Our Left Wing

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Sister blogger Maryscott O’Connor of My Left Wing is featured on the front page of the Washington Post today. The article, by David Finkel, is titled “The Left, Online and Outraged: Liberal Blogger Finds an Outlet and a Community.” Maryscott blogs about the writing of the article here.

I admit I had mixed feelings about the article when I read it. Maryscott is one of the smartest bloggers on the web, but the article focused on how angry she is. Lord knows she has a right to be angry. We’re all angry. But Maryscott is a lot better than just angry.

But then I thought, how many other angry people are out there who haven’t discovered the Blogosphere yet? If you aren’t absolutely enraged at what the Bushies and the VRWC are doing to our country, you’re an idiot or a rightie. But I repeat myself.

Sorry, couldn’t resist that one. Just funnin’ with ya, righties. But I hope that a lot of people who read that article will check out the Blogosphere and join in.

Predictable reaction from rightie blogs: We’re cool and intellectual, and those lefties are unhinged. I was checking out reactions on one rightie blog, where I found this comment:

“I don’t recall there being a vocal Right that was calling for the public lynching of President Clinton.”

Sorta takes your breath away, doesn’t it? I couldn’t read any further. Enough of that.

I’m going to ramble for a few paragraphs, but I will connect the ramble back to Maryscott and blogging, so please bear with me — Sam Keen wrote a book called Passionate Life — published in 1984 — in which he argued that adulthood is not the final and ultimate stage of life. I regret I don’t have the book at hand and it’s been a while since I read it, but I found the stages discussed online in this sermon. The five stages, Keen said, are (1) child, (2) rebel, (3) adult, (4) outlaw, and (5) lover.

As I remember it, Keen defined the adult stage as a time in which one’s values most closely reflect those of one’s society. Adulthood is the point at which we set aside adolescent rebellion and join the collective. We focus on careers and status as defined by our peers. If you are a standard middle class American adult, for example, your life’s quest becomes acquiring a fixed low-interest mortgage and a stock portfolio. The sermon linked mentions “constructing character armor,” which I remember as adopting the persona assigned to you by society, e.g., businessman, housewife, etc. Most people remain at adult stage for the duration of their lives.

The next stage, outlaw, happens to the lucky few who are separated from the collective. The separation may be caused by crisis or spiritual epiphany, but however it happens, the outlaw looks at the values of his society and sees a load of crap. “Successful” people who used to be role models seem more like zombies — the walking, soulless dead. And, like Cassandra, the more you rave about what crap it all is, the more the adults think you’re nuts. The only people who understand you are the other outlaws (or lovers). It can be very lonely.

For a good example of someone in the outlaw stage, check out the later writings of Mark Twain. His rantings were laced with wit, but if (for example) you read through this, the anger flames out at you suddenly, and you realize you are reading a very different essay from the one you thought you were reading.

Twain would have been one hell of a blogger.

One difference between the adolescent rebel and the post-adult outlaw is that the adolescent is mostly ego-driven — he’s rebelling because he wants something for himself — whereas the outlaw is less concerned about himself than about others. He wants others to see what he sees — the sham, the injustice — to make the world a better place. With luck the outlaw will eventually put aside his anger and become a lover, a person motivated by compassion to help mankind. Think Gandhi.

I’d like to add that sometimes the outlaw stage misfires and the person separated from the collective doesn’t become a true outlaw but just joins a different collective, or else works his butt off to be allowed back into the old collective. But that’s a different rant.

Anyway, with that context in mind — Maryscott O’Connor is an outlaw. And as such she’s a shining beacon for other outlaws. It’s good to be a beacon in a dark time.

Anger is nothing to be ashamed about. I like this quote from Keen:

Anger is a necessary part of the dance of love. Think of clean anger as the voice of the wise serpent on the early American flag who says, “Don’t tread on me.” Without anger we have no fire, no thunder and lightning to defend the sanctuary of the self. No anger = no boundaries = no passion.

Honor your anger. But before you express it, sort out the righteous from the unrighteous. Immediately after a storm, the water is muddy; rage is indiscriminate. It takes time to discriminate, for the mud to settle. But once the stream runs clear, express your outrage against any who have violated your being. Give the person you intend to love the gift of discriminating anger.

May all our anger be righteous.

Update: See also The Rude Pundit (who may be in a life stage unique to himself) and Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof.

Update update: One other thought about anger — right now, we’re on offense, and they’re on defense. Military historians say that attackers usually take more casualties than defenders, because the defenders are fighting from behind barricades or rocks or something, whereas the attackers have to expose themselves to fire to get to the barricades. Unless the attackers have artillery. Or maybe tanks. (Can we use tanks?) Anyway, as Maryscott says, we’ve been fighting from a position of powerlessness; therefore, we have to be more fierce. Let’s see how the Bush Bitter Enders act after the shoe’s on the other foot, eh?

Good Friday Links

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Murray Waas has a new installment of “As the Leak Drips” at National Journal. In this episode, we see Deadeye Dick leaking a still classified CIA report to Scooter so that Scooter can smear glam spy Valerie Plame.

At Unclaimed Territory, Glenn Greenwald wonders at the amazing ability of righties to delude themselves. Writing of rightie reaction to the protesting retired generals —

In response, Bush followers have publicly speculated about every defamatory motive which could be fueling these Generals — they have embraced every possible explanation except for the possibility that these Generals might actually hold these views sincerely. …

… The first objective — which worked very well for a good couple of years — was to prevent all dissenting views by labeling those who questioned the war or who opposed it as subversives, traitors, Friends of the Terrorists, America-haters, and crazed radicals. That took care of dissenting views for awhile, ensuring an echo chamber where the President’s views on the war were basically unchallenged. But the profound error of their judgments and the rank falseness of their claims could not be obscured forever, because the reality of the war slowly exposed the truth. But amazingly, facts do not deter them either.

