was never capable of producing much in the way of bomb material. This reinforces the conclusion that the key diplomatic moments came in 1994, when the North Koreans agreed to substantially scale back their nuclear ambitions in return for aid, and in 2002 when they gave up on this agreement. … [T]he Bush administration in 2002 faced two unfortunate but clearly distinguishable realities; one in which North Korea had the material required to make one or two bombs, and one in which [North Korea] had the capacity to make nearly a dozen. Because of its diplomatic ineptitude, ideological commitment, and obsession with Iraq, the administration had neither the interest in dealing with North Korea nor the capacity to carry out any threats.

For reasons explained very well and clearly in the articles linked below, North Korea’s decision to un-freeze plutonium production is entirely the fault of the Bush Administration.

The North Korea link archive:

Eric Alterman, “Blaming Success, Upholding Failure”

Rachel Weise, “North Korea Nuclear Timeline”

Hilzoy, “Do You Feel Safer Now?”

Joe Conason, “Wagging the Big Dog”

Fred Kaplan, “The Slime Talk Express”

Rosa Brooks, “A Good Week for the Axis of Evil”

Tom Teepen, “Bush’s newest N. Korea policy: Blame Clinton”

Fred Kaplan, “Rolling Blunder”

The Mahablog North Korea posts (most recent first):

“Blame Everybody (But Bush)”

“More Bombs”

“Bombing”

“Happy Talk”

“Bolton Lies; Righties Confused”

And finally,

“Blame Bush for North Korea’s Nukes”

The JabberDick

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I haven’t found it outside the subscription firewall yet, but I want to mention Paul Krugman’s column in today’s New York Times. It begins,

In a recent interview with The Hartford Courant, Senator Joseph Lieberman said something that wasn’t credible. When the newspaper asked him whether America would be better off if the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives next month, he replied, “Uh, I haven’t thought about that enough to give an answer.”

And the Democratic Party leadership in Washington wonders why we bloggers don’t like him. But this column isn’t about Lieberman. It’s about why America would be better off if the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives next month.

The really important reason may be summed up in two words: subpoena power.

Even if the Democrats take both houses, they won’t be able to accomplish much in the way of new legislation. They won’t have the votes to stop Republican filibusters in the Senate, let alone to override presidential vetoes.

The only types of legislation the Democrats might be able to push through are overwhelmingly popular measures, such as an increase in the minimum wage, that Republicans don’t want but probably wouldn’t dare oppose in an open vote.

But while the Democrats won’t gain the ability to pass laws, if they win they will gain the ability to carry out investigations, and the legal right to compel testimony.

The current Congress has shown no inclination to investigate the Bush administration. Last year The Boston Globe offered an illuminating comparison: when Bill Clinton was president, the House took 140 hours of sworn testimony into whether Mr. Clinton had used the White House Christmas list to identify possible Democratic donors. But in 2004 and 2005, a House committee took only 12 hours of testimony on the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

The Bush White House, and in particular Dick the Dick, has some history with subpoenas. Let us revisit the tale of “Dick the Dick and the GAO Subpoena,” as told by John Dean in August, 2003.

In a sense, this story begins during the close 2000 Presidential election, when energy industry special interests were big-dollar contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign. (In 2004’s re-election campaign, they will doubtless be called upon once again.)

After he was elected – and very much beholden to those contributors – Bush put Cheney in charge of developing the National Energy Policy. To do so, Cheney convened an Energy Task Force. (Details about the Task Force can be found in my prior column.)

Cheney’s selection alone was ominous: He had headed Halliburton, just the kind of big-dollar Republican energy industry contributor that had helped Bush-Cheney win the election in the first place.

The Energy Task Force might have operated in absolute secrecy, were it not for GAO. GAO is a nonpartisan agency with statutory authority to investigate “all matters related to the receipt, disbursement, and use of public money,” so that it can judge the expenditures and effectiveness of public programs, and report to Congress on what it finds.

To fulfill its statutory responsibility, GAO sought documents from Vice-President Cheney relating to Energy Task Force expenditures. But in a literally unprecedented move, the White House said no.

