Kaine Wins in Virginia!

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That’s worth a banana dance!

Peter Baker wrote in today’s Washington Post:

In jumping into the Virginia governor’s race just 10 hours before polling booths open, President Bush put his credibility on the line last night and ensured that the results will be interpreted as a referendum on his troubled presidency. But the White House is gambling that after weeks of political tribulations, Bush has little more to lose.

Bush’s election-eve foray to Richmond to rally behind Republican Jerry W. Kilgore inserted him into the hottest election of the off-year cycle and will test his ability to energize his party’s base voters, according to strategists from both parties. Even in a traditionally Republican-leaning state such as Virginia, polls register disenchantment with Bush’s leadership, and Kilgore has had trouble running against national headwinds. …

Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist close to the White House, said a Kilgore win would essentially avoid another setback for a president who has seen nothing but reverses lately. “Nobody’s going to suggest that ‘Gee, something happened in Virginia that’s an overall tonic for the president’s problems,’ ” he said. “But it would be the absence of bad, and when you’re in trouble the absence of bad is the first step toward recovery.”

On the other hand, analysts said, if Democrat Timothy M. Kaine beats Kilgore in a state that solidly backed Bush twice, it will feed into a widespread perception of weakness afflicting the president and those associated with him. With the troubled response to Hurricane Katrina, the failed Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, the indictment of a top White House official in the CIA leak case and continuing violence in Iraq, Bush’s approval ratings have sunk to some of the lowest ever for a second-term president in modern times. And with Democrats likely to win the New Jersey governorship, the only other major race on the ballot, Bush can find little good news to seize on.

The vote totals aren’t final yet, but it wasn’t terribly close–Kaine 51%, Kilgore 46%, Independents and write-ins mopping up the rest.

“They need a win,” said Charlie Cook of the independent Cook Political Report. “With the exception of [the confirmation of Chief Justice John G.] Roberts, they haven’t had a break all year. Just pulling off one of these would slow down the snowball a little.”

The Virginia venture, though, could accelerate the snowball. “I think he will regret it and I think the only reason he went is because not going was a threat to his manhood,” Democratic political consultant Mark Mellman said. “It’s a very big risk. . . . There’s not much gain for him there. I don’t think anybody is going to say Bush’s popularity helped Kilgore. But people will say Bush’s unpopularity really hurt Kilgore.”

Heh. How about another banana dance?

Trent’s Revenge

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You probably know that Trent Lott lost his chance to be Senate Majority Leader because of remarks he made at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party. It is widely believed that it was the White House, not nasty Democrats, who took away Trent Lott’s leadership position, because the Bushies wanted the more ideological Bill Frist instead of Lott. True or not, in his new book, Herding Cats: A Life in Politics, Lott says he felt betrayed by Frist. “If Frist had not announced exactly when he did, as the fire was about to burn out, I would still be majority leader of the Senate today.” Lott implies that Frist stabbed him in the back.

I think Trent may have found the opportunity he’s been waiting for. Tgnyc writes at Daily Kos:

Too funny! Hastert and Frist make a big show of calling for an investigation into a leak allegedly affecting national security — the locations of secret “black site” torture prisons. And then — BOOM!!! Lott just said, Tuesday afternoon, that he thinks it was a GOP Senator who leaked the info to the Washington Post last week. He says the details had been discussed at a GOP Senators-only meeting last week, and that many of those details made it into the WaPo story.

Money quote from Lott; “We can not remain silent. We have met the enemy, and it is us.”

All just reported on CNN. We are, folks, witnessing the full-on implosion of the national Republican Party. And not a second too soon.

Trent is not stupid. He’s been in Washington longer than the Bushies have been in Washington, and he’s not about to go down the drain with them.

Deconstructing Dick

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The Vice President is out of control. This is the essential message of several recent editorials and opinion pieces in the nation’s newspapers and political web sites.

James Carroll wrote in yesterday’s Boston Globe that it’s time to consider “just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States.”

After examining Cheney’s past career in which he enabled the rollback of essential antipoverty programs, tried to destroy detente, and always favored violence over diplomacy, Carroll progresses to what The Dick hath wrought as Veep:

With all of this as prelude, it seems as tragic as it was inevitable that Cheney was behind the wheel again when the next fork in the road appeared before the nation. When the World Trade Center towers were hit in New York, it was Cheney who told a shaken President Bush to flee. The true nature of their relationship (Cheney, not Bush, having shaped the national security team; Cheney, not Bush, having appointed himself as vice president) showed itself for a moment.

The 9/11 Commission found that, from the White House situation room, Cheney warned the president that a ”specific threat” had targeted Air Force One, prompting Bush to spend the day hiding in the bunker at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska. There was no specific threat. In Bush’s absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the president, took command of the nation’s response to the crisis. There was no authorizing telephone call. The 9/11 Commission declined to make an issue of Cheney’s usurpation of powers, but the record shows it.

