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.

Hello? Karl?

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New evidence of the utter moral bankruptcy of the Bush Administration is coming along to light so fast it’s hard to keep up. This morning’s clue comes to us from Larry Margasak of the Associated Press:

Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court show.

The records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin, who recently was convicted in the case, made two dozen calls to the White House within a three-day period around Election Day 2002 — as the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out and then abruptly shut down.

Karl? Karl? ‘Zat you, Karl?

The phone jamming scandal goes back to the 2002 midterms, when Tobin’s operation used repeated hang-up calls to jam phones at a Democratic Party get-out-the-vote center. Tobin was working on behalf of then-Rep. John Sununu Jr., who won a narrow victory over Gov. Jeanne Shaheen for a U.S. Senate seat. A week before the election the race had been too close to call.

The prosecutors in Tobin’s case did not make the White House calls part of their case, although the phone records were an exhibit. “The Justice Department has secured three convictions in the case but hasn’t accused any White House or national Republican officials of wrongdoing, nor made any allegations suggesting party officials outside New Hampshire were involved,” writes Margasak. Apparently the Bush Justice Department prosecuted the case as narrowly as it could. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee spent millions on Tobin’s defense.

Besides the conviction of Tobin, the Republicans’ New England regional director, prosecutors negotiated two plea bargains: one with a New Hampshire Republican Party official and another with the owner of a telemarketing firm involved in the scheme. The owner of the subcontractor firm whose employees made the hang-up calls is under indictment.

The phone records show that most calls to the White House were from Tobin, who became President Bush’s presidential campaign chairman for the New England region in 2004.

The case is back in the news because the Dems are bringing a civil suit alleging vote fraud (ya think?). Republicans say there are always lots of calls flying around between Republicans on election day.

A Democratic analysis of phone records introduced at Tobin’s criminal trial show he made 115 outgoing calls — mostly to the same number in the White House political affairs office — between Sept. 17 and Nov. 22, 2002. Two dozen of the calls were made from 9:28 a.m. the day before the election through 2:17 a.m. the night after the voting.

There also were other calls between Republican officials during the period that the scheme was hatched and canceled.


Josh Marshall suggests there is “a nexus between the phone-jamming case and the Abramoff scandal,” although it’s not clear to me where the connections are. But check out the TPM “Grand Ole Docket” page.

Update: Why I quit using Google AdSense — The Peking Duck also has a story about Tobin and Phonegate today, but check out the ad in the screen-captured Google adstrip:

Too funny.

The New Iron Curtain

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I remember back in the late 1950s when I was a little hillbilly child and the old folks wuz watchin’ civil rights marches on the TV, an’ they’d look at each other real scared like, an’ say that Martin Luther King is gonna show up here some day. And then they’d all turn whiter than they already were.

Somehow, the reaction on the Right Blogosphere to the immigration marches reminded me of that. Michelle Malkin must’ve changed her pants a dozen times today.

See, what’s got them really scared is that Democrats are talking to the marchers. Dems are even recruiting voters from among the marchers. Michelle is hollering about voter fraud, because, you know, the only people who join those marches are illegal aliens.

When Anna Salazar was first dating her husband, Roberto, it didn’t occur to her to ask his immigration status.

By the time the California native learned Roberto was an illegal immigrant, it didn’t make a difference: She had met the love of her life. Now — five years, a Valentine’s Day wedding and two baby boys later — they are facing Roberto’s deportation to Mexico and a possible 10-year exile from the country where he has lived since he was 8. …

… Sensenbrenner’s bill would build 700 miles of fencing along the border and have Anna Salazar, too, charged with an aggravated felony — “harboring” her undocumented husband. She could face more than a year in prison, loss of her children to foster care during that time and forfeiture of her assets. [link]

Oh, wait …

Righties can’t wrap their heads about the fact that huge numbers of native born Americans are personally connected to “illegals.” Dr. Atrios has photographs of the immigration rally in Philadelphia that brings this point home. Families are terrified they are going to be torn apart. Citizens of the United States are begging their government not to deport their parents or grandparents, or wives, or husbands, or siblings.

