Open Letter to the 101st Fighting Keyboarders

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Dear Bloggers de Guerre,

Like most of you, I’ve been a civilian all my life. Most of what I know about war I learned from books and movies. If you’ve never served in the military or lived in an active war zone (New York City doesn’t count), all you know about war you learned from books and movies. You may not wish to admit this; some of you seem to think you have superior insight into martial matters bestowed upon you by ideological grace. But I doubt that’s true, even if you’ve seen a lot more war movies than I have.

Like most of you, I have enormous respect and appreciation for the U.S. military. I realize that most of you think liberals by definition hate the military, because you have encountered some liberals who hated the military, and since we’re all just alike we must all hate the military. But in fact it doesn’t work that way. I believe most of us, in fact, do not hate the military. I am personally acquainted with at least one sure-enough liberal who was a career army officer. Believe it, or not.

I want to talk to you about the allegations that U.S. Marines deliberately killed more than a dozen Iraqi civilians last November 19. I take it most of you do not believe these allegations. Many of you are accusing Rep. John Murtha, who repeated the allegations on last night’s “Hardball” at MSNBC, of making wild accusations, of being anti-American, of engaging in a verdict first, trial later condemnation. Copious amounts of adjectives like “dishonorable,” “unconscionable” and “treasonous” are being heaped on Murtha’s name. Some of you concede there might be some truth in the allegations, but that Murtha should not have spoken out while investigations are ongoing.

Here’s what I say: As investigations are ongoing, we who were not there do not know what happened. OK, but that includes Murtha, you say. According to Drew Brown of Knight Ridder, however, Murtha said he learned what the investigation found from “military commanders and other sources.” He is known to be well connected to the career military guys in the Pentagon, so this is possible.

It can be argued that Murtha should not have spoken up until the investigation was complete. On the other hand, it’s possible that without some pressure on the Pentagon the results of the investigation will never be made public. Billmon:

I don’t know why Murtha went public (just as the right wingers don’t know) but I can make my own guess: He did it to try to prevent Rumsfeld’s toadies from classifying and then deep sixing the investigative report, as they tried to bury the Taguba report on Abu Ghraib. And if the past really is prologue, Murtha is probably speaking on behalf of some fairly senior Marine officers who either can’t abide a cover up, or who want to pin the blame on the people who created this mess, and left the jarheads in Haditha to deal with it, instead of on their beloved Corps.

Accounts of what happened on November 19 are heart-wrenching. This is from Nancy A. Youssef of Knight Ridder (April 8, 2006):

The Marines say they took heavy gunfire afterwards and thought it was coming from the area around Younes’ house. They went to investigate, and 23 people were killed.

Eight were from Younes’ family. The only survivor, Younes’ 13-year-old daughter, said her family wasn’t shooting at Marines or harboring extremists that morning. They were sleeping when the bomb exploded. And when the Marines entered their house, she said, they shot at everyone inside. …

… The events of last November have clearly taken their toll on Yaseen and his niece, Safa, who trembles visibly as she listens to Yaseen recount what she told him of the attack. She cannot bring herself to tell the tale herself.

Frightened, Safa fainted. She thought she had died. When she awoke, she remembered seeing her mother still lying in bed. Her head was blown open. She looked around and heard her 3-year-old brother, Mohammed, moan in pain. The blood was pouring out of his right arm.

“Come on, Mohammed. Get up so we can go to uncle’s house,” she told her brother. But he couldn’t.

In the same room where her mother, aunt and sisters lay dead, Safa grabbed the toddler, sat down and leaned his head against her shoulder. She put his arm against her chest and held it to try to stop the bleeding. She kept holding and talking to him until, like everyone else in the room, he too was silent. And then she ran next door.

Maybe Yaseen and Safa are lying. Maybe they’re confused. Maybe they aren’t.

I’m fond of reading about history, including military history. Incidents like those described by Yaseen and Safa happen in war. Exactly one century ago, in 1906, troops under the command of Gen. Leonard Wood massacred at least 900 (reported at the time as 600) Filipino Muslims on the island of Jolo. The dead included women and children, killed indiscriminately. Anti-imperlialists published pamphlets and distributed a photograph of the carnage.