I realize it can be argued that it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what Junior did on 9/11, since Junior truly cannot watch TV and chew pretzels at the same time. But it’s the principle I’m talkin’ about. Carroll continues,

At world-shaping moments across a generation, Cheney reacted with an instinctive, This is war! He helped turn the War on Poverty into a war on the poor. He helped keep the Cold War going longer than it had to, and when it ended (because of initiatives taken by the other side), Cheney refused to believe it. To keep the US war machine up and running, he found a new justification just in time. With Gulf War I, Cheney ignited Osama bin Laden’s burning purpose. Responding to 9/11, Cheney fulfilled bin Laden’s purpose by joining him in the war-of-civilizations. Iraq, therefore (including the prewar deceit for which Scooter Libby takes the fall), is simply the last link in the chain of disaster which is the public career of Richard Cheney.

Ouch.

Daniel Benjamin writes at Slate:

It has become a cliché to say that Dick Cheney is the most powerful vice president in American history. Nonetheless, here is a prediction: When the historians really get digging into the paper entrails of the Bush administration—or possibly when Scooter Libby goes on trial—those who have intoned that phrase will still be astonished at the extent to which the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney was the center of power inside the White House—and at the grip it had on foreign and defense policy.

With a national security staff that numbered 14 last year (Al Gore usually had four or five), Cheney’s office has a finger in every pie. Several of the State Department’s top diplomats, including Eric Edelman, now undersecretary of defense for policy, and Victoria Nuland, now ambassador to NATO, are alums of Cheney’s office. According to David L. Phillips’ Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco, the dominant figure in some of the key interagency deliberations on postwar Iraq was not the State Department official who chaired them but Samantha Ravich, a Cheney aide who left the government and has since returned to OVP*. In addition, Cheney has remarkable influence over his onetime boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

For the next several centuries, historians will be writing about the dark duo of Rummy and Vice and how they destroyed America.

Kevin Drum writes,

As Benjamin points out, when you follow stuff like this back to its origin you invariably end up at the same place: Dick Cheney. Feith may have been the guy in charge of the Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which produced much of the dodgy intelligence that made its way into public speeches from administration officials, but “Dick Cheney was CTEG’s patron.”

As a wise man said back in January 2003 regarding Cheney and his curiously enduring reputation for competence even in the face of mountains of contrary evidence, “his terrible judgment will, at some point, become impossible even for the Beltway crowd not to see.” Looking back, perhaps historians will say that November 2005 was when they finally saw it.

Kevin links to an old Washington Monthly article by Josh Marshall, “Vice Grip,” that’s a must read. Josh documents that throughout his long, public career, The Dick was nearly always wrong. And I don’t mean “wrong” in an ideological sense, but “wrong” in the way policies and events eventually played out. “[I]t’s usually a sure bet that if Cheney has lined up on one side, the opposite course will turn out to be the wiser,” Josh wrote.

This is an editorial in today’s New York Times:

After President Bush’s disastrous visit to Latin America, it’s unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can’t afford an American government this bad for that long. …

Yes, the Times really published that in their lead editorial. However, they’ve yet to fire Judy Miller.

…Second terms may be difficult, but the chief executive still has the power to shape what happens. Ronald Reagan managed to turn his messy second term around and deliver – in great part through his own powers of leadership – a historic series of agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev that led to the peaceful dismantling of the Soviet empire. Mr. Bush has never demonstrated the capacity for such a comeback. Nevertheless, every American has a stake in hoping that he can surprise us.

The place to begin is with Dick Cheney, the dark force behind many of the administration’s most disastrous policies, like the Iraq invasion and the stubborn resistance to energy conservation. Right now, the vice president is devoting himself to beating back Congressional legislation that would prohibit the torture of prisoners. This is truly a remarkable set of priorities: his former chief aide was indicted, Mr. Cheney’s back is against the wall, and he’s declared war on the Geneva Conventions.

Mr. Bush cannot fire Mr. Cheney, but he could do what other presidents have done to vice presidents: keep him too busy attending funerals and acting as the chairman of studies to do more harm. Mr. Bush would still have to turn his administration around, but it would at least send a signal to the nation and the world that he was in charge, and the next three years might not be as dreadful as they threaten to be right now.

In theory, I suppose a President with the backing of senior party leaders could in a behind-the-scenes way force a veep to resign, but let’s go on … So far, the Bush Administration has consisted of The Dick running foreign policy, Karl Rove running domestic policy, and Junior prancing about in his paramilitary costumes and playing the role of Dear Leader for the cameras. If Rove and The Dick go, the job of President of the United States would fall into George Bush’s lap. For the first time. Not a cheering thought. But possibly, if faced with doing the actual job he’s supposed to be doing, Junior would retreat to Crawford and spend the rest of his second term hiding under the bed. At least he’d be safely ineffectual.

Yet perhaps The Dick’s days of unfettered power are closing. Thomas DeFrank writes in the New York Daily News that the relationship between Dubya and The Dick is eroding:

Multiple sources close to Bush told the Daily News that while the vice president remains his boss’ valued political partner and counselor, his clout has lessened – primarily as a result of issues arising from the Iraq war.

