Reality Bites

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Could an epidemic of second thoughts be spreading on the Right?

If so, it’s spreading slowly. Righties are still righties, and many’s the winger who will insist he still feels fine even as flesh is consumed and internal organs are shutting down. But reality can be catching, and nobody avoids it forever.

In Salon, Joe Conason reports that some righties are grudgingly acknowleding that, maybe, um, we need some government regulation after all.

On the day that avian flu reaches these shores, even the most conservative Americans may begin to understand why effective government and global cooperation are as important as “free markets” and national sovereignty. With millions of lives at stake, they may well wish that we had spent more to bolster public health agencies at all levels — including the United Nations — instead of entertaining the simple-minded demagogy of the right for the past two decades.

Indeed, the pandemic threat is already exposing the limits of “free market” rhetoric among Washington’s right-wing think tanks, which have remarkably little to say about the subject that now preoccupies officials and experts around the world. …

…After many years of undermining global and national efforts to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic, organs of Republican propaganda like Heritage suddenly consider public health to be a pressing concern of the federal government, right next to national defense on the list of priorities. Conservatives tend to change their attitudes quickly when their own lives and families might be endangered.

Conason reminds us that another repository of conservative “thinking,” the Cato Institute, in the pre-Katrina past called for the abolishment of FEMA — “presumably because everyone should depend on free-market solutions in case of an earthquake or hurricane” — and wanted the U.S. to stop paying dues to the U.N., thereby defunding the World Health Organization.

“The withdrawal of American participation and support from world organizations has always been a matter of principle for the Republican right,” Conason says, “although conservative ideology has yet to explain how we can close our borders to bird-borne disease.”

Details, details.

“The Cato attitude toward bird flu is much like the libertarian solution to global warming: If the ‘free market’ can’t solve the problem, let’s pretend it isn’t happening,” Conason writes. But the free market is not cooking up the stockpiles of vaccines and Tamiflu we’re likely going to need.

(Republican problem-solving amounts to denying there’s a problem until it bites their butts. Poverty, jobs, environment, health care, you name it — every time, Republicans will insist there is no problem until the crisis actually gets in their faces and threatens to hurt them in the next election. Then, of course, they will blame the problem on Democrats. On the other hand, Republicans are prone to manufacturing crises where none exist in order to enact some policy they know won’t sit well with the public.

Democrats on the whole will recognize problems shaping up down the road, although their solutions may or may not work as promised. However, I have to think back quite a while to remember a time when Democrats were in a position to enact much of anything that wasn’t compromised to death by Republicans before it became law. But if a Democratic remedy misfires, Republicans exploit the failure to expound their anti-government theories, never mind that the problem would not have evaporated had government not responded to it. )

Reality is settling over the GOP like a bad hangover. At the Washington Post, Shailagh Murray writes that some in the GOP regret they overindulged in pork when they wrote the highway bill.

The highway bill seemed like such a good idea when it sailed through Congress this summer. But now Republicans who assembled the record spending package are suffering buyer’s remorse.

The $286 billion legislation was stuffed with 6,000 pet projects for lawmakers’ districts, including what critics denounce as a $223 million “Bridge to Nowhere” that would replace a 7-minute ferry ride in a sparsely populated area of Alaska. Usually members of Congress cannot wait to rush home and brag about such bounty — a staggering number of parking lots, bus depots, bike paths and new interchanges for just about every congressional district in the country that added $24 billion to the overall cost of maintaining the nation’s highways and bridges in the coming years.

But with spiraling war and hurricane recovery costs, the pork-laden bill has become a political albatross for Republicans, who have been promising since President Bush took office to get rid of wasteful spending.

So why couldn’t they see this coming? Did the war thing just slip their minds? Did a ouija board tell them not to worry about natural disasters? Of course, part of the problem is that there used to be presidents who took the governing thing seriously and who would have refused to sign the bill. Murray continues,

President Ronald Reagan once vetoed a highway bill because it contained 152 pet projects. Despite the pork inflation, Bush had no complaints about the current package when he signed it on Aug. 10. “This bill upgrades our transportation infrastructure,” he declared. “And it accomplishes goals in a fiscally responsible way.”

Junior wouldn’t recognize fiscal responsibility if it bit his butt.

That was before Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, leaving tens of thousands homeless and requiring billions of dollars in unanticipated rebuilding costs. Trying to live within a tight budget, Republican leaders in the House and the Senate are in the process of pushing through politically difficult cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, farm subsidies and student loans.

Making sure the poor and disadvantaged make all the sacrifices–that’s the Republican way. And since entrenched poverty so excacerbated the damage of Katrina, it’s so sensible to make the problems of poverty even more intractable. The Guardian observes,

If the budget cuts passed by the US senate on Thursday are anything to go by, the whole thing will end in tears. Republicans – disgracefully – targeted most of the cuts on the elderly and the poor through restructuring (ie cutting) some Medicare and Medicaid programmes. Worst of all, part of the cuts originally aimed (creditably) at cutting America’s ludicrously high agriculture subsidies was amended so the brunt would be taken by chopping $844m from food stamps for the poor rather than from farm subsidies. Meanwhile, Republicans are hoping to pass yet more tax cuts for the wealthy. An administration that can tackle a serious budget problem in this way deserves all that may be coming to it.