Every fact that contradicts their initial premises is discarded as fiction or the by-product of malice. Every opinion that undermines their position can be explained only by venal and corrupt motives. Every event that transpires which deviates from what they predicted ends up being the fault of others. And any individual who questions their grand plan for epic and glorious triumph in a never-ending, all-consuming War of Civilizations is someone who is either weak-willed, weak-minded, or just plain subversive — whether that be life-long public servants like Richard Clarke and Joe Wilson (both of whom were smeared by Powerline in a separate post yesterday, which quoted RealClearPolitics calling them “Political hacks” and “fools” who “espouse positions publicly that they know to be untrue”); life-long conservatives like William Buckley or George Will, and even American military generals, including those who actually led ground troops in Iraq as recently as 2004.

From Kevin K, posting at firedoglake about righties:

They’re scared is all. They’re scared of a lot of things because they need to be scared of a lot of things. They lack purpose without things relentlessly scaring the shit out of them. And in order to distract the media from the fact that they’re more juiced up on fear than love for their country, they constantly try to frame liberals—who in their minds still wear patchouli, listen to Jefferson Airplane and love the fuck out of Jane Fonda—of being the cowards because, um, we’re “anti-war” (what fucked up times we live in where being “anti-war” is a “bad thing”) and we aren’t 100% freaked out that gay people, Mexicans, Arabs and the Dixie Chicks are roaming free in our streets. …

… I didn’t really follow the explosion of bedwetting blogs post-9/11 because I was too busy languishing in my pre-9/11 NYC liberal mindset, but apparently the blogosphere was flush with dorks in crouched-down, defensive positions who pecked away at something they called “warblogs.” These, ahem, “warbloggers” (must … stop … tittering) thought they were at war and no amount of fear of Blogger’s registration process and/or HTML interface was going to get in their way to fight the good fight. They were G.I. Jonesin’ for some seriously manly cutting ‘n’ pasting as they bravely stormed the frontlines of HyperText Transfer Protocol. And some of them, primarily “9/11 Republicans” and alleged libertarians, were so addicted to the notion that “everything changed after 9/11” that they discarded large, important chunks of their belief systems because they figured the “everything changed” doctrine applied to their very beings as well. A few of them have circled back to reality and well-earned rounds of raspberries, but a substantial number still cling to what are becoming increasingly razor-thin threads of dignity, and generally when you take it that far, you never come back because, let’s face it, it’s really, really embarrassing to do so. The Roger L. Simons and Charles Johnsons of today are the ex-lefty David Horowitzes and Michael Savages of tomorrow, except, as Pantload Media has proved, we don’t ever have to worry about Rog and Chucky being anywhere near as popular, successful or influential. Or handsome.

Larry Johnson posts on the “Throw Rummy from the Train Movement.” Stick a fork in Rummy, says Johnson. He’s done.

Save Us from CEOs

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It would have worked out if we’d just stayed the course, the chief executive said. Everything would have been fine if people had had more faith. We failed because we were attacked by people who wanted us to fail.

Bush in Iraq? No, Jeffrey K. Skilling in court.

The former Enron CEO, on trial for multiple counts of conspiracy and fraud, told the court yesterday that Enron’s slide into bankruptcy was caused by a loss of faith. Thomas Mulligan writes for the Los Angeles Times,

The defense contends that Enron was in great shape in the fall of 2001 but its slide into bankruptcy was caused by a sudden loss of faith by creditors, akin to a run on a bank. The creditors, according to the defense, were spooked by erroneous media coverage stirred up by short sellers — stock-market players who try to profit by betting that companies’ shares will fall. …

… “I am devastated because the company was brought to its knees unnecessarily,” Skilling said Thursday.

Enron got caught using, um, creative accounting practices to hide losses and make some parts of the company look profitable when, in fact, they were not.

Several prosecution witnesses, including the one-time heads of the broadband and retail energy units, previously testified that by the spring of 2001, those businesses were dead in the water. They said Enron officials tried desperately to cover up the units’ woes because they were a big part of the “growth story” the company was selling to Wall Street.

But maybe Skilling is right. Maybe, had Enron not been caught, those units someday would have begun making a profit. And then everyone would have made money and lived happily ever after.

And maybe Iraq will settle down and start being a good little nation any day now. All we have to do is stay the course.

Are we seeing a pattern here? I believe we are.

Awhile back the nation was seized with a cultlike admiration for celebrity CEOs. William Greider wrote in The Nation (July 2002):

The cult of the CEO (as some business gurus now call it) promoted a celebration of testosterone and greed that has coarsened the culture and damaged economic life in severe ways. The adoration of corporate executives–those with a tough-guy disregard for their employees and social norms–seems to be receding now, along with stock prices and disappearing profits, but it does resemble a utopian cult, in which the followers obsessively worship a few strong guys said to possess superhuman qualities.

Not everyone was taken in. In my experience the worker bees in the office cubicle hives were more likely to wonder if the guys in the penthouse office suites had any brains at all; hence the popularity of Dilbert.

If you’ve been around for awhile you’ve probably noticed that CEOs tend to come up through the ranks of sales and marketing departments, or maybe corporate finance. Or maybe, like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, they move back and forth between plum government jobs and CEO positions without much in the way of hands-on, private-sector business experience at all.