“The relationship is not what it was,” a presidential counselor said. “There has been some distance for some time.” …

…Other sources familiar with Bush’s thinking say Cheney’s zealous advocacy for what has become a troubled Iraq policy has taken a toll – especially since Cheney’s predictions about how Iraq would play out have proven optimistic.

These sources also said Libby’s indictment was a wakeup call for White House aides who have long believed the Cheney national security operation has enjoyed too much of a free hand in administration policymaking.

“The vice president’s office will never be quite as independent from the White House as it has been,” said a key Bush associate. “That will end.

“Cheney never operated without a degree of [presidential] license, but there are people around who cannot believe some of the advice [Bush] has been given.”

My sense is that Bush has been sailing along not overtaxing his brain too much on foreign policy because he figured The Dick understood that stuff and knew what to do. But now even Junior is starting to notice that nothing has worked out as Dick promised. Iraq is a mess, the world is growing more and more dangerous, and pretty much everyone on the globe hates George W. Bush.

Last week on The Huffington Post, Nora Ephron discussed what she called Bush’s “rosebud moment.”

As you may recall, on May 11, 2005, a small plane made an unauthorized detour into the air space over the nation’s Capitol, setting off a red alert. The Secret Service evacuated Dick Cheney and rushed Laura Bush to a bunker in the White House. The President was not there. He was off riding his bicycle in Beltsville, Maryland, and the Secret Service didn’t notify him about the incident until it was over. At the time they claimed they didn’t want to disturb his bicycle ride. It’s my theory that this incident was one of the reasons for the rift between Bush and Cheney — a rift, I’m proud to say, that I was one of the first to point out (on the Huffington Post), on the basis of no information whatsoever, and which now turns out (according to this week’s Newsweek) to be absolutely true.

Ephron speculates that Bush is depressed, which is an idea I may address in a future post. But for now the point is that The Dick has an alarming tendency to assume power that isn’t rightfully his. And I think Bush is too much of a weenie to smack him down for it.

See also Dan Froomkin, “Cheney’s Dark Side Is Showing.”

Grow Up With God

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Following up the last post — Jason Felch and Patricia Ward Biederman write in today’s Los Angeles Times that the conservative National Association of Evangelicals has reached across the doctrinal aisle to support All Saints Church of Pasedena. The church is being hassled by the IRS for preaching that Jesus didn’t like war.

The evangelicals’ act is a welcome contrast to the juvenile gloatings of a couple of trolls; see this, this, and this. I want to point this out because I don’t believe all conservative Christians are pubescent, literacy-challenged Kool Aiders. It just seems that way because pubescent, literacy-challenged Kool Aiders tend to run things in Rightie World. But in this case the evangelicals are behaving like adults:

When Ted Haggard, head of the 30-million-member National Assn. of Evangelicals, heard about the All Saints case Monday, he told his staff to contact the National Council of Churches, a more liberal group.

Haggard said he personally supports the war in Iraq and probably would not agree with much in the Rev. George Regas’ 2004 sermon at All Saints, which was cited by the IRS as the basis for its investigation. But Haggard said he wants to work with the council of churches “in doing whatever it takes to get the IRS to stop” such actions.

For the record, even the Southern Baptist Convention was mightily pissed off by the attempt to exploit churches on behalf of the Bush campaign, as described in the last post.

Haggard’s act was welcomed by the National Council of Churches.

Robert Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, cheered when he heard of Haggard’s offer, which Edgar said represented a rare reaching out by the evangelical group to the council.

Edgar, a United Methodist minister, former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania and ex-president of the Claremont School of Theology, said the IRS move against All Saints appeared to be “a political witch hunt on George Regas and progressive ideology. It’s got to stop.” He stressed that Regas did not endorse a candidate in the sermon.

The article goes on to explain the distinction between issue advocacy and candidate endorsement:

The tax code prohibits nonprofits from “participating or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office.” The ban includes endorsements, donations, fundraising or any other activity “that may be beneficial or detrimental to any particular candidate.”

Advocating for ballot initiatives, as many California churches have done in advance of today’s special election, is a separate issue, tax experts said. Churches and other tax-exempt organizations are allowed to engage in lobbying as long as “a substantial part of the organization’s activities is not intended to influence legislation.”

Savvy churches make sure they don’t draw unwanted attention from the IRS, church officials and others said.

When elections near, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles sometimes sends reminders to local parishes of its guidelines on political action. “We don’t endorse or oppose candidates, but we can endorse ballot propositions when there is a moral or ethical issue involved,” said archdiocese spokesman Tod Tamberg, who knew of no local Catholic churches under IRS scrutiny.

This weekend, during Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Archbishop Roger Mahony endorsed Proposition 73, the state ballot initiative requiring parental notification before an abortion can be performed on a minor.