On August 2, 2001, Vice President Cheney sent a letter – personally signed by him – to Congress demanding, in essence, that it get the Comptroller off his back. In the letter, he claimed that his staff had already provided “documents responsive to the Comptroller General’s inquiry concerning the costs associated with the [Energy task force’s] work.” As I will explain later, this turned out to be a lie.

In the end, GAO had to go to court to try to get the documents to which it plainly was entitled. On December 9, 2002, GAO lost in court – though, as I argued in a prior column, the decision was incorrect.

Then, on February 9, 2003, the Comptroller General announced GAO’s decision not to appeal. He said he feared that another adverse decision would cause the agency to lose even more power, more permanently. Several news accounts suggest that it was the Republican leadership of Congress that stopped the appeal.

About the lie — At one point the Dickster released 77 pages of documents to the GAO with a signed letter saying these were, substantially, the “responsive” documents the GAO sought. The documents included “unexplained phone bills, columns of unidentified figures, and a pizza receipt,” says Dean, but not the information the GAO had requested.

The story continued. Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club had filed suit to obtain energy task force records, also. This case eventually made it to the Supreme Court after district courts refused to dismiss the suit, and in June 2004 the SCOTUS bounced the case back to the district courts. A whiff of impropriety surrounded the decision, as the Dick’s duck-hunting buddy Antonin Scalia refused to recuse himself. John Dean explained,

On June 24, in Cheney v. U.S. District Court, the Supreme Court gave Vice President Dick Cheney only a partial victory in the suit that seeks to learn how his National Energy Policy Development Group developed its recommendations. …

… This case received a great deal of press attention because Justice Antonin Scalia refused to recuse himself from it, despite his duck hunting trip with Cheney. And unsurprisingly, Scalia did indeed side with Cheney in the case.

But rather that write an opinion, Scalia joined a brief dissent by Justice Clarence Thomas that would have resolved the matter in Cheney’s favor – and resolved it on the merits, going into the constitutional issues involved.

But that did not happen. Five other Justices — Kennedy, Rehnquist, Stevens, O’Connor and Breyer – preferred to send the case back to the Court of Appeals, as noted above. They based their ruling on a number of fairly esoteric procedural grounds.

Finally, the remaining two Justices, Ginsburg and Souter, wanted to send the case all the way back to the trial judge – and allow it to proceed.

And in May 2005, the case was dismissed. Steve Soto reported,

Yes, Dick Cheney won his case on the Enron/Energy Task Force disclosure lawsuit in front of the District of Columbia District Court of Appeals yesterday. In an unusual unanimous 8-0 ruling that included Carter, Reagan, Bush I-II, and Clinton-appointed judges, the DC court of appeals found that the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch failed to show that nongovernmental officials and lobbyists were involved in the writing the Bush energy policy. As a result, the court dismissed the lawsuit for failing to show why the Executive Branch didn’t act within its authority to seek confidential input while it itself drafted the policy.

Both the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch are evaluating whether or not they will appeal to the Bush-Reagan Supreme Court. Observers have noted that the one startling assertion that all 8 bipartisan judges made in their decision is that they accepted on faith what the Bush Administration said about the non-involvement of industry in the drafting of the policy, without giving plaintiffs the opportunity to cross-examine or challenge the Bush Administration’s claims.

The imperial presidency has been fully established in the DC Court of Appeal and of course in the Bush/Reagan Supreme Court. Too bad they didn’t feel this way in the 1990s.

I am no lawyer, but it seems to me the legal issues surrounding subpoenas of the White House are pretty muddy these days. And what would happen if the White House were to run out of appeals and still refuse to honor a subpoena?

Fill in the Punch Line

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How many Neocons does it take to screw in a light bulb? One to hold the bulb and nine to rotate the ladder, plus 300,000 ground troops to invade Iran.

If you can think of other answers, add ’em.

How about these:

You may have heard Neocons are complete idiots, but that’s not true. Some parts are missing.

You can tell which kids will grow up to be Neocons. They’re the ones outsmarted by Silly Putty.

I started to create a Photoshop pic of Kristol and Hume wearing “I’m with stupid” T-shirts, but decided that would be redundant.

What Does He Know That We Don’t?

