Propaganda 101

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Did Democrats take money from Jack Abramoff? “Yes they did!” yell the righties. “No they didn’t!” say the lefties. Who is telling the truth?

You will be astonished to learn Republican claims that “Democrats did it too” are based on a sleight-of-hand that counts money not coming from Abramoff as “Abramoff money.” Yes, you are astonished. And shocked. Cough.

This is how it works: Indian tribes were clients of Jack Abramoff. Therefore, all money donated by Indian tribes is “tainted” by Abramoff, even if the money didn’t go through Abramoff but was donated directly by a tribe to a Democrat and Abramoff had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Matthew Continetti wrote in The Weekly Standard:

“THIS IS A REPUBLICAN scandal,” Harry Reid, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace in December. Wallace had asked Reid about his relationship with Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist who last week pleaded guilty, in two separate investigations, to five counts of mail fraud, tax evasion, wire fraud, and conspiracy. Reid said there was no relationship. “Abramoff gave me no money,” he said. “So don’t lump me in with Jack Abramoff.”

Reid might not have taken money directly from Abramoff, a lifelong Republican and conservative activist, but he did accept donations–some $66,000 worth–from Abramoff’s clients, Indian tribes operating casinos throughout the United States. And Reid’s willingness to do so, and his reluctance to return the Abramoff-related funds, as many of his Republican colleagues have done, suggests that Washington’s latest lobbying scandal may be more complex than partisans have let on, and more difficult for Democrats to make partisan hay out of than pundits now think.

The paragraphs above would make sense only if Jack Abramoff owned and operated the Indian tribes, like one of his bogus charities.

Mary Beth Williams of Wampum points to this bit from an Associated Press article:

Some watchdog organizations that specialize in tracking campaign money have linked former Oklahoma U.S. Rep. Brad Carson and the Oklahoma Democratic Party to Abramoff because both received money from Indian tribes that had been represented by the lobbyist or his firm.

Among the tribes was the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. According to Senate records, Abramoff’s firm was registered to lobby for the Cherokee Nation briefly in 2003. A spokesman for the Cherokee Nation could not be reached Thursday.

Mary Beth notes that not only did these contributions not go through Abramoff, Brad Carson is a member of the Cherokee Nation. She continues,

In the interest of full-disclosure, Eric and I purchased gas from the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe last summer in Michigan. The Saginaw-Chippewa were clients of Jack Abramoff’s lobbying firm. Thus, we here at Wampum have been tainted by the receipt of an Abramoff-linked commodity. Hence, the Koufax Awards must also be tainted, as are all the recipients of Awards from the past four years. And if FEC blog-linking rules go into effect, we’ve poisoned everyone on our sidebar as well. Isn’t that how it works, according to new GOP “they did it too” rules?

ReddHedd writes,

Let’s get something straight up front: Native American groups have the same right as anyone else in this country to donate money to political campaigns that they feel represent their interests. That goes for Democrats and Republicans alike.

Donations directly from specific tribal groups are not only proper, but it’s just like the National Chamber of Commerce or the UAW or any other specific, targeted group that is trying to advance the interests of its members. It is the illegal scamming of the money and then the bribing of officials that Abramoff and his cronies did that is illegal.

Can we say that the “Democrats did it too” argument is, essentially, racist? I believe we can.

Some Republican apologia should be preserved in a “Creating Effective Propaganda” textbook. Let’s look at this article from Investor’s Business Daily:

Nearly all Senate Democrats took money steered their way by Jack Abramoff, and Hillary Clinton’s fundraising committee has agreed to a $35,000 fine. Republicans aren’t the problem. The system is.

This is the lede. A casual reader would assume that nearly all Senate Democrats took money steered their way by Jack Abramoff, wouldn’t they? But that’s not true. A casual reader would assume that Hillary Clinton is being fined because of her association with Abramoff. But that isn’t true, either.

The false “steered their way by Jack Abramoff” claim is not explained in this article. This is as close as the writer gets to an explanation, buried several paragraphs down:

The DSCC and Hillary’s campaign jointly set up the New York Senate 2000 committee for the express purpose of bypassing the $2,000 limit on contributions from individuals. It’s that phony limit that empowers the likes of Abramoff, whose clients and associates gave Sen. John Kerry close to $100,000, according to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid apparently got nearly $70,000 from Abramoff sources, and Schumer himself benefited to the tune of nearly $30,000. All but five Democratic senators have taken Abramoff cash, says the NRSC.

But it wasn’t “Abramoff cash,” and Abramoff did not “steer” the cash to the recipients. These transactions did not involve Abramoff.

