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Bernard Weiner's Blogs -- The Archives

July 29, 2004

THE BARELY-HIDDEN RIFT AT THE DNC

How can one NOT talk about the Democratic National Convention? It's the best show in town.

Sure, its outcome is known in advance, it's a whole lot of positioning and spinning, it's a creaky ritual dance. But there also is high drama offstage and on.

Our text today is the rift behind the Dems united front for Kerry. The delegates, 95% of whom are adamantly opposed to the Iraq War, are trying to follow the party line of not bashing Bush too openly on that disastrous conflict -- even Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean bent to that line -- and instead are mostly talking about hope and health insurance, positive programs and the like. (There were a few heart-warming exceptions that laid some good wood on Bush over Iraq: President Jimmy Carter, Rev. Al Sharpton, Teddy Kennedy, and, to a certain extent, the Big Dawg, Bill Clinton's address).

The Dem delegates, and many of us on the outside looking in, are so desperate to get rid of the Bush crowd, that we're willing to give Kerry a free pass to do and say what he feels he has to do or say in order to win the election. We sense in our hearts that the true policies of Kerry with regard to Iraq, Israel-Palestine, and the use of America's sole-superpower status in geopolitics -- which we trust are somewhat different than what he is saying now -- will come to the fore after the November victory.

But there is a great deal of nervousness about Kerry's security-first approach, about his unwillingness to take on Bush frontally over Iraq, on 9/11 pre-knowledge, on the torture scandal, and so on.

MAKING PROGRESSIVES ANXIOUS

Indeed, the nerve-wracking part of the Kerry Campaign's foreign policy -- at least as described Tuesday night by keynoter Barack Obama, and Wednesday night by John Edwards and General Shalikashvili -- was the apparent decision to attack Bush from the right on Iraq rather than from the left: more stay-the-course language, more military might and the willingness to use it (with our old allies) in Iraq and elsewhere, more promise of security for Israel but not even a bone thrown to the Palestinians in return, etc.

Now, maybe all that is just a daring campaign ploy, to throw Rove and the rest of the Bushies into a tizzy, to out-hawk the hawks, but it makes me nervous no end because part of me wonders whether Kerry really believes that stuff. If so, and he were to win, the U.S. would be in for one long slide downward in world affairs, and we'd better be prepared for more terrorism emanating from the extreme Islamists in the Middle East and beyond.

Now, as I say, many of us supporting Kerry are hoping these extreme positions, some of which out-Bush Bush, are derived of campaign strategy, and will change drastically once the Dems come into power. (We may know more after Kerry's acceptance speech on Thursday.) If all this talk is a campaign ploy, let us hope that it works and that Kerry will not alienate the anti-war base that is the heart of the Democratic Party. But, at heart, it's a terribly risky and potentially self-destructive strategy -- and may be even more insidious, if truly believed.

We'll work and vote for Kerry, to be sure -- the alternative, in foreign and domestic policies, is too horrendous to do anything but work for Bush's defeat -- but we progressives know we may have to redouble our efforts for change in America's approach to the world after Election Day, regardless of who wins.

OTHERS ARE FRIGHTENED

As I say, I'm not the only one made nervous by the apparent Kerry foreign-policy direction. Here's Tikkun's Michael Lerner, for example, emailing from Boston:

The rhetorical thrust of the convention has been overwhelmingly militaristic, insisting that Kerry will be strong by sending MORE troops, giving better support to the army and to those returning from service, but failing to give any serious respect to the majority of Democrats who have served their country by NOT FIGHTING, by rejecting and demonstrating against the war. The war-makers in both parties should rejoice, but the peace forces are being isolated. All in the name of "winning."

..."Winning is everything--we've got to beat Bush." Yet to beat Bush there needs to be a coherent vision that can speak to people in a way that makes them believe that something can really be different.

This is what worries many of the delegates when you talk to them away from the pandemonium of the convention hall. They want a winner, and for that reason are willing to go with the Kerry strategy...Their great fear, expressed constantly in small conversations, is that this big gamble may not excite many of the increasing numbers of Americans who don't bother to vote at all. Looking responsible and balanced to the editorial writers and pundits may get the Democrats praise, but it may not produce the necessary votes to replace the Bushites who are unlikely to be similarly polite or restrained once the campaign heats up in the Fall--and who are not afraid to stand for what they stand for.

...The irony is that the democratic process this past Winter and Spring demonstrated that there are millions of Americans who resonate to this broader vision. They are yearning for something very different--a turn toward peace, social justice, and a whole new discourse of caring. Many of these Americans realize that the rhetoric of American superiority, exceptionalism, and our-needs-above-the-needs-of-everyone-else on the planet--a rhetoric which seems to pop up even in the talks of those thought to be most liberal or progressive in the Democratic party--is precisely what undermines our capacity as a people to envision a world of mutual interdependency. The spiritual vision of The Unity of All Being is side-lined to tin-horn patriotism that ignores all that we've learned in the past forty years.

Yet however powerful that yearning for a different world may be, it has at least temporarily been silenced by the fear of Bush. The ultimate irony may be that it is precisely allowing that vision of a different world--not just the refining of the old liberal politics that have been so uninspiring for the past thirty years--that might have been the most effective way to actually beat Bush. It may yet turn out that this Democratic Convention and the "Bush lite" strategy behind the Kerry campaign may not really be so "realistic" after all.

For more on these Bush/Iraq issues, see also David Corn's "To Bash, or Not Bash Bush? in The Nation, and the Agence-France Press story, "Kerry, Democrats Still Struggling With Iraq."

Blogger Digby first points us to a rival, mainstream journalist blogging, the Washington Post's Harold Meyerson, at the American Prospect website for some news and analysis nuggets not seen elsewhere.

Then he discusses an AFL-CIO caucus plan:

"...on the afternoon and evening of George W. Bush’s speech to the Republican convention -- Thursday, September 2 -- union activists will knock on the doors of one million union households in the 16 battleground states. I like it.

Also he mentions the likelihood of Bush calling Congress back into session right after the Dem convention, to deal with the 9/11 intelligence reforms:

(Of course, this would also have the effect of shifting attention away from the Kerry-Edwards ticket that will be nominated on Thursday.) The Democrats have no intention of having this issue taken away from them, however. [Congresswoman Jane] Harman said that tomorrow morning at 8:00 A.M., House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will convene a Democratic House Caucus meeting here in Boston, which Harman will address, to make sure the Democrats have the fullest possible proposal on the table before Bush acts.

I'm sure you are all aware that the day after the convention is like the afterglow day. The campaign found its big release the night before and smoked its metaphorical cigarette and everybody's in love. For Bush to burst through the bedroom door is pretty darned uncivil but predictable. The Dems are all together and they should be able to formulate a counter strategy.

This is interesting stuff.

Then Digby focuses on a Salon article describing a veterans' caucus meeting where Wesley Clark, Max Cleland and James Carville roused the assembled vets.

In a building riff that brought veterans to their feet, Clark said: "That flag is our flag. We served under that flag. We got up and stood reveille formation, we stood taps, we fought under that flag. We've seen men die for that flag, and we've seen men buried under that flag. No Dick Cheney or John Ashcroft or Tom DeLay is going to take that flag away from us."

Clark's fiery performance knocked the GOP-style stuffing out of the veterans' event, turning it into a Bush-bashing barnburner. By the time Carville reclaimed the stage he was in full sputtering ragin' Cajun mode. "I know the Kerry people back there are having a heart attack," Carville said. "They're saying, 'There goes Carville, the mad dog, the pit bull.'"

Uh huh.

It seems to me that the Kerry campaign's public face of cheery optimism barely holding back the furious grassroots is a pretty good strategy. Everybody keeps parroting the party line like "positive" and "upbeat" when they're talking to the celebcorps while even speakers like Jimmy Carter (?) allude to Bush's national guard service and lying. You end up wondering what they'd be saying if Kerry hadn't "given the word" to be disciplined. He shows leadership and the Democrats look like they're ready for a fight. The Republicans are frustrated because they want the Democrats to make the mistake they made in 1992 and go over the top.

It's as if the Party has Jack Nicholson's smile.

Finally, Juan Cole has a super instant-analysis blog deconstructing Bill Clinton's talk, "Clinton's Low-Key Dissing of Bush." Here are some key paragraphs:

If Bush's world is Manichaean, characterized by a division of human beings into Good and Evil, the Democrats' world is organic, capable of being molded into a smoothly functioning whole. The Manichaean world-view implies warfare, the vision of organic unity allows for peace.

Clinton contrasted the cooperative and idealistic vision of the Democrats with what he depicted as a selfish and cynical opportunism among Republicans:

"We Democrats want to build a world and an America of shared responsibilities and shared benefits. We want a world with more global cooperation where we act alone only when we absolutely have to. We think the role of government should be to give people the tools to create the conditions to make the most of their own lives. And we think everybody should have that chance.

On the other hand, the Republicans in Washington believe that America should be run by the right people — their people — in a world in which America acts unilaterally when we can and cooperates when we have to . . ."

Clinton points to a moment of betrayal, when Bush failed to live up to the expectations of national unity and altruism raised by September 11:

"The president had an amazing opportunity to bring the country together under his slogan of compassionate conservatism and to unite the world in the struggle against terror. Instead, he and his congressional allies made a very different choice. They chose to use that moment of unity to try to push the country too far to the right and to walk away from our allies, not only in attacking Iraq before the weapons inspectors had finished their work, but in withdrawing American support for the climate change treaty and for the international court on war criminals and for the anti-ballistic missile treaty and from the nuclear test ban treaty. Now, now at a time when we're trying to get other people to give up nuclear and biological and chemical weapons, they are trying to develop two new nuclear weapons which they say we might use first."

The attack on Bush is not that he went to war against Iraq. It is that he did so virtually unilaterally, "walking away from our allies." This is a genteel way of saying that the Bush administration humiliated and demeaned France, Germany and later Spain, for not going along with the war or for later withdrawing from it in the case of Spain. Note that Clinton or his speech writer keep the focus on Bush, not foregrounding the allies (France is not popular). The crime is to "walk away" from old friends. Although complaints about this abandonment of old Europe would have had no resonance a year ago, by now it is obvious that it would be awfully nice to have a division each from France and Germany in Iraq, and that the Bush administration's gratuitous insults made it highly unlikely that such help will be forthcoming.

Likewise, the timing of the war rather than the war itself is criticized. The Bush administration orchestrated a UN resolution that put the weapons inspectors back in Iraq, but then attacked "Iraq before the weapons inspectors had finished their work." This impatient unilateralism also led, Clinton said, to the repudiation of Kyoto and other important international treaties. Bush is depicted as rash, hotheaded, impatient, and a dangerous loner.