The Filipinos of Jolo, fleeing gunfire, took shelter in the crater of a dormant volcano.

The Americans rigged a block and tackle to hoist their artillery up the last 300 feet, and, as the Moros fled over the lip, the Americans opened a barrage into the 50-foot-deep crater. With orders from Wood to “kill or capture the six hundred,” the American forces descended into the crater in an ever-shrinking circle. Wood wrote, “The action resulted in the extinction of a band of outlaws.” Fifteen Americans were killed in the fighting; all six hundred Moros died.

Mark Twain’s comments on the episode are here.

There have been other massacres by U.S. troops, such as Wounded Knee in 1890 and My Lai in 1968. In fact, the history of warfare around the world, through history, is riddled with accounts of atrocities. We who have not been at war might like to imagine that such acts are aberrations or only committed by our enemies, not us. But I suspect we are being naive.

Two centuries ago, the historians tell us, wars in western society were mostly fought in discrete battles by soldiers in pretty uniforms. Battles were horrific — mostly bayonet work, close up and bloody — but most of the time battles would last a day or two, and the soldiers had days or weeks or months of relative safety until the next battle. But since the dawn of trench warfare — by most accounts, Grant’s siege of Petersburg, Va., 1864-65 — soldiers in war face unrelenting stress for days, weeks, months on end. And in these days of “asymmetrical warfare,” when combatants blend in with civilians and death can come even at the hands of children, the stress must be a great deal more than the human nervous system was designed to bear.

Some soldiers are going to break down. This happens. We don’t know if it happened in Iraq on November 19, but it could have happened. The allegations may or may not be true, but they are not “outrageous.” They are serious.

If this massacre did occur as Yaseen and Safa described it, suppressing discussion of it out of some misguided notion of national pride isn’t doing the war effort a damn bit of good. Even if Americans never hear the details, Iraqis have heard the details. The rest of the Muslim world has heard the details. They heard the details months ago, long before Jack Murtha spoke of them on television. Denying what they know — or believe — to be true doesn’t make us more trustworthy in their eyes. If even those who might want peace and democracy believe they cannot trust the U.S. and our troops, there isn’t much point in our remaining in Iraq, is there?

If it happens that the allegations are not true, and we can prove it, we need to get our proof in front of the world as soon as possible. If we learn that the allegations are not true, we should reprimand Rep. Murtha. But if they are true, we should thank him. You should thank him, if you are serious about accomplishing anything positive in Iraq.

But most of all, those of you who supported, and still support, the invasion of Iraq, should grow up and face the truth that atrocities will happen in war, even at the hands of U.S. troops, because we are asking troops to endure unbearable stress for prolonged periods of time. This is one of several reasons why war should be a solution of last resort. It’s easy for those of us who are safe and protected here at home to talk about what is “honorable” and what isn’t. But those who are bearing the burden you asked them to bear are human beings, not movie characters.

You helped send our troops into a war that didn’t have to be fought. If the allegations are true, you bear some of the blame. If the allegations are true, you owe both the Marines and little Safa an apology.

See also: ” Escalating the rhetoric.”

Hayden’s Hearing

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The Big Event today is the Senate confirmation hearing for CIA director-nominee Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, a man with way too many prefixes. Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe writes that the White House is trying to separate Hayden from the NSA spy scandal in an effort to keep the Senators from dwelling on Hayden’s role at the NSA.

The Bush administration moved yesterday to separate General Michael Hayden’s nomination to be the next CIA director from discussion of the secret domestic spying programs that he designed as head of the National Security Agency, in a seeming reversal of the White House’s political strategy for today’s confirmation hearing.

In a prepared statement submitted yesterday to the Senate intelligence committee for release today, Hayden makes no mention of the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs, according to a former official who has seen the five-page unclassified document. Instead, Hayden focuses only on rebuilding the embattled Central Intelligence Agency.

And for the first time yesterday, the administration briefed every Senate and House intelligence committee member about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping efforts. The White House previously insisted that the program was too sensitive to disclose its details to the full committees, leading several senators to vow that they would use Hayden’s confirmation hearing to press for more information.