Seems to me that advocating for or against a ballot initiative is intended to influence legislation, but let’s go on … throughout American history, religions have been engaged in the nation’s hot-button issues. There was preaching both for and against slavery and secession, for example. Church groups worked to prohibit the sale of liquor and to stop child labor laws (yeah, you read that right; conservative churches wanted six-year-olds to work in factories). More recently, conservative churches have pushed hard to stop legal abortion. African-American churches were at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement. This is a role American churches and other religious institutions have played from the beginning of our history, and I think it’s a legitimate role. And I have no problem with treating churches as tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, as long as they are genuinely nonprofit and not fronts for something that would otherwise be taxed.

However, I agree that tax-exempt organizations should be prohibited from actively campaigning or endorsing parties or candidates. Otherwise, you’d soon have “churches” that were nothing more than fronts for political campaigns. Political parties could take over established churches through generous “donations” in exchange for endorsements and a compliant ministry. Ministers could find themselves serving two masters–God and the Party. The wall of separation so many conservatives want to tear down protects religious independence of politics.

Update: Don’t miss flaming idiot Don Surber’s comment to this post (here and here) and my response. You will laugh your butt off, unless you are Don Surber. And what is it with righties that they can’t read the bleeping posts they comment on?

IOKIYAR for Churches

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Remember last year, when the Republican Party used conservative churches to campaign for Bush?

The Bush-Cheney reelection campaign has sent a detailed plan of action to religious volunteers across the country asking them to turn over church directories to the campaign, distribute issue guides in their churches and persuade their pastors to hold voter registration drives. …

… The instruction sheet circulated by the Bush-Cheney campaign to religious volunteers lists 22 “duties” to be performed by specific dates. By July 31, for example, volunteers are to “send your Church Directory to your State Bush-Cheney ’04 Headquarters or give [it] to a BC04 Field Rep” and “Talk to your Pastor about holding a Citizenship Sunday and Voter Registration Drive.”

By Aug. 15, they are to “talk to your Church’s seniors or 20-30 something group about Bush/Cheney ’04” and “recruit 5 more people in your church to volunteer for the Bush Cheney campaign.”

By Sept. 17, they are to host at least two campaign-related potluck dinners with church members, and in October they are to “finish calling all Pro-Bush members of your church,” “finish distributing Voter Guides in your church” and place notices on church bulletin boards or in Sunday programs “about all Christian citizens needing to vote.” [Alan Cooperman, The Washington Post, July 1, 2003]

Here’s another one:

The Republican National Committee is employing the services of a Texas-based activist who believes the United States is a “Christian nation” and the separation of church and state is “a myth.”

David Barton, the founder of an organization called Wallbuilders, was hired by the RNC as a political consultant and has been traveling the country for a year–speaking at about 300 RNC-sponsored lunches for local evangelical pastors. During the lunches, he presents a slide show of American monuments, discusses his view of America’s Christian heritage — and tells pastors that they are allowed to endorse political candidates from the pulpit. [Deborah Caldwell, Beliefnet, 2004]

Well, folks, that was then, and this is now: Patricia Ward Biederman and Jason Felch of the Los Angeles Times write that the feds have a different standard for liberal churches.

The Internal Revenue Service has warned one of Southern California’s largest and most liberal churches that it is at risk of losing its tax-exempt status because of an antiwar sermon two days before the 2004 presidential election.

Rector J. Edwin Bacon of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena told many congregants during morning services Sunday that a guest sermon by the church’s former rector, the Rev. George F. Regas, on Oct. 31, 2004, had prompted a letter from the IRS.

In his sermon, Regas, who from the pulpit opposed both the Vietnam War and 1991’s Gulf War, imagined Jesus participating in a political debate with then-candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. Regas said that “good people of profound faith” could vote for either man, and did not tell parishioners whom to support.

But he criticized the war in Iraq, saying that Jesus would have told Bush, “Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster.”

Apparently the IRS has doctrinal issues with All Saints:

On June 9, the church received a letter from the IRS stating that “a reasonable belief exists that you may not be tax-exempt as a church … ” The federal tax code prohibits tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from intervening in political campaigns and elections.

The IRS offered All Saints a dispensation if it agreed to repent:

After the initial inquiry, the church provided the IRS with a copy of all literature given out before the election and copies of its policies, Bacon said.

But the IRS recently informed the church that it was not satisfied by those materials, and would proceed with a formal examination. Soon after that, church officials decided to inform the congregation about the dispute.

In an October letter to the IRS, Marcus Owens, the church’s tax attorney and a former head of the IRS tax-exempt section, said, “It seems ludicrous to suggest that a pastor cannot preach about the value of promoting peace simply because the nation happens to be at war during an election season.”

Owens said that an IRS audit team had recently offered the church a settlement during a face-to-face meeting.

“They said if there was a confession of wrongdoing, they would not proceed to the exam stage. They would be willing not to revoke tax-exempt status if the church admitted intervening in an election.”

The church declined the offer

What’s next? Thumb screws? Iron maidens?