Now Clinton ties the foreign misadventure to the domestic economy: "At home, the president and the Republican Congress have made equally fateful choices, which they also deeply believe in. For the first time when America was in a war footing in our whole history, they gave two huge tax cuts, nearly half of which went to the top 1 percent of us."

Clinton is saying that you were cheated out of your fair share of the tax break, a tax break that probably shouldn't have been given in the first place because of the extra demands of the war that shouldn't have been fought. The cumulative effect is to raise fears that a series of grave policy errors has been committed and that, worse, it has deleteriously affected you in the pocket book. It is one thing to have the US government mucking things up overseas. It is another for it to cheat you out of your fair share of a tax break.

I suspect that the Kerry-Edwards campaign will pick up on Clinton's themes. Not the war but the rush to war and unilateralism will be critiqued. Not the troops but the Bush administration officials will be faulted. The criticism will be subtle rather than blunt, and the theme will be hope rather than fear.

July 26, 2004

BushCheney: Alzheimer's/Dementia?

I was holding my mom's hand the other day in her care-facility ward (she's 93), when it hit me: In ways very similar to my mother's condition, America is in such bad political and social shape because it, too, had contracted Alzheimer's Disease.

Consider my mom's history: She has been consumed by fright in her later years, a paranoia usually manifested in how enemies were going to kill her or steal from her. She would explode in anger, or engage in non-sequitur conversations, at odd moments. She retreated into a corrosive sort of narcissism, which meant she was fairly isolated, since others didn't want much to do with her, leaving her fairly friendless. Sometimes, she would shout and strike out at others. Often, she would have vivid conversations in her mind with strangers, or pick up newspaper headlines on the ceiling over her bed.

She lost her short-term memory, repeating phrases and thoughts she had just uttered moments before. She lost her middle-range memory, of things that happened recently or not too long ago. Then she lost her long-term memory, of events from years and years back. When she was still able to walk, she'd occasionally wander into neighbors' apartments and use their toilets, frightening the hell out of them when they'd open the bathroom door. And so on.

And now the rough comparisons -- some referring to our culture as a whole, many to actions and behaviors of the Bush Administration -- bold-faced where appropriate:

* The neo-conservatives at the center of power in the Bush Administration -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Khalidad, et al. -- have a supremely negative view of the world, which, in shorthand, translates into a feeling that the world is a place of constant dread and fright, filled with those wishing to attack us and/or steal our goodies. Therefore, do unto others before they do it unto you -- especially if they're weak and can barely defend themselves.

* Other nations of the world have watched Bush&Co. lash out at its enemies, real and imagined -- with thousands of innocent civilians dying in the process -- and are wary of doing anything that could enrage the American superpower into unleashing its anger.

* Bush constantly engages in non sequiturs when talking, or in strange usages, or in made-up words.

* Under the neo-con theories dominating the Bush Administration, a dangerous form of narcissism has resulted in isolation of the U.S. from the rest of the world. The U.S. engages in unilateral behaviors such as starting wars, withdrawing from treaties, humiliating and insulting former allies, and then has to face the truth that few foreign leaders or populations like America. But Bush&Co. don't care: You're either with us or with the terrorists, so there.

* Bush and Cheney constantly repeat statements, even though they bear no resemblance to reality. Bush once admitted that Saddam had no connection to 9/11, for example, but then apparently couldn't remember that he'd said that and continued to suggest the connection. All the investigating bodies have made clear that Saddam had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of 9/11, but Bush and Cheney and others continue to conflate the two. Likewise, the official investigating bodies have determined that Al-Qaida and Iraq had minimal contacts (and certainly no operational links) in the years leading up to 9/11 and the current Iraq War, but the Bush folks continue to suggest otherwise. Bad short-term memory loss.

* Middle-term and long-term memory losses continue in evidence as well. Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger spent hours warning the incoming Bush Administration about Osama bin Laden and likely attacks by al-Qaida directed at the U.S. But once they assumed power -- and even when counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and CIA Director George Tenet were telling them an attack was imminent -- they ignored the advice and set up their own commission to "study" the threat of terrorism. The chairman of that group, someone named Dick Cheney, apparently forgot all about that commission's mandate, since it never met.

* The U.S. war in Vietnam in the -'60s and '70s provided numerous lessons for every administration since. Every President remembered those lessons, and made sure not to make the same mistakes again. But one Administration did forget that history. Even with Vietnam veteran Colin Powell as Secretary of State, George W. Bush's war-machine forgot that humiliating episode and proceeded to make the same mistakes.

It attacked a country about which it knew very little, used a much-too-small attack force, outfitted them poorly and with confusing battle plans, antagonized the local citizenry (many of whom then joined the guerrillas), and had no exit strategy in place. And, as in Vietnam, it thought its overwhelming firepower eventually would rule the day, so no need to consider negotiations or withdrawing its forces -- until the situation got totally out of hand and it had to agree to terms it could have accepted years before (thus saving many thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives) and withdrew its forces and supporters in a humiliating, chaotic retreat.

* Bush admits that he hears voices from the beyond, urging him to smite the evildoers. "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East," he told leaders in the Middle East; More recently, he told an Amish group that he believes "God speaks through me."

* As with my mom, sometimes the Bush Administration wanders into someone's house or back yard and leaves a terrible, stinky mess there. In Afghanistan and Iraq, for example. Others are expected to come along after them, and pick up the excrement. These often are former allies, who resent the shoveling task.

So you see, even though the parallels are not exact, when a country's leaders contract Alzheimer's and forgets their nation's true and best values -- and its history -- a lot of damage can be done, endangering so many people.

The people responsible for ruining the reputation of the United States really need help. They bumble around, creating havoc wherever they go; they need to be in a care-facility, with numerous assisted-living, and assisted-thinking, aides. On November 2, we will be their care assistants, telling them that they can no longer be permitted to drive the state, that they will have to turn over their keys of power to others.

Give to the Alzheimer's Foundation, help us find a cure. But until that time, we must ensure that more responsible leaders take over from those too debilitated to carry on in a stable, helpful fashion. Our country and its glorious institutions and history are too important to leave in the hands of individuals whose erratic behavior threatens to take us all down with them.

THE 9/11 PANEL'S REPORT

The detailed facts are there in the 9/11 Commission's report -- ones devastating to the lies and distortions of the Bush Administration -- but the fix was in and so no blame is assigned to anybody by name. (For a host of super articles on this topic, go to our new "9/11 Commission Report" page)

Since he was not singled out for most of the 9/11 blame, Bush feels he is insulated on the campaign trail from effective criticism. And he'll be right if Kerry & Edwards play nice little campaigners and don't go for the exposed jugulars of Bush & Cheney & Rumsfeld & Ashcroft.

The Democrats, bless their naive little hearts, permitted themselves to get hustled big time by agreeing that the final part of the 9/11 Commission's work -- the most important part of its job, reporting on how Bush&Co. misused the corrupted and phony intelligence it did receive -- will be issued only AFTER the election!

Talk about being snookered! It's almost like the Democrats want to lose the election, still playing by the rules of legislative civility when the GOP extremists long ago stomped all over that concept and dumped it in the Tidal Basin.

All Kerry-Edwards have to do is to use the facts published in its report -- asserting clearly that despite BushCheney's constant and continuing suggestions to the contrary, there was no meaningful or operational connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida and no connection at all to 9/11 -- and let the voters decide.

We shall see. All indications are, as I write this on the day the Democratic National Convention opens, that the conclave will be a feel-good affair, with no heavy mortar rounds lobbed at the Bush Administration.

The campaign seems to be operating on the following game-plan: The vote is going to be razor-close, especially if Nader hangs in there, and thus the election will be decided by the very small slice of independent voters. So, all comments will be aimed at getting those swing voters to like us, thus no angry rhetoric and roundhouse rights aimed at the Republican candidates.

I see it differently. The momentum in state after state, especially in key toss-up states -- such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Arizona, Nevada -- is swinging more and more to Kerry. I think, if we keep expanding our base and working our butts off for the next three months, Kerry may well win in an Electoral College landslide.

So much depends on the acceptance speech Kerry delivers at the Convention. Can he generate anything even resembling charisma? Can he deliver short, pithy, punchy, sound-bite arguments? Will he evidence any desire to take off the gloves and go for Bush's very vulnerable chin?

We shall see.

THE BLOGGERS AMONG US

A big media story at the Convention is the officially-sanctioned presence, for the first time, of website political bloggers. Not much news will come out of their convention blogs (remember, they are not trained as reporters; they are opinionated political writers), but that's not why this is a story.

The reason this story is of interest is that it validates the influence and impact of the internet -- much as Howard Dean's smooth, effective internet presence did, especially in organizing folks around the country and raising lots of money, quickly, for the campaign. Or the amazing impact of groups such as MoveOn.org . (See Matt Bai's fascinating "Wiring the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy").

These bloggers -- such as Josh Marshall, Steve Gilliard, Kos, Atrios, Corrente, Digby, et al. -- are extremely influential in focusing on items buried by the conglomerate-owned mass-media, reporting instantaneous political happenings, cogently analyzing the events and spin of the day, etc. In this, especially for the growing body of younger citizens who get their political education via bloggers and Jon Stewart's "Daily Show," they rival in some ways the traditional influence of veteran reporters and large newspapers.

Finally, as Steve Gilliard writes below, we should look at bloggers' presence at the DNC Convention as a tryout for them, a way of learning how to maneuver away from their virtual desks in the actual political labyrinth that is contemporary politics. Their mettle truly will be tested when they blog next month from the Republican National Convention in New York, where there will be real news inside the hall, and likely real violence outside on the streets.

Enough from me. Check out Steve Gilliard and Josh Marshall on the blogging phenomenon, linked to below. And Robert Dreyfuss on one aspect of the 9/11 Commission's report.

Excerpts from Steve Gilliard's insightful piece on bloggers, "Blogging Boston Part II," about how and why we do what we do, and what it means in terms of those covering the conventions. Here's part of his conclusion:

If bloggers are going to learn how to cover a spot news event, this is the place and time, a relatively friendly event, lots of activity and a small city. Some folks will shine, some will not, but that's the way it is with news. Will we supplant the reporters? No. Because they will do what they do. Will there be a fresh voice for the news? Not really, because this isn't really a news event, so fresh is unlikely.

But, the reason people need to blog the DNC, and there are a lot more than 30 people going to cover this thing, is to learn what they can and cannot do. This is a good way to break into the big time of reporting on things and not just commenting on them. People shouldn't judge the DNC as a test of bloggers, per se, but a training experience, one hopes more like Taranto than Dieppe. There are a lot of smart, thoughtful people blogging, but few who have ever covered spot news.

Why?