While we’re here, let’s look at the claim “The DSCC and Hillary’s campaign jointly set up the New York Senate 2000 committee for the express purpose of bypassing the $2,000 limit on contributions from individuals.” This statement is true, as explained here:

In 1999, First Lady Hillary Clinton’s campaign set up a joint fundraising committee with the national party’s Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC) to raise unlimited soft money contributions.

The joint committee — called New York Senate 2000 — then transferred the soft money funds to the DSCC, which transferred the money to the New York Democratic state party. The state party then spent the soft money on ads promoting Hillary Clinton….

…Mayor Rudy Giuliani has just set up a similar joint fundraising committee with the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC) to raise soft money. The Mayor’s committee is called Giuliani Victory Fund.

In these circumstances, the joint fundraising committees at the DSCC and NRSC function, in effect, as “bank accounts” for the Senate candidates. The candidates could just as easily establish these “bank accounts” with the New York Republican and Democratic state parties, with no impact on the raising or spending of unlimited soft money.

This is the sort of hard money/soft money commingling that campaign finance reform is supposed to eliminate, although I’m not sure that it has. There were allegations that this was illegal in 2000, although I don’t believe that was a universally held opinion. If it was illegal, then it was illegal, and I won’t excuse what Clinton did with “Guiliani did it too,” even though he did. But Abramoff was not involved, and it seems to me the inclusion of this episode in this article is nothing but a gratuitous smearing of Hillary Clinton by working her into the same paragraph as Jack Abramoff.

Let’s go back to Senator Clinton’s $35,000 fine, which one might infer from Investor’s Business Daily is somehow connected to the Abramoff scandal. One of Clinton’s fundraising committees has indeed agreed to pay the fine, for failure to disclose $722,000 in contributions raised by Peter Paul, a convicted felon. That was wrong. Regular readers will know I’m no Hillary Clinton fan and am not going to spin my wheels making excuses for her. But Jack Abramoff was not involved in the Peter Paul fundraiser.

Investor’s Business Daily says “Republicans aren’t the problem. The system is.” In the grand scheme of things, I agree. The system sucks. The system encourages lawbreaking and corruption, and corruption is perfectly happy to cross party lines. But the Abramoff scandal is a Republican scandal. Just because, for example, Charles Rangel took $36,000 “from Abramoff’s Indian clients” doesn’t make him dirty if the donations conformed to the law and Abramoff played no part.

Law, Democracy, and Liberalism

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Sometimes one finds two essays written by two different people on two different subjects that illuminate each other. I believe I found such a pair today.

The first is at Unclaimed Territory (and cross-posted to Hullabaloo) by Glenn Greenwald. He writes,

What we have in our Federal Government are not individual acts of law-breaking or isolated scandals of illegality, but instead, a culture and an ideology of lawlessness. It cannot be emphasized enough that since September 11, the Bush Administration has claimed the power to act without any constraints of law or checks from the Congress or the courts. Its view of its own power and governing philosophy is based upon, and perfectly encapsulated by, this single paragraph from the incomparably pernicious September 25, 2001 Memorandum, written by then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo:

    1. In both the War Powers Resolution and the Joint Resolution, Congress has recognized the President’s authority to use force in circumstances such as those created by the September 11 incidents. Neither statute, however,

can place any limits on the President’s determinations

    1. as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution,

are for the President alone to make

    .

Awhile back Mr. Greenwald challenged righties to explain “how there can be any limits at all on his power under the theories of Executive Power which they are advocating to argue that Bush had the right to violate Congressional law.” The answers he received can be boiled down to: There aren’t. It is entirely within the President’s discretion which laws he will or will not follow; therefore, there are no limits to his power.

As disturbing as Bush’s power-grab has become, the knee-jerk defense of unlimited executive power coming out of the Right — often from self-styled “libertarians” — is beyond creepy. In Rightieworld, the White House is the sole arbiter of right and wrong. What Bush wants trumps not just Congress, but also the courts.

Glenn Greenwald continues:

The NSA law-breaking scandal cannot be seen as some isolated act. It is merely the most flagrant symptom (thus far) of the fact that we have a President — with three full years left in office — who has claimed for himself the right to ignore Congressional law and who believes that virtually all decisions of any real significance in our country are his “alone to make.” FISA. The National Security Act of 1947. The McCain Amendment. These are all federal laws — laws — which the Administration is openly claiming it has the right to violate.

How could this possibly be defensible in the United States? Do “conservatives” have no principles at all?