This is significant, because …

Together, the two events stood in contrast to the administration’s prior expressions of eagerness to turn Hayden’s confirmation hearing into a showdown with critics of the domestic surveillance programs Bush authorized following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Last week conventional wisdom said that Hayden was chosen as the nominee because Karl Rove wanted a public fight on the NSA. Frank Rich wrote,

This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss’s appointment in the autumn of 2004.

Something happened to make Karl change his mind. The White House doesn’t want a fight over the NSA after all.

Of the White House decision to brief the intelligence committees, a Los Angeles Times editorial says,

Easing Hayden’s confirmation, apparently, is more of an inducement to openness for the administration than are legitimate questions in Congress and among U.S. citizens about the NSA’s surveillance of Americans. Confirmation for Hayden — whose nomination is problematic for several reasons — is not necessarily the price Congress and the American people should have to pay for more transparency about the administration’s domestic surveillance program.

Also at the Los Angeles Times, Laura K. Donohue writes,

The scrutiny of the NSA is deserved, but the Senate and the American public may be missing a broader and more disturbing development. For the first time since the Civil War, the United States has been designated a military theater of operations. The Department of Defense — which includes the NSA — is focusing its vast resources on the homeland. And it is taking an unprecedented role in domestic spying.

It may be legal. But it circumvents three decades of efforts by Congress to restrict government surveillance of Americans under the guise of national security. And it represents a profound shift in the role of the military operating inside the United States. What’s at stake here is the erosion of the principle, embedded in the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, that the U.S. military not be used for domestic law enforcement.

Interesting. Will the Senators be thinking about this?

On the other hand, will they, in Frank Rich’s words, “be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they’ll fail to investigate the nominee’s record?”

It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 — “Tomorrow is zero hour” for one — and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden’s N.S.A. also failed to recognize that “some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose,” as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and “for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores.”

Senators, for once, do your job.

The Frankenstein President

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Last August, President Bush led Lance Armstrong on a two-hour bicycle tour of the Crawford ranch.

Bush stayed in the lead, mind you, by presidential order. Nobody passes Dear Leader on a bicycle. Most people would be thrilled to watch a world-class — nay, legendary — athlete in the practice of his sport. Most people would have wanted the athlete to show off his skill a bit, even for a little while. But nobody shows off in the presence of Dear Leader except, you know, Dear Leader.

I thought of that this morning when I read Thomas Friedman’s column, “Saying No to Bush’s Yes Men.”

It’s comical to think of this administration hoping to get a popularity lift from shaking up the president’s cabinet, considering the fact that it has kept its cabinet secretaries so out of sight — even the good ones, and there are good ones — so the president will always dominate the landscape.

When you centralize power the way Mr. Bush did, you alone get stuck with all the responsibility when things go bad. And that is what is happening now. The idea that the president’s poll numbers would go up if he replaced his Treasury secretary is ludicrous. Replacing him would be like replacing one ghost with another.

Even Friedman has his moments of clarity. Bush insists on dominating the landscape; on being the focus of attention. So since 2001, the whole world has been watching him. This amounts to a great deal more scrutiny than he’s ever gotten in his life. He was governor of Texas about as long as he’s been president, but a state governor doesn’t get the blazing spotlight than a president does. As governor, his every move wasn’t covered by news bureaus from all over the world. It was easier for Bush’s family, and then his loyal yes men, to cover for him and create the illusion of a decisive leader and competent executive that he very clearly isn’t.

And, as governor, he didn’t have the most powerful military the world has ever known at his disposal. He didn’t have a foreign policy. There was less opportunity to screw up.

Unfortunately for Bush, he bought into the illusion. He has no appreciation of his own limitations. He insists on dominating the landscape.

Dick Meyer of CBS:

Short of another disaster on the scale of 9/11, George Bush no longer has the power, credibility or ability to effectively govern for the rest of his term in office. Contrary to what you hear on television, governing remains more important than campaigning. Government is more important than elections — to the extent the two can be differentiated anymore.