Because the RNC will be serious business. There won't be time to learn and to figure things out. I expect serious confrontations and some open hostility to the RNC and their delegates. People will have to know what kind of risk they feel comfortable with, and things they can deal with. I wouldn't send any inexperienced people into New York's streets in August. It won't be smiles and pats on the back.

Josh Marshall www.talkingpointsmemo.com is puzzled by the swiftness with which blogging has gone mainstream, the dangers therein, and what their presence at the DNC might mean:

When I see the mainest of mainstream outfits buying into the [blog] concept or the model, I really don't know what to think. The best way I can describe my reaction is some mix of puzzlement and incredulity.

I've always thought of this as just a vehicle for writing -- a mix of reporting and opinion journalism, done in a format that allows a maximum degree of flexibility, not bound by limitations of space -- the need to write long or short -- or any of the confining genre requirements that define conventional journalism.

The whole thing is mystifying to me.

Over at Tom Paine.com, Robert Dreyfuss examines one aspect of the 9/11 Commission's Report:

Five Things Wrong With The 9/11 Report

I’m going to spend some time this week pointing out five things wrong with the 9/11 Commission report—one each day. A thorough job could be, well, 567 pages long, which is the size of that bulky, now-a-best-seller tome. It has some good stuff in it, mostly in the form of on-the-record documentation. But there are many flaws, some of which are dangerous ones.

So what’s wrong?

Thing One. There is a scary rush to judgment about implementing the Big Brother-like recommendations of the commission. You wouldn’t think that officials and members of Congress would pay that much attention to the opinion of a Republican governor of New Jersey et al. when it comes to matters of reorganizing the intelligence community. But the politicians don’t want to be accused of dragging their heels when it comes to implementing all 567 pages, in case there is a pre-election terrorist incident. Adding fuel to the fire are the families of the 9/11 victims. Let’s be honest here—having endured the tragedy of a terrorist attack doesn’t make you an expert in fighting terrorism. The commission’s proposal for reorganizing intelligence is wrong-headed and scary. It would create a Big Brother that even the authors of the USA PATRIOT Act wouldn’t have dreamed of.

First, the commission proposes the creation of a National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). It would have two functions: intelligence and operations. Of its intelligence function, the commission says: “The NCTC should lead strategic analysis, pooling all-source intelligence, foreign and domestic, about transnational terrorist organizations of global reach.” Operationally, “The NCTC should perform joint planning. The plans would assign operational responsibilities to lead agencies, such as State, the CIA, the FBI, Defense and its combatant commands, Homeland Security, and other agencies.” According to the commission, the head of the NCTC “must have the right to concur in the choices of personnel to lead the operating entities of departments and agencies focused on counterterrorism, specifically to include the head of the Counterterrorist Center, the head of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, the commanders of the Defense Department’s Special Operations Command and Northern Command, and the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism."

Then the commission would couple this all-powerful new entity with the creation of a National Intelligence Director. The NID would be an intelligence czar, overseeing both foreign and domestic intelligence collection and analysis. "The National Intelligence Director must be able to directly oversee intelligence collection inside the United States.” The NID would also have authority to “approve and submit nominations to the president of the individuals who would lead the CIA, DIA, FBI Intelligence Office, NSA, NGA, NRO, [parts of] Homeland Security and other national intelligence capabilities.” And the NID would control their budgets. The NID would also oversee covert operations. And: “The head of the NCTC would report to the national intelligence director.”

In tandem, the NCTC and the NID would create an intelligence power of truly awesome scope. Because terrorism is essentially a political crime, as the ACLU reminds us constantly, counterterrorist investigations always involve politics, dissidents and rebels. It’s not like investigating crimes, or like intelligence on war-making capabilities of nations. Just as the Patriot Act knocked down the “wall” between the CIA and the FBI, making it far easier to conduct domestic spying operations against American citizens not suspected of a crime, the NCTC-NID combination would concentrate the power to carry out domestic spying in all-powerful nexus, located (where?) in the White House. The NID would report directly to the president, or to the “POTUS,” in the pompous wiring diagram in the commission report. Says the report: “The intelligence entity inside the NCTC .. would sit there alongside the operations management unit, … with both making up the NCTC, in the Executive Office of the President.”

Such changes in our foreign and domestic spying capabilities cannot, and should not, even be considered in the months before a presidential election, with each party competing with the other to show how tough on terrorism they are. I expect that normal bureaucratic resistance will happily block the commission's radical plan this year, but you never know. One thing we do know: If Osama bin Laden & Co. are planning some attack this year, the commission's Big Brother plan won’t stop them—whether it’s enacted or not.

July 23, 2004

Are You Better Off?

Years ago, I was friends with, and often exchanged long political letters with, the late documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio ("Point of Order," "In the Year of the Pig," "Millhouse: A White Comedy," "Rush to Judgment," etc.). Given that he was a serious leftist, he shocked me one day at lunch by pulling out the Wall Street Journal and flipping through the back pages.

I asked him what on earth he -- who liked to call himself a revolutionary -- thought he was doing subscribing to, and reading, the Wall Street Journal. His answer was wise: "Anyone can read and quote from The Nation or New Republic or Daily Worker, but when I want to know what's going on in the economy or in politics, I read the Wall Street Journal. The little items in the back of the paper, if you know how to read them, often tell me what's really going on in the elite corridors of power in this country and the world. Plus, it's always better to quote the rightwing publications; they can't be dismissed as easily."

I learned a lot from "de" (pronounced "dee") over the years, and that insight affected the way I learned to read newspapers. Obviously, I pay attention to the big stories on the front pages, but it's often the paragraphs buried inside those stories, sometimes at the very end of a long piece, that contain the nuggets you need to know. I.F. Stone, another of my journalistic heroes and role-models, operated along the same lines, always ripping the smaller stories out of some newspaper or other and putting them in his pocket for later use.

So, with that intro, here are the key paragraphs from this week's Wall Street Journal story that needs to be read and folded into the presidential campaign. Warning: Class warfare alert! Class warfare alert! (From the WSJ no less! Thanks, de.)

With the U.S. economy expanding and the labor market improving, it isn't clear how well the Democrats' message of a divided America will resonate with voters this fall. But many economists believe the economic recovery has indeed taken two tracks...

Upper-income families, who pay the most in taxes and reaped the largest gains from the tax cuts President Bush championed, drove a surge of consumer spending a year ago that helped to rev up the recovery. Wealthier households also have been big beneficiaries of the stronger stock market, higher corporate profits, bigger dividend payments and the boom in housing.

Lower and middle-income households have benefited from some of these trends, but not nearly as much. For them paychecks and day-to-day living expenses have a much bigger effect. Many have been squeezed, with wages under pressure and with gasoline and food prices higher. The resulting two-tier recovery is showing up in vivid detail in the way Americans are spending their money.

..."To date, the [recovery's] primary beneficiaries have been upper-income households," concludes Dean Maki, a J.P. Morgan Chase (and former Federal Reserve) economist who has studied the ways that changes in wealth affect spending. In research he sent to clients this month, Mr. Maki said, "Two of the main factors supporting spending over the past year, tax cuts and increases in [stock] wealth, have sharply benefited upper income households relative to others."

For more on this important story, see Billmon's long piece, "Building a Bridge to the 19th Century," along with the story above it, "Minimum Wage."

SANDY BERGER/JOE WILSON FLAPS

How to interpret what's happening in Iraq, the controversies surrounding Joseph Wilson, Sandy Berger, Martha Stewart, et al? Is there some fire there or just a lot of Bush Campaign smoke?

It seems clear to me that in order to understand what's happening in all these, and other, areas of politics, you have to peer through the lens of November 2. Certainly, that's how Rove sees the world.

What I mean is that everything, EVERYTHING, done by the Bush Administration these days is for one purpose and one purpose only: to get Bush back in the White House for another term. If they're successful, they can revert back to their normal modus operandi -- further amassing of police-power and slicing away of Constitutional protections at home, and abroad moving toward "regime change" in Syria and Iran and Cuba

But they can not begin to implement those aggressive agendas unless they win the election. Ergo, go on the offensive, change the subject of discussion, get the Bush-friendly mass media on board to snow the public.

* For example, the attempt to alter Iraq news to benefit Bush's campaign, by "handing over" something termed "full sovereignty" to the U.S.-friendly interim government. The entire object of that enterprise was to get the Iraq mayhem off the front pages, or, if not that, have Iraqis dying and getting maimed, not American troops. (As it turns out, more U.S. troops have died in July already, AFTER the handover, than in all of June.)

* In the case of Berger and Wilson, it's important to harass and destroy the reputations of these two guys because they have been damaging Bush&Co. on 9/11 pre-knowledge and the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame (Wilson's wife).

Rove figures he can get a two-for-one by sliming Berger and Wilson, because both are tied to the Kerry campaign, as foreign-policy consultants.

Berger, Clinton's National Security Advisor, told the incoming Bush administration that their major security concern would be terrorism as plotted by Osama bin Laden; the Bushies ignored the warning. If Berger can be shown to be a liar and endangering "national security" himself, by having taken classified documents home with him, Bush's pre-9/11 vulnerability can be diminished. At least, that's their hope.

Likewise, if they can make Wilson out to be a liar, on any small detail of his story, they hope they can take attention away from the felonious outing of a covert CIA operative (by two "senior Administration officials") by putting it on Wilson. It is especially important to do that now, just before the indictments are issued in the Plame case.

Now, does this mean that Berger and Wilson -- and let's now bring Martha Stewart into the mix as well -- are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing? No. But let's keep our eyes on the ball here and not get distracted: Whatever these folks did or didn't do is not what's at issue here; what IS at issue are the crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush Administration in: outing a covert CIA operative, in ignoring the clear-and-present-danger warnings about a coming al-Qaida attack, in continuing to carry out a war against Iraq based on lies and deception that is getting hundreds of troops and Iraqi civilians slaughtered each week.

One can hope that seeing how Bush&Co. are trying to shift the focus of media attack to their opponents, Democrats and those associated with Kerry will take special care to keep their noses clean. Don't give the Bush forces any opening, no matter how small, to change the subject away from Bush&Co's incompetence, misrule, and reckless domestic and foreign policies.

Enough from me. Here's more on some of these topics by fellow bloggers Corrente, Kos, Billmon, Kevin Drum, Juan Cole, and Josh Marshall.

Over at Corrente, Lambert has this take on the Berger affair:

Gee, I wonder if the whole Berger smear could be politically motivated?

Bush:

President Bush on Wednesday described the federal inquiry into Clinton White House national security adviser Sandy Berger's mishandling of classified documents as "a very serious matter."