The Republicans may hope to pass yet more tax cuts for the wealthy, but there are signs the soak-the-poor crowd may be losing their edge there, too. Robert Kuttner writes in the Boston Globe,

AFTER HIS reelection, President Bush set two top domestic priorities — privatization of Social Security, and ”reform” of the tax system. Privatization ran into a wall of opposition once the public grasped that the price would be a big cut in guaranteed retirement checks.

On Tuesday, Bush’s blue-ribbon commission on tax reform issued its recommendations, and they are hitting with a similar, resounding thud. The political right wanted a flat tax, a consumption tax, or a national sales or value-added tax in place of the progressive income tax. Not only did the commission fail to support any of these, but it took on one sacred cow — capping the mortgage interest deduction that would raise taxes on the upper middle class. … it was far from what the drown-the-government crowd wanted, and one more sign that Bush is losing control of the agenda.

Damn those economists. They actually check their math.

And here’s the biggest jaw-dropper of the day: Jim VandeHei writes in WaPo that

President Bush has ordered White House staff to attend mandatory briefings beginning next week on ethical behavior and the handling of classified material after the indictment last week of a senior administration official in the CIA leak probe.

Bush? Ethics? The Apocalypse is at hand, I tell you …

Feel the Love II

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Updating the last post– Tim Padgett writes for Time (web exclusive):

President George W. Bush shouldn’t have been too surprised by the angry — and ultimately violent — welcome he received Friday at the 4th Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina. After pledging during his 2000 election campaign to correct Washington’s indifference to Latin America, the president is viewed as having all but turned his back on the region after most Latin American capitals declined to back his invasion of Iraq. But Bush’s hemispheric cold shoulder has backfired: It created a political vacuum that has been largely filled by neo-leftists like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who was expected to join tens of thousands of raucous demonstrators Friday marching through Mar del Plata to denounce Bush and his all-but-doomed efforts to forge a hemispheric free trade pact.

Far from being the mejor amigo he promised to be, Bush today is arguably more unpopular in Latin America than any U.S. president in history. In Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, a recent poll showed 64% have a poor or very poor opinion of him. Elsewhere in the region, Bush’s approval rating usually falls below 25%. Part of the problem is broad opposition to the Iraq war; another is the perception that Bush is a Monroe Doctrine throwback to heavy-handed U.S. interventionism in the region. That image caught fire after the Bush Administration was widely accused of backing a failed coup against Chavez in 2002 (a charge the White House denies). Fuel was added last summer when conservative televangelist Pat Robertson — a high-profile supporter of President Bush — publicly called for Chavez’s assassination. (Robertson has since apologized.) Chavez is a democratically elected President, but his close friendship with Cuba’s Fidel Castro, his own flirtations with autocratic government and his recently declared interest in acquiring nuclear technology have Washington bristling. As a result, the fiery Chavez and his growing number of supporters around the region remain vocally convinced that Bush is out to kill him.

Note this part about F.T.A.A.:

But Bush’s biggest south-of-the-border PR problem is economic. Even before the start of the November 4-5 Summit, devoted to combating poverty and creating jobs, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and other Latin nations banded together to nudge Washington’s Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) proposal off the agenda. The move, which has angered the Bush Administration, reflects growing skepticism in Latin America over the virtues of free-market reforms, which many believe have simply widened the chasm between rich and poor in a region that already displays the world’s worst disparities in wealth.

To be fair, a lot of the economic problems in Latin America are the result of bad decisions and corruption in Latin America going back to the time of the Conquistadors.

The article goes on to say that anti-Bush sentiment has sparked a neo-lefist revival in Latin America (way to go, Chimpy!).

Some on the Right Blogosphere noticed the protests and the fact Cindy Sheehan was there, somewhere–it’s not clear to me if she did much but show up. The rightie Gateway Pundit quotes Mexican President Vincente Fox as rebuking Chavez on F.T.A.A. —

Mexican President Vicente Fox, a Bush ally, countered Chavez by saying a trade accord in the Americas will boost growth and should go ahead even if some countries refuse to join. Only about four or five nations are against it, and their opposition is “ideological,” Fox told reporters.

But Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela are the big guns, economically speaking, aren’t they?

It’s not just Latin Americans crabbing at Bush. He’s also taking potshots from Canada.

Free trade in the Americas would be a powerful antidote for poverty – if everyone played by the rules, Prime Minister Paul Martin said here Friday in a veiled shot at U.S. President George W. Bush.

As the Summit of the Americas got underway in this fortified seaside town, Martin said Canada fully supports the U.S. push for an expanded Free Trade Area of the Americas. But he made a point of raising the simmering softwood lumber fight between the U.S. and Canada, just before a private meeting with Mexican President Vicente Fox.

“The fact is that President Fox, myself, President Bush, all of us believe strongly in the free trade of the Americas. But we know that it’s got to be based on rules – and rules that are listened to,” Martin said.

Rules? Bush thinks rules are for the little people.

Feel the Love

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Latin Americans are greeting our president, in Argentina for the Summit of the Americas, with enthusiasm. The BBC reports:

Thousands of protesters chanting “Get out Bush” have thronged the streets of Mar del Plata, an Argentine beach town hosting the Summit of the Americas.

The US president and 33 other regional leaders are in town to discuss free trade and poverty, amid tight security. …

…The rally was held in a football stadium, after a mainly peaceful march though boarded-up streets.