Bush’s realm of efficacy will be limited to areas where he can make unilateral decisions, mostly in war and foreign policy. The tax cuts that oozed through Congress last week may well be his last “significant” piece of domestic legislation; I put quotations around significant because they are, in fact temporary. The entire menu of Bush tax tinkering is set to expire in 2010 on someone else’s watch, an apt metaphor for this administration.

The Bush administration is now locked in a triple-hammer hold that would defeat Houdini.

Long-time Republican Party leadership must feel like Victor Frankenstein when his monster broke loose to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world.

In the late 1990s the Republican Party worked hard to promote Gee Dubya as a “centrist” candidate for the presidency. By 2000 they had successfully planted the meme that Bush was a “compassionate conservative,” not a hard-hearted radical. When John McCain became a serious threat and won the New Hampshire primary in 2000, the party saw to it McCain was kneecapped in South Carolina. The party threw every resource it had into, um, claiming the electoral win in Florida. The party and the whole VRWC echo chamber stopped at nothing to wrap their boy in glory after September 11. And Republicans in Congress dutifully took orders from Karl Rove and in effect became extensions of the White House staff. Bush wanted to dominate the landscape, and other Republicans stepped aside and let him do it.

Did they know they were creating a monster?

Dick Meyer continues,

The vaunted brilliance and corporate organization of Rove/Bush Inc. has been pretty much blown away in the second term. Rove is fighting off an indictment. From the Dubai deal to the Harriet Miers death march, the White House’s political ear seems to be getting tinnier. Porter Goss’ appointment to the CIA was a disaster not just politically but substantively. In his second term, the president has never reached outside his core circle for advisers, staff or ideas.

Of course not. New people might try to pass him.

In January Karl Rove proclaimed that the party would run on national security for the midterm elections, painting themselves as fearless defenders of the Homeland and Dems as weak, dreamy appeasers. But E.J. Dionne wrote yesterday that this plan may have changed. He wrote of Rove’s recent speech at the American Enterprise Institute:

In his speech yesterday, Rove shelved the world-historical perspective in favor of the staple issue of midterm politics, pleading with his audience to think kindly of the Bush economic record. He spoke at length about the mess the economy was in toward the end of Bill Clinton’s term (though he did not mention Clinton’s name), and how our economic problems were deepened by the consequences of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush’s economic policies, particularly his tax cuts, helped cure what ailed us, Rove said bravely. They “have strengthened the economy, increased productivity and created new jobs.”

That Rove needed to make this case in the first place tells you the trouble the administration faces. All the polls, which Rove played down but acknowledged reading avidly (“I love all these polls,” he said before dismissing the idea of poll-driven policies), show large majorities disapproving of Bush’s handling of the economy.

There is also a rather widespread sense that the economy did very well under Clinton — better than under Bush — and it’s doubtful that getting voters to think about the Clinton days will do Republicans much good in November 2006.

Karl may be some kind of political genius, but he’s not in Texas any more.

Karl’s new tactic is to emphasize the president’s likability. At the American Enterprise Institute he claimed that “some polls” show that up to 60 per cent of the people like the President. These polls must be highly classified, since no one has found them in the public record; maybe they exist only in Karl’s head. Lance Mannion suggests that Karl tried to copy the success of Ronald Reagan, who got away with just about anything because he was so darn likable:

It’d be no wonder if Karl Rove concluded from that likeability in a political leader was all, and no wonder yet again when he discovered that young George Bush was “likeable” that he decided that here was the man to take Karl Rove to the White House.

What Rove forgot to take into account was that he himself was warped.

What he found likeable was probably not going to be the same things that most normal people liked.

They don’t like bullies. They don’t like sarcastic twerps who can’t be bothered to remember their names and cut them off short whenever they try to say something. They don’t like angry drunks. They really don’t like angry dry drunks. They don’t like snotty rich kids who screw up again and again, blame everybody but themselves for their screw-ups, and let their daddies and their daddies’ friends clean up after them while they go on to make another mess somewhere else.

What will the Republicans do? They created the monster, but now the monster is running wild and wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting world. He wants to dominate the landscape, after all.