Update: See Steve Clemons, “Religion, Wars, and the IRS: Pro-War Sermons Get Tax Privilege; Anti-War Sermons Not”

Update update: See Dave Johnson, “IRS Cracking Down On War Opponents” and John Aravosis, “Bush administration threatens liberal church for being anti-war.”

C’est un Riot!

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If you follow Memeorandum or other blog aggregator sites you’ve noticed that for the past several days the entire Right Blogosphere has been wallowing in the French riots. Truly, I have never before witnessed such undiluted Schadenfreude. Most people have at least a little twinge of guilt about rejoicing in the misfortune of others, but not our righties. They are rollicking in every fire, every shooting, every broken window. Righties haven’t had this much fun since the Dan Rather smackdown.

The French riots apparently feed into several of their collective detestations–of France, of Muslims, and of socialism. A trifecta! And they can’t let go of it. I thought that when they caught a sniff of Cindy Sheehan in Argentina they’d change course and go howling in that direction. But Sheehan in Argentina barely caused a ripple.

Of course, the truth is that the riots in France were not caused by a failure of “socialism.” Conservatives, not socialists, are in charge of France right now, and awhile back they adopted a hard-right immigration policy that any rightie would love. No multiculturalism allowed; if you live in France, you had better assimilate right now or get bounced. No affirmative action–employers can discriminate against Muslims without penalty. And French schools do not treat all religions equally, but give preferential treatment to Christians.

Today they’ve hit a new low; rightie bloggers are gleefully linking to an article written by an Israeli college professor titled “Got That ‘Ooo La La, Intifada’ Feeling?”

Well, there are very few things as amusing these days as watching the French grapple with their backyard intifada. The suburbs of Paris are now more dangerous than Jenin, and the French are getting their comeuppance for decades of snootiness, for anti-American and anti-Israel agitprop, for decades of cowardice, and especially for the repulsive French love of old Jerry Lewis movies.

That’s sick. Je ne suis pas amusé.

Finally the Left weighs in–Jonathan Miller of Blogoland writes,

I’m struck by the unrestrained glee emanating from righty bloggers over the rioting in France this past week.

For instance, this is just one of many, but InstaPundit links to a blogger who bizarrely declares: “The current intifada in France has stripped the American Left of its second Utopia in a generation. The Left lost its earlier worldly utopia when the Soviet Union fell apart.”

Are they kidding?

As the NYT points out today (and a passage that InstaPundit curiously omits in his linking to the same article) France’s policy towards immigrants is every hard-right, total-assimilationist’s wet dream:

    The government has been embarrassed by its inability to quell the disturbances, which have called into question its unique integration model, which discourages recognizing ethnic, religious or cultural differences in favor of French unity. There is no affirmative action, for example, and religious symbols, like the Muslim veil, are banned in schools.

What’s not to love? National unity, denial of heritage, no affirmative action, subjugating ethnicity to the larger state, a “French Identity.” Paging Patrick Buchanan!

Exactly. It isn’t “multiculturalism” that started the riots in France. It was “assimilationism.” Immigrants to France are required to sign a bleeping integration contract that stipulates instruction in the French language and French values. No multiculturalism allowed.

Over at the Peking Duck, we read:

Nothing is more depressing than seeing those on the right jump for joy over the Muslim youths rioting in Paris. They’re thrilled because it confirms how dysfunctional and bad France is, and confirms that Muslims are animals. (For a fine example, head over to this monstrous site — a real “hate site,” and one linked to enthusiastically by InstaPuppy and Michelle Malkin.) It’s depressing because their joy is ill-founded and based on two lies: 1.) that this is part of a worldwide Islamofascist “intifada,” and 2.) that the rioting is due to France’s liberal, multicultural, Muslim-loving tendencies.

Actually, France takes a rather right-wing, Charles Johnsonesque approach to Muslims, isolating them from mainstream society, ghettoizing them and enforcing a unicultural policy. …

…And returing to No. 1, this isn’t about Muslim terrorism. It’s about poor disaffected youth on the fringes of society, warehoused in project housing with no hope and no future. The rioting may be totally wrong and inexcusable, but at least see it for what it is. It is not a 911-like attack, but the result of many years of stigmatization and poverty. First try to understand it, then criticize it. Is that too much to ask?

Yes, it is too much to ask of righties. It would require them to think and learn stuff and all. Too much work. They’d rather fall back on their comfortable old fears, prejudices, and hatreds.


Echidne adds,

The best short reading of these riots is that they are like the 1960’s race riots in the U.S., as Atrios suggested. The main cause for the riots is in unemployment, poverty and marginalization of the French immigrants and their descendants. The religious angle complicates things, naturally, and makes the chasms in the French society (as well as in the societies of quite a few other European countries) more dangerous to navigate. And as usual, the actual violence also has other elements, from accusations that the police are egging it on to hints that some of the arson is manufactured by drug overlords.