The FBI:

But a government official who asked not to be identified because of the political sensitivity of the matter said that FBI agents did not regard the Berger inquiry as "a front-burner-type of investigation." (via USA Today).

The fish really does rot from the head, doesn't it?

Kevin Drum skewers the rightwing obsession with the Berger case, noting how this behavior differs from what they did -- nothing -- in the Plame case.

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW....Tom Davis is the Republican chairman of the House Government Reform Committee. Among other things, this means he's the point man for congressional investigations of governmental misdeeds.

Here is Tom Davis on his plans to open an investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, which was first exposed by David Corn on July 16, 2003:

July 17, 2003: Nothing.

October 3, 2003: "I know [John] Ashcroft very well, and I'm sure he'll go by the book." Um, OK. Nonetheless, he also said he was "gearing up" to lead an investigation of the matter. "It's our obligation to do so. This is something we can't tolerate."

January 23, 2004: "If they don't find it, we will. It will be looked at and second-guessed. It's a troubling and serious violation." But we'll still wait on gearing up that investigation.

July 21, 2004: Still gearing up. No investigation yet.

Two days ago, on July 19, 2004, AP reported that former NSA Sandy Berger had removed some classified documents from the National Archives and is the subject of an active FBI investigation. How does Davis feel about this?

July 21, 2004: Congress has "a constitutional responsibility to find out what happened and why. At best, we're looking at tremendously irresponsible handling of highly classified information." An investigation is underway.

Hey! Tom Davis can move mighty quickly when he puts his mind to it! I wonder what the difference between these two cases is?

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who has been equally sanguine about the FBI's ability to investigate the Plame case, is also deeply concerned.

Kos takes a long look:

I have admittedly ignored the Sandy Berger thing. Everything I read indicated that he may have done something stupid, but if Ashcroft's Justice Department wasn't interested in pursuing a case, it couldn't be anything serious.

Of course, the GOP hysteria over the topic isn't really about anything Berger did. It's about fear of the upcoming 9/11 report. Stealing this from the Center for American Progress:

One day before the bipartisan 9/11 Commission is scheduled to release its final report, Bush administration allies on Capitol Hill have put their partisan spin machine into high-gear. Despite overwhelming evidence that President Bush underfunded counter-terrorism, ignored repeated memos warning of an imminent attack by Osama bin Laden, and took one of the longest vacations in presidential history while the pre-9/11 security threat boiled, Republicans are seeking to blame 9/11 on the Clinton administration even before the Commission's report has been published. Their current target: former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who in October 2003 acknowledged inadvertently losing two documents from the National Archives. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist claimed Berger was trying to deceive the 9/11 Commission. They failed to mention the Commission refuted that charge, and that even the Bush Justice Department admits the incident is so innocuous, that CBS News reports "law enforcement sources say they don't expect any criminal charges will be filed."

REPUBLICANS ADMIT THE TIMING SMELLS: CBS News reported last night that even Republicans "say the timing of the investigation's disclosure smells like politics, leaked to the press just two days before the 9/11 Commission report comes out." Republican strategist Eddie Mahe said, "somebody is manipulating the process." Why? Because, as the WP reports, the final report by the commission concludes Iraq "never established operational ties" with al Qaeda. In other words, the Commission is about to formally conclude that one of the two major justifications the administration gave for war in Iraq was a fraud. With the WMD justification also proving false, the administration is desperate to distract from polls that show a majority of Americans say the war was a mistake. Even more troubling for the White House, almost half the public now says the White House "deliberately misled" America about Iraq. It was this fear that the Commission would embarrass the Bush administration that led the White House to oppose its creation.   And it is no surprise that yesterday Commission Chairman Tom Kean admitted that some wanted the 9/11 Commission to fail.

MOTIVE ACCUSATIONS JUST PLAIN SILLY: Reuters reports "Republicans accused Berger of taking the documents so they could be used by the Kerry campaign at a news conference on port security." Said Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA): "Right after the documents were taken, John Kerry held a photo op and attacked the president on port security. The documents that were taken may have been utilized for that press conference." Although the timing in this fable may be accurate, one thing is clear: neither Kerry nor any citizen in America needs secret documents from the National Archives to know the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress have dangerously underfunded seaport and airport security. As American Progress fellow PJ Crowley notes, while the Coast Guard has said it needs $7.5 billion for key port security upgrades, the White House has requested just $45 million this year. Similarly, as the Century Foundation reports, while "the Transportation Security Administration estimates there is a 35% to 65% chance that terrorists are planning to place a bomb in the cargo of a U.S. passenger plane" the administration has only provided funding to make sure that 5% of air cargo is screened.

WHERE IS THE LEAK OUTRAGE?: CBS News reports the controversy "was triggered by a carefully orchestrated leak" about the FBI's investigation of the matter. Yet, top administration officials and Republicans who have previously expressed outrage about leaks were nowhere to be found. There was no statement of outrage or call for an investigation from Attorney General John Ashcroft who in 2001 said leaks "do substantial damage to the security interests of the nation." Similarly, there was nothing from the Chambliss, who one year ago said "leaks have always been a problem and continue to be a problem." And it was all quiet at the Pentagon, despite Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stating last year that leaks are "disgraceful, they're unprofessional, they're dangerous."

NO SIMILAR OUTRAGE ABOUT BUSH RECORDS BEING DESTROYED: Even as Rush Limbaugh and the GOP's congressional leadership insinuate without proof that Berger was deliberately trying to destroy records, they have made little mention about last week's disclosure that President Bush's key military draft records were destroyed by Pentagon officials. The documents in question would have proven whether the President was lying about whether he fulfilled his military service that allowed him to avoid going to Vietnam. The destruction of the documents has forced the Associated Press to sue for copies of them, which are legally required to exist in the Texas archives. Despite promises to release all documents, the president has refused to release the Texas copies.

Josh Marshall provides more context for the whole affair:

Hmmm. Imagine that. Senior officials at the White House Counsel's Office (perhaps understandable) and "several top aides to" the president (not so understandable) were given a heads-up about the Berger investigation months ago.

So says the New York Times.

Meanwhile, the Post has a tangled article about how Archives staffers allegedly became suspicious of Berger while he was reviewing the documents and even started monitoring him. Calling the piece 'tangled' isn't necessarily a criticism. The reporters clearly have two very conflicting versions of events and are trying to explain both -- and point out the ways they contradict. The piece reads as if the authors' themselves are uncertain which version to credit. What's also clear from the Post article is that not only law enforcement officials but also one 'government source' are leaking like crazy about this story.

The story the leakers tell in the Post story certainly seems hard to reconcile with inadvertence.

Finally, USA Today says that FBI agents involved in the case didn't think the whole thing was particularly serious.

Finally a case President Bush is eager to see investigated. Bush on Berger: "This is a very serious matter that will be fully investigated by the Justice Department."

As we said earlier, desperate.

Winning campaigns don't put the candidate in the mud.

Apropos of my earlier post about Republican desperation, here's Charlie Cook of the Cook Report on the state of the presidential race ...

Last week in this space, I discounted the widely held view that the knotted polling numbers between Bush and Kerry meant that the race itself was even. I argued that given the fact that well-known incumbents with a defined record rarely get many undecided voters -- a quarter to a third at an absolute maximum -- an incumbent in a very stable race essentially tied at 45 percent was actually anything but in an even-money situation. "What you see is what you get" is an old expression for an incumbent's trial heat figures, meaning very few undecided voters fall that way.

......This is certainly not to predict that Bush is going to lose, that this race is over or that other events and developments will not have an enormous impact on this race. The point is that this race has settled into a place that is not at all good for an incumbent, is remarkably stable, and one that is terrifying many Republican lawmakers, operatives and activists. But in a typically Republican fashion, they are too polite and disciplined to talk about it much publicly.

From a Press Release just out from Speaker Hastert ...

Speaker Hastert on Congressional Investigation Regarding National Security and Sandy Berger

(Washington D.C.) Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) today made the following statement:

"Like many Americans concerned about our national security, I look forward to learning more from the House Government Reform Committee's investigation into the wayward actions by Sandy Berger. The American people deserve to know why Mr. Berger apparently skirted the law and removed highly classified terrorism documents, purportedly in his pants, from a secure reading room at the National Archives and then proceeded to lose or destroy some of them.

"How could President Clinton's former National Security Advisor be so cavalier?

"Was Mr. Berger trying to cover-up key facts regarding intelligence failures during his watch?

"What happened to those missing documents?

"Whose hands did they fall into?

"What kind of security risk does that pose to Americans today?

"I know Chairman Tom Davis (R-VA) will work to get the full truth of what really happened and help all of us better understand why Sandy Berger, a person who should fully understand the gravity and importance of sensitive national security materials, would operate with such overt negligence and apparent disregard for the law."

Any Democrat has to see red when reading those words -- in fact, I'm tempted to say anyone with more than a bit of decency.

But I post them because critics of the administration, whatever their anger or indignation over those comments, should actually greet all this with a smile.

There's no doubt this Berger imbroglio has thrown the Dems seriously off message for a couple days. And it's embarrassing. There's no denying it. But Hastert's words are those of folks who are desperate -- real desperate. Folks looking at November 2nd, not liking at all what they see, and casting about for anything that will change the political lay of the land.

It's cornered, wounded animal time.

Finally, Juan Cole has a go at aspects of the 9/11 Commission's final report:

The September 11 Panel will issue its findings on Thursday. It notes 10 points at which the US made key mistakes that might have stopped Bin Laden's plot. Four of these were under Clinton and 6 under Bush.

Bush came out today and said that if he had known what was coming, he would have expended every effort to stop it, and that so would have Clinton. This statement is, despite its facade of fair-mindedness, so many weasel words. Of course Bush would have tried to stop 9/11 if he had known it was coming.

The question is, "Should he have known it was coming?"

The answer is, "Yes!"

We now know that Bush and his administration came into office obsessed with Iraq. Cheney was looking at maps of Iraq oil fields and muttering about opportunities for US companies there, already in January or February of 2001.

Wolfowitz contradicted counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke when the latter spoke of the al-Qaeda threat, insisting that the preeminent threat of terrorism against the US came from Iraq, and indicating he accepted Laurie Mylroie's crackpot conspiracy theory that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Towers bombing. If you believe crackpot theories instead of focusing on the reality--that was an al-Qaeda operation mainly carried out by al-Gamaa al-Islamiyyah, an Egyptian terrorist component allied with Bin Laden-- then you will concentrate on the wrong threat.

Even after the attacks on September 11, Bush was obsessing about Iraq.

Wolfowitz lied to him and said that there was a 10 to 50% chance that Iraq was behind them. (On what evidence? The hijackers were obviously al-Qaeda, and no operational links between al-Qaeda and Iraq had ever been found).