What does “liberty” mean if you aren’t free to be with the people you love?

From Wizbang:

The fact that the Dems are recruiting at these protests isn’t a surprise. It fits into their big picture of race and politics (which is why the flyer’s visual puts Texas and Mexico together [Note: the protest under discussion was in Texas — maha]). The Democrats classify people based upon race and then work to corner the racial voting collectives.

I’ve yet to understand how the Dems manage to corner a “voting collective” without putting microchips in people’s heads. But Republicans, as you know, never use racially targeted campaigns to win votes. They didn’t do it here, either.

I haven’t written much about immigration because I haven’t seen any proposals that I’m entirely comfortable with. “Guest worker” programs were a disaster for Europe, which makes me wonder why we’re even talking about them. Certainly we have to gain control of our borders, for our own security. And Paul Krugman wrote in his March 27 column —

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

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

But there are undocumented workers already here, and undocumented workers are underpaid and exploited workers. I hate the fact that “The System” turns a blind eye to some portion of illegals because, you know, we need those people to pick fruit and watch the kids. I hate the fact that the burden of law falls heavier on the workers than on the employers who exploit them. And breaking up families is unspeakably cruel.

My solution would involve slowing the flow of immigration by prosecuting and severely punishing employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers to avoid complying with wage and hour laws. But for people already here, especially people who have been here for years and who have loved ones — friends and family — who are citizens, it should be possible for them to stop hiding and to fully integrate with this nation, of which they are already a part. If that’s amnesty, then I guess I’m for amnesty.

Gebe Martinez of the Houston Chronicle reports that some Republicans are uneasy with their party’s “get tough” approach.

When the U.S. House passed a bill in December making it a felony to be in the country illegally, the ”get-tough” message became the flash point that has drawn millions of protestors into the streets.

With the Senate failing last week to finish a bill that would have rejected some of the harshest language in the House version, Republicans are expressing regret that the punitive House measure stands as the most recent congressional action on immigration.

I ‘spect there are a few who will regret it even more in November.

Yes, He Would

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Via True Blue Liberal you can read today’s Paul Krugman column without breaking through the NY Times firewall. Here are two terrible truths Bush supporters cannot face, never mind refute:

First, it’s clearer than ever that Mr. Bush, who still claims that war with Iraq was a last resort, was actually spoiling for a fight. The New York Times has confirmed the authenticity of a British government memo reporting on a prewar discussion between Mr. Bush and Tony Blair. In that conversation, Mr. Bush told Mr. Blair that he was determined to invade Iraq even if U.N. inspectors came up empty-handed.

Second, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Mr. Bush knew that the case he was presenting for war — a case that depended crucially on visions of mushroom clouds — rested on suspect evidence. For example, in the 2003 State of the Union address Mr. Bush cited Iraq’s purchase of aluminum tubes as clear evidence that Saddam was trying to acquire a nuclear arsenal. Yet Murray Waas of the National Journal reports that Mr. Bush had been warned that many intelligence analysts disagreed with that assessment.

These two truths have been verified way beyond a shadow of a doubt, yet righties cannot address them honestly. Instead, when challenged, they concoct a straw man and argue with that. For example, Gateway Pundit’s defense of the newest leak revelation is titled “Media Appalled that George Bush Dare Defend Himself.” And, of course, no one is appalled that Bush would defend himself. We’re appalled that he keeps lying his ass off to do it.

But Krugman’s main point is that no one should doubt Bush could invade Iran.

“But he wouldn’t do that,” say people who think they’re being sensible. Given what we now know about the origins of the Iraq war, however, discounting the possibility that Mr. Bush will start another ill-conceived and unnecessary war isn’t sensible. It’s wishful thinking. …

… Why might Mr. Bush want another war? For one thing, Mr. Bush, whose presidency is increasingly defined by the quagmire in Iraq, may believe that he can redeem himself with a new Mission Accomplished moment.