Once I read about a CEO who had actually worked his way up through engineering, which the article writer acknowledged was practically unheard of. I have seen a few product development people move up pretty far. But if you’re in production or manufacturing, fuhgeddaboudit.

In other words, the more your job involves producing a tangible product, the less likely it is you’ll ever be a CEO.

CEOs tend to be salesmen. And above all else, they exceed in selling themselves. That’s how they get where they get. Although I take it on faith they aren’t all incompetent, this 2002 article in Harvard magazine by Craig Lambert documents a number of horror stories of CEO blunders. He also argues that the CEO Cult was largely a cult of personality; star CEOs have charisma. And charisma, among other things, is impervious to rationality. Here Lambert quotes Rakesh Khurana, a Harvard PhD and author of Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs, which explores the messianic appeal of charismatic chief executives.

The trend toward charisma may have started when “the idea took root that if a firm was doing poorly or well, it was because of the CEO,” Khurana explains. “Previously, CEOs were about as well-known as their chauffeurs. But something happened when Lee Iacocca was credited with single-handedly saving an American icon. Most people forgot about the $2-billion federally guaranteed loan to bail out Chrysler, or the United Auto Workers’ givebacks. Iacocca made other CEOs look bland–there was even talk of drafting him for president. The image of a CEO changed from being a capable administrator to a leader–a motivating, flamboyant leader with a new task. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, business tried to redefine itself; it was no longer about the profane task of making money, but concerned with vision, values, mission—essentially religious terms.”

This meant “importing the sacred into the profane,” explains Khurana, who uses the German sociologist Max Weber’s works on charisma as a touchstone. Charismatic leadership, which grows from a personal magnetism that inspires devotion, reaches its apotheosis in religious cults. Its ascendance in corporate life is “a throwback to an earlier form of authority that proved to be very unstable,” says Khurana. “Weber said that charisma and rationality cannot coexist. The progress of Western civilization has been a movement away from charismatic leadership toward rational authority invested in laws and institutions. After Hitler and Mussolini, Americans were rightly skeptical of charismatic leaders. Separating the individual from the office is one of the great victories of Western society.”

Over the years I’ve observed that groups will defer to members who are sure of themselves. Most of us have fears and doubts about our abilities and decisions; it can be a relief to let the guy with no fears and doubts make the decisions. And once the leader-follower relationship is established, it’s very hard to break even after the leader screws up and the followers have lost faith. If you’ve been around the block a few times you’ve probably seen this yourself.

For that reason, self-confidence trumps knowledge and competence nearly every time. An absolute faith in his own correctness will propel a man’s career a very long way. And once a guy has a reputation for gravitas and competence he has to screw up big time before those around him get a clue he may really be a fool — or, in current office parlance, “a real Dick Cheney.”

I’ve been speaking of the CEO cult in past tense, which isn’t entirely correct. I’m sure there are a lot of real Dick Cheneys still running companies. And the cult lingers on in the Bush Administration.

Ellen Goodman writes in today’s Boston Globe,

After manipulating this faucet of fear, the president then defended the war in the name of national security, casting himself as the country’s father-protector. In short, he sold himself as the person we needed to protect us from the fear he provoked. Welcome to the protection racket. And lest you forget, his reelection campaign was run by the same racketeers. George W. was transformed from a conservative who was compassionate to a commander in chief who was unflappable. John Kerry was accused of the unmanly crime of nuance and caricatured as flip-floppable. We were subjected to an endless strongman debate with Arnold Schwarzenegger leading the attack on ”girlie men.” …

… There’s something to be learned in the Bush debacle. Beware the call of the old manliness. Beware the man who ramps up the danger and offers himself as hero and security blanket. And beware the leader whose unwavering, unflappable, unnuanced, and unjustified confidence in the face of risk becomes our disaster.

In her column, Goodman argues that the same overconfident, risk-taking, hypermasculine behaviors that we look for in our leaders are the same attributes that our enemies look for in their leaders. Our he-men demand that we look to them for protection from their he-men. Testosterone creates a self-perpetuating protection racket.

Manliness is defined by Harvey Mansfield as ”confidence in the face of risk.” I was reminded of a book I read years ago — sorry I can’t remember the title — in which the author defended obscenely high salaries for CEOs (which are even more obscene now) because CEOs take risks. His examples of lower-paid jobs that didn’t involve “risk” included firemen and policemen. I kid you not. Some of these guys really are living in their own fantasy world in which they’re the superheros.

They’re confident in the face of risk not because they’re brave, but because they’re bleeping delusional.

Let’s go now to Bob Burnett, who posted “George Bush — Failed Christian, Failed CEO” at Huffington Post.

Dubya’s carefully crafted image as America’s “CEO President” ignores the reality that he has consistently been a failure as an executive. He’s made dreadful mistake after mistake, but never learns from any of them. As an oilman, baseball executive, governor, and now as President, George Bush has been a figurehead executive, the public face of an enterprise where the real power lay somewhere else. His oil businesses were notable disasters, although he never suffered financially, as friends of the Bush family bailed him out. Because George W was buffered from reality throughout his adult life, he never had to come to grips with his failures. The lessons he didn’t learn are painfully evident in the occupation of Iraq, where Bush has committed each of the classic CEO mistakes and hasn’t recognized any of them.