Standing side by side with Argentine former football legend Diego Maradona, Mr[Hugo] Chavez told the crowd that the world’s eyes were upon them and the Americas.

Wearing a T-shirt accusing Mr Bush of war crimes, Maradona said: “Argentina is dignified. Let’s throw out Bush!”

Earlier protesters had surrounded a train that brought their comrades from Buenos Aires, among them Bolivian left-wing presidential candidate Evo Morales.

From CBC World News:

A crowd of 10,000 protesters chanting “Get out Bush!” swarmed the streets of this Argentine resort Friday, hours before the hemisphere’s leaders sat down to debate free trade, immigration and job creation.

Before dawn, thousands greeted a train bringing the last group of fellow demonstrators from Buenos Aires, including Bolivian presidential hopeful Evo Morales and soccer great Diego Maradona, who donned a T-shirt accusing U.S. President George W. Bush of war crimes.

Chanting “Fascist Bush! You are the terrorist!” the protesters hung from the engine and moved up the sides of the train, trying to shake hands with those inside.

Elisabeth Bumiller and Larry Rother report for the New York Times:

At a parallel “People’s Summit” in Mar del Plata on Thursday [see BBC photos], organized by a coalition of left-wing, indigenous and antiglobalization groups, American proposals on free trade also came in for criticism, as did Mr. Bush himself.

“We Said No and No Means No: No to Bush, No to F.T.A.A. and No to Repaying the Debt,” read one large banner at the conference, held in a group of tents and classrooms on the campus of a local university. Several thousand people attended.

“We’ve had enough of neo-liberalism and the damage it has inflicted on our societies,” said Juan Montenegro, who came from Buenos Aires to take part. “Bush is trying to destroy Iraq with bombs and guns and Latin America with an economic program that will rob us of our sovereignty.”

The “antisummit” began early in the week and is expected to culminate today in mass protest marches, led by Alfonso Pérez Esquivel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Diego Maradona, the soccer idol. Mr. Chávez, with a foot in both of the gatherings here, is expected to be the main orator at a closing protest rally to be held at the main soccer stadium.

“F.T.A.A.” stands for Free Trade Area of the Americas, which is a proposal to unite the economies of the Americas into a single free trade area. This is a long-standing proposal that was also supported by President Clinton. I admit I am not well versed in the pros and cons of this proposal; anyone who wants to editorialize about it in the comments is welcome to do so.

However, as I understand it this area would include the U.S. I bet most American voters have never heard of it. And I bet most American voters would be enormously skeptical of it. It’d bite if F.T.A.A. were approved in Latin America but rejected in the U.S., huh?

Michael Fletcher writes for the Sydney Morning Herald:

The Bush Administration had hoped the meeting would help revive stalled plans for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a zone that would stretch from Alaska to Argentina.

“From our point of view, the Free Trade Area of the Americas has defined the summit process,” said Thomas Shannon, the US assistant secretary of state for the western hemisphere.

But that message was at odds with the sentiment in much of Latin America, where millions of people have yet to realise the promised benefits of democratic governments and free trade.

Across the region, half a dozen populist leaders have been elected in recent years, often supported by constituencies that blame US-backed economic policies, private investment and international trade for poverty and inequality.

It’s too soon to tell if the F.T.A.A. proposal will make any headway during the summit.

Marchela Sanchez of the Washington Post writes that most people of Latin America are tired of being caught between warring economic theories, whether Bush’s or Chavez’s.

As titillating as these activities on the sidelines of the summit may become, they will only serve to distract from the popular concerns that bring together the 34 elected leaders of the Americas — namely, to strengthen democracy and reduce poverty through job creation.

Indeed, the average Latin American is much less concerned with protesting against Washington, the war or Bush than in keeping his job and seeing his economic situation improve. More than in a battle of ideas, he or she is engaged in a day-to-day struggle to succeed in a democratic system.

New economic, social and political experiments, like the kind Chavez is pushing, are not gaining a foothold in Latin America. After 10 years of polling, the Chilean firm Latinobarometro concluded last week that Latin Americans are sold on democracy as a way of life. And even though in the last three years popular approval of democracy has not budged from 53 percent, Latin Americans are not actively seeking out alternatives. In fact a large majority say market economies (63 percent) and the private sector (59 percent) are what will help their countries develop.

As Marta Lagos, head of Latinobarometro put it, “people in Latin America are no longer interested in buying the dreams offered by extreme ideologies.'” Rather, she said, “they want to buy refrigerators.”

Cindy Sheehan is in Argentina with the protesters, which appears to me to be a bad move on her part. Outside the U.S. leftist extremism can actually get extreme, and Sheehan could lose credibility in America if she becomes too closely tied to far left anti-Americanism abroad.

The Right Blogosphere hasn’t picked up on this yet, however, probably because at the moment they are having a high ol’ time making fun of France.

Anyway–Nedra Pickler writes for the AP that Bush is trying to improve America’s image in Latin America. Fat chance. Marcela Sanchez of WaPo writes,

More than the Iraq war, it is Bush’s failure to recognize the maturation of democracy south of the Rio Grande that has increased popular disapproval. Regional democracies, most of them in their third decade of existence, have grown beyond the simplicity of left-right, either-or choices. Still, Bush’s war against terror and his obsession with Chavez and Cuban leader Fidel Castro suggest to Latin Americans that his administration’s frame of reference is still purely ideological and unevolved.