Here we come to the second essay, written last June by Michael Bérubé. [Update: Michael Bérubé has corrected me; the post I am quoting was written by John McGowan.]

Republicans have launched a full-scale assault upon democracy at home. Setting aside (for the moment) the simple fact that this assault is about grabbing and using power, it also reflects an impoverished view of democracy, basically one that limits democracy to free elections. In this view, the people ratify a set of leaders–a government–in an election, and, in so doing, gives those leaders a blank check. …

… This understanding of democracy tends toward the plebiscite–and toward the establishment of a strong leader, usually one who promises to sweep aside the complexities, compromises, frustrations, and inefficiencies introduced by parliamentary janglings and an independent judiciary. From Napoleon III and Bismarck in the 19th century to the Governator in the late 20th century, the plebiscite has almost always favored right wing leaders impatient with legal and institutional impediments to forceful action.

There was an interview on tonight’s “Hardball” that illustrated this perfectly; I’ll try to remember to post the transcript tomorrow. Essentially, an apologist for the Bush Regime said that if the people don’t like warrantless searches, in 2008 they can vote for a candidate who promises to get warrants. Until then … tough.

Bérubé McGowan explains that “A free society is one in which there are various centers of power, various positions from which people have the ability to influence decisions.” I might add that the separation of powers written into the Constitution can not lawfully be suspended just because one political party controls all branches of government and finds the separation cumbersome. The Constitution gives powers and authorities to legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government, not to whatever party wins the most elections.

Bérubé McGowan continues:

There is nothing that underwrites the rule of law except the continued practice of upholding it. The law must be reaffirmed anew each and every time it is enunciated and enforced. And the temptation to circumvent the law, to rewrite it to accommodate one’s current beliefs and practices, is also ever present. To pay the law heed is to accept that one’s own virtue is doubtful–or that one’s own beliefs are, in every sense of that word, “partial.” It is their assurance in their own virtue that renders the Republicans most dangerous, most prone to set the law aside when it gets in the way of doing when they know in their hearts is right. Impatience with the law is endemic–and it is the harbinger of extreme politics of either the right or the left. (It is here, of course, that the leftist will leap. But why should we think leftist self-righteousness any more attractive or less dangerous than the rightist variety?)

I think this answers the question of why righties are so blind to their own radicalism, and why they can so casually toss the “rule of law” out the window when it gets in the way of their agenda.

My point is that liberalism, first and foremost, is a set of expedients (mostly institutional and legal) for minimizing tyranny by setting limits to government power. It also tries to prevent the consolidation of power by fostering the multiplication of power. Democracy, in my view, is not worth a damn if it is not partnered with liberalism. Democracy and liberalism are a squabbling pair; they each locate power in a different place–democracy in the people, liberalism in the law–and they aim for different goods: democracy (in its most ideal form) for something like the “general will,” liberalism for a modus vivendi in a world characterized by intractable conflicts among people with different beliefs, goals, ambitions, and values. Neither one trumps the other; both, in my view, are essential ingredients of a legitimate polity.

Liberalism can seem “unnatural,” Bérubé McGowan says, because “It involves self-abnegation, accepting the frustration of my will.” Because liberalism values compromise, liberals can appear to have no strong convictions at all. But, IMO, one of the significant differences between Left and Right in America today is that liberals value the processes and procedures of democracy above any particular agenda, but conservatives place their agenda above the processes. For the sake of fleeting policy victories and an advantage in the next elections, “conservatives” (and I use the word loosely) are undermining the institutional structures of government that have sustained this country for more than two centuries. If those structures aren’t around to sustain future generations — who cares? We’ll all be dead.

What do we make of conservatives who don’t “conserve”? What we make of them is that the American Right has moved off the scale; it has become thoroughly radicalized. In truth, our present Right vs. Left conflict is really a conflict between radicals and moderates. I suspect a lot of Americans are beginning to sense this.

Update: See Lichtblau and Shant, New York Times: “Basis for Spying in U.S. Is Doubted.”

Control

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The New York Times catches on to something I’ve been saying for a while:

For proof that criminalizing abortion doesn’t reduce abortion rates and only endangers the lives of women, consider Latin America. In most of the region, abortions are a crime, but the abortion rate is far higher than in Western Europe or the United States. Colombia – where abortion is illegal even if a woman’s life is in danger – averages more than one abortion per woman over all of her fertile years. In Peru, the average is nearly two abortions per woman over the course of her reproductive years.