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Michael Abramowitz writes in today’s Washington Post:

Amid widespread panic in the Republican establishment about the coming midterm elections, there are two people whose confidence about GOP prospects strikes even their closest allies as almost inexplicably upbeat: President Bush and his top political adviser, Karl Rove.

Flashback: As I remember it, on election night 2000 the extended Bush clan watched the train wreck from the Texas governor’s mansion. From time to time they’d appear on television, watching television. And at some point someone told them Florida had been called for Gore, and they shrugged it off. They weren’t worried about Florida. They knew they had Florida, one way or another.

Abramowitz continues,

The official White House line of supreme self-assurance comes from the top down. Bush has publicly and privately banished any talk of losing the GOP majorities, in part to squelch any loss of nerve among his legions. Come January, he said last week, “We’ll have a Republican speaker and a Republican leader of the Senate.”

The question is whether this is a case of justified confidence — based on Bush’s and Rove’s electoral record and knowledge of the money, technology and other assets at their command — or of self-delusion. Even many Republicans suspect the latter. Three GOP strategists with close ties to the White House flatly predicted the loss of the House, though they would not do so on the record for fear of offending senior Bush aides.

After the 2004 election, Maureen Farrell wrote an editorial for Buzzflash that documented Bush’s pattern of supreme confidence before “elections”:

On election night, Peter Jennings looked measurably surprised when he learned that President Bush had provided a tape of himself, sitting in the White House, commenting on his impending victory. It was an unprecedented move. No sitting president had ever addressed the nation while polls were still open. It was just not done. But there was George, exuding confidence, offering an election day reminder of our leader’s legitimacy.

It was all so perfectly Rovian, too. And why not? The Bush family filmed a similar made-for-TV moment in 2000, you might recall, when they assured America that Florida belonged to George. “There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would Never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying, and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote, two weeks before the Supreme Court’s fateful decision.” Of course Bush would win Florida. Losing was out of the question. Here was the whole bloody Family laughing & hooting & sneering at the dumbness of the whole world on National TV.”

Election night 2004, however, was not punctuated by any such hooting. It was the end of a long and grueling journey for the President of the United States and his supporters. Tales of voter intimidation, computer glitches and “partisan mischief,” were reported during early voting in Florida, but somehow those things usually worked in the President’s favor. (Would anyone have complained, do you suppose, if John Kerry’s brother had been running the show?).

Of course, thanks to the Electoral College, in a close presidential election one has only to steal one or two states to swing the election. To keep the House in Republican hands, BushCo is going to have to pull a “Florida” in several states at once. And when pollsters are predicting a blowout (as Kevin Heyden notes, even much of the Right Blogosphere has written off the House), even the U.S. news media might get suspicious if Republicans win.

Emptywheel reminds us that Rove isn’t always right.

As I’ve been flying around the world, I’ve been reading all the Rove classics, including Bush’s Brain. And what struck me as I was reading it is the failures that never get mentioned. There’s the loser campaign in PA. Rove’s plans to win CA in 2000 and MI in 2004. These were all part of Rove’s grand plan and they didn’t come to fruition. Only Rove’s overconfidence in the 2000 NH primary ever gets mentioned. Underlying it all (particularly the MI loss, with the failed bid to win supporters by imposing a steel tariff, which really decimated the Tool and Die industry in MI) is the real possibility that, eventually, people are going to want results. Eventually, policy does matter. Rovian politics are not enough–not enough to win wars in Iraq, not enough to save jobs in the Midwest, and not enough to ensure seniors get prescription drugs.

Also at The Next Hurrah, DemFromCT provides a list of “Perceived GOP Errors” that includes Terri Schiavo, Harriet Miers, Dubai Ports, and immigration. I don’t know how much of a hand Rove had in those little episodes, but certainly each of these issues showed the White House with its pants down, so to speak, and very much caught off guard by public reaction it didn’t anticipate.

I’ve long believed that Karl Rove is a kind of Idiot Savant who is brilliant at one thing — Assault Politics — but barely competent at anything else. Like his boy Bush, he may finally have waded in over his head.

Out With a Bang?

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“If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements, corrupts even more.”—Barbara Tuchman

I don’t know where Tuchman wrote the above; I found it in a “quotes for today” column. If anyone recognizes it, please speak up.