Rumsfeld initially rejected an attack on al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, saying there were "no good targets" in Afghanistan. (What about 40 al-Qaeda bases that had trained the 9/11 hijackers and other terrorists gunning for the United States??) The Pentagon did not even have a plan for dealing with Afghanistan or al-Qaeda that it could pull off the shelf, according to Bob Woodward.

Bush did not have his eye on the ball. Neither did Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Wolfowitz. They were playing Captain Ahab to Saddam's great white whale.

Imperial Hubris makes the case that lots of people in the CIA and counter-terrorism divisions elsewhere in the US government knew all about Bin Laden and the threat he posed. They were from all accounts marginalized and not listened to. Bush demoted Dick Clarke, among the most vocal and focused of the al-Qaeda experts, from his cabinet. Dick could never thereafter get any real cooperation from the cabinet officers, who outranked him, and he could not convince them to go to battle stations in the summer of 2001 when George Tenet's hair was "on fire" about the excited chatter the CIA was picking up from radical Islamist terrorists.

As for the Clinton administration, let me say one thing in its defense. Clinton had worked out a deal with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in summer of 1999 that would have allowed the US to send a Special Ops team in after Bin Laden in Qandahar, based from Pakistan. I presume you need the Pakistan base for rescue operations in case anything went wrong. You also need Pakistani air space. The plan was all set and could have succeeded.

But in fall of 1999, Gen. Pervez Musharraf made a coup against Nawaz Sharif. The Pakistani army was rife with elements protective of the Taliban, and the new military government reneged on the deal. Musharraf told Clinton he couldn't use Pakistani soil or air space to send the team in against Bin Laden.

Look at a map and you try to figure out how, in fall of 1999, you could possibly pull off such an operation without Pakistani facilities. Of course, you could just go in by main force. But for those of you tempted in that direction, please look up Carter's Tabas operation. It should be easily googled.
Clinton tried, and tried hard. The gods weren't with us on that one.

July 19, 2004

T-Shirt "Terrorists"

Many HardRightists think that those of us who cherish civil liberties are paranoid about the tone set by the Patriot Act and other such draconian measures emanating from the Bush Administration. They tend to justify the slicing away of Constitutional protections as necessary given the terrorist threat to our national security.

But how can they possibly justify the infringement of free speech involved when a couple wearing anti-Bush T-shirts were handcuffed and thrown out of a public gathering where Bush was to address the crowd? That's what happened to Nicole and Jeff Rank at a West Virginia rally on (of all appropriate days) the 4th of July.

Another example: a local Wisconsin politico, Jayson Nelson, was running late to attend a political speech by Bush. He had just come from a Kerry rally and grabbed his heavy, long-sleeved shirt and buttoned it all the way to the top. Someone tipped off the Secret Service, or maybe spied the tiny bit of green t-shirt poking above the highest button. He was unceremoniously ushered to the Secret Service and ejected.

In both cases, ordinary citizens, had come to hear Mr. Bush speak, to hear what he had to say. They caused no disruption, nor did they come there with intent to. But they were denied the right to peaceably assemble with other citizens, with whom they might or might not agree, to partake of a public (not a private) event. But they were ejected anyway. The first pair were handcuffed and taken to jail (a judge later dismissed their trespassing charge); the second, Nelson, said: “I was told that no law was broken, but I was nearly treated like a criminal for the terrible crime of wearing a T-shirt.”

In both cases, when confronted, the Secret Service agreed that the citizens had every constitutional right to be there, and the guards had no right to throw them out. But they were ejected anyway. (Which action accomplished its aim, to frighten others who witnessed the arrests from taking similar action, keeping them docile.)

"WHO CARES WHAT YOU THINK?"

But these cases are not unique. There are scads of such reports, of visits from the FBI because of statements opposed to Bush policies, of being ejected from public gatherings, of being refused the right to fly, and so on.

One expects such behavior from Bush -- insecure at his core, he's notoriously thin-skinned, and brooks no dissent. Let us not forget the incident early in his tenure, when a citizen shook his hand when Bush came to town and asked him a critical question about his policy, and Bush replied "Who cares what you think?"   It's been the same ever since.

When Bush has to appear in a non-structured event -- that is, when he's not speaking to groups of invited pro-Bush citizens: military troops, defense contractors, neo-conservative gatherings, Christian Right congregations, etc. -- he makes sure that all those who have contrary points of view are segregated blocks, and often and miles, away from where he might have to see or hear them. The police, with no attempt at irony, refers to these areas as "free-speech zones."

How would the Bushistas react, I often wonder, if the situations were reversed -- if President Gore was appearing in their community and they wished to silently express their displeasure at his policies by wearing political-message T-shirts, and they got thrown out, or were forced to mill about miles away in "free-speech" enclosures? Somehow, I don't think they'd appreciate such heavy-handed approaches to their Constitutional right to assemble and express themselves.

THE RULE OF THE RIGHTEOUS

On occasion, I have been able to ask several rightwing acquaintances this very question. I'm sure you can guess the reaction I got: "Yeah, but you guys are wrong, and potentially dangerous, and besides terrorists could be among you."

In other words, ignoring the question while asserting their righteousness, and your "wrong"-ness, which apparently is meant to justify the illegal behavior of the police.

This attitude is greatly influenced by the tone, and disrespect for democracy, that emanates from BushCheneyRove and their ilk. (See Digby's commentary below.) Bush on at least three public occasions has expressed -- supposedly in jest, ha ha -- his desire to rule as a dictator. The way his Republican congressional allies violate the rules and manhandle the rights of the Democrat minority is likewise in the same vein.

THE GREAT SMITER OF NATIONS

The name of the game is winning, and using power as a weapon to get their way. Bush claims that he gets his war marching orders from God, ("God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East"; a few days ago, he told an Amish group that he believes "God speaks through me"), and thus apparently doesn't feel he has to take other points of view into consideration.

Once upon a time, we looked on those who expressed such views as fanatic zealots, or, if in extremis, in need of institutional care. Now they are treated deferentially, as if such Talaban-like pronouncements are welcome in a democratic republic, founded by wise men who knew firsthand the dangers of religious self-righteousness.

Our democratic institutions are in grave danger of permanent erosion, if the election results give this crew another four years to finish their constitutional deconstruction project. The Patriot Act is bad enough, permitting police agents to enter your home and computer, check them out, and never have to tell you; read your emails; attorney-client privilege no longer is sacrosanct; the FBI can find out what books you read, and your librarian is forbidden by law to tell you they're doing it.

SNOOPS AND SNEAKS

But there are more recent atrocities: Their project to turn citizens into informers is still lying dormant; they have asked churches to supply their congregation lists to the Bush Campaign; in Minnesota, loyal GOP cadres are being asked to supply information, obtained however they can, on the politics of their neighbors; in New York, immigrant tenants asking for repairs to their shoddy apartments are told by the landlords that they'll be reported to the Homeland Security Administration unless they keep silent; and on and on.

And that's just the domestic damage they are doing. Abroad, it's even scarier, since thousands of people are being killed and maimed in the name of America's desire to control Middle East energy sources, and to reshape the geopolitics of that key area of the world -- one that doesn't really seem to want to move, at the barrel of a gun, toward an American vision of democracy and free-market capitalism.

The other Arab states in the area look at Iraq and wonder what kind of "democracy" is being peddled. Iyad Allawi, the new prime minister of Iraq -- picked by us to lead his nation into democracy and respect for the rule of law after we "liberated" the country from the brutality and lawlessness of Saddam Hussein -- has been accused of taking out a pistol recently at an Iraqi jail and murdering six suspected insurgents, devoid of charge or trial.

What hath we wrought?

Enough from me. Here are further thoughts on these and other matters from fellow bloggers Digby and Steve Gilliard.

Digby takes a serious look at how the Bush Administration views American democracy and its restraints on rulers:

They Don't Like Democracy

Charles Pierce gets to the nub of the argument:

There really is only one issue in this election. Since the Extended Florida Unpleasantness, this has been an Administration utterly unconcerned with any restraints, constitutional or otherwise, on its power. It has been contemptuous of the idea of self-government, and particularly of the notion that an informed populace is necessary to that idea. It recognizes neither parliamentary rules nor constitutional barriers. (Just for fun, imagine that the Senate had not authorized force in Iraq. Do you think for one moment that C-Plus Augustus wouldn't have launched the war anyway, and on some pretext that we'd only now be discovering was counterfeit?) It does not accept the concept of principled opposition, either inside the administration or outside of it. It refuses to be bound by anything more than its political appetites. It wants what it wants, and it does what it wants. It is, at its heart, and in the strictest definition of the word, lawless. It has the perfect front men: a president unable to admit a mistake because he's spent his entire life being insulated from even the most minor of consequences, and a vice-president who is viscerally furious at the notion that he is accountable to anyone at all. They are abetted by a congressional majority in which all of these un-American traits are amplified to an overwhelming din.

So, now we are faced with the question: Do you want to live in a country where these people no longer feel even the vaporous restraints of having another election to win?

BUSH-CHENEY UNLEASHED. Up or down? Yes or no?

There you have it.

Jon Chait in The New Republic amplifies this theme:

Here we have a sample of the style of governance that has prevailed under Bush's presidency. It's not the sort of thing you would find in a civics textbook. Bush and his allies have been described as partisan or bare-knuckled, but the problem is more fundamental than that. They have routinely violated norms of political conduct, smothered information necessary for informed public debate, and illegitimately exploited government power to perpetuate their rule. These habits are not just mean and nasty. They're undemocratic.

What does it mean to call the president "undemocratic"? It does not mean Bush is an aspiring dictator. Despite descending from a former president and telling confidants that God chose him to lead the country, he does not claim divine right of rule. He is not going to cancel the election or rig it with faulty ballots. (Well, almost certainly not.) But democracy can be a matter of degree. Russia and the United States are both democracies, but the United States is more democratic than Russia. The proper indictment of the Bush administration is, therefore, not that he's abandoning American democracy, but that he's weakening it. This administration is, in fact, the least democratic in the modern history of the presidency.

I think it's very important to note that this is not something that's confined to the Bush administration alone as if they are some sort of GOP anomalies. The fact is that this is an ongoing, serious problem of the modern Republican Party in general. They are congenitally opposed to compromise which leads inevitably to rule by force.

Chait argues that the Bush administration is not destroying democracy but rather weakening it. I would suggest that that adds up to the same thing. They are unlikely, except in a desperate situation, to attempt a military coup or do something dramatically attention grabbing like cancel the election. They aren't that stupid. They can attain everything they want over time by simply eroding democracy to the point at which it has all of the trappings and none of the substance. That process has been going on for some time now and escalating gradually to the point at which we now find ourselves with a presidency (which has always been the repository of Republican ruling fantasies) that quite blatantly declares that it has no responsibility to uphold the laws if it deems them an impediment to national security.