For these reasons I wouldn’t read the events as a clash of religions or civilizations as so many right-wing bloggers do. I think that they are plugging into their own fears and add to that a lot of ignorance about the French political system. For example, it’s the conservatives who are in power in France right now, not some socialists as I have read on the wingnut net.

In short, the French are making most of the same mistakes with immigrant populations that white Americans did with African American populations, and with many of the same results–ghettoization, poverty, and now violence. Same old, same old. France isn’t experiencing “l’intifada.” It’s experiencing “Les Watts.”

Update: Steve Gilliard writes,

Any African American who doesn’t find this familiar would be lying. The death of the two kids was a charge on long simmering feelings of anger at the police, which is mostly white and French. Sarkozy should put down the Giuliani bio and listen. Order has to be restored, but this will happen again unless real change takes place.

You shouldn’t have to lose your culture to be French. That was the same crap the French did in the colonies: be French, but get treated like niggers.

When people who play within the system still aren’t treated fairly, eventually someone will strike back at the system.

What’d I Say?

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If you are a regular here you have heard me say this before, but I’m going to say it again because repeated lies need repeated correction.

As I wrote a few days ago, righties are trying to confuse the issues surrounding Libby’s Leaks by fudging the distinction between the words covert and classified. I found this again in an article in World Nut Daily, which argues that Valerie Plame Wilson (hereafter VPW) was no longer covert because she hadn’t worked outside the United States for at least five years. And since she was not covert, they’re trying to argue that Scooter et al. could not have committed a crime by leaking her identity as a CIA agent.

It may be that VPW had not taken part in overseas covert operations for some time. However, her status was still classified. The indictments brought against Scooter Libby say that VPW’s status at the CIA was classified. Apparently Patrick Fitzgerald went to great lengths to verify that her status was classified before he brought indictments, including asking her neighbors if they knew she worked at the CIA. Rightie mythology that everybody on the eastern seaboard knew she was an agent is a Big Lie.

The indictment says (page 3):

At all relevant times from January 1, 2002 through July 2003, Valerie Wilson was employed by the CIA, and her employment status was classified. Prior to July 14, 2003, Valerie Wilson’s affiliation with the CIA was not common knowledge outside the intelligence community.


Patrick Fitzgerald stated:

Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer. In July 2003, the fact that Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer was classified. Not only was it classified, but it was not widely known outside the intelligence community.

Valerie Wilson’s friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life.

The fact that she was a CIA officer was not well- known, for her protection or for the benefit of all us. It’s important that a CIA officer’s identity be protected, that it be protected not just for the officer, but for the nation’s security.

Valerie Wilson’s cover was blown in July 2003. The first sign of that cover being blown was when Mr. Novak published a column on July 14th, 2003.

Righties play with words to spread the lie that leaking VPW’s identity did not potentially harm national security. Once again, they show how easily people who call themselves “patriots” can betray their own country.

If VPW wasn’t actively working as an undercover spy, then what difference did it make to out her? Once again, it made a difference to agents who are engaged in covert operations right now. Outing VPW also outed the dummy company that had provided a cover to her and still provided a cover to possibly hundreds of over agents — until the leak.

As explained by two former agents who were interviewed by Rita Cosby:

JIM MARCINKOWSKY, FORMER CIA AGENT WHO TRAINED WITH PLAME: We‘re outraged. Betrayal—I mean, that‘s the—that‘s the lowest description I can put on it. We held this secret for 18 years until betrayed by the White House, whether we were inside the agency or outside the agency. It‘s is simply outrageous.

COSBY: You know, Melissa, do you find it sort of ironic that here you go—I know when you go for your job and your training, you‘re told, Keep these things covert. You don‘t expect the government to be the one doing the outing.

MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE, FORMER CIA SPY: No, you certainly don‘t because you know your cover is what allows to you do your job. And so since the government presumably wants you to do your job, that they‘ll also protect it.

COSBY: You know, Jim, let‘s talk about this company, I found this fascinating, a company called Brewster Jennings and Associates. It‘s been outed now by others, so we can talk about it. But explain (INAUDIBLE) sort of it was sort of a mock company under a cover.

MARCINKOWSKY: Well, that‘s exactly right. There‘s commercial covers. You‘re not protected overseas by governmental immunity, diplomatic immunity. And if you get caught under one of those kinds of covers, non-official cover, you‘re going to suffer the consequences of any other body that may be operating and conducting the espionage in a foreign country.

COSBY: But Jim, with this Brewster-Jennings, it was a business card. It was sort of a pseudo-company that folks who worked for the CIA could pretend that they worked for this company, right?

MARCINKOWSKY: Correct. And it doesn‘t matter whether it‘s just a telephone or a business card. The fact of the matter was, it was sufficient to get in and out of a country safely, and that‘s all that matters in the eyes of an agent.

COSBY: You know, and how detrimental, Melissa, when something like a Brewster Jennings is let out? Because I would imagine a lot of agents use that as their cover.