Backlash

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Richard Morin and Dan Balz write in today’s Washington Post:

Public confidence in GOP governance has plunged to the lowest levels of the Bush presidency, with Americans saying by wide margins that they now trust Democrats more than Republicans to deal with Iraq, the economy, immigration and other issues, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll that underscores the GOP’s fragile grip on power six months before the midterm elections.

Dissatisfaction with the administration’s policies in Iraq has overwhelmed other issues as the source of problems for President Bush and the Republicans. The survey suggests that pessimism about the direction of the country — 69 percent said the nation is now off track — and disaffection with Republicans have dramatically improved Democrats’ chances to make gains in November.

Democrats are now favored to handle all 10 issues measured in the Post-ABC News poll. The survey shows a majority of the public, 56 percent, saying they would prefer to see Democrats in control of Congress after the elections.

The catch, say Morin and Balz, is that the voters aren’t all that wild about Democrats either. There is widespread dissatisfaction with incumbents of all species. The numbers reflect a backlash against right-wing mis-government, not a conversion to the Democratic Party vision, whatever that is. Of those surveyed, 52 percent said they didn’t see much difference between the two parties.

Meanwhile the alleged front-runner for the 2008 Dem nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton, cautiously practices “tactical bipartisanship” to win approval of some mythical “center.” Robert Kuttner writes,

With the Republicans in free-fall, national problems continuing to mount, and a rising national chorus begging the Democrats to stand for something, Senator Clinton has come to epitomize why the Democrats may yet fail to rise to the occasion and lead. …

… If she keeps transparently cozying up to the right, Senator Clinton could easily lose what faltering affection she retains from Democratic voters, but without impressing the center. Democratic operative Donna Brazile contends, too charitably, that Murdoch’s support shows that Hillary has ”crossover appeal” (sure, as in crossing over to grab whatever isn’t nailed down).

Back to Morin and Balz. “The public mood indicates that the midterm elections are likely to be a referendum on the president and his party,” they write. But the GOP still has more than five months in which to demonize their opposition, a tactic that has worked brilliantly for them in the past. Once again, the Dems’ failure to define themselves give the GOP the opportunity to define the Democrats.

On the bright side, today the Hartford Courant is running an op ed by Lowell Weicker endorsing Joe Lieberman’s challenger, Ned Lamont. (Yay!) Writes Weicker,

The majority of Democrats say they support Sen. Joe Lieberman in spite of his backing the war, since Iraq, after all, is only one of many issues facing voters.

Hello! To characterize the most monumental screw-up of our times as “only one of many issues” is like admiring the theater marquees on Broadway with King Kong on the loose.

And here’s a big ray of hope — last night brother blogger Chris Bowers of MyDD won election to the Pennsylvania Democratic State Committee. Chris’s election means that an establishment Democrat has been replaced by a sure-enough leftie blogger. “The city, the state, and the nation will change as a result,” writes Chris. “I promise everyone that. … We will all win, eventually.” We just have to keep pushing.

Lowell Weicker quoted a couple of lines from the abolitionist poem “The Present Crisis” by James Russell Lowell, written in 1844. (Some readers might recognize the poem as the lyrics for “Once to Every Man and Nation,” sung to the tune of a Welsh hymn, “Ton-y-botel.” I think “ton-y-botel” means “tune in a bottle,” but I’m not going to swear to that.) If you think “Iraq” where Lowell wrote “slavery,” some of these lines seem appropriate now:

Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood,
Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,
Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day,
Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;-
Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ‘t is prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

Cowards, stand aside.

Update: They’re starting to sound like us — this guy (a rightie) thinks it would be better for Republicans in 2008 if Dems take back Congress in 2006. Heh.

Dancing With Them That Brung Ya

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The natives outside the Beltway are restless. We lefties threaten to storm the gates and elect Democrats who will be proactively progressive and not GOP Lite. Meanwhile, righties were way underwhelmed by the President’s prime time immigration speech. I notice they’ve started to call him “Jorge,” probably not out of affection. And social conservatives are threatening to withhold support from Republicans in the midterm elections if they don’t hop to it and do something about abortions and gay marriage.

Wow, suddenly we’re one nation again. We’re united in frustration with the politicians in Washington.