Among these mistakes was invading Iraq with no plan for occupation. Further,

When their projects go disastrously off-course, CEOs find it difficult to pull the plug. Typically, they plead for more time; insist that they see the light at the end of the tunnel. President Bush claims, “The progress in the past year has been significant — and we have a clear path forward.” Beleaguered CEOS argue that to even talk of shutting down a project demoralizes those working on it. President Bush maintains, “It would send the wrong message to our troops — who need to know that we are serious about completing the mission they are risking their lives to achieve.”

And Enron’s floundering divisions would have turned a profit eventually, and then everything would have been just fine.

The entity we call the “Bush Administration” is a perfect storm of CEO cultism; a near-pure distillation of chest-thumping, risk-taking, steely-eyed, self-deluded arrogance; a collection of losers who couldn’t lose, who bluffed and bullied their way to the top and who now are trying to bluff and bully their way out of the disasters they’ve created through sheer joy-ride recklessness.

Until very recently I haven’t given serious thought to whether Bush would finish his second term, but now so many chickens are coming home to roost — and they’re big, mean, ugly motherbleeping chickens — I am giving it serious thought. Outside of Washington the pool of Bush Bitter Enders is shrinking fast. Most people aren’t even listening to Bush any more. Yet we face massive problems, not all of Bush’s making, that will take more than banners and bluster to manage.

We’re on a trajectory now that, I think, could result in Bush’s (and Cheney’s) impeachment or forced resignation before 2008. That trajectory depends in part on events outside of anyone’s control, so it could change. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, retired generals have finally worked up the courage to take on Donald Rumsfeld:

Retired Major Gen. John Riggs told National Public Radio that Rumsfeld had helped create an atmosphere of “arrogance” among the Pentagon’s top civilian leadership.

“They only need the military advice when it satisfies their agenda. I think that’s a mistake, and that’s why I think he should resign,” Riggs said.

Advice? Manly men don’t take advice. If you have absolute faith in your own judgments, why would you take advice? If we just give it more time, we’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel, and then everyone will know that Rummy and Dick and George were right, after all. And they have no doubts they were right.

And maybe William Bennett would’ve made up his $8 million in gambling losses if he’d had one more weekend in the casinos. Ya never know.

Update: See also Paul Krugman, “Weapons of Math Destruction.“

Lib Links

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There are a couple of good articles on Salon (and also at True Blue Liberal) that I don’t have time to comment on, but they’re good reads. I’ll give both links for each article.

Fritz Umbach, “Bush’s Bogus Document Dump” — Salon Link — TBL Link

Sidney Blumenthal, “The Slow-Motion Trap” — Salon Link — TBL Link

Update: See also “Another General Calls For Rumsfeld’s Resignation” at Think Progress. This is genuinely extraordinary, for reasons modus potus explains here. But I have it on good authority that the brass has hated Rummy from the get-go.

A Real Dick Cheney

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Jonathan Alter on last night’s Countdown:

OLBERMANN: But even in that context, other historical examples, President Reagan rebounded from Iran-contra, and President Clinton rebounded after the impeachment. But Harry Truman did not shake off Korea while troops were still in Korea, and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon certainly didn’t shake off Vietnam while troops were there. Are not the president’s poll numbers, and, to a large degree, his presidency now, absolutely indivisible from our continuing presence in Iraq?

ALTER: Yes, I think pretty much, which is why there are not a lot of people who expect him to move very much in the polls. And once you’re tagged as an incompetent, that’s pretty hard to recover from.

I mean, you’ve got a situation now where, you know, in workplaces across America, if somebody says, He’s a real Dick Cheney, what they mean is, a guy who sounds like he has a lot of gravitas in those meetings at your company, and looks the part, but is actually, you know, kind of full of it and can’t get the job done when it comes to making a profit.

And so that’s where these guys are now. Their credibility for getting the job done has been eroded, I think largely because they surround themselves with these yes-men, the truth doesn’t get up the chain of command, as we saw with these trailers. So they—because people feel like if they tell them the truth, they’re just going to get their heads bitten off. And as a result, your batting average on decisions goes down, down, down, your competence level goes down, down, down, because you’re not making well-informed decisions.

Heh.

Are We Afraid Yet?

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The Big Debate today is over how long it will take for Iran to have the bomb.

Years, say analysts quoted in the New York Times.

Western nuclear analysts said yesterday that Tehran lacked the skills, materials and equipment to make good on its immediate nuclear ambitions, even as a senior Iranian official said Iran would defy international pressure and rapidly expand its ability to enrich uranium for fuel.

The official, Muhammad Saeedi, the deputy head of Iran’s atomic energy organization, said Iran would push quickly to put 54,000 centrifuges on line — a vast increase from the 164 the Iranians said Tuesday that they had used to enrich uranium to levels that could fuel a nuclear reactor.

Still, nuclear analysts called the claims exaggerated. They said nothing had changed to alter current estimates of when Iran might be able to make a single nuclear weapon, assuming that is its ultimate goal. The United States government has put that at 5 to 10 years, and some analysts have said it could come as late as 2020.

Andy Grotto at Think Progress explains:

Iran enriched the uranium using a cascade of 164 centrifuges that spin uranium hexafluoride gas at supersonic speed. This process extracts U-235—usable in power reactors and nuclear weapons—from the gas. The enriched uranium that Iran produced cannot be used in a nuclear weapon because it contains just 3.5% U-235, whereas a nuclear weapon typically requires highly-enriched uranium (HEU) that contains more than 90% U-235. Assuming Iran has perfect luck with the centrifuge, it would need to operate this cascade continually for more than five years to produce enough HEU (15-20 kg, roughly the size of a basketball) for a crude nuclear bomb.