MAHLE: Well, I tell you, when you start exposing how—what kinds of covers that the CIA uses in whether business or whatever, you start setting a trail that bad guys can follow and say, Hey, let‘s look at these kind of companies and see what—you know, Maybe we can find some more agents.

COSBY: Well, that‘s what I was going to say. There‘s a huge rippling effect, right, Melissa?

MAHLE: Yes, and I think that‘s one of the things that really concerns the CIA because we need to protect our agents and our officers if we‘re going to be able to achieve our mission. …

Righties don’t actually care about the security of the United States. They only care that their tribal leaders in the Bush Regime don’t have to suffer the indignity of being held responsible for anything.

The Fruits of Torture

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Via Dr. Atrios, here’s an update to the last post, which describes how a Mr. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi gave testimony about al Qaeda-Iraq collusion that the Defense Intelligence Agency strongly suspected wasn’t true, but the Bush Administration charged ahead and based arguments for invading Iraq on his bogus testimony anyway —

Michael Hirsh, John Barry and Daniel Klaidman wrote about Libi in the June 21, 2004, issue of Newsweek:

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was America’s first big trophy in the war on terror: a senior Qaeda operative captured amid the fighting in Afghanistan. What is less known is that al-Libi, who ran Qaeda training camps, quickly became the subject of a bitter feud between the FBI and the CIA over how to interrogate terror suspects.

Uh-oh.

At the time of al-Libi’s capture on Nov. 11, 2001, the questioning of detainees was still the FBI’s province. For years the bureau’s “bin Laden team” had sought to win suspects over with a carrots-and-no-sticks approach: favors in exchange for cooperation. One terrorist, in return for talking, even wangled a heart transplant for his child.

With al-Libi, too, the initial approach was to read him his rights like any arrestee, one former member of the FBI team told NEWSWEEK. “He was basically cooperating with us.” But this was post-9/11; President Bush had declared war on Al Qaeda, and in a series of covert directives, he had authorized the CIA to set up secret interrogation facilities and to use new, harsher methods. The CIA, says the FBI source, was “fighting with us tooth and nail.” …

…Al-Libi’s capture, some sources say, was an early turning point in the government’s internal debates over interrogation methods. FBI officials brought their plea to retain control over al-Libi’s interrogation up to FBI Director Robert Mueller. The CIA station chief in Afghanistan, meanwhile, appealed to the agency’s hawkish counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black. He in turn called CIA Director George Tenet, who went to the White House. Al-Libi was handed over to the CIA. “They duct-taped his mouth, cinched him up and sent him to Cairo” for more-fearsome Egyptian interrogations, says the ex-FBI official. “At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says, ‘You’re going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I’m going to find your mother and I’m going to f— her.’ So we lost that fight.” (A CIA official said he had no comment.)

Although the article doesn’t say exactly what was done to Libi, as explained in the previous post Libi told his interrogators a bunch of made up stories that the Bushies repeated to the American public as reasons we had to invade Iraq.

Kevin Drum calls this episode “one of the first test cases for Dick Cheney’s campaign to introduce torture as a standard interrogation technique overseas, replacing the FBI’s more mainstream methods.”

Kevin continues,

As Mark Kleiman points out, this is the pragmatic case against torture: not only is it wrong, but it doesn’t even provide reliable information anyway — and it makes Cheney’s relentless moral cretinism on the subject all the worse. Larry Wilkerson, who investigated this back when he was Colin Powell’s chief of staff, confirms that “there was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s office” that authorized the practices that led to the abuse of detainees, and Cheney continues to vigorously support the use of torture to this day, pressuring Congress behind closed doors not to pass John McCain’s anti-torture legislation.

Andrew Sullivan writes,

He’s still furiously lobbying Senators to protect his right to torture. A man who avoided service in Vietnam is lecturing John McCain on the legitimacy of torturing military detainees. But notice he won’t even make his argument before Senate aides, let alone the public. Why not? If he really believes that the U.S. has not condoned torture but wants to reserve it for exceptional cases, why not make his argument in the full light of day? You know: where democratically elected politicians operate.

Like cockroaches, Cheney and his minions are more active in the dark. I’m starting to wonder what would happen to them if they were drug out into the sunlight. Would they burst into flames?

Smokin’

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President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then Secretary of State Colin Powell, and other Bush Administration officials based many of their pre-Iraq War claims of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda on the testimony of a detainee who was known to be a fabricator.

Douglas Jehl writes in this Sunday’s New York Times,

A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The newly declassified portions of the document were given to Jehl by Senator Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. It appears this revelation had something to do with Senator Reid’s parliamentary move that closed the Senate last week. Levin and Senator John D. Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, made a request to declassify the two paragraphs on October 18. In its response, the CIA said it found “no reason for it to remain classified.”

The story in brief: Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was captured in Pakistan at the end of 2001. In February 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported in the two paragraphs that Libi’s statements were highly improbable. The report said he was “‘intentionally misleading the debriefers’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons,” writes Jehl.