But it's not the Bushies, it's the party. Removing Bush will not solve this problem. Indeed, I'm sure the GOP congress would love to get back into action and resume its natural investigative role which they have been shut out of while Republicans are in the white house. Their egos demand a little bit of the spotlight.

I'm sure there are many Republicans who simply don't see what is happening and would be horrified if they did. Not even the Democrats who have been on the receiving end of these undemocratic power plays seem to have been aware until recently of what has been going on.

I have been repeating this "undemocratic" mantra since the mid 1990's. (You can Google this blog for the word and you'll see that I've done my best to bore everyone to tears with it.) It is a huge threat to this country --- one that has been magnified a hundred fold by the events if 9/11. It's not tin-foil kookiness and it's not partisan angst. It's real. And while I have little doubt that many reasonable sorts (which, by the way, I am also) will shake their heads sadly once again at my shrillness and hysteria for taking this view, I'll continue to do it. The Emperor has no clothes. I see what I see. I'm glad to have some company.

Steve Gilliard adds a warning addendum to the story referenced above about the GOP activists asked to snoop on their neighbors' politics and report back to the Bush Campaign:

So when those names wind up in the Homeland Security database, it would be an "accident."

It's one thing to report positives, but another to keep track of negatives. This is the kind of thing which gets people sued.

July 16, 2004

Setting Up the Rigging Poles

This question may have occurred to you, too: Why would Bush&Co., with a straight-face, still continue telling the most outrageous lies about Iraq -- especially about the alleged but non-existent "close ties" between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida -- even when they've been proven demonstrably false time and time again?

Certainly, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report lowered the boom on the Administration's intel failures (starting with the CIA). Even Tony Blair, who used the same faulty intelligence to justify the war -- and likewise got smacked around by the investigating panel's report just a few days ago -- is backing away from some of his more outrageous claims.

Here are some possible answers with regard to the Bush Administration:

1.    The Busheviks believe what they're saying.

2.    Those claims are designed to distract their opposition from focusing on other, perhaps more important issues.

3.    Bush&Co. know they have to have a reason, some reason, ANY reason, to justify the invasion, so, not knowing what else to say, they revert back to what has worked for them earlier, before the truth became fully apparent to the investigating bodies and the citizenry at large. If you tell whoppers long enough, they may believe, those lies take on a life all their own and many in the citizenry come to believe them. The art of agit-prop.

4.    The modus operandi of Bush&Co. is to lie, obfuscate, distort, deceive, manipulate. They're addicted to this technique. Lies are their "fix."

5.    Those Bush&Co. lies are not aimed at folks more attuned to the complex political situation. They are designed to help solidify the base in the fundamentalist 30-35% of the population, some of whom are beginning to wander away from the Bush fold. Also helps explain why the GOP regularly throws that segment of the population hunks of red meat to chomp on -- the attempt by GOP senators to pass an "anti-gay marriage" amendment, for example. Doomed to defeat from the git-go, but a pot worth stirring in the fundamentalist right's kitchen.

No doubt, there are other options that I haven't included, but let's examine these five.

RATING THE REASONS

Number One:    I don't really accept this one; Rove is vicious and incompetent, but he knows exactly what he's doing. The Bushies may be dumb, but they ain't stupid.

Number Two:    They know how those lies enrage the left and critical press, and that their opposition therefore will take after them big time, focusing on those whoppers rather than on larger, more potentially damaging scandals: the torture orders emanating from the top, the attempt to set up an extra-constitutional dictatorship, the Plame case, Cheney's energy and Halliburton scandals, Bush and Ken Lay, preparations for "legally" derailing the elections, etc. etc.

Number Three is partially true: The Bush Administration hasn't yet worked out the new approach to Iraq. They keep hoping Iraq miraculously will turn around for them, and they won't have to step out on any limbs that might indicate they've made mistakes, either in going to war or in the way the Occupation has been conducted. So, in the meantime -- and it's a real question how long they can continue hoping for a major change before the truth socks them upside the head -- they'll keep spinning the old pre-war web of lies and distortions.

Number Four is definitely true -- they do need help, won't admit that they need help, and therefore the stress of maintaining these fictions, and fighting off those who reveal their falseness, is taking them to the emotional edge -- and therefore we citizens will have to help them out with an electoral "intervention" on November 2.

THE BIG NUMBER FIVE

This mention of the upcoming election brings us to Number Five, which I think has much merit. If, as a Bush campaign planner, you see Kerry surging, and your candidate is not, you must win essentially with your base. That means you've got to reduce the Democratic base of voters below yours, by some strategem, in order to eke out enough victories in the toss-up states to take the Electoral College prize.

Let's think of ways the GOP can keep that Democrat vote down:

a. Back Nader, to siphon off votes that otherwise might go to Kerry; this already is happening in a number of states, with GOP funders pouring money into the Nader campaign, paying for petition drives for him, etc.

b. Slime the Dem candidates, trying to convince wavering Dems (especially progressives) and moderate Republicans who might be tempted, to not vote for the Kerry-Edwards ticket. We're sure to see the crudest of dirty-tricks campaigning in the next several months.

c. In whatever toss-up states that are using touch-screen voting systems without voter-verified safeguards, consider fiddling with the software to remove some votes from Democrats and move them over into the Republican column, enough to make for a Bush victory. It may have been done in Georgia in 2002. It's already been demonstrated how easy it is for this manipulation to be accomplished -- either by the software technicians, by hackers from the outside, or by those companies tabulating the votes -- without leaving a single trace that the tallies have been altered.

(Note: By and large, the companies who make and install the computer voting machines -- several of the largest of which are owned by rabid Republican supporters -- also tabulate the votes, in secret, and then report the results to the election officials. Don't forget the promise by the chairman of Diebold -- one of Bush's major "Pioneer" donors -- that he's "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." Think absentee ballots!

d. Keep new voters from registering Democratic, especially recent immigrants who tend to vote more liberally. After a recent swearing-in ceremony for new citizens, for example, voting registration forms were supplied outside the hall by GOP operatives -- with the Republican box already checked-off -- to these eager new Americans, many of whom couldn't read English all that well and had no idea they had signed up as Republicans and would be receiving all the Bush propaganda in the mail and probably by visitors to their homes as well.

e. Keep many Democrats from going to the polls. The process already has started. The Administration has been pounding away at the fright theme with regard to the upcoming elections. Remove some likely Dem voter from the rolls (see Florida for tips.) "Al-Qaida will try to disrupt our election process" before or during the voting, we are told Armed guards may have to be stationed outside polling stations. (Remember Florida in 2000, when many black citizens in poor counties approached the polling stations, to find armed police standing there, oftentimes questioning their bone fides?) I've even heard speculation about taking advantage of a supposed terrorist attack on the Democratic convention. Anything to keep Dems from wanting to exercise their right to vote. Yet another argument for voting by absentee ballot, but don't forget to check to see how those votes will be counted.

f. Finally, if the pre-election poll numbers for BushCheney (or Bush and whomever takes Cheney's place on the ballot if he's indicted by France and Nigeria in connection with Halliburton scandals) are too low to permit even a corrupted election, there's always the option of "postponing" the voting due to this expected terrorist attack and/or threat. The "postponement," of course, would be couched as necessary in order to "defend the right of every citizen to vote." Germany in the '30s, anyone?

In short, friends, organize, organize, ORGANIZE! And fasten your seat-belts; it's going to be a VERY bumpy ride these next few months.

Enough from me; here are some relevant comments from fellow bloggers.

Matthew Yglesias examines the question "Who's Helped by a Terrorist Attack":

Dan Drezner asks the question of the hour -- who wins politically from a terrorist attack? One thing that's interesting about this question is that it sort of encourages each side's partisans to say it will help the other guy. After all, if it becomes entrenched conventional wisdom that an attack will help Bush, then if an attack happens it will seem like it was partially designed to help re-elect Bush, which would hurt Bush. This is why GOP partisans have been running around town darkly implying that an attack may be in the works aimed at influencing the election "just like in Madrid." In other words, terrorists love John Kerry.

So that's one complication to add to a complicated dynamic. Folks on both sides of the aisle will be scrambling like hell to make the case that Osama has endorsed candidate X or candidate Y. Most broadly, though, I think that while the immediate impact of an attack would be to help Bush ("rally 'round the flag," etc.) that pretty soon afterwards that bounce would fade and Kerry would get the advantage. The reason is that a successful attack would (a) reveal that we're still unsafe, and (b) reveal that Bush isn't doing anything to try and make us any safer, he's busy fighting a counterinsurgency in Iraq.

The president's not going to be able to go off on another three-year, two-war sequence in response to a second attack, which is going to wind up revealing the fact that there really isn't all that much "decisive leadership" forthcoming from this gang. Kerry, meanwhile, will get to say something vague about how this shows it's time for a new approached centered on doing good things in smart ways, or whatever it is you say on a campaign trail.

The question is -- how long would the bounce last? The post-Saddam bounce lasted six weeks, which I'd say is a reasonable estimate for a terror bounce as well. So starting in late-September, I think attacks help Bush, but until then they wind up helping Kerry.

That means that if an attack comes soon, the terrorists want Kerry to win and you should vote for Bush. If it comes later, they want Bush to win and you should vote for Kerry. Or maybe they know that's what you'll think and if they like Kerry they'll attack late and if they like Bush they'll attack early. But what if they guessed that, too? Well, then. . . .

Juan Cole dissects Bush's reiterated lies in a recent speech; here are the opening paragraphs:

President Bush gave a speech on Tuesday in which he made specific claims about how the United States is safer as a result of his military action. I dispute assertions about particular Middle Eastern or South Asian countries.

"The world is changing for the better because of American leadership. America is safer today because we are leading the world. Afghanistan was once the home of al-Qaeda. Now terror camps are closed, democracy is rising, and the American people are safer," he said.

Cole: The Afghanistan war was the right war at the right time, and it did break up the network of al-Qaeda training camps from which terrorists would have gone on hitting the United States. But the fact is that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld did not want to fight that war after September 11. Rumsfeld sniffed that "there were no good targets" in Afghanistan. Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney all wanted to leave al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and attack Iraq first. At first Wolfowitz was leaked as the proponent of this crazy idea, and although he did back it, it is now clear from insider accounts like that of Richard Clark that the three top leaders just mentioned wanted Iraq first.

The UK ambassador to the US maintains that it was Tony Blair who talked Bush into going after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan first, with a promise that he would later support an Iraq war. MI6 would have been briefing Tony about the dire threat coming from Afghanistan, and he, unlike the Bush team, could see the dangers of getting bogged down in an Iraq quagmire while al-Qaeda and the Taliban were still in control of Afghanistan. (Can you imagine the full scope of that disaster that Bush had planned for us?)