To acquire a credible nuclear weapons capability, Iran’s next step is to use this successful experiment as the basis for building a 3,000 centrifuge cascade at Natanz, as Iran has frequently claimed it would do. In theory, such a facility would be capable of producing enough HEU for 2-3 bombs a year. Building such a facility, however, is far more difficult and demanding than operating the 164 centrifuge cascade.

Even if everything goes right, such a facility would not be fully operational until 2009 at the earliest. This is still too soon for comfort, but it does leave significant time for some hard-nosed diplomacy.

Even some rightie bloggers admit that Iran isn’t likely to have the bomb next week. This guy, for example, quotes a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School who said 2009 was the earliest possible date for the mullahs to build an atomic weapon.

And talking about 3,000 or 54,000 centrifuges makes the pre-Iraq invasion hysteria over the aluminum tubes and rumors that Saddam Hussein was trying to build a centrifuge seem all the more rinky-dink, doesn’t it?

Still, there is much talk of cascades and centrifuges on the Blogosphere today. My understanding is that building a whole lot of centrifuges and getting them to work together properly to make weapons-grade material is devilishly difficult and expensive — easier said than done — and also requires vast amounts of uranium and energy. Although I guess an oil nation has that last part licked.

Bottom line — no matter what anybody says, we shouldn’t have to bomb Iran this year. There seems to be general consensus on that point.

At the Washington Post, David Ignatius writes,

The emerging confrontation between the United States and Iran is “the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion,” argues Graham Allison, the Harvard University professor who wrote the classic study of President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 showdown with the Soviet Union that narrowly averted nuclear war. If anything, that analogy understates the potential risks here.

That doesn’t sound good.

Allison argues that Bush’s dilemma is similar to the one that confronted Kennedy in 1962. His advisers are telling him that he may face a stark choice — either to acquiesce in the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a dangerous adversary, or risk war to stop that nuclear fait accompli. Hard-liners warned JFK that alternative courses of action would only delay the inevitable day of reckoning, and Bush is probably hearing similar advice now.

Kennedy’s genius was to reject the Cuba options proposed by his advisers, hawk and dove alike, and choose his own peculiar outside-the-box strategy. He issued a deadline but privately delayed it; he answered a first, flexible message from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev but not a second unyielding one; he said he would never take U.S. missiles out of Turkey, as the Soviets were demanding, and then secretly did precisely that. Disaster was avoided because Khrushchev believed Kennedy was willing to risk war — but wanted to avoid it.

But, um, Kennedy isn’t the guy plotting the course any more. And Bush and Cheney put together don’t have half the smarts that collected in JFK’s toe jam.

Ignatius continues,

What worries me is that the relevant historical analogy may not be the 1962 war that didn’t happen, but World War I, which did. The march toward war in 1914 resulted from the tight interlocking of alliances, obligations, perceived threats and strategic miscalculations. The British historian Niall Ferguson argued in his book “The Pity of War” that Britain’s decision to enter World War I was a gross error of judgment that cost that nation its empire.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, makes a similar argument about Iran. “I think of war with Iran as the ending of America’s present role in the world,” he told me this week. “Iraq may have been a preview of that, but it’s still redeemable if we get out fast. In a war with Iran, we’ll get dragged down for 20 or 30 years. The world will condemn us. We will lose our position in the world.”

Howard Fineman at Newsweek:

For as long as I’ve known him, Bush has liked to muse aloud about his theory of “political capital.” His dad’s mistake, he told me more than once, was to have not spent the vast political capital he accumulated in 1991 as the “liberator of Kuwait”—a failure that led, in his son’s mind, to Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992.

After the attacks on 9/11, after the successful (and globally popular) obliteration of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and after the midterm congressional elections of 2002, President Bush was sitting in the White House with a colossal pile of military, diplomatic and political capital in front of him. And then he pushed the entire pile to the middle of the poker table and bet it all on his predetermined decision to invade Iraq. I said at the time and still believe that it was one of the most momentous decisions any president had ever made.

Now, and largely as a consequence, Bush finds himself bereft of political capital at precisely the moment when he (and the rest of the world) needs it most. To use his father’s terms (from his 1989 inaugural address), we have neither the will nor the wallet to take care of business in and with the bullies in Iran.

Somebody — it may have been Fineman — said on Countdown last night that we spent our military capital on the wrong I-country.

Fineman goes on to say that the President is boxed in politically because he’s lost credibility with too many voters. He’s boxed in militarily because Iran is, well, not Iraq —

Saddam Hussein was a bellicose character, but Iran has four times the population and several thousand more years of unified national identity. Iran also has big-league ballistic missiles capable of reaching, and ruining, lots of places in the Middle East region, including Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Iran also has millions of Shia allies in Iraq who would regard (and be asked to regard) an attack on Iran as an attack on Shia Islam. One retired general I checked in with (who asked to remain unidentified because he sometimes is called on for counsel by the administration) says that American troops in Iraq—who’ve been working in many ways with the Shiite majority there—would risk coming under attack by them, especially if there was any effort to redeploy them.

Bush is boxed in diplomatically because, frankly, he needs to be able to work with the UN and the IAEA, not shove them around, and Bush and the UN/IAEA have, um, some history. And he’s boxed in economically because starting another war in the Middle East would send oil prices even higher.