In all of our endless fighting over abortion law, one never hears the simple fact that making abortion illegal doesn’t stop it. Indeed, as I argued in this post, we don’t know for sure if the rate of abortions in the U.S. is higher now than it was pre-Roe. Estimates of the number of abortions performed in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s put the number as high as 1.2 million per year. That’s the same approximate number of abortions performed annually in the United States right now, and in a larger population.

Studies of contraceptive practices in several nations before and after legalization reveal no indication that abortion replaces contraceptive use, as some anti-privacy activists claim. On the other hand, there is copious data that shows making contraceptives easily (and legally) available does lower abortion rates. (See “Sharing Responsibility: Women, Society & Abortion Worldwide” [Alan Guttmacher, 1999, PDF].)

The New York Times editorial continues [emphasis added],

In a region where there is little sex education and social taboos keep unmarried women from seeking contraception, criminalizing abortion has not made it rare, only dangerous. Rich women can go to private doctors. The rest rely on quacks or amateurs or do it themselves. Up to 5,000 women die each year from abortions in Latin America, and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized.

According to the Center for Disease Control, in the U.S. 14 women died as a result of complications from known legal induced abortion in 1998 and 1999. The mortality rate related to abortion in the U.S. is <1 death per 100,000 abortions. This is a much lower mortality rate than for pregnancy — in 1999, says the CDC, there were 12 deaths resulting from pregnancy per 100,000 live births.

Every time news media carries a story about an American woman dying after an abortion you can count on the anti-privacy army to march forth screaming that abortions are medically risky and must be banned. This, of course, would make abortion a whole lot more risky, but try to explain that to the Fetus People. Just try. It’s like explaining algebra to spinach.

Back to the New York Times editorial:

Latin American women, who are increasing their participation in the work force and in politics, have also become more vocal. Their voice would be much louder were it not for the Bush administration’s global gag rule, which bans any family planning group that gets American money from speaking about abortions, or even criticizing unsafe illegal abortions. This has silenced such respected and influential groups as Profamilia in Colombia. Anti-abortion lawmakers in Washington can look at Latin America as a place where the global gag rule has worked exactly as they had hoped. All Americans can look at Latin America to see unnecessary deaths and injuries from unsafe abortions.

You aren’t going to budge the anti-abortion lawmakers with sordid tales of maternal mortality, of course, because they don’t care if women die. It’s more important to control women’s behavior and punish them for being sexual than to care about their health and well-being. But the majority of Americans favor keeping abortion legal. And making abortion illegal doesn’t stop it. So, one might ask — what are we arguing about, again?

Here’s what we’re arguing about:

Next week the SCOTUS confirmation hearings for Sam Alito will begin. NARAL is sending out a fact sheet on Alito and birth control saying that Alito considers some birth control methods — such as birth control pills, the contraceptive ring, the IUD (intrauterine device), and the birth control patch — to be “abortifacient” rather than contraceptive. He has also argued in favor of requiring women seeking abortions to be given misleading and counter-factual anti-reproductive-rights propaganda. Alito “appears to question the competence of women to make their own choices,” the fact sheet says. “Alito urges that the state become the moral guide of the woman facing a crisis pregnancy, that the bedrock principle of informed consent be twisted beyond all recognition into a political instrument.”

Alito is one more right-wing control freak who doesn’t trust you to live your own life. It’s not about babies (states with the most restrictive abortion laws tend to have higher infant mortality rates than more liberal states). It’s not about women’s health. It’s not about conscience. It’s about control.

The War on the Professionals

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Bill Gertz of the Washington Times reports that a former NSA official wants to spill the beans to Congress.

Russ Tice, a whistleblower who was dismissed from the NSA last year, stated in letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees that he is prepared to testify about highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that were improperly carried out by both the NSA and the DIA.

“I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency and with the Defense Intelligence Agency,” Mr. Tice stated in the Dec. 16 letters, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Times.

Susanhu of Booman Tribute points out that this news falls way short of being a scoop. Even so, this morning rightie bloggers dutifully leaped into action to discredit Tice. Scott Johnson at PowerLine lets us know that “a Defense Department psychologist concluded that he [Tice, not Scott Johnson] suffered from psychotic paranoia.” And how does Johnson know this? The link he provides takes us to an article about Tice in which Tice alleges this psychologist issued a phony report to discredit him.

As Kevin Drum says, Tice is either a genuine whistleblower or a genuine screwball. Time, I hope, will tell.

In the same post, Mr. Johnson wrote something else that bears discussion.