Meanwhile —

I’ve written a couple of posts recently about President Bush’s increasing irrelevancy, here and here. But it may be he’s not planning to go out with a whimper.

Kenneth Walsh of US News and World Report writes,

Some Republican strategists are increasingly upset with what they consider the overconfidence of President Bush and his senior advisers about the midterm elections November 7–a concern aggravated by the president’s news conference this week.

“They aren’t even planning for if they lose,” says a GOP insider who informally counsels the West Wing. If Democrats win control of the House, as many analysts expect, Republicans predict that Bush’s final two years in office will be marked by multiple congressional investigations and gridlock.

“The Bush White House has had no relationship with Congress,” said a Bush ally. “Beyond the Democrats, wait till they see how the Republicans–the ones that survive–treat them if they lose next month.”

Billmon suggests there is a plan — start a war with Iran. Would this help win the midterm for Republicans? I doubt it; at this point I think it would just make for a bigger rout. However, I think Tristero is on to something:

I believe that Bush will, as he has done since the beginning, continue to play chicken with the US Constitution, daring Congress to force the constitutional crisis he’s created, which has been going on since before he took office, into a full-blown public meltdown. And I believe, just as they did with the filibuster, that Congress will back down to prevent a public meltdown from happening. Congress, either Dem-controlled or not, will prefer to avoid a very frightening confrontation with a rogue presidency – that could lead who knows where – in the hopes that Bush’s insane challenge to the very structure of the US government simply will end when Bush leaves office in 2009.

I’m not saying I like this or that I think it’s a good (or bad) idea. All I’m suggesting is that even if there is a rout, don’t expect much. With Bush in office, the serious danger to the country’s kind of government persists. He will do whatever he wants to do. The Congress, like it or not, will be very anxious to do nothing to exacerbate the crisis, hoping to wait him out.

Yes, indeed, a Democratic House/Congress may raise quite a stink over Bush’s desire for the big Iran Bang Bang he’s planning. But even so, Congress will do all it can not to confront Bush but avoid the confrontation.

That’s right: Even a Democratically controlled Congress may very well go along with Bush’s war plans in order to avoid a catastrophic showdown over who really has the true power in America these days. It may mean that the confrontation over Bush/Iran could devolve into an open clash between Bush and very reluctant generals, with Congress stuck, badly, in the middle. (And I can clearly see the headlines on Fox declaring a ” military coup d ‘etat” and “mutiny.”) But frankly, I doubt it. I suspect that there will be no major dramatic confrontations and, barring the totally unforeseen, that Bush could get away with starting another war. Possibly even a nuclear war – and then watch the fur fly as the world condemns the US and Congress tries to figure out what to do while the bodies of radiated children are displayed on television and Bush demands “loyalty in a time of active war.”

You know that some Dems would give Bush anything he wants — Lieberman, for example, if he returns to the Senate and remains a Dem. You can count on Lieberman and some others to sell us out.

As for the rest of the Dems, majority or not, beginning the day after the November election we must begin an all-out, full-court-press campaign to let the Dems know that, if they don’t stand up to Bush, they will face worse consequences from us.

It’s entirely possible Bush isn’t making any plans because he’s got his head shoved so far up his ass he really doesn’t know he’s in trouble. It’s also possible he will decide to work out some kind of compromise — don’t indict me for war crimes, and I’ll behave. We’ll see. It’s important to remember that, for all his bluster, Bush is a weak man and a weak leader. He doesn’t get his way by leading, but by subterfuge and lies. His weakness is, in fact, his strength — he has no scruples at all, and he might very well force the nation to choose between allowing him to reign as dictator and some sort of coup d’état. But weenie that he is, it’s possible there’s someone who can take him into hand and force him to comply. Like, maybe, his mother.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About North Korea’s Nukes

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I’ve written so much about North Korea I get tired just thinking about it, so I’m grateful when someone else takes up the slack. Here are some new links, plus links to oldie-but-goodie stuff, all in one handy-dandy post to bookmark for future reference..

Some links I haven’t posted before:

Hilzoy, “Do You Feel Safer Now?”