In other words, Bush’s Great White Father act is not winning ’em over. Maybe next time he’ll send Karen Hughes.

Home Alone III

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The Bush Administration’s downward spiral continues. A new Washington Post/CBS News poll shows Bush’s popularity at another new low; 58 percent question his integrity.

The question at hand is: What’s he gonna do about it?

Many’s the cable news bobblehead who says that he can come back from such a popularity low. Reagan did it, they say. Other presidents have done it. It can be done.

Yes, it can be done. But not by George W. Bush.

Last May I wrote that Bush is a one-trick pony. Bush and his circle of enablers found a way to bamboozle the public into accepting a spoiled, lazy frat boy as their glorious leader. Their trick worked really well, for a long time. But now that the public is catching on, they don’t have another trick.

Five months ago Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei wrote at WaPo that Bush had spent his political capital. From May 31, 2005:

Through more than four years in the White House, the signature of Bush’s leadership has been that he does not panic in the face of bad poll numbers. Yet many Republicans on Capitol Hill and in the lobbyist corridor of K Street worry about a season of drift and complain that the White House has not listened to their concerns. In recent meetings, House Republicans have discussed putting more pressure on the White House to move beyond Social Security and talk up different issues, such as health care and tax reform, according to Republican officials who asked not to be named to avoid angering Bush’s team.

“There is a growing sense of frustration with the president and the White House, quite frankly,” said an influential Republican member of Congress. “The term I hear most often is ‘tin ear,’ ” especially when it comes to pushing Social Security so aggressively at a time when the public is worried more about jobs and gasoline prices. “We could not have a worse message at a worse time.”

Baker and VandeHei quoted conservative “pundits” who were as clueless as the White House. For example, Newt Gingrich advised that Bush focus harder on “personal” Social Security accounts, and Bill Kristol thought that pushing through John Bolton’s nomination for UN ambassador would be just the thing to rally the public. Can we say, “out of touch”?

The Bushies continued to party until Katrina broke in and flipped on the lights. Now we’re two months past Katrina, and the Bushies still show no signs of being able to update their act.

At Salon, Sidney Blumenthal writes that the Bush’s famous “bubble,” which protected him from all unpleasantness, has turned into a bunker:

His nomination of his White House legal counsel Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was an acknowledgment of his sharply narrowed political space. Bush believed he could thread the needle with her because her record was unknown. While the Republican masses supported him, the Leninist right staged a revolt. In Bush’s cronyism and opportunism, they saw his deviation. He was the disloyalist. With the prosecutor’s indictment imminent, Bush withdrew Miers and caved. Broadly unpopular, he could not suffer a split right. His new nominee, federal Judge Samuel Alito, a reliable sectarian, is a tribute to his bunker strategy.

Hostage to his failed fortune, Bush is a prisoner of the right. His administration has become its own little republic of fear. Libby’s public trial will reveal the administration’s political methods. Cheney, along with a host of others, will be called to testify. Whatever other calamities may befall Bush, their specter harries him to the right. “Disunity, dissolution and vacillation” are hallmarks of “the path of conciliation,” as Lenin wrote in “What Is to Be Done.” The vanguard on “the path of struggle,” criticized for being “an exclusive group,” must oppose any retreat proposed by the “opportunist rearguard.” “We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire.”

Bush’s last refuge is a place light years to the right of the American mainstream. From there, he has no where to go but down.

Also: Today’s Paul Krugman, online. You will enjoy this. Pass it on.

Those Pesky Senate Dems

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Bob Geiger at Yellow Dog Democrat explains why Senate Dems feel shut out:

Let’s go to the numbers because, just looking at the first 10 months of 2005 reveals a Republican-dominated Senate that, far from practicing what they preach and extending a hand of cooperation across the aisle, have gone out of their way to scuttle almost every amendment and bill sponsored by Democratic senators.

The numbers don’t lie and here’s how it stacks up after reviewing all 281 roll call votes taken in the Senate through the end of October.

Of 118 pieces of Democratic-sponsored legislation, a whopping 80 percent were rejected by Senate Republicans, many of them on straight party-line votes. Of those bills, 24 were “agreed to” and 94 were “rejected.”

Omitted from this analysis for the sake of simplicity are votes to table – effectively trash – Democratic legislation without a vote. But, even when those instances are examined, eight of twelve motions to table a bill sponsored by a Democrat succeeded, in predominantly party-line actions.

But it’s even worse than it looks for those paragons of civility and bipartisan cooperation in the GOP.

Of the 24 Democratic amendments that the Republican leadership allowed to slip through, nine were benign acts that passed by a unanimous vote or, in one case, 94-6. For example, in July, a bill sponsored by Tom Harkin (D-IA) “…recognizing and honoring the 15th anniversary of the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990” passed 87-0. A vote of 100-0 passed an amendment by Mary Landrieu (D-LA) to give a tax credit to employers continuing to pay the salaries of Guard and Reserve employees serving in Iraq. Sponsored by Dick Durbin (D-IL), an almost-clerical bill mandating a change to the numerical identifier used to identify Medicare beneficiaries under the Medicare program passed muster with everyone 98-0.


Via Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice—Charles Babington of the Washington Post explains why Harry Reid didn’t give Bill “here, kitty!” Frist advance warning of Monday’s parliamentary move to close the Senate.