Even after Bush was dragged kicking and screaming into doing the right thing by Blair, he did it half-heartedly. He let Bin Laden and al-Zawahir escape. (I'll repeat that. He let Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri escape). Instead of rebuilding and stabilizing Afghanistan, as he promised, he put almost nothing into reconstruction for that country.

...So, no, Americans are not safer, Mr. Bush. They face the threat of substantial narco-terrorism from Afghanistan. Iraq is a security nightmare that could well blow back on the American homeland. Pakistan remains a military dictatorship with a host of militant jihadi movements that had been fomented by the hardline Pakistani military intelligence. Saudi Arabia is witnessing increased al-Qaeda activity and attacks on Westerners. And the Israeli-Palestine dispute is being left to fester and poison the world.

These are not achievements to be proud of. This is a string of disasters. We are not safer. We face incredible danger because of the way the Bush administration has grossly mishandled the Middle East.

(For more of this extraordinary essay, you'll find it at www.juancole.com , July 14 listing .)

Bush, who doesn't like reading, sometimes pays the price for his had habits. See this item at Corrente:

It's always the coverup that kills you, right? Only one day, and the Republican CYA CIA strategy of blaming the Iraq WMD fiasco 100% on the CIA, and 0% on Inerrant Boy is starting to fall apart: [Quotes from New York Times story, "Bush and C.I.A. Won't Release Paper on Prewar Intelligence"]

The White House and the Central Intelligence Agency have refused to give the Senate Intelligence Committee a one-page summary of prewar intelligence in Iraq prepared for President Bush that contains few of the qualifiers and none of the dissents spelled out in longer intelligence reviews, according to Congressional officials.

So, they gave Him the black and white, "don't do nuance" view that they knew He wanted to hear, right?

Senate Democrats claim that the document could help clear up exactly what intelligence agencies told Mr. Bush about Iraq's illicit weapons. The administration and the C.I.A. say the White House is protected by executive privilege, and Republicans on the committee dismissed the Democrats' argument that the summary was significant

They would. Gee, it's funny how everything that makes Bush look good is disclosed, and everything that makes Him look like what He is is suppressed, isn't it?

The review, prepared for President Bush in October 2002, summarized the findings of a classified, 90-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's illicit weapons. Congressional officials said that notes taken by Senate staffers who were permitted to review the document show that it eliminated references to dissent within the government about the National Intelligence Estimate's conclusions. (via Times)

Oh, and the "yet again" part?

Bush has a habit of making life-and-death decisions based on sloppy one-page memos written by his fluffers. As we wrote back in December:

Think! What about [current WhiteWash House Counsel and torture apologist] Alberto Gonzales pimping 56 easy kills for Bush in Texas, detailed in The Texas Clemency Memos?   What kind of a man [Bush] signs a death warrant on the basis of "the most cursory briefings"?

It really is a question of character, isn't it? Fool me once....

Bob Dreyfuss at Tom Paine has some interesting thoughts on war intelligence:

This weekend I read Anonymous' new book, Imperial Hubris, which reminds us to remember Afghanistan. It also helps put in perspective some of the news we're getting. Today's New York Times reports that the final report of the 9/11 commission, due out in a week or so, will put the final nail in the nail-filled coffin about Iraq's nonexistent ties to Al Qaeda:

The commission investigating the 9/11 attacks is nearing completion of a final, probably unanimous report that will stand by the conclusions of the panel's staff and largely dismiss White House theories both about a close working relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda and about possible Iraqi involvement in 9/11, commission officials said.

Okay, we've all known that. But for Mr. and Mrs. Man-in-Street, it's an important punctuation mark, and it sets people thinking. (Actually, of course, not only did Iraq not support Al Qaeda, it was probably the single strongest Arab state opposed to Al Qaeda and to Islamic fundamentalism in general. Pre-war Iraq was indeed, as Bush claimed, a "central front in the War on Terror," not in precisely the opposite way that Bush meant. Pre-war Iraq was a bulwark against Al Qaeda, bin Ladenism and Khomeinism. But no more.)

Which brings me to Anonymous. His book makes the case, over and over again, that the war in Afghanistan was an utter failure, that Al Qaeda and Osama have regrouped, that Afghanistan itself will inevitably fall back under the control of a Taliban-style regime backed by Pakistan and Islamic fundamentalists, that pathetic President Karzai has little power and that what remaining influence he does have will soon be gobbled up by fascist militia from Afghanistan's countryside. It's a sobering read, in that it comes from the CIA guy in charge of the Osama bin Laden task force....

Kevin Drum connects the U.K. dots, and then places the responsibility for using the faulty intelligence where it belongs -- at the top:

Over in London, Lord Butler has released yet another investigation of prewar Iraq intelligence, and he comes to the following conclusions:

* British intelligence reports were "seriously flawed."

* The 45-minute claim went to the "outer limits" of the available intelligence — i.e., it was wrong.

* There was not, it turns out, even enough evidence to justify claims that Iraq was in breach of United Nations resolutions, let alone anything more.

* Tony Blair was one among several people who fooled the public into thinking the evidence was considerably stronger than it really was.

But hey — that was all in the past! There was no "deliberate distortion," perish the thought, and neither Blair nor incoming intelligence chief John Scarlett, who was responsible for much of the reporting, should be held accountable. They've learned their lesson, right?

Sheesh!

Michael O'Hanlon, in the course of an op-ed suggesting that the CIA didn't screw up quite as badly as the Senate Intelligence Committee says it did, points out that, after all, before the war it sure looked like Saddam was hiding something:

Let's face it, it would have taken an overwhelming body of evidence for any reasonable person in 2002 to think that Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of chemical and biological agents

....The United Nations and most European and Middle Eastern intelligence outfits had the same incorrect beliefs as our agencies, for the same understandable reasons. Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons in war and against his own people in the 1980's. For more than a decade after the Persian Gulf war, he obstructed international inspectors' efforts to find and destroy such weapons, ensuring that United Nations sanctions that cost his country more than $100 billion would remain in place. He had his underlings confront the inspectors on several occasions in ways that led to military strikes against his security organizations. It certainly looked as if he valued chemical and biological agents a great deal, and was prepared to do a lot to hold onto them.

This may — or may not — get the CIA off the hook, but the drumbeat repetition of this argument (mostly by war supporters) deliberately obscures a far more important point: by the time we invaded Iraq none of this mattered.

Remember, UN inspectors re-entered Iraq three months before the invasion and found nothing there except a handful of missiles that violated UN limits by a few miles. Saddam destroyed them.

The United States provided the inspectors with detailed intel on where to find Iraq's WMD stockpiles. No dice: every single followup turned out to be a wild goose chase.

Hans Blix's team searched everywhere, including Saddam's palaces. Nothing.

Before the invasion, France and several other countries made proposals for even more intrusive inspections: thousand of inspectors backed up by military units. George Bush turned them all down.

The fact is that by March 2003 we didn't have to rely on CIA estimates or on the estimates of any other intelligence agency. We had been on the ground in Iraq for months and there was nothing there. There was nothing there and we knew it.

Did the CIA screw up? Probably. Did it matter? No. George Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003 not because he was convinced Iraq had WMD, but because he was becoming scared that Iraq didn't have WMD and that further inspections would prove it beyond any doubt. Facts on the ground have never been allowed to interfere with George Bush's worldview, and he wasn't about to take the chance that they might interfere with his war.

Whatever faults the CIA has, let's not blame them for the war in Iraq. We all know exactly whose mistake it was.

Finally, if you want to read something really sad, and disturbing, check out Steve Gilliard's take on the embarrassing phone call ) Ralph Nader made to Salon about his GOP backers. Read the transcript and Gilliard's annotated comments. A former hero of the left besmirches himself royally. Pitiful.

Gilliard's summation:

This is a 70 year old man ranting like some hopped up high school junior having just read the Communist Manifesto. No one is a fascist here, this isn't a dictatorship, if it were, he'd be in jail or dead. Nader refuses to abide by election laws and he's whining about them now. I mean he sounds like a paranoid liar, and Talbot, who is not one of my favorite people, is conciliatory, at worst. He's trying to reason with Nader and it just doesn't get through. Nader is willfully blind to the effect his GOP "supporters" are trying to have.

It's amazing Nader would say these unhinged things, but said them he did. It's like seeing a mask revealed and it isn't pretty.

No one on the left wanted Nader to do this, to be so willfully self-destructive and blind to the harm he's causing.

Once you read this, what choice do the Dems really have but to use the law to crush his campaign? My God, I thought he was unsuited to be president before, but now? He lies like Bush, for God's sake, and right in front of you. What a truly scary and paranoid man.

July 13, 2004

How to Win an Election: Cancel It

One of the Bush Administration's favorite techniques is to scattershot its awfulness. Each week, it seems, three or five or ten new policy atrocities are trundled out and the Democrats have to scatter their energies just to keep up with them. But every so often, Bush&Co. come up with a single policy so monumentally abhorrent that it takes your breath away. Here is this week's:

Rove and his minions have seen the handwriting on the wall, as their poll numbers continue to slide downward: They may very well lose the upcoming November election, perhaps by a landslide. What to do? How about postponing the vote?

You think I jest? Take a look at this Periscope piece, "Election Day Worries," by Michael Isikoff in the latest, July 19th, Newsweek:

American counterterrorism officials, citing what they call "alarming" intelligence about a possible Qaeda strike inside the United States this fall, are reviewing a proposal that could allow for the postponement of the November presidential election in the event of such an attack, Newsweek has learned.

The prospect that Al Qaeda might seek to disrupt the U.S. election was a major factor behind last week's terror warning by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. Ridge and other counterterrorism officials concede they have no intel about any specific plots. But the success of March's Madrid railway bombings in influencing the Spanish elections-as well as intercepted "chatter" among Qaeda operatives-has led analysts to conclude "they want to interfere with the elections," says one official.

As a result, sources tell Newsweek, Ridge's department last week asked the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit the postponement of the election were an attack to take place. Justice was specifically asked to review a recent letter to Ridge from DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the newly created U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Soaries noted that, while a primary election in New York on September 11, 2001, was quickly suspended by that state's Board of Elections after the attacks that morning, "the federal government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election."

Soaries, a Bush appointee who two years ago was an unsuccessful GOP candidate for Congress, wants Ridge to seek emergency legislation from Congress empowering his agency to make such a call. Homeland officials say that as drastic as such proposals sound, they are taking them seriously-along with other possible contingency plans in the event of an election-eve or Election Day attack. "We are reviewing the issue to determine what steps need to be taken to secure the election," says Brian Roehrkasse, a Homeland spokesman.