Joe Conason, “Wagging the Big Dog”

Fred Kaplan, “The Slime Talk Express”

Rosa Brooks, “A Good Week for the Axis of Evil”

Tom Teepen, “Bush’s newest N. Korea policy: Blame Clinton”

Linked before, but not to be missed:

Fred Kaplan, “Rolling Blunder”

The Mahablog North Korea posts (most recent first):

“Blame Everybody (But Bush)”

“More Bombs”

“Bombing”

“Happy Talk”

“Bolton Lies; Righties Confused”

And finally,

“Blame Bush for North Korea’s Nukes”

Update: New links:

Eric Alterman, “Blaming Success, Upholing Failure”

Rachel Weise, “North Korea Nuclear Timeline“

Reagan Youth

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More on the increasing irrelevancy of George W. Bush, which I discussed yesterday — in the November 2006 issue of Harper’s there’s a bone-chilling article by Wells Tower called “The Kids Are Far Right.” I very much regret that it isn’t online yet, and probably won’t be for a couple of months. If you want to look for it on newsstands, the cover art is a donkey head with a halter made of $100 bills.

Tower spent a week at the National Conservative Student Conference in Washington, DC, talking to the young folks. Among many striking passages was this one:

Despite all the jaunty blood thirst for liberals and hippies, it’s interesting to note that none of the students utters words of praise for George W. Bush, or goes in for any cuticle-nibbling over the daily media forecasts of the drubbing the G.O.P. is supposed to suffer at the polls fourteen weeks from now. The more than 400 attendees is a record for the conference, and although this is good news for the conservative movement, it is also an oblique sort of nose-thumbing at the Republican Party, whose frantic volunteer trenches these students have disdained to spend the week in Washington. Proud self-declared Republicans, in fact, are curiously hard to come by among the students , nearly all of whom identify themselves as libertarians or simply as “conservatives,” and who will later describe our president to me in the following terms: “embarrassing,” “stupid,” “arrogant,” “a halfway conservative,” “a puppet of lobbyists and special interests,” and “a liberal, basically.”

Our President is many things, but of course there’s nothing in him that remotely resembles “liberal.” I assume the young person was using liberal in the sense of “nyah nyah nyah.” In another passage, one not-conservative tatooed and black-garbed Goth, attending the conference at the behest of her father, described how she was snubbed by the other attendees:

She says she is still trying to make sense of an incident yesterday, when a group of conferees inside the dorms yelled “neocon” at her, evidently road-testing a new vulgarity they had not quite mastered.

If these young people are in any way a representative sampling of rightie youth, this suggests that young people are breaking from the Republican Party establishment and populism generally. And this reminds me of the way the New Left dissed the Dems and ditched New Deal populism back in the 1970s. Young righties are working hard to marginalize themselves, in other words, which is good news, because this is one creepy bunch of kids. More on that later in this post.

As far as President Bush is concerned, I extrapolate from this that when he retires from the White House — and however he retires from the White House — he is unlikely to be the conservative icon that Ronald Reagan was and still is. The Washington Republican establishment may, or may not, continue to make excuses for Bush in the years to come, but the young folks intend to bury him alive so they can forget he ever lived. He’s not going to be invited to their parties. They aren’t going to buy his ghost-written books or cheer him at his public appearances. Bubble Boy is in for a hard fall.

Instead of remaining actively engaged in public issues as many former presidents do, I predict G.W. Bush (assuming he escapes prosecution for war crimes) will disappear into a ghost world for the rest of his sorry life, much as Lyndon Johnson did in his retirement.

Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, is an icon — nay, an idol. The cult of Reagan that permeated the conference was so strong it made a few attendees uncomfortable. “I know Reagan was amazing,” said one, “but I think it’s weird that we’re supposed to pretend he’s God.” That Alzheimer’s ate Reagan’s retirement (and, IMO, his second term) is not an issue, and I suspect it may have helped keep his almighty presidential image pure.

Lately much attention has been paid to the authoritarian tendencies of conservatism. On the surface these young people seem both authoritarian and anti-authoritarian at once. Their heroes — Dr. Walter E. Williams and Wayne La Pierre, for example — are treated with unquestioning adulation. Otherwise their attitude toward authority, particularly government, reflects that of a spoiled little boy told he’d better be nice to Grandma or he won’t get dessert. Come to think of it, that may be the most normal thing about them. But some seem to take anti-authoritarianism to extremes. Tower writes of a young man who has already abandoned political ambitions:

The conference has drawn, or perhaps cultivated more people like Jeff Scott, who would like to see government wholly destroyed (save for the military), than students with fantasies of ascending to the highest office in the land.