I want to go back to what Fineman said about Bush and political capital: His dad’s mistake, he told me more than once, was to have not spent the vast political capital he accumulated in 1991 as the “liberator of Kuwait”—a failure that led, in his son’s mind, to Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992. What Bush never understood is that “political capital” has a limited shelf life whether you spend it or not. Eventually, people start to ask what have you done for me lately? The Bushies seemed to think the free ride they got from 9/11 would last forever; that they could do whatever they wanted for the next seven years. I think only now it’s starting to sink in that the 9/11 boost is over.

I’m also reminded of what Ezra Klein said — “This White House was predicated on the belief that policies didn’t matter, only politics did. That’s been disproven, they’ve found themselves unable to fight failure with photo-ops.” For Bushies, policy is just a continuation of politics by other means. Bush blew his “political capital” on political games instead of substance. And now he’s broke and we’re bleeped.

Judging by past performance, whatever the Bushies choose to do about Iran will be the wrong thing. It may be that the best we can hope for is that nobody starts a war before we can pry the Bushies out of the White House. At least Tehran shouldn’t be able to make a bomb before then.

Protesting 101

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Long-time Mahablog readers probably have noticed I am ambivalent about protest marches and demonstrations. Even though I take part in them now and then, on the whole I don’t think they have much of an effect.

Ah-HAH, you say. The immigration marches just showed you. So why isn’t the antiwar movement marching all the time?

Good question.

Sometimes it ain’t what you do, but the way that you do it, that matters. Some demonstrations have changed the world. But in my long and jaded experience some demonstrating is a waste of time. Some demonstrating is even counterproductive. What makes effective protest? I’ve been thinking about that since the big antiwar march in Washington last September (when I suggested some rules of etiquette for protesting). I started thinking about it more after Coretta Scott King died, and I saw photos like this in the newspapers:

What’s striking about that photo? Notice the suits. Yeah, everybody dressed more formally back in the day. But it brings me to —

Rule #1. Be serious.

The great civil rights marches of the 1950s and 1960s should be studied and emulated as closely as possible. People in those marches looked as if they were assembled for a serious purpose. They wore serious clothes. They marched both joyously and solemnly. They were a picture of dignity itself. If they chanted or carried signs, the chants or signs didn’t contain language you couldn’t repeat to your grandmother.

The antiwar protests I’ve attended in New York City, by contrast, were often more like moving carnivals than protests. Costumes, banners, and behavior on display were often juvenile and raunchy. Lots of people seemed to be there to get attention, and the message they conveyed was LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT HOW CLEVER I AM, not NO IRAQ WAR. Really. Some street theater is effective — I am fond of Billionaires for Bush — but most of the time street theater is juvenile and tiresome and reminds me of bad summer camp skits. Except raunchier.

Which takes me to —

Rule #2. Be unified of purpose.

One of my ongoing gripes about antiwar marches is the way some groups try to tack their own agenda, which many others in the demonstration may not share, onto marches. International A.N.S.W.E.R. is a repeat offender in this category. Most of the marchers last September were in Washington for the sole purpose of protesting the war. But ANSWER hijacked CSPAN’s attention and put on a display so moonbatty it made The Daily Show; see also Steve Gilliard.

Message control is essential. During the Vietnam era, I witnessed many an antiwar protest get hijacked by a few assholes who waved North Vietnamese flags and spouted anti-American messages, which is not exactly the way to win hearts and minds —

Rule #3 — Good protesting is good PR.

I know they’re called “protests,” but your central purpose is to win support for your cause. You want people looking on to be favorably impressed. You want them to think, wow, I like these people. They’re not crazy. They’re not scary. I think I will take them seriously (see Rule #1). That means you should try not to be visibly angry, because angry people are scary. Anger is not good PR. Grossing people out is not good PR. Yelling at people that they’re stupid for not listening to you is not good PR. Screaming the F word at television camera crews is not good PR.

Rule #4 — Size matters.

Size of crowds, that is. Remember that one of your purposes is to show off how many people came together for the cause. But most people will only see your protest in photographs and news videos. More people saw photographs of this civil rights demonstration in August 1963 than saw it in person —

The number of people who marched for immigration reform over the past few days was wonderfully impressive. It’s the biggest reason the marches got news coverage. The overhead shots were wonderful. On the other hand, last September I wrote of the Washington march —

The plan was to rally at the Ellipse next to the White House and then march from there. Only a small part of the crowd actually went to the Ellipse, however. Most seem to have just showed up and either stayed in groups scattered all over Capitol Hill, or else they just did impromptu unofficial marches as a warmup to the Big March. … It would have been nice to get everyone together for a mass photo, but that didn’t happen. Too bad. It would have been impressive.

As I waited on the Ellipse I could see vast numbers of people a block or two away. The Pink Ladies had a big contingent and were busily showing off how pink they were — LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT HOW CLEVER I AM — but they seemed to evaporate once the official march started. (Re-read Rules #1 and #2.)

Anyway, as a result, there were no photos or videos to document for the world how big the crowd really was. You had to be there.

A sub-rule — IMO, an occasional REALLY BIG demonstration that gets a lot of media attention is way better than a steady drizzle of little demonstrations that become just so much background noise..

Rule #5 — Be sure your opposition is uglier/more hateful/snottier than you are.

In the 1950s and 1960s white television viewers were shocked and ashamed to see the civil rights marchers — who were behaving nicely and wearing suits, remember — jeered at by hateful racists. And when those redneck Southern sheriffs turned fire hoses and attack dogs on the marchers, it pretty much doomed Jim Crow to the dustbin of history. I think Cindy Sheehan’s encampment in Crawford last August, although a relatively small group, was such a success because of the contrast between Sheehan and the Snot-in-Chief cruising by in his motorcade without so much as a how d’you do. Truly, if Bush had invited the Sheehan crew over for lemonade and a handshake, the show would’ve been over. But he didn’t.