Reid’s aides said yesterday that their boss decided on the dramatic, attention-grabbing ploy because he was weary of GOP foot-dragging on a promised inquiry by the Senate intelligence committee into the Bush administration’s handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq. “We’d had enough press conferences and requests, public and private,” Reid spokesman Jim Manley said. “Now it was time to act.”

But Reid did not have to start from scratch. His predecessor, former Democratic leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.), had considered going into closed session to discuss intelligence use and to spur the inquiry launched in early 2004. But he wanted the cooperation of Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.).

“For the past couple of years, Senator Frist and I had agreed to hold an executive session,” Daschle said yesterday. But Frist “kept putting it off.” Daschle said several Democratic senators “threatened to do it over his opposition during that time, but it never got to that point.”

You’ll remember that Frist pitched a five-alarm temper tantrum in reaction to Reid’s maneuver. Clearly, he never learned that if you don’t play nicely with others, sooner or later somebody’s going to stop taking crap from you.

Heck of a Job

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Email to Michael Brown:

“Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical. Here some things you might not know. Hotels are kicking people out, thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water. Hundreds still being rescued from homes.

“The dying patients at the DMAT (disaster medical assistance team) tent being medivac. Estimates are many will die within hours. Evacuation in process. Plans developing for dome evacuation but hotel situation adding to problem. We are out of food and running out of water at the dome, plans in works to address the critical need.

“FEMA staff is OK and holding own. DMAT staff working in deplorable conditions. The sooner we can get the medical patients out, the sooner we can get them out.

“Phone connectivity impossible.” – Marty Bahamonde, FEMA regional director, to Brown, describing the situation in New Orleans on Aug. 31.

Michael Brown’s response:

“Thanks for update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?”

Good Question

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In today’s Washington Post, Jim Hoagland asks why the White House didn’t answer Joe Wilson’s 2003 op ed openly instead of resorting to a smear campaign.

Dear Mr. President,

Wouldn’t a letter to the editor have sufficed?

Seriously. Wouldn’t it have been better if you or Karl Rove or Scooter Libby had just written a letter to the newspapers that got so deep under the official skin by publishing the leaks and articles provided by former ambassador Joe Wilson?

“He’s full of it” would have been one time-honored approach, followed by convincing supporting detail, of which you had some. Why not spring for a stamp and argue your case in public, rather than let Official A (aka Rove) and Libby overreact with anonymous counter-leaks about Wilson’s wife, the CIA officer and Vanity Fair babe?

Mr. Hoagland assumes that the Bush administration could answer Wilson’s charges without lying or subterfuge, which I doubt. But it’s still a good question, and it gets to the heart of what’s fundamentally wrong with the Bush Administration: It doesn’t trust anyone outside its small inner circle.

In the past, presidents have responded to their opposition by writing letters to the editor. Even when he was bogged down by the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln would from time to time fire off a letter to a newspaper to answer some of his critics. If Scooter Libby had composed a counter-op ed to answer Joe Wilson instead of embarking on the secret smear campaign, probably both Wilson’s article and Libby’s answer quickly would have dropped into the memory hole.

Hoagland continues, addressing President Bush,

It is not surprising that your White House distrusts and/or despises the media, the CIA, the State Department’s career officers, the United Nations and a host of other institutions that you could not control, but that you could not accept that you could not control. Like most paranoia, yours is not totally unfounded: People in those institutions were out to defy and/or get you.

But you and yours helped them accomplish the mission. One lesson available in this story is that amateurs are no match for the CIA in disinformation campaigns. The spies are far better at operating in the shadows than you politicians will ever be. They have a license to dissemble. …

It’s not clear to me how the CIA has been “dissembling” in the Plame case, but let’s go on

… But you feared something else more. You feared openness. You feared laying out your fallibilities along with your strengths for others to judge. You feared laying out facts — good, bad and indifferent — for others to judge. You were unable even to acknowledge that the fiefdoms within your administration were at war. So all attacks had to be subterranean.

This leads to a devastating but now inescapable conclusion: You distrusted not only the media but the public at large, which, unlike yourself, does rely on publicly available information that is carried in the media. …

…Telling the public that there was an independent stream of intelligence, with all the problems and counterattacks it would have triggered from the opposition leakers, would have been better for you than aides’ taking it on themselves to plant stealthy suggestions of nepotism at the CIA.

This administration has a pathological fear of openness, even in circumstances that shouldn’t require secrets. This has got to be the least transparent administration ever to take up space in the White House.

Arraignment Day

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[Update: Scooter pleads not guilty. No trial date has been set. Apparently some of the evidence submitted by Libby is classified, and the judge and others will have to get security clearances to see it. Interesting.]

Scooter’s arraignment is scheduled for 10:30 am today. I will post whatever happens. He will probably plead not guilty, of course, but given that the Bushies really don’t want a trial, it’s possible someone got to him and persuaded him to fall on his sword for the Team. We’ll see.

Meanwhile–I just found this quote at Fallen Monk:

If by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people – their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties – someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad; if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.” – John F. Kennedy

Nice.

Secrets and Shame

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Damn the New York Times and its damn subscription firewall. Bob Herbert’s column for Thursday comments on the CIA’s secret prisons (see “Government of Sadists,” below) and it’s brilliant.