So what is it, authoritarian or anti-authoritarian? I think this bit from a panel on conservative literature provides a clue:

Majory Ross recommends the usual syllabus: Goldwater, Kirk, Buckley, Ayn Rand. At the mention of Rand, a current of ardor passes through the ballroom, and someone gives a low, deferential whistle.

I’ve long viewed Randians with astonishment and wonder. Here are people who have built a cult around someone whose message boils down to individuality is God; the hell with community. If you ever have the bad judgment to wander into an Objectivist forum, you’ll find one Randian after another quoting the same passages from The Fountainhead to demonstrate how individualistic they are. But as this fellow says, “Rand’s sacred word is unmistakably ‘EGO.'” Since most of the world’s philosophy, East and West, warns against the perils of egotism, if you’re looking for a philosophy that says ego-indulgence is good, Rand’s is an obvious choice. And I understand Randians hate neocons almost as much as they hate liberals, which accounts (sorta) for the epithet hurled at Goth girl, above.

Thus, the Reagan youth are less individualistic than they are self-centered little brats who mistake egotism with individualism. As such, it is striking how much they resemble George W. Bush — like him, they are spoiled, narcissistic, and badly socialized.

For example, one evening a young man from Oregon describes what he does for fun:

Bunny bashing, he explains, involves borrowing someone’s father’s pickup truck for an evening and filling the bed with young men armed with cudgels. Then you drive around the countryside until an unlucky jackrabbit freezes in the high beams, at which point somebody hops out and clubs the animal to death.

What becomes of the dead rabbit? I ask.

Chase Dannen turns bashful. “Do you really want to know?”

With a little prodding, he continues. If you’re keeping true to the spirit of the thing, what you do is rip the rabbit’s head off and then impale it through the throat and eye socket on the antenna of the borrowed truck. On a bountiful evening, he says, you can accumulate a totem pole sure to astound the truck’s owner when he sees it in the morning.

This reminded me of the charming story of Young George and the Exploding Frogs.

“We were terrible to animals,” recalled [Bush pal Terry] Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush borne turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. “Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,” Throckmorton said. “Or we’d put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.”

Kristof made plain that “we” explicitly included George W. Bush, and that George W., the Safari Club International Governor of the Year in 1999 for his support of trophy hunting, was the leader among the boys who did it.

There is a well-documented link between animal cruelty and Antisocial Personality Disorder.

That was just one kid, but the Reagan youth do seem to have a proclivity for romanticizing cruelty and violence. For example:

In her facebook bio, Samantha Soller listed among her hobbies “political science, philosophy, and hippie-hunting, enjoys foreclosing on poor people’s cardboard boxes, eating red meat, using her Sigarms P232 Stainless to shoot cute little bunny rabbits.”

We’re into the creepy part, by the way. Note that these same young people can work themselves into outrage over the “cruelty” of abortion.

Throughout the young folks display the easy arrogance of the privileged toward the poor. Sheltered and provided for from birth, they cannot imagine their life any other way. Thus they are eager to dismantle all “welfare,” including Social Security. They imagine that poor people would learn to fend for themselves if cut off from government assistance.

Bennett Rwicki, who has been in a quiet, reflective mood since the lecture, ponders the drug issue with a troubled brow. After a moment he brightens. “Hey, do you think — like what Walter Williams said — if you got rid of welfare, so that if families had to support themselves, that would lead to people doing less drugs?”

“Absolutely,” says Marianne Brennan.

“I think so,” says Samantha Soller.

“Definitely,” says Tom Samper of the College of New Jersey. “If it’s a choice between drugs or survival, they’re going to spend their money on survival.”

With the trouble birds of welfare reform and the drug problems of the American poor neatly felled with a single stone, an air of satisfaction settles over the table, and Samantha Soller makes a trip to the buffet table to fetch everybody some dessert.

Like I said — bone chilling.