In his interview with Katie Couric earlier this week, James Risen sympathetically described the motives of the “nearly a dozen” leakers who discussed the NSA program with him roughly as follows:

    “The checks and balances that normally keep American foreign policy and national security policy toward the center kind of broke down. You had more of a radicalization, in which the career professionals were not really given a chance to forge a consensus within the administration. The principals — Rumsfeld, Cheney Tenet and Rice — were meeting constantly, setting policy and never allowing the experts, the people who understand the region to have a say.”

According to Risen and his sources, national security policy is to be set by “career professionals” rather than by the elected and appointed officials to whom he refers. When the elcted and appointed officials assert the prerogatives of their office, “career professionals” will take the law into their hands and work together with the New York Times to set things right. (Thanks to reader Charles McFarling for the rough transcript of the Risen quote.)

I couldn’t find a transcript of the Couric-Risen interview and cannot verify that the quote of Risen is accurate. But let’s look at Scott Johnson’s comment, “According to Risen and his sources, national security policy is to be set by ‘career professionals’ rather than by the elected and appointed officials to whom he refers. When the elcted and appointed officials assert the prerogatives of their office, “career professionals” will take the law into their hands and work together with the New York Times to set things right.”

That’s one way to look at it. Another way is that the “career professionals” aren’t trying to set national security policy. They are trying to obey the law, which was (after all) written by elected officials. Johnson is arguing that Bush and his appointees have the power to decide what the law is without going through regular legislative channels, and proper career professionals had better do what they’re told.

We are witnessing a slow-motion coup d’état, in progress. “A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder,” said Edward Luttwak, which is a pretty fair description of what the Bushies are trying to do. Behind the smokescreen of the “global war on terror,” the Bush White House functions as an absolute power unto itself, for the most part unchecked by Congress or courts. The White House interprets law and the Constitution as it likes. The White House has surveillance capabilities to use for its own ends. The White House has (somehow) intimidated enough of the press and political opponents into being very, very cautious about issuing challenges to executive actions and power.

At Salon, Sidney Blumenthal writes that Bush is engaging in a war on those very career professionals because they get in the way of the coup.

Bush’s war on professionals has been fought in nearly every department and agency of the government, from intelligence to Interior, from the Justice Department to the Drug Enforcement Administration, in order to suppress contrary analysis on issues from weapons of mass destruction to global warming, from voting rights to the morning-after pill. Without whistle-blowers on the inside, there are no press reports on the outside.

Bush Administration “investigations” into the New York Times‘s source for the NSA story and the Washington Post‘s source for the secret prison system are designed, Blumenthal says, to put reporters and the career professionals on notice that speaking up is dangerous.

Scott Johnson implies that the “career professionals” are putting themselves above the law and the will of officials elected by the people. But it seems some elected officials are more equal than others. Blumenthal writes,

Bush has built a secret system, without enabling legislation, justified by executive fiat and presidential findings alone, deliberately operating beyond the oversight of Congress and the courts, and existing outside the law. It is a national security state of torture, ghost detainees, secret prisons, renditions and domestic eavesdropping.

The arguments used to rationalize this system insist that the president as commander in chief is entitled to arbitrary and unaccountable rule. The memos written by John Yoo, former deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, constitute a basic ideology of absolute power.

Congress, at best, is held in contempt as a pest and, at worst, is regarded as an intruder on the president’s rightful authority. The Republican chairmen of the House Armed Services and Senate Intelligence committees, Rep. Duncan Hunter of California and Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, have been models of complicity in fending off oversight, attacking other members of Congress, especially Republicans, who have had the temerity to insist on it, using their committees to help the White House suppress essential information about the operations of government, and issuing tilted partisan reports smearing critics. This is the sort of congressional involvement, at White House direction, that the White House believes fulfills the congressional mandate.

Sure enough, today Scott Shane of the New York Times reports,

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said on Wednesday that the limited Congressional briefings the Bush administration has provided on a National Security Agency eavesdropping program violated the law.

In a letter to President Bush, the representative, Jane Harman of California, said the briefings did not comply with the National Security Act of 1947. That law requires the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to be “kept fully and currently informed” about the spy agencies’ activities.

Now Republicans and Democrats in Congress are squabbling over whether the very limited briefings satisfied the law or not. Opinions will fall along party lines, and the party with the most clout wins.

Blumenthal continues,

During his first term, President Bush issued an unprecedented 108 statements upon signing bills of legislation that expressed his own version of their content. He has countermanded the legislative history, which legally establishes the foundation of their meaning, by executive diktat. In particular, he has rejected parts of legislation that he considered stepped on his power in national security matters. In effect, Bush engages in presidential nullification of any law he sees fit. He then acts as if his gesture supersedes whatever Congress has done.