Yet administration officials merrily went ahead and repeated Libi’s stories in their speeches.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’’ …

… Mr. Powell relied heavily on accounts provided by Mr. Libi for his speech to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, saying that he was tracing “the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al Qaeda.’’

For more examples of Bush Administration statements based on Libi’s fabrications, see Think Progress.

At the time Powell made his speech, Jehl says, an unclassified statement by the CIA said Libi’s stories were credible. “But Mr. Levin said he had learned that a classified C.I.A. assessment at the time stated ‘the source was not in a position to know if any training had taken place.,’ Jehl writes.

One might conclude that someone in the CIA was being helpful to the White House cause and making sure that statements supporting the war made the rounds, while those not supporting the war were hidden out of sight.

And the DIA report would have circulated widely in government, Jehl says, and would have been available to the CIA, the White House, the Pentagon, and other agencies. However, neither the Senate Intelligence Committee report nor the September 11 Commission report, both issued in 2004, made any reference to the 2002 DIA report. “It remains unclear whether the D.I.A. document was provided to the Senate panel,” Jehl writes.

Libi recanted his stories in January 2004, which prompted the CIA to recall all intelligence reports based on his testimony. This fact was recorded in a footnote to the September 11 Commission report, but the original DIA report report is MIA from the 9/11 report.

Jehl continues,

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al-Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Senator Levin seems a tad miffed.

Mr. Levin said the new evidence of early doubts about Mr. Libi’s statements dramatized what he called the Bush administration’s misuse of prewar intelligence to try to justify the war in Iraq. That is an issue that Mr. Levin and other Senate Democrats have been seeking to emphasize, in part by calling attention to the fact that the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee has yet to deliver a promised report, first sought more than two years ago, on the use of prewar intelligence. …

… In an interview on Friday, Mr. Levin also called attention to a portion of the D.I.A. report that expressed skepticism about the idea of close collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, an idea that was never substantiated by American intelligence but was a pillar of the administration’s prewar claims.

“Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements,’’ the D.I.A. report said in one of two declassified paragraphs. “Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.’’

Libi, who apparently has been in custody at Guantanamo since 2003, was of course not the only intelligence source later uncovered as a fibber. For example, an Iraqi exile code named “Curveball” was the primary source for the ephemeral mobile biological weapons labs. And there is Ahmed Chalabi, beloved of neocons, who has been accused of feeding the Pentagon all manner of misinformation.

So far, the White House has refused to comment, while Republicans are sticking to this weeks’ talking point that they weren’t the only ones to make mistakes in prewar assessments.

Jehl concludes,

The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to meet beginning next week to review draft reports prepared as part of a long-postponed “Phase II’’ of the panel’s review of prewar intelligence on Iraq. At separate briefings for reporters on Friday, Republicans staff members said the writing had long been under way, while Senate Democrats on the committee claimed credit for reinvigorating the process, by forcing the closed session. They said that already nearly complete is a look at whether prewar intelligence accurately predicted the potential for an anti-American insurgency.

Other areas of focus include the role played by the Iraqi National Congress, that of the Pentagon in shaping intelligence assessments, and an examination of whether public statements about Iraq by members of the Bush and Clinton administrations, as well as members of Congress, were substantiated by intelligence available at the time.


Steve Soto of The Left Coaster writes,

When Harry Reid shut down the Senate earlier this week due to Pat Roberts and Bill Frist’s stonewalling of a Phase Two investigation over how the Bush Administration used intelligence in making its case for war, many of us wondered why now? What took you guys so long to use a procedural lever that you’ve had available to you all along that could have been employed before the election to raise the issue of Bush’s lies into a campaign issue? Was it a sudden re-growth of guts and balls that did this, or did the Democrats now come into possession of new information that was withheld from them before the election that gave them the club to force this issue out into the open now? We now know the answer, and it is the latter.

Moreover, Steve says, it puts Junior in a shitload of trouble.

… we now know that the Bush Administration also knew as far back as January 2003 that the Niger uranium claim was based on forgeries. We know that the Bush Administration was also told that the aluminum tubes story was bogus before the invasion as well. We now know that the claim that Saddam was assisting Al Qaeda was also a lie, and that the Administration knew this from Rummy himself as far back as February 2002. And we know that the IAEA was still on the ground in Iraq and had not confirmed any of Bush’s claims that Saddam had definitively stockpiled WMDs in violation of the two UN resolutions that Bush based his war upon.

And why exactly is this so important? Because take a look at the certification that Bush sent to Congress to start the war, which was required in the October 2002 war resolution, and then see that as we suspected over two and a half years ago, Bush has a big problem now …

This latest revelation means that at the time Bush justified the commencement of war against Iraq consistent with what was required under Public Law 107-243, he certified things not in evidence, and made claims to Congress (Saddam’s active operation of a WMD program and Saddam’s assistance to Al Qaeda) that he, Cheney, and Rummy already knew were false.

If Bush isn’t called to account for this, then there is no democracy in America any more.

[Cross-posted to The American Street.]