[Update: Legally or illegally, you can read the whole thing here.]

Ultimately the whole truth will come out and historians will have their say, and Americans will look in the mirror and be ashamed.

Abraham Lincoln spoke of the “better angels” of our nature. George W. Bush will have none of that. He’s set his sights much, much lower. …

…The individuals held in these prisons have been deprived of all rights. They don’t even have the basic minimum safeguards of prisoners of war. If they are being tortured or otherwise abused, there is no way for the outside world to know about it. If some mistake has been made and they are, in fact, innocent of wrongdoing – too bad.

As Ms. Priest wrote, “Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.”

This is the border along which democracy bleeds into tyranny.

No doubt, says Herbert, some of the individuals detained are murderers who intend to do us harm. But others possibly are not.

After September 11, the CIA had planned to hide and interrogate a small number–two or three dozen–top leaders of Al Qaeda with knowledge of terrorist plots against the United States. But somehow it got away from them. As Dana Priest wrote in the Washington Post, no one seems to have thought out the strategic purpose of the secret prisons.

Herbert continues,

A number of current and former officials told The Washington Post that “the original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored.”

The secret C.I.A. prisons are just one link in the long chain of abominations that the Bush administration has unrolled in its so-called fight against terrorism. Rendition, the outsourcing of torture to places like Egypt, Jordan and Syria, is another. And then there are the thousands upon thousands of detainees being held at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. There is little, if any, legal oversight of these detainees, or effective monitoring of the conditions in which they are being held.

Terrible instances of torture and other forms of abuse of detainees have come to light. The Pentagon has listed the deaths of at least 27 prisoners in American custody as confirmed or suspected criminal homicides.

And here is the part that disturbs me most:

None of this has given the administration pause. It continues to go out of its way to block a legislative effort by Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, to ban the “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of any prisoner in U.S. custody.

And for what purpose? There’s no indication any useful intelligence has come out of these prisons. Granted, such information is classified. But you know that if the Bushies could brag about such intelligence having foiled one terrorist plot, they’d be doing it.

Last month, President Bush said in a speech that the U.S. and its allies had foiled at least 10 al Qaeda plots since September 11, 2001. But when challenged to provide details as to what those plots might have been, the White House had to “clarify”; it appears the “plots” had generally not yet reach the plotting stage. Sara Goo wrote in the Washington Post (October 23):

A White House list of 10 terrorist plots disrupted by the United States has confused counterterrorism experts and officials, who say they cannot distinguish between the importance of some incidents on the list and others that were left off.

Intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the White House overstated the gravity of the plots by saying that they had been foiled, when most were far from ready to be executed. Others noted that the nation’s color-coded threat index was not raised from yellow, or “elevated” risk of attack, to orange, or “high” risk, for most of the time covered by the incidents on the list.

The president made it “sound like well-hatched plans,” said a former CIA official involved in counterterrorism during that period. “I don’t think they fall into that category.”

Some terrorists have been foiled, of course, such as “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. As I recall, he was prevented from blowing up an airplane by a stewardess who spotted Reid trying to ignite his shoes.

There are other ways, you know. Four al Qaeda members captured after the 1998 embassy bombings were tried and convicted in New York. At least one of those convicted, Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-‘Owhali, provided considerable information about al Qaeda operations, as did Ahmed Ressam, who was convicted of trying to smuggle a bomb intended for the Los Angeles Airport into the U.S. These men had the benefit of U.S. courts of law, yet they talked. Amazing.

Bob Herbert continues,

I had a conversation yesterday with Michael Posner, executive director of Human Rights First, about the secret C.I.A. prisons. “We’re a nation founded on laws and rules that say you treat people humanely,” he said, “and among the safeguards is that people in detention should be formally recognized; they should have access, at a minimum, to the Red Cross; and somebody should be accountable for their treatment.

“What we’ve done is essentially to throw away the rule book and say that there are some people who are beyond the law, beyond scrutiny, and that the people doing the detentions and interrogations are totally unaccountable. It’s a secret process that almost inevitably leads to abuse.”

Worse stories are still to come – stories of murder, torture and abuse. We’ll watch them unfold the way people watch the aftermath of terrible accidents. And then we’ll ask, “How could this have happened?”

Some of us already know.


Update: Also in the New York Times, this editorial:

It’s maddening. Why does the Bush administration keep forcing policies on the United States military that endanger Americans wearing the nation’s uniform – policies that the military does not want, that do not work and that violate standards upheld by the civilized world for decades?

When the Bush administration rewrote the rules for dealing with prisoners after 9/11, needlessly scrapping the Geneva Conventions and American law, it ignored the objections of lawyers for the armed services. Now, heedless of the lessons of Abu Ghraib, the civilians are once again running over the people in uniform. Tim Golden and Eric Schmitt reported yesterday in The Times that the administration is blocking the Pentagon from adopting the language of the Geneva Conventions to set rules for handling prisoners in the so-called war on terror.

Senior military lawyers want these standards, as do some Defense and State Department officials outside the inner circle. They say the abuse and torture of prisoners has reduced America’s standing with its allies and taken away its moral high ground with the rest of the world. They also know that it endangers any American soldiers who are captured.