In other ways, however, Left and Right are in very different places, and I think the Right’s position is more perilous. Of course, it’s always possible the Dems will blow off opportunity once again and the Republicans will maintain domination of government.

Washington Dems tremble in fear of us raging, wild-eyed, unhinged lefties who are tired of “progressive” policies that are nothing but tweaks to the mighty Right Wing agenda. We want to see substantive progress in health care, an increase in the minimum wage, and protection of the environment. We want investment in education and sustainable energy sources. And we want a foreign policy modeled more after JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis and less after Clint Eastwood in “Dirty Harry.”

Most of all we want a government that works. We want a government that responds to the will of We, the People, not a government that acts as a vending machine for big corporations and special interests.

This is, I realize, lunatic. Some of us even take inspiration from such un-American radicals as Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and John F. Kennedy. We are one wild and crazy political faction. No wonder Washington Dems won’t be seen with us in public (they’ll take our money, though).

However, the Dems’ problems are simple compared to what the GOP faces.

Over the past 30 to 40 years or more Republicans carefully and patiently patched together a coalition of social conservatives, small-government conservatives, isolationist conservatives, imperialist conservatives (a.k.a. “neocons”), plus the flotsam and jetsam of conservatism past — bigots, nativists, fundamentalists, survivalists, etc.

The GOP accomplished this via a two-step approach. Step one, scare the wits out of the natives. Tell them they are about to be overwhelmed by the evils of Communism, or uppity black people, or dirty antiwar hippies, or feminists, or perpetually pregnant welfare queens, or atheist school principals who take Bibles out of the hands of little Christian children. Or persuade voters our country faces ruin because of birth control and legalized abortion and gay people getting married to each other. Using these and other issues Republicans skillfully reached into the darkest and ugliest impulses of the American psyche and exploited those impulses. They used well-coordinated and relentless talking point campaigns (which were especially effective after the rise of conservative talk radio and Faux News) to whip Americans into spasms of fear and outrage. Most of all, they demonized liberalism to the point that even liberals were afraid to use the L word in public.

Once the natives were properly fearful and angry, Republicans moved on to step two — they presented themselves as God’s Chosen Agents to save America from whatever Americans were afraid of at the time. Through use of inflammatory rhetoric, spin, and “swift boat”-style smear campaigns, Republican politicians persuaded Americans they were tougher, more patriotic, more God-fearing, and more moral than their opponents. (Never mind that Republicans get caught up in scandals at least as frequently as Democrats. When a Republican is caught red-handed it’s either an aberration or a false charge drummed up by the leftie media. When a Democrat is caught red-handed, however, it’s proof they’re all corrupt.)

The Republicans’ strategy has been wonderfully effective for them. They created a solid base of voters who would stick with Republicans no matter how inept they were because, you know, Democrats are all perverts. And anything “liberal” is, by definition, insane. This meme works especially well with people who have no clue what liberalism actually is, which is most Americans these days. Republicans (as well as most of the Democrats) have thrived in a system that allows government to lavish attention on Big Money campaign contributors, special interest groups, and mega-corporations, while voters are distracted by demagoguery so they won’t notice the government isn’t working for them.

But now something is happening that the Republicans didn’t anticipate. Now that Republicans have a near-absolute control of the federal government, the conservative base wants results.

El Presidente Bush is in a bind over immigration because, on the one hand, the Big Money guys who put him in the White House in the first place want to import cheap labor. Measures that would effectively reduce the flow of illegals into the country would cut into profits and force rich people to raise their own children. (Oh, no!) But the base wants the illegals gone. So last night Bush pushed his misbegotten “guest worker” program but also threw a bone to the growlers by promising to send National Guard to the borders. Judging by the blogosphere, however, the base ain’t buyin’ it.

Regarding gas prices — one of the Bush Administration’s first official acts was to look the other way while their buddies at Enron ripped off California. Their next official act was to invite oil executives to write the administration’s energy policies. You think they’re going to get tough with oil companies? Yeah, and I’m Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

In the area of social issues like abortion, for years the Right has been playing a fired-up pro-criminalization minority against a complacent pro-legalization majority. At least some GOP party leaders must be smart enough to realize that if the GOP were to deliver on their promise to criminalize abortion the backlash would send the GOP the way of the Whigs. And don’t even think about criminalizing birth control.