And it’s not just Mr. Bush’s legacy that’s at risk. Current polls suggest that the Democrats could take one or both houses of Congress this November, acquiring the ability to launch investigations backed by subpoena power. This could blow the lid off multiple Bush administration scandals. Political analysts openly suggest that an attack on Iran offers Mr. Bush a way to head off this danger, that an appropriately timed military strike could change the domestic political dynamics.

See also John Steinberg of Raw Story —

In a rational world, Bush’s dismal track record (by our standards) would hasten the handing of the car keys to a designated driver. In the strange world that Bush and Karl Rove inhabit, it means that a bigger distraction must be created.

Now, I don’t think the public would back an invasion of Iran unless a new, major terrorist strike could be blamed on Iran, or if, as Steinberg suggests, a couple of American warships happened to sink in the Persian Gulf. That might do it.

William M. Arkin of the Washington Post writes in “Goldilocks and Iran” that there are three ways Iran and the U.S. could enter into a war:

  • We could go to war if a cornered Iran lashes out.
  • We could go to war if the intelligence community assesses that Iran has clandestinely acquired nuclear weapons and an administration decides that the U.S. must preempt.
  • We could go to war if intensified military activity on both sides leads to greater possibilities for contact leading to an accident or incident that escalates out of control.

    • None of those sound all that farfetched to me.

    Fred Kaplan at Slate talks about a “Global Game of Chicken“:

    They’ve been revving the engines and rattling the sabers loud and hard lately. In the past few weeks, President Bush has released a document on national-security strategy that declares Iran to be the single biggest threat on the planet. Vice President Dick Cheney has warned that Iran will face serious consequences if it continues to enrich uranium. Joseph Cirincione, a sober-minded nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment, writes in the new issue of Foreign Policy:

      For months, I have told interviewers that no senior political or military official was seriously considering a military attack on Iran. In the last few weeks, I have changed my view. In part, this shift was triggered by colleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran.

    BTW, the Cirincione article quoted above is titled “Fool Me Twice” and is a good read.

    At a series of seminars at the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday, analysts and ex-officials debated the pros and cons of attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, but they agreed that keeping the conflict to a snappy “limited strike” was unlikely; it would almost certainly escalate to all-out war, with regional and possibly global repercussions.

    Yes, that’s certainly not comforting.

    In the new issue of Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows discusses a “war game” sponsored by the Atlantic in 2004.

    … under the guidance of Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel who had conducted many real-world war games for the Pentagon, including those that shaped U.S. strategy for the first Gulf War, we assembled a panel of experts to ask “What then?” about the ways in which the United States might threaten, pressure, or entice the Iranians not to build a bomb. Some had been for and some against the invasion of Iraq; all had served in the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, or other parts of the nation’s security apparatus, and many had dealt directly with Iran.

    The experts disagreed on some details but were nearly unanimous on one crucial point: what might seem America’s ace in the hole—the ability to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations in a pre-emptive air strike—was a fantasy.

    Fallows elaborates and explains the reasons why this is a fantasy, which I will not list here. Bottom line, the panel agreed that Iran’s getting nuclear weapons capability would be a very bad thing. But trying to solve this problem by dropping bombs on it would fail militarily (for reasons given in the article) and would also cause other more serious problems. Like Iraq, only worse.

    If you are doom and gloomed out now, Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian looks at the bright side. Unfortunately, it’s only the bright side for Brits.

    Britain is unlikely to participate in the nuclear bombing of Iranian atomic weapons research facilities. Instead, our role in any forthcoming nuclear blitz will be to fill the blogosphere with sarcastic posts and make tut-tutting noises. The latter may or may not be heard above B61-11s slamming nukes into Iran’s Natanz centrifuge plant, which is challengingly located 75ft below ground.

    (The lousy exchange rate makes Britain damn expensive, but maybe my Welsh relatives will take me in for a while. …)

    Cross-posted at The American Street.)

    Update: See also “Why Iraq Was a Mistake.”