Political scientist Phillip Cooper, of Portland State University in Oregon, described this innovative grasp of power in a recent article in the Presidential Studies Quarterly. Bush, he wrote, “has very effectively expanded the scope and character of the signing statement not only to address specific provisions of legislation that the White House wishes to nullify, but also in an effort to significantly reposition and strengthen the powers of the presidency relative to the Congress.” Moreover, these coups de main not only have overwhelmed the other institutions of government but have taken place almost without notice. “This tour de force has been carried out in such a systematic and careful fashion that few in Congress, the media, or the scholarly community are aware that anything has happened at all.”

BTW, the author of this strategy was a lawyer named Samuel Alito. You may have heard of him.

Rightie views of democracy generally boil down to “might makes right.” If you have a majority, however slim, you have a mandate to do whatever you want. If your party has the most clout in Congress, you may interpret the law and the Constitution any way you please.

Also in Salon, and elsewhere, Tom Engelhardt writes about the cult of presidential power.

The “cabal,” as Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department, has called Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and various of their neoconish pals, stewed over this for years, along with a group of lawyers who were prepared, once the moment came, to give a sheen of legality to any presidential act. The group of them used the post-9/11 moment to launch a wholesale campaign to recapture the “lost” powers of the imperial presidency, attempting not, as in the case of Nixon, to create an alternate national security apparatus but to purge and capture the existing one for their private purposes. Under George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their assorted advisers, acolytes, and zealots, a virtual cult of unconstrained presidential power has been constructed, centered on the figure of Bush himself. While much has been made of feverish Christian fundamentalist support for the President, the real religious fervor in this administration has been almost singularly focused on the quite un-Christian attribute of total earthly power.

Righties will call this paranoid. But what else does one make of the secret NSA program? Bush has yet to present a plausible explanation for bypassing FISA. Even if, as some claim, request for FISA warrants was too time-consuming and cumbersome, surely after 9/11 Congress would have tripped all over itself streamlining the process to White House specifications, had they been asked.

Engelhardt continues,

For these cultists of an all-powerful presidency, the holy war, the “crusade” to be embarked upon was, above all, aimed at creating a president accountable to no one, overseen by no one, and restricted by no other force or power in his will to act as he saw fit. And so, in this White House, all roads have led back to one issue: how to press ever harder at the weakening boundaries of presidential power. This is why, when critics concentrate on any specific issue or set of administration acts, no matter how egregious or significant, they invariably miss the point. The issue, it turns out, is never primarily — to take just two areas of potentially illegal administration activity — torture or warrantless surveillance. Though each of them had value and importance to top administration officials, they were nonetheless primarily the means to an end.

The hazily defined and potentially endless “global war on terror” provided the Bushies with the perfect smokescreen behind which to operate. “War powers” are evoked, and calls for oversight or limits are swatted down as threats to national security. And the only witnesses to Bush’s usurpation of power are the career professionals being co-opted into the Bush Regime’s schemes.

Howie Gets … Something

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If you remember the late, great site Media Whores Online, you might remember the place of honor held there by Howard Fineman. He was 2002 (I think) Whore of the Year for his sickeningly obsequious commentary on George W. Bush. Had MWO remained online, he might well have taken the title in 2003 and 2004 as well. He certainly earned it.

Today, although Howard is far from shrill, he seems to be struggling toward some approximation of reality.

Calling the Abramoff scandal “the biggest influence-peddling scandal to hit Washington in recent times,” Fineman lists winners and losers. Among the losers:

The Republican Party: The semi-conventional wisdom here is as follows: Some Democrats are likely to be stained by ties to Jack Abramoff; polls show that the public has a plague-on-both-your-houses attitude toward wrongdoing in Washington; therefore, the GOP won’t be hurt in November. I don’t buy it. Republicans are the incumbent party in the Congress. They are led by a less-than-popular president in the traditionally weak sixth year of his presidency.

Wow, that’s … right. Way to go, Howie.

Other losers are the DeLay-Hastert Crowd — “Look for a major shake-up in the GOP House leadership, perhaps soon.” — and the Bush-Rove White House — “Rove will have a hard time claiming now that he didn’t know how the machinery worked, especially since Abramoff himself became a major contributor to Bush’s re-election campaign.”