Republicans face the same problem on issue after issue. The base wants to ban gay marriage; moderates may be ambivalent about gay marriage, but they are definitely turned off by excessive homophobia. Hurricane Katrina taught us that, although volunteerism and self-reliance are fine, sometimes, people really do need a big, strong government to help them. Voters across the political spectrum want the U.S. to gain better control of its borders, but draconian campaigns to deport illegals who are already here would result in heart-wrenching news stories of families being torn apart. This would turn off moderates and liberals as well as ensure that Latino citizens will be Democrats for the next century or so.

The Republicans are even losing the majority on their all-time greatest fear-mongering issue, terrorism. And bringing the troops home from Iraq might please a majority of voters but would infuriate the base.

Thus, Republicans face an agenda impasse; they have to promise one thing to the base while assuring the rest of the country they don’t really mean it. Since issues aren’t working for them, they’re trying to keep Congress by whipping up fear and loathing of Democrats.

And, unfortunately, inside-the-Beltway Dems are clueless enough to let the GOP get away with it.

As the Shoes Drop

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We return to our ongoing social science demonstration titled “How Good Democracies Go Bad.” Today we hear that the federal government is tracking phone calls from major news media — ABC News, the Washington Post, the New York Times — to discover which government employees might be talking to them. Brian Ross and Richard Esposito report for ABC News:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

“It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation. …

…Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers. [Emphasis added.]

Josh Marshall asks, “Isn’t this the other shoe dropping?” But in fact, we’ve had a whole warehouse full of shoes drop already. Some people aren’t going to be concerned until the whole bleeping warehouse lands on their thick little heads.

Let’s recall some of those shoes. CNN reported on January 1:

During his re-election race in April 2004 in Buffalo, New York, Bush spoke to reporters about the USA Patriot Act and attempted to assure them the measure did not encroach on Americans’ civil liberties.

“There are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order.

“Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.

“It’s important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.”

But then we learned that maybe the President might have given the wrong impression.

President Bush on Sunday defended his administration’s use of wiretaps on U.S. citizens without a court order, saying comments he made in 2004 that “nothing has changed” in the use of wiretaps were not misleading….

…Asked what he would tell Americans worried that the practice violates their privacy rights, Bush said, “If somebody from al Qaeda is calling you, we’d like to know why.

“In the meantime, this program is conscious of people’s civil liberties, as am I. This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America — and I repeat: limited.”

Bush said the calls monitored are limited to those between known al Qaeda members or their affiliates outside the United States and people inside the United States.

Up until last week the Administration insisted they were not monitoring domestic calls without warrants. Dan Eggen reports for the Washington Post:

When he was asked about the National Security Agency’s controversial domestic surveillance program last Monday, U.S. intelligence chief John D. Negroponte objected to the question and said the government was “absolutely not” monitoring domestic calls without warrants.

“I wouldn’t call it domestic spying,” he told reporters. “This is about international terrorism and telephone calls between people thought to be working for international terrorism and people here in the United States.”

Three days later, USA Today divulged details of the NSA’s effort to log a majority of the telephone calls made within the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — amassing the domestic call records of tens of millions of U.S. households and businesses in an attempt to sift them for clues about terrorist threats.

Did Negroponte lie? Well, it depends on what you mean by monitoring. They’re not listening to the phone calls, see; just looking for phone calling patterns. However,

… as illustrated by Negroponte’s remarks last week, administration officials have been punctilious in discussing the NSA program over the past five months, choosing their words with care and limiting their comments to the portion of the program that had been confirmed by the president in December.

In doing so, the administration only rarely offered any hint that a much broader operation, involving millions of domestic calls, was under way. Even Sunday, after days of congressional furor and extensive media reports, administration officials declined to confirm or deny the existence of the telephone-call program, in part because of court challenges that the government is attempting to derail.