This takes us back to rules #1 and #2. You don’t win support by being assholes. You win support by showing the world that your opponents are assholes.

Rule #6 — Demonstrations are not enough.

It’s essential to be able to work with people in positions of power to advance your agenda. And if there aren’t enough people in power to advance your agenda, then get some. Frankly, I think some lefties are caught up in the romance of being oppressed and powerless, and can’t see beyond that.

Remember, speaking truth to power is just the first step. The goal is to get power for yourself.

Any more rules you can think of?

Update: I’ve posted a revised version of this post at Kos Diaries and American Street.

Old News

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Did they really think they could get away with this? Joby Warrick writes in today’s Washington Post,

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.

The report was stamped “secret” and shelved, and for the next several months Administration officials continued to claim the trailers were weapons factories.

This seems to me the most chilling part of Warrick’s news story:

The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts — scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons — who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. … None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that their jobs would be jeopardized.

As I recall, Saddam Hussein had the same deal going with his weapons scientists. They’d tell him what he wanted to hear so they could keep their jobs. This sort of thing is not supposed to happen with the government of a free nation.

Today rightie bloggers are indignant about this story, calling it deceptive. They point to this paragraph that, they say, vindicates the President:

Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the trailers noted that the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in Washington, the analysts said. “It was hotly debated, and there were experts making arguments on both sides,” said one former senior official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

No cigar, righties. The Administration didn’t say, we think these trailers might be mobile labs. It said they were, unequivocally. And the evidence that they weren’t was then suppressed. That was dishonest. And it’s part of the now-familiar pattern — the Bushies cherry-picked intelligence, believing what they wanted to believe, discarding anything that didn’t support their conclusions.

Throughout the summer and fall of 2003, the trailers became simply “mobile biological laboratories” in speeches and press statements by administration officials. In late June, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell declared that the “confidence level is increasing” that the trailers were intended for biowarfare. In September, Vice President Cheney pronounced the trailers to be “mobile biological facilities,” and said they could have been used to produce anthrax or smallpox.

Warrick goes on to say that the Bushies had been looking for mobile labs because of stories told by the now-infamous Curveball. Good ol’ Curveball was shown photographs of the trailers, and he identified them as mobile labs. Others had doubts. So the Defense Intelligence Agency put together a team of specialists to resolve the issue. The specialists flew to Kuwait, where the “labs” were stored, to examine the labs. Within four hours it was clear to the entire team that the trailers were not mobile weapons labs.

But back in Washington, a CIA analyst had already written an official assessment that called the trailers “the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.”

The technical team’s preliminary report was transmitted in the early hours of May 27, just before its members began boarding planes to return home. Within 24 hours, the CIA published its white paper, “Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants,” on its Web site.

One can imagine the pressure being applied from the White House to cover Bush’s butt on the WMDs. But I ask again — did they really believe they could get away with this?

I’m thinking about something Taylor Marsh said yesterday — “…it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s been going on for years. The president’s people have been covering for the president.” Exactly so. At first Bush family connections covered for him, and once he got into politics in Texas a team of cronies and sycophants — and Karl Rove — surrounded him to create the artful illusion that Bush was substantive, a leader, a man to be taken seriously. And they sold that illusion to a gullible public.

One of the paradoxes created by the mass media age is that the more local the government, the less most voters are paying attention to it, because mass media news is focused on national stories. Thus, We, the People get more news about what’s going on in Washington than we get about our state and local governments. It’s likely that, say, a governor of Texas gets less media scrutiny than a president of the United States. Such a governor could funnel money and favors to his supporters and cronies without worrying much about the public catching on. It also may be easier to persuade state judges to let aspiring presidential candidates wriggle out of giving testimony that might have been embarrassing, for example. Then again, had Bush served a seventh year as governor the artful illusion might have collapsed like a failed soufflé. Ya never know.

My point is, however, that for years the Bush team had been creating whatever “reality” they wished the public to believe. And they’d always gotten away with it. So when they got to Washington they continued to operate the way they’d always operated. And they got away with it for a remarkably long time.

But it’s obvious now the lot of them are in way over their heads, including the mighty Karl. Because now, the whole world is watching. And most of the world has no vested interest in covering Bush’s butt.

***

Via Steve Soto — Robert Scheer writes,

On Monday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told me that he and his department’s top experts never believed that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat, but that the president followed the misleading advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim. Now he tells us.

Thanks loads, Colin.

The harsh truth is that this president cherry-picked the intelligence data in making his case for invading Iraq and deliberately kept the public in the dark as to the countervailing analysis at the highest level of the intelligence community. While the president and his top Cabinet officials were fear-mongering with stark images of a “mushroom cloud” over American cities, the leading experts on nuclear weaponry at the Department of Energy (the agency in charge of the U.S. nuclear-weapons program) and the State Department thought the claim of a near-term Iraqi nuclear threat was absurd.

A few hours ago the Pentagon announced the deaths of five U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The death total for April is now 31, which is the total for all of March. The grand total, for want of a better term, is now 2,363.

Lots of Leak Links

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Gallup reports that six in ten Americans are critical of Bush on the issue of leaks. Plus, “The more closely people are following the issue, the more likely they are to say he did something illegal rather than unethical.” That’s not exactly how Leakgate being reported, but interesting nonetheless.