Among the winners is a third-party reform movement. I found this startling until I read Fineman’s description–

If Sen. John McCain doesn’t win the Republican presidential nomination, I could see him leading an independent effort to “clean up” the capital as a third-party candidate. Having been seared by his own touch with this type of controversy (the Keating case in the ’80s, which was as important an experience to him as Vietnam), McCain could team up with a Democrat, say, Sen. Joe Lieberman. If they could assemble a cabinet in waiting — perhaps Wes Clark for defense, Russ Feingold for justice, Colin Powell for anything — they could win the 2008 election going away.

McCain-Lieberman. Gag. Feingold-Clark … now, there’s a ticket.

Still, Howard has shown other flickering moments of promise. In another recent Newsweek column, he wrote,

As controversy rages over the war in Iraq, as his poll numbers shrink to new lows, as American leadership of the West comes under fire in ways we haven’t seen in a generation, you have to wonder: who does Bush think he is?

Now he asks.

These are murky times in Washington, when getting a handle on the truth seems especially difficult.

What do the Pentagon generals really think about how Iraq is going? Are Condi Rice’s denials about CIA torture camps to be taken at face value? What is really happening in Iraq outside the Green Zone in Baghdad? Bush and Vice President Cheney insist that American forces will stay until the war there is “won.” But what do they really mean by victory?

Hey, Howard, see that door over there? The one marked “Shrill”? Go ahead and walk through it. You know you want to. We’ll be waiting for you on the other side.

Dark as a Dungeon

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I come from a long line of stone cutters and miners, and I grew up in a small mountain mining town. I don’t know if this gives me any unique insight into the Sago mine tragedy, however. Our mines were lead mines, which are not nearly as hazardous as coal mines since lead is not combustible.

As a small town girl, though, it’s not hard to imagine the impact of those 12 deaths on the small town of Sago. In small towns everybody knows everybody, so everyone in town will have known somebody who died. The impact of the disaster on Sago will be as heavy as the impact of 9/11 on New York City.

Why are we still hearing about coal mine disasters? Surely by now technology exists that would minimize the dangers. And if not, why not? Is cheap coal more important than the lives of miners? Oh, wait …

In small mining towns, everyone’s lives depend on the benevolence of the mine owners. Mining towns tend to be one-industry towns, and if you don’t work for the mining company you will have a sales or service industry job that depends on the mining salaries that flow through the community. Thanks to unions, most miners get decent wages and benefits and have something to say about working conditions. But unions aren’t what they used to be, and in a one-industry town the one industry gets cut a lot of slack.

Joby Warrick reports in the Washington Post that the Sago mine had a history of safety violations. The current owners took possession of the mines only two months ago, but it seems the previous owners allowed conditions in the mines to deteriorate rather badly. And the Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration wrote citations but was, apparently, helpless to force the company to actually do anything.

In today’s Boston Globe, Peter Rousmaniere writes about the erosion of worker safety. He is writing about Massachusetts, but most of what he says applies to the nation.

When they sustain a serious work injury they are less able to access the protections of our four-generations-old workers’ compensation system.

It has become easier for employers to cut corners on their legal obligations. If Congress succeeds in criminalizing undocumented worker status, it will become even easier.

This puts a wrinkle on mining safety that hadn’t occurred to me before. Mining jobs have tended to go to the children of miners; in one-industry towns, most young people go from high school to the mine company’s employment office. I haven’t seen a list of the dead, but I expect many of the names are British, and that many of the miners could trace their ancestry back to Welsh, English, and Scottish miners who immigrated in the 19th century. But after reducing the power of unions and weakening federal regulations, I guess the hiring of illegals to work the mines will be the next step.

Although he wasn’t writing about mining, Harold Meyerson’s WaPo essay, “A Gentler Capitalism,” goes along with this story. Meyerson said one thing that pops out — “The American people have a lot more power as voters than they do as workers.” This correlates to what I was ranting about yesterday, that when righties talk about limiting the power of government to regulate business, what they’re really talking about is limiting the power of the people, otherwise known as workers or employees. Take that away, and workers will have no protection at all. Sweatshops and sharecropping, here we come …

Update: See The Super at American Street.

More Liberal Bias

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I read rightie blogs so you don’t have to … to their writers’ credit, the majority of rightie blog posts I skimmed through this morning acknowledged that what Abramoff and associates did was very, very bad, and that Washington politicians had better clean up their act. To their discredit, they are to a blogger clinging to the fiction that this is a bipartisan scandal (example).

It ain’t. Although it is possible a few Dems will be caught in the indictment net, the fact is that the Abramoff operation was a GOP operation. Jack is their boy.

Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Dan Balz write in today’s Washington Post:

Jack Abramoff represented the most flamboyant and extreme example of a brand of influence trading that flourished after the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives 11 years ago. Now, some GOP strategists fear that the fallout from his case could affect the party’s efforts to keep control in the November midterm elections.

Abramoff was among the lobbyists most closely associated with the K Street Project, which was initiated by his friend Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), now the former House majority leader, once the GOP vaulted to power. It was an aggressive program designed to force corporations and trade associations to hire more GOP-connected lobbyists in what at times became an almost seamless relationship between Capitol Hill lawmakers and some firms that sought to influence them.

A few paragraphs down, Birnbaum and Balz add,

With an eye on November’s elections, Republicans have sought to limit the damage to themselves by portraying the scandal as bipartisan, describing Abramoff as an equal-opportunity dispenser of campaign cash and largess.

So far, the public has not identified corruption as solely a Republican problem. A Washington Post-ABC News poll in November asked Americans whether they thought Democrats or Republicans were better on ethical matters; 16 percent said Democrats, 12 percent said Republicans, and 71 percent said there was not much difference between the parties.

But Republicans worry about two possibilities. The first is that Abramoff, known for his close ties to DeLay, mostly implicates Republicans as a result of his plea agreement. That could shift public attitudes sharply against the GOP. “People are uneasy about what else is out there,” said one GOP strategist who requested anonymity to speak more candidly about the possible political fallout.

This strategy is working well so far, as Digby notes. Most of the media dutifully is reporting the scandal as bipartisan. Dat ol’ libruhl bias strikes again. “The press is surely under tremendous pressure from the Republicans to report this as a bi-partisan scandal and they are already buckling under,” says Digby. “But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a GOP operation from the get — and they know it.” But you know if journalists start reporting facts, the rightie hoardes will swarm upon them and devour them, à la Dan Rather and Eason Jordan. If you don’t have the truth on your side, sheer nastiness will do. In fact, nastiness trumps truth most of the time these days.

And the circle of corruption extends beyond Abramoff. James Wolcott has a lovely time poking fun at Chris Matthews’s smarmy commentary on Abramoff on yesterday’s Hardball:

His performance this afternoon after the announcement of the Jack Abramoff plea was a power-bottom tour de force. He gave the Republican establishment a complete pass. He insisted against all evidence under heaven and stars that this was not a partisan scandal, that 99% of elected officials were honest and upright, that “Duke” Cunningham was sort of a lone wolf, and that Abramoff was a Vautrin-like villain and corrupter of souls.

But there are ties between Abramoff and Matthews, says John Aravosis. Tweety helped Abramoff raise money for one of his phony charities. Funny; I don’t believe Tweety mentioned that on yesterday’s show.

Jane Hamsher found another cause for concern. Alice Fisher, the assistant attorney general in charge of the corruption investigation, is a career Republican, a former lobbyist for the Frist (as in Bill) family healthcare company, and she has ties to Tom DeLay’s defense team. If she had an ethical bone in her body she would have recused herself. She didn’t. So much for a fair investigation.

Be sure to read Juan Cole’s “Abramoff and al-Arian: Lobbyist’s ‘Charity’ a Front for Terrorism.” Here are details you aren’t likely to see on Faux Nooz. Probably not anywhere else, either. Roger Ailes the Good also surveys rightie sites. Think Progress’s “The House That Jack Built” is a vital resource for understanding the scandal. For a quickie rundown on some major players, see John Dickerson, “Jack Attack,” at Slate.

Let the Games Begin

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The GOP defensive strategy in the Abramoff case seems to be “Dems did it too.” It’s not much, but it’s all Wizbang and Hugh Hewitt could come up with. When cornered, righties will either fall back on “Dems” (or “Clinton”) “did it too,” or else feign boredom. (Yawn. So Washington is corrupt. Who cares?) Sure enough, Hugh Hewitt seems to be cultivating righteous indifference in this post.

But the ReddHedd says Abramoff did not give money to Democrats. Expect the Right Blogosphere to become mightily bored with this story.

What’s in a Word?

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Steven E. Landsburg is an asshole. That’s my opinion. Ezra, on the other hand, says Steven Landsburg is a dick. Hmm, which is worse — dick, or asshole? I say asshole, but I’ll listen to arguments.

Max says he’s an idiot savant, but that sounds too grandiose. How about “morally autistic”? But in an earlier post Max said Landsburg has the “moral sensibility of a biscuit.” Better.

Kevin Drum came up with “condescending, juvenile, obtuse, and soul cankered.” Best comment: “Have we no workhouses?”