"Secure the election" indeed.

The key question is: Could they get away with it? Would the Democrats rise up? Would the people rise up?

You'd think so, but, given the fright factor -- and the relentless pounding on that drum by Bush&Co. and their mass-media corporate supporters -- you never know. Certainly, even though this story has been out there for only a few days, there hasn't been much objection heard from politicos or organizations.

I'm with the sharp blogger Digby (see below), who writes:

Constitutionality aside, why would there be any need to do this? We lived under the threat of nuclear war for decades --- real weapons of mass destruction pointed at all of our major cities --- and nobody ever contemplated suspending elections and devised no plans to do so. We have held elections during every war, including the civil war, and didn't contemplate suspending them in case of an attack.

This is absurd. Unless the terrorists are somehow able to prevent large numbers of people from exercising their right to vote by bombing individual polling places there can be absolutely no reason to postpone this election.

Besides, if I recall correctly, the Bush administration made quite a case a few years back that there should be no changing of the rules, even when certain rules are contradictory, in election procedures. I remember that deadlines, particularly, were sacrosanct. Indeed, the dates surrounding election laws were seen as written in stone. Somehow, I have to believe that if terrorists attack us around the election, Americans will crawl out of the rubble on their hands and knees to vote. But then, that's obviously what they're really afraid of, isn't it?

If Ridge (read: Rove) really tries to get a law passed to authorize such electoral hanky-panky, I'd say the resolutions on impeachment shouldn't be far behind.

THE SENATE INTELLIGENCE WHITEWASH

The report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee, basically laying the blame for bad pre-war intelligence on the CIA, may snow a lot of folks in the heartland red states into believing that the White House is exonerated for the lousy intel on Iraq that got us into war.

But anybody knowing anything about how the "pressure" game is played in Washington will immediately smell a whitewash -- one in which the Democrats permitted themselves to be ensnared. (They were told to sign this report, and there would be another one on how the White House used, or misused, that CIA intel. Problem is that report, if it comes at all, will arrive only AFTER the November election.)

When the President and Vice President and Secretary of Defense and the Assistant Secretaries of Defense have already made the decision to launch a war againt Iraq, and request the intelligence to back up their decision, any CIA analyst knows by the very nature of that reverse process what kind of intelligence is being requested. So they went to work and produced a whole lot of possibly useful intel, but had enough backbone under Tenet to include a whole lot of caveats that indicated how tenuous the intelligence was on a number of key issues: WMD, nuclear weapons, drone planes, al-Qaida link, etc.

The White House took that caveated intelligence and -- after no doubt running the CIA's findings to Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans (staffed by neo-con ideologues under the direction of Doug Feith) -- and, surprise, dropped out all the caveats.

Now they could go to the Congress and the United Nations with all this assertive "intelligence" and "prove" all sorts of nefarious intent and weaponry on the part of the Iraqis.

Why Kerry won't bring himself to say what Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller admitted the other day -- that, had he known then what he knows now about the phony intelligence, he would not have voted for the resolution authorizing Bush to go to war -- continues to astound me.

Senator Kerry: You didn't make a mistake; you were snookered, along with your fellow senators, and are much the wiser now, wise enough to know you wouldn't have voted for that damn resolution, based as it was on lies and deceptions.

Kerry works slowly; maybe he'll come to his senses before November 2 -- but, at the very least, after November 2.

Enough from me. Here are some cogent thoughts on the election-postponement issue from fellow bloggers:

Kos asks some pertinent questions:

So, what do we have here? Is this merely a perfectly reasonable contingency plan, preparation for one possible course of action if, say, a purloined nuke hidden in a ship container takes out a 2-mile radius at the Port of Long Beach or Seattle on October 29?

Or is it a trial balloon for a Cheney-Bush plan to call off the November election for purely political reasons?

Would a terrorist attack - even an extremely serious attack on four or five widely dispersed targets - actually offer enough rationale for calling off the elections?

Some people argue that such an attack so close to the elections might skew the results, as they claim occurred in Spain after the 3/11 Madrid bombings. Perhaps. But which way? Would Americans rally behind the incumbent out of fear and a gut desire for unity after such an attack? Or would they be angry because the attack proved that not enough and many of the wrong things had been done to protect us against terrorism during the incumbent's term of office?

Short of a full-out nuclear exchange of the sort much discussed during the Cold War, do you think there is any justification for calling off national elections?

Over at Corrente, we find this:

Department of "No! They would never do that!" Postponing the November election.

Funny how all that heavy sarcasm about "we're the government and we're here to help you" melts away as soon as the Republicans start consolidating their hold on power, isn't it?

From USA Today (funny how Pravda on the Potomac and Isvestia on the Hudson aren't following up on this):

Counterterrorism officials are looking into the possibility of postponing the November presidential election if there is a terrorist attack at election time, Newsweek reported Sunday.

Newsweek said DeForest Soaries, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, wants Ridge to ask Congress to pass legislation giving the government power to cancel or reschedule a federal election. Soaries said New York suspended primary elections on the day of the Sept. 11 attacks, but the federal government does not appear to have that authority...

Seems to me, that in a democracy, we would want legislation to make sure that elections were held no matter what. Since otherwise, the terrorists have won, right? Wouldn't it be a shame if election 2000 turned out to be our last free election, eh?

Digby razors right in on the central issue:

Covering Their Bases

Tom Ridge wants John Ashcroft to look into the possibility of postponing the election in case of a terrorist attack. Considering that Ashcroft and company have believed that the GWOT justifies everything from unlimited detention to torture it's going to be very surprising if they don't back the idea that doing so would be constitutional.

But constitutionality aside, why would there be any need to do this? We lived under the threat of nuclear war for decades --- real weapons of mass destruction pointed at all of our major cities --- and nobody ever contemplated suspending elections and devised no plans to do so. We have held elections during every war, including the civil war, and didn't contemplate suspending them in case of an attack.

This is absurd. Unless the terrorists are somehow able to prevent large numbers of people from exercising their right to vote by bombing individual polling places there can be absolutely no reason to postpone this election.

Besides, if I recall correctly, the Bush administration made quite a case a few years back that there should be no changing of the rules, even when certain rules are contradictory, in election procedures. I remember that deadlines, particularly, were sacrosanct. Indeed, the dates surrounding election laws were seen as written in stone. Somehow, I have to believe that if terrorists attack us around the election, Americans will crawl out of the rubble on their hands and knees to vote. But then, that's obviously what they're really afraid of, isn't it?

And Corrente again, from an earlier post:

Will we have an election?

The folks over at Seeing the Forest... are wondering aloud if we're even going to have an election in November.

John Emerson (aka Zizka) even goes so far as to posit that, if we have one and Kerry wins, we won't get our new president "on time."

Hmmm. If W and the boys are really far behind and the "a vote for Kerry-Edwards is a vote for Osama" argument doesn't work, would they postpone the election? Worse yet, having lost the election, would W and the boys let Kerry and Edwards have the White House?

As a historian, this is an interesting thing to ponder. Even the Federalists, despite their hatred of Jefferson, eventually let him have the election and the White House in 1800. (If you recall, the lame duck Federalist-controlled congress had to decide who won the election because Burr and Jefferson got the same number of electoral votes.) Many in the world were quite surprised that there was a peaceful handover of the White House in 1800....

As for my current opinion on the question, I'll put it this way: having watched W and his administration reach unparalleled levels of public mendacity for nearly four years now, there really isn't a damn thing that I put past these guys.

July 9, 2004

Edwards to Lay to Rove: Connect the Dots

Let's take a look at the three big stories of the week: John Edwards joins the ticket, Ken Lay gets busted, Karl Rove orders a major Al Qaida arrest to coincide with the Democratic Convention, if possible, but definitely before Election Day.

And, of course, as in most matters political, all three of those stories are inter-related.

KERRY EXPANDS THE CENTER

The news behind Edwards ascension to the ticket, and why it took so long for Kerry to make the obvious choice, is that the Kerry campaign had to see if BushCheney were imploding on their own, or whether he'd have to jog considerably to the right in his Veep choice.

During the months when Kerry was vetting the contenders, Iraq went from worse to disastrous, the torture scandals revealed so gross an overreaching into legislative and judicial prerogatives that even the U.S. Supreme Court slapped them down, the job figures weren't rising fast enough, Bush was questioned for 70 minutes by the prosecutor in the Plame, spy-outing case -- in short, Kerry could look around and see that BushCheney were in big trouble and weren't going to find an easy way to climb out.

So, he went with Edwards, who brings few negatives and a lot of positives, to the campaign. The biggest negative is his lack of foreign policy experience, but Bush had zip when he ran in 2000, and that was for the presidency, not the vice presidential job. (See Juan Cole's take on this non-issue below.)

In sum, Kerry can expand his run from the center-right to the liberal left, instead of having to stick too close to the center-right and risk losing a vital share of his liberal/progressive base by doing so. And Edwards will help bring in the few remaining independents who haven't made up their minds.

KENNY WHO?

The indictment of Ken Lay (the close family friend, and major contributor to Bush's political career from his Texas days up to and including the 2000 race) helps Bush in some ways, and harms him in others. (Bush, of course, is still pretending he doesn't have a relationship with "that man.")

Lay's arrest helps in shifting the focus away from the bad Iraq and electoral news; now the press can hype the Lay/Enron brouhaha, and downplay the more meaningful stories. But by putting Lay front and center, the old relationship between Kenny-Boy and Georgie-Boy will generate lots of stories about Lay's enormous influence over Bush Administration energy policy, remind folks of the accounting and other corporate scandals that occurred on Bush's watch, and add more fuel to the interest in finding out how closely Lay was involved in Cheney's secret energy-policy meetings and in the creation of that policy.

One can guess that Lay will keep his mouth shut about his BushCheney ties and what he knows of the inner workings of U.S. energy policy, and gamble that the prosecution will blow the case in the courts. If the worst happens and he's convicted on some counts, Lay probably figures he can rely on a presidential pardon somewhere down the line.

ROVE DIPS INTO THE OPTIONS BAG

Karl Rove, the power behind the Bush throne, is cranking up the get-the-Democrats machine big time. The character-assassination and negative campaigning has begun, but, given his candidate's slide in the polls, the deteriorating situation in Iraq, the various torture/Plame and other scandals erupting, the revelations in "Fahrenheit 9/11," etc., Rove knows he's got to come up with something really big to regain the momentum.

1. To cover its butt and heighten the fright factor in the population, he Administration is already preparing the public for a massive Al Qaida attack within the next four months. No doubt, it's already devising plans for how to take advantage of that terrorism if and when it occurs, a la the original