The rigid ideologues blocking this reform say the Geneva Conventions banning inhumane treatment are too vague. Which part of no murder, torture, mutilation, cruelty or humiliation do they not understand? The restrictions are a problem only if you want to do such abhorrent things and pretend they are legal. That is why the Bush administration tossed out the rules after 9/11.

It’s a terrifying thing when the people who devote their lives to protecting our national security feel that the civilians who oversee their operations are out of control. Dana Priest reports in The Washington Post that even the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine operators are getting nervous about the network of secret prisons they have around the world – including, of all places, at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe.

We’re not naïve enough to believe that if the C.I.A. nabs a Qaeda operative who knows where a ticking bomb is hidden, that terrorist will emerge unbruised from his interrogation. Extraordinary circumstances are different from general policies that allow foot soldiers and even innocent bystanders to be swept up in messy, uncontrolled and probably fruitless detentions. Ms. Priest reports that of the more than 100 prisoners sent by the C.I.A. to its “black site” camps, only 30 are considered major terrorism suspects, and some have presumably been kept so long that their information is out of date. The rest have limited intelligence value, according to The Post, and many of them have been subjected to the odious United States practice of shipping prisoners to countries like Egypt, Jordan and Morocco and pretending that they won’t be tortured.

The editorial notes that torture stories always seem to circle around Dick Cheney’s office.

Mr. Cheney, a prime mover behind the attempts to legalize torture, is now leading a back-room fight to block a measure passed by the Senate, 90 to 9, that would impose international standards and American laws on the treatment of prisoners. Mr. Cheney wants a different version, one that would make the C.I.A.’s camps legal, although still hidden, and authorize the use of torture by intelligence agents. Mr. Bush is threatening to veto the entire military budget over this issue. …

Here’s the boffo finish:

So we can only conclude that President Bush has decided to expend the minimal clout remaining to his beleaguered administration in a fight to put the full faith and credit of the United States behind the concept of torture. After all, the sign on Dick Cheney’s door says he is the vice president.

Also—An editorial in today’s Washington Post:

LAST MONTH a prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay military base excused himself from a conversation with his lawyer and stepped into a cell, where he slashed his arm and hung himself. This desperate attempted suicide by a detainee held for four years without charge, trial or any clear prospect of release was not isolated. At least 131 Guantanamo inmates began a hunger strike on Aug. 8 to protest their indefinite confinement, and more than two dozen are being kept alive only by force-feeding. No wonder Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has denied permission to U.N. human rights investigators to meet with detainees at Guantanamo: Their accounts would surely add to the discredit the United States has earned for its lawless treatment of foreign prisoners.

Guantanamo, however, is not the worst problem. As The Post’s Dana Priest reported yesterday, the CIA maintains its own network of secret prisons, into which 100 or more terrorist suspects have “disappeared” as if they were victims of a Third World dictatorship. Some of the 30 most important prisoners are being held in secret facilities in Eastern European countries — which should shame democratic governments that only recently dismantled Soviet-era secret police apparatuses. Held in dark underground cells, the prisoners have no legal rights, no visitors from outside the CIA and no checks on their treatment, even by the International Red Cross. President Bush has authorized interrogators to subject these men to “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment that is illegal in the United States and that is banned by a treaty ratified by the Senate. The governments that allow the CIA prisons on their territory violate this international law, if not their own laws.

This shameful situation is the direct result of Mr. Bush’s decision in February 2002 to set aside the Geneva Conventions as well as standing U.S. regulations for the handling of detainees. Under the Geneva Conventions, al Qaeda militants could have been denied prisoner-of-war status and held indefinitely; they could have been interrogated and tried, either in U.S. courts or under the military system of justice. At the same time they would have been protected by Geneva from torture and other cruel treatment. Had Mr. Bush followed that course, the abuse scandals at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the severe damage they have caused to the United States, could have been averted. Key authors of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, could have been put on trial, with their crimes exposed to the world.

Instead, not a single al Qaeda leader has been prosecuted in the past four years. The Pentagon’s system of hearings on the status of Guantanamo detainees, introduced only after a unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court, has no way of resolving the long-term status of most detainees. The CIA has no long-term plan for its secret prisoners, whom one agency official described as “a horrible burden.”

Some Senators (led by John McCain) plus military officers and career State Department officials oppose the Bush torture policy. The advocates of torture, the editorial says, are “a small group of civilian political appointees circled around Mr. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney.” And weenies every one, no doubt. Real men don’t get off on torture.

This being WaPo, the editorial writer must follow staff guidelines and find a way to blame Democrats. In this case, the Dems are criticized for orchestrating a “stunt” to “reopen — once again — the debate on prewar intelligence about Iraq” instead of working to close the secret prisons. Of course, we’ve never actually had a full debate on prewar intelligence and we desperately need one, but I guess the Dems are supposed to shut up and wait until Senate Republicans decide to have it, which will be about the same time pigs are seen flying around the capitol dome.