After last week’s data mining revelation, righties were quick to assure us that there was no chance we ordinary citizens are being monitored. As long as we aren’t affiliated with al Qaeda, we have nothing to worry about. According to Heather Mac Donald at The Weekly Standard, “As a practical matter, no one’s privacy is violated by such analysis. Memo to privacy nuts: The computer does not have a clue that you exist; it does not know what it is churning through; your phone number is meaningless to it.”

Now another shoe drops. Um, of course, we were only talking about the NSA program. This is a different program.

Thud, thud, thud. We’re in a pile of shoes up to our necks. Apologists for the Regime smile and tell us not to worry. As long as we’re not terrorists or potential whistleblowers or journalists (or Democrats, or anyone who has pissed off top administration officials, or … ?), we have nothing to worry about.

So when the jack boot comes down on Kool Aider‘s necks, what will they say then? “Shine, mister?”

CYA

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Or, news reporting is tricky.

One of the first and most important lessons of journalism is that hardly anything ever actually happens. It allegedly happens. Or it happens according to so-and-so. Maybe if the big event happens right in front of the reporter’s eyes it’s OK to say it happened, but to be safe the reporter should preface any observation with “this reporter observed this event,” followed by “according to so-and-so, that’s what happened.”

There are several reasons for this, but a big one is that sources often get the facts wrong themselves. Even people in a position to know stuff sometimes get the details scrambled in their own heads. If the reporter writes that thus-and-so happened and it didn’t happen, then the reporter was wrong. On the other hand, if the reporter writes that thus-and-so happened according to Whomever, and the reporter can document that Whomever really did provide that information, the mistake was Whomever’s.

It’s also standard practice to get corroboration from other sources, especially if the sources want to be off-the-record, before publishing a news story. A single source who comes forward with juicy information may be trying to manipulate some event by spreading false information. Or, the single source might just be wrong, even if he or she is in a position to know something.

Wannabe journalists who blog often skirt around these rules and proclaim something to be true and factual because his friend Joe heard it from his father-in-law. Or they’ll construct fanciful scenarios based on gossamer evidence without warning readers that the scenario is just speculation. Most professionals have had the experience of getting chewed out by an editor for screwing up, but the amateurs usually bury a mistake in a ton of verbiage and bluster and skip away. So they don’t learn from mistakes. That’s why they’re amateurs.

If you’re a regular you may have noticed that I slap generous amounts of disclaimers and caveats and “according to’s” around most of what I write here. Especially when dealing with unfolding events, a certain amount of skepticism is essential to getting at the truth

So when Jason Leopold of Truthout claimed on Saturday that Karl Rove had already been indicted, I said I was skeptical. Today some people in a position to know the facts deny there is an indictment and even that Fitzgerald met with Karl Rove’s lawyer last Friday. Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft has tracked down some of Jason Leopold’s sources and has confirmed that he did have sources and did not just make up the story out of thin air. However, it seems to me the sourcing was thin, even partly second-hand (the source told another reporter who passed it on to Leopold).

Thin sourcing doesn’t mean a story isn’t true. In the news biz one can’t always wait until every detail is locked down and independently verified; often, by the time you’ve accomplished that, the story is a week old and the public has lost interest. So news media often go public with sourcing that’s not as solid as they might wish. But in that case the reporter had better inject plenty of “allegedly’s” and “according to’s” and every other disclaimer in the dictionary into the published story to warn news consumers to consume with caution. And Jason Leopold didn’t do that.

I’m sorry, but this is amateur work. It may very well be that Leopold was set up, as Jeralyn suggests. But reporters get set up all the time. That’s what disclaimers are for. It may be that eventually we’ll learn Leopold’s story was correct, but that doesn’t excuse posting a story as thinly sourced as this one was without sticking some warning labels on it.

His Mother’s Son

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Via Tristero, be sure to see David Neiwert’s post on George Bush’s character. Among other things, Dave links to a Gail Sheehy article from 2000 that people should have taken more seriously. Just one Mother’s Day anecdote:

Even as an adult, George was so out of control that his mother, then the president’s wife, removed her eldest son to the opposite end of the table at a state dinner for the Queen of England. Although sober by then, the First Son had introduced himself to the Queen as “the black sheep of the family.”

George W. Bush was then 44 years old.