Cable and network news did a good job of juxtaposing Bush’s statement from October 2003 — “I don’t know of anyone in my administration who has leaked. If somebody did leak classified information, I’d like to know it, and we’ll take the appropriate action” — with his recent admission that he authorized the leaks. A big chunk of the American electorate must’ve seen it.

As Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas wrote in Newsweek, the clip became “Cable-TV wallpaper.”

The real knee-slapper is reported by Tom Hamburger in today’s Seattle Times:

“I wanted people to see the truth,” Bush said in response to a question from a member of the audience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. “You’re not supposed to talk about classified information and so I declassified the document. I thought it was important for people to get a better sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches.”

“I wanted people to see the truth”? My dear Mr. Alleged President, your Administration can’t handle the truth.

It appears lots of Americans are seeing the truth, however. And if it’s Tuesday, it must be time for new record low Bush approval numbers.

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) — U.S. President George Bush`s approval rating has fallen 3 points to a record low 38 percent in a Washington Post-ABC News poll published Tuesday.

The April 6-9 poll of 1,027 adults nationwide found 47 percent of respondents say they ‘strongly’ disapprove of Bush`s handling of the presidency — more than double the 20 percent who strongly approve.

Karl might want to take notes:

Those asked were divided evenly on terrorism, with 46 percent expressing more confidence in the Democrats and 45 percent trusting Republicans.

The essential E.J. Dionne has a great column on leaks in today’s Washington Post:

What’s amazing about the defenses offered for President Bush in the Valerie Plame leak investigation is that they deal with absolutely everything except the central issue: Did Bush know a lot more about this case than he let on before the 2004 elections?

But first, let’s offer full credit to the Bush spin operation for working so hard and so effectively to change the subject.

Heh.

The president’s defenders want you to think that when it comes to leaking, every president does it. Why should Bush be held to a different standard? Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) told CNN on Sunday that the Bush administration was innocently asking itself, “How do we get the full story out there?”

Besides, since the president can authorize the declassification of anything he chooses to declassify, he can’t be involved in anything untoward. “This was not a leak,” Joseph diGenova, a top Republican lawyer, told the New York Sun’s Josh Gerstein. “This was an authorized disclosure.” Ah, yes, it depends on what the meaning of the word “leak” is. That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

I think this ties down why so many Americans are falling away from Bush. They might’ve been fooled by the well-orchestrated, um, misdirection campaigns of the Mighty Right. But now they’ve seen the President caught in a flat-out lie. And not the first one. They might have been bamboozled about what’s happening on the other side of the world in Iraq, but Americans saw the New Orleans debacle in detail on their TVs. By now anyone on Medicare, or with parents or grandparents on Medicare, knows Bush’s prescription drug program is hardly the “accomplishment” he makes it out to be. Etc.

It’s seemed to me all along that the Bush White House was not a real presidential administration, but an ongoing pageant representing an administration. Bush has yet to figure out what a president of the United States actually does. Karl and Karen and the rest of his team are masters at maintaining the illusion of a presidency, and with the deference of the press and support from a loyal Republican majority in Congress it was hard to tell the difference. But now we’re going on six years with no substantive governing leadership coming out of the White House — they’re brilliant at politicking, yes, but they don’t know how to govern — and the consequences are just too plain to ignore. No amount of pageantry and lighting and staging and banners will get them out of the hole they’re in now.

I think the only way Bush could gain back some of the public support he has lost is to actually accomplish something that’s tangible. But I doubt he knows how to do that.

Oh well, back to leaks —

Dana Milbank describes Bush brushing off a question about leaks at Johns Hopkins yesterday:

But then a second-year master’s student asked about “Prosecutor Fitzgerald” and White House leaks to punish a critic. You could practically hear the zipper sealing the president’s lips.

“Yes, no, I, this is, there’s an ongoing legal proceeding which precludes me from talking a lot about the case,” the president finally managed to say. All he could answer, Bush said, was that he declassified a National Intelligence Estimate because “it made sense for people to see the truth.”

That answer neatly encapsulated the White House’s response to the CIA leak imbroglio: No comment and non sequitur.

BTW, it wasn’t that long ago that Bush’s taking an unscripted question would’ve been the top news story. Now it barely gets covered. The boy’s got to learn a new trick to get attention. Juggling? Or maybe he and Dick can put together a ventriloquist act.

The Isikoff-Thomas article cited above is worth taking the time to read. Among other things, it reveals that the Bushies have been a tad inconsistent with their “leaks” and “declassifications.”

Update: See Ezra Klein —

Bush isn’t flailing because this White House is insufficiently politically adept. He’s flailing because the major policies on which he’s staked his presidency are self-destructing. Iraq is a bloodbath, the deficit threatens to swallow the country whole, the Middle East is less stable than ever, economic insecurity is rampant, inequality has risen, the government response to a national disaster was staggeringly incompetent etc, etc. So while any of Lizza’s ideas might result in a temporary bump, that spike would rapidly flatten under the perpetual stream of bad news. Fact is, Bush is proving that presidencies are about something more than communication strategies. This White House was predicated on the belief that policies didn’t matter, only politics did. That’s been disproven, they’ve found themselves unable to fight failure with photo-ops. And this country will be better for it.

Update update: Taylor Marsh —

With President Bush on tape talking about how he wanted to catch the leaker, then admitting he leaked the information himself, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s been going on for years. The president’s people have been covering for the president.

Bush’s legendary “capital” has run out.