W Stands for Weenie

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Even David Broder gets something right now and then:

… after the fiasco of the Harriet Miers nomination and the other reversals of recent days and weeks, the Alito nomination inevitably looks like a defensive move, a lunge for the lifeboat by an embattled president to secure what is left of his political base. Instead of a consistent and principled approach to major decision making, Bush’s efforts look like off-balance grabs for whatever policy rationales he can find. The president’s opponents are emboldened by this performance, and his fellow partisans must increasingly wonder if they can afford to march to his command. …

… The conservative screamers who shot down Miers can argue that they were fighting only for a “qualified” nominee, though it is plain that many of them wanted more — a guarantee that Miers would do their bidding and overrule Roe v. Wade . But whatever the rationale, the fact is that they short-circuited the confirmation process by raising hell with Bush. Certainly there can be no greater sin in a sizable bloc of sitting senators using long-standing Senate rules to stymie a nomination than a cabal of outsiders — a lynching squad of right-wing journalists, self-sanctified religious and moral organizations, and other frustrated power-brokers — rolling over the president they all ostensibly support.

But the message that has been sent is that this president is surprisingly easy to roll.

Look, people, he’s a weenie. He can swagger and talk tough, but deep down inside he’s a sniveling little cowardly weenie.

The Toronto Star editorialized on this point a year ago; article archived here:

The President of The World is not President of The World for Life, at least not yet.

But is he a weenie?

What evidence is there of Dubya’s weenieness, apart from him chickening out when it came to going up against the filthy Commies in the skies over the Rio Grande during the unpleasantness in Vietnam?

He was afraid to speak to real, live U.S. voters except in situations where everybody had been required to sign a loyalty oath.

He was afraid to speak to the British Parliament.

The thought of being anywhere near Parliament in Ottawa has scared him speechless.

Every American who heckled him during the election campaign got arrested.

But in satellite nations like the United Kingdom, not to mention rogue countries like Canada, it’s out of his hands.

Anybody could holler anything when he’s here next week and get off scot free.

This makes him very, very anxious.

Ron Fournier writes for the Associated Press that Bush appears to have lost his way:

The building blocks of President Bush’s career — his credibility and image as a strong and competent leader _ have been severely undercut by self-inflicted wounds, leading close allies to fret about his presidency. They say he’s lost his way.

These senior Republicans, including past and current White House advisers, say they believe the president can find his way back into people’s hearts but extreme measures need to be taken. Shake up his staff, unveil fresh policies, travel the country and be more accountable for his mistakes — these and other solutions are being discussed at the highest levels of the GOP.

But Bush is too big a weenie for a make-over. As I wrote yesterday, Bush’s little permanent entourage is for him a a coccoon of co-dependency that maintains and protects his mighty ego. He’d be naked and alone without them. Major staff shakeups are out of the question.

He took a stab at a “fresh” policy recently with the bird flu proposals, but as Keith Olbermann pointed out on last night’s Countdown, Congress had already acted on most of his proposals. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa said,

Many of the points the president just made tracked very closely with what we‘ve already done here. I‘m surprised the president keeps saying he‘s going to ask Congress to do these things. We‘ve already done it. We put the money in there a week ago in the appropriations bill, for our labor health human services appropriations bill, and we addressed all those issues. We put the money in there for global surveillance, for vaccine production, and especially for state and local public health entities.

I‘m glad the president mentioned that because his budget that he sent up this year cut over $100 million from our state and local public health agencies. So I hope he‘ll come up and help us put the money back in there for that.

Well, OK, maybe he’ll come up with another fresh policy proposal.

Travel the country–he traveled the country on the recent Bamboozlepalooza Tour, did he not? And see how that turned out! And as for being more accountable for his mistakes–he said he took responsibility for Katrina mishaps, although you know he didn’t mean it. As Nancy Gibbs and Mike Allen recently wrote in Time, these days Bush seems to be blaming everybody but Laura and himself for recent White House problems. Fournier writes,

Bush accepted responsibility, but the belated and reluctant nature of his mea culpa did not go over well with Americans who like their leaders to be buck-stops-here accountable.

“I think it’s hard for the president to admit mistakes,” said Chris DePino, former chairman of the Connecticut GOP. “It would be better if he did.”

So the “highest levels of the GOP” can talk about reversing Bush’s downward spiral all it likes; Bush doesn’t have it in him to make the kind of changes that are necessary.

Instead of facing up to his problems, Bush is going to run away. At the Guardian, Simon Tisdall notes that Bush is not exactly taking a stand:

When the going gets rough, American presidents leave the country. Ronald Reagan used cold war summitry to bury the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton embraced Middle East peacemaking instead of Monica Lewinsky. And the much-berated George Bush is following suit.

After a dinner tomorrow for Charles and Camilla, Mr Bush is off to Latin America and a summit in Argentina. Later this month he will visit Japan, South Korea and China. A trip to Mongolia, where sheep matter more than Lewis Libby, Karl Rove or Dick Cheney, may provide welcome relief from Washington’s rancorous ruminations.

The flaw in this plan is that Mr. Bush’s foreign policy agenda is an even bigger mess.

Complaining of US indifference, Latin American countries have moved broadly left during his tenure; and tensions with Bolivarist Venezuela and communist Cuba have sharpened. Last year Mr Bush became the first US president to see his candidate for secretary general of the Organisation of American States fail to be appointed.

Another set of problems awaits Mr Bush in Asia, ranging from export, currency and security-related disputes with China and rising anti-Americanism in South Korea to the supposedly nuclear-armed North Korea.

These tough regional agendas do not take into account other international friction points, notably accelerating US confrontations with Iran and Syria, the ongoing conflict in Iraq, and fraught world trade tariff reduction negotiations in Hong Kong next month. On all these fronts, perceived presidential weakness is certain to be exploited.

(Singing)

Nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide …