Progressive Idiocy: A Sin Of The Past

Over at Other Words, former George McGovern campaign worker Steve Cobble wrote this about the experience of working for McGovern's losing presidential campaign the other day:

Image credit: From original article

I learned a few hard lessons about electoral politics that day. Being decent, humane, smart, caring, and brave was not enough.

Being a decorated war hero who flew 35 bomber missions against Nazi Germany didn't stop the Nixon Republicans from labeling McGovern unpatriotic. Caring enough about working men and women to write his history Ph.D. thesis about the 1914 Ludlow coal strike and massacre was not enough to keep AFL-CIO head George Meany from double-crossing McGovern when he became the nominee. Telling the truth about the immorality of the Vietnam War and the crookedness of the Nixon Administration did not convince nearly enough voters to win.

To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, America couldn’t handle the truth in 1972. Nor since, given that we still have an empire stretching across the globe.

Remembering George McGovern and Old-School Campaign Tools

Sound familiar? It should. I wrote something similar a few days ago when I learned of McGovern's death. I hadn't mentioned a couple things that Cobble does here, though. The first is his Ph.D. thesis, which to me is just an indication of where McGovern's real concerns lay. He was one of those folks who, despite being very successful, never forgot that there are plenty of people who are less fortunate through no fault of their own. It's interesting, but mainly in a historical sense. It might be enlightening to consider how few of today's congressmen have such an academic background, or have done anything else in their lives that might indicate they have some understanding of what it's like to be a working stiff here in America.

The other thing is about George Meaney, and this point is something that is definitely relevant to our situation today. I'll let Wikipedia explain what Cobble meant there:

Meany opposed the anti-war candidacy of U. S. Senator George McGovern for the Presidency against incumbent Richard Nixon in 1972, despite McGovern's generally pro-labor voting record in Congress. He also declined to endorse Nixon. On Face the Nation in September 1972, Meany criticized McGovern's statements that the U.S. should respect other peoples' rights to choose communism, because there had never been a country that had voted for communism; he accused McGovern of being "an apologist for the Communist world".[21] Following Nixon's landslide defeat of McGovern, Meany said that the American people had "overwhelmingly repudiated neo-isolationism" in foreign policy. Meany pointed out that the American voters split their votes by voting for Democrats in Congress.[22] According to Meany, class resentment was a major reason that Nixon won 49 states against McGovern, despite the dislike of the Vietnam War by a majority of American voters.

Wikipedia: George Meany: 1972 Presidential Election

Meany wasn't one of those modern labor leaders who seem to be mostly interested in making their own lives better, rather than the people they're supposed to represent. He led a fight against corruption in labor unions, and was born into a blue collar family. He understood the working class, because he came from it. Still, Meany couldn't get past his own hangups about "communism", in quotes because he, like many Americans, had a view of the subject that was more based on prejudice than actual knowledge, to support the presidential candidate who would have made sure organized labor was protected. Instead, he helped lumber us with four more years of Nixon, which meant four more years of Vietnam, four more years of the Southern Strategy, and the beginning of the decline of organized labor in America. All because of an issue that wasn't relevant to organized labor.

Which, I think, is the lesson here. When Meany became a big political player, he forgot what was really important. The guy from the blue collar labor union background set the stage for the decline of organized labor. He did that, because he obsessed about winning a war against communism that couldn't be won. That war fell harder on the working class, his people, than it did on the rich or the upper middle class. If you don't believe that, consider that George W. Bush, Dan Quayle, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Mitt Romney all found something better to do than risk serving in Vietnam. While Bill Clinton stayed opposed to the war, the others supported it. Kids from the working class, though, were far less likely to have a route to Canada, a college deferment, or a relative who could get them a posting to the National Guard. Yet Meany ignored all this, in the name of combating something that was, at best, a theoretical consideration for the people he represented.

This sin of Meany's, what Cobble refers to as a betrayal of McGovern and the Democrats of that time, might not have been enough to ensure Nixon's victory in 1972. Meany's endorsement might not have been enough to give McGovern the White House, but to the members of his unions he was one of them, and his feelings would have been persuasive to some. It certainly made McGovern's showing worse. That showing helped to engender the changes that it would eventually occur in the Democratic Party. That party quickly turned its back on labor and liberalism generally, and eventually learned that it could do pretty much whatever it wants without losing labor's support.

In short, Meany was another progressive who forgot what was really important, once he became important. It's a tale we've seen many times since.

Only In America

Waterboarding in the Middle Ages, which is where it should have remained.


Only in America, or more specifically, the dark version of America we've been living in the last few years, can a former Vice President go on TV and confess to having ordered criminal acts with no possibility of consequences, as Dick Cheney admitted in an interview with Johnathan Karl Sunday:

KARL: ... waterboarding, clearly, what was your...

CHENEY: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques that...

KARL: And you opposed the administration's actions of doing away with waterboarding?

CHENEY: Yes.

Transcript: "This Week" Feb. 14, 2010 (pg. 3)

Both Andrew Sullivan and Scott Horton make a convincing case that Cheney confessed to a war crime on national TV. But, as Glenn Greenwald observes, it's highly unlikely Cheney will ever have to pay for his crimes:

In general, people who commit felonies avoid publicly confessing to having done so, and they especially avoid mocking the authorities who fail to act. One thing Dick Cheney is not is stupid, and yet he's doing exactly that. Indeed, he's gradually escalated his boasting about having done so throughout the year. Why? Because he knows there will never be any repercussions, that he will never be prosecuted no matter how blatantly he admits to these serious crimes. He's taunting the Obama administration and the DOJ: not only will I not hide or apologize, but I will proudly tout and defend my role in these crimes, because I know you will do absolutely nothing about it, even though the Attorney General and the President themselves said that the act to which I'm confessing is a felony. Does anyone doubt that Cheney's assessment is right? And isn't that, rather obviously, a monumental indictment of most everything?

Dick Cheney's Taunting

Of course, if they give time off for chutzpah, Cheney has nothing to worry about. Even I can figure out that President Van Pelt isn't going to prosecute Cheney if he can avoid it. That would be like looking backward or something. I suppose at this point the only thing stopping Cheney from confessing any further is how quickly he gets bored by the same conversation.

Despite the extraordinary event of having a former Vice President confessing to multiple felonies on national TV, the biggest crime news is the continuing obsessive coverage of Amy Bishop, the apparently deranged woman who shot six of the people who rejected her professorship at the University of Alabama. Cheney's interview didn't even rate a mention on Talking Points Memo, a site that generally prides itself in dredging up any GOP-related scandals. It's pretty clear our "news" organizations aren't too interested in reliving the past, either.

Just makes you proud, doesn't it?

Dick Cheney's Dreadful Folly

image credit: U.S. Army

Seven years after the Bush Administration used the confessions of tortured prisoners to justify war in Iraq, our soldiers and Iraq's citizens are still paying for this dreadful folly. Here's the caption for this picture:

Spc. Herrick Lidstone, a radio operator with Company B, 2nd Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, takes a security halt during a nighttime foot patrol in Sha'ab, Baghdad on May 4 [,2007].

There was a time when people only half-seriously suggested that the Bush Administration deliberately had terrorism suspects tortured to produce "evidence" that there was a link between Iraq's President Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. As Joe Conason reports in Salon, that's not a joke any more:

In an essay that first appeared on the Washington Note blog, [aide to then Secretary of State Colin Powell Lawrence] Wilkerson says that even when the interrogators of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the Libyan al-Qaida operative, reported that he had become “compliant” -- in other words, cooperative after sufficient abuse -- the vice-president’s office ordered further torture of the Libyan by his hosts at an Egyptian prison because he had not yet implicated Saddam with al-Qaida. So his interrogators put al-Libi into a tiny coffin until he said what [Vice President Dick] Cheney wanted to hear. Nobody in the U.S. intelligence community actually believed this nonsense. But now, al-Libi has reportedly and very conveniently "committed suicide" in a prison cell in Libya, where he was dispatched to the tender mercies of the Bush administration's newfound friends in the Qaddafi regime several years ago. So the deceased man won't be able to discuss what actually happened to him and why.

Wilkerson's essay was followed swiftly by an investigative report in the Daily Beast, authored by former NBC News producer Robert Windrem, who interviewed two former senior intelligence officers who told him a similar story about a different prisoner. In April 2003, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi official named Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, who had served in Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat. Those unnamed officials said that upon learning of Dulaymi's capture, the vice-president's office proposed that CIA agents in Baghdad commence waterboarding him, in order to elicit information about a link between al-Qaida and Saddam. Evidently that suggestion was not enforced by Charles Duelfer, the head of the Iraq Study Group who controlled Dulaymi's interrogation.

We Tortured To Justify War

[links from original]

Let's just review this evidence to see why, while this information is based partly on anonymous sources, it is credible.

First, it's not entirely anonymous. We know who Lawrence Wilkerson is. At the time in question, he was the aide of Secretary of State Colin Powell. It's certainly possible that he knew the origin of whatever intelligence he was told about regarding Iraq. He certainly would have asked what the origin of any intelligence was, since that's information necessary to determine its validity.

Wilkerson has also been a critic of the Bush Administration's foreign policy:

In President Bush's first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security -- including vital decisions about postwar Iraq -- were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

When I first discussed this group in a speech last week at the New American Foundation in Washington, my comments caused a significant stir because I had been chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell between 2002 and 2005.

But it's absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.

The White House Cabal

This article by Wilkerson, short though it is, is a thoughtful essay on effective decision making in areas where the relevant knowledge isn't all in one person's head. That's a set of problems that includes most of the ones organizations deal with these days. Business and government leaders at any level should read it and take its lessons to heart. Wilkerson is neither a fool nor stupid.

The second reason is that the story is at least partially confirmed by Charles Duelfer, who as the head of the Iraq Study Group:

In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA),” who thought Khudayr’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. “They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.”

Cheney's Role Deepens

The third reason we should take this seriously is that it explains the events that followed. The White House, and its sycophants in the press, insisted that there was a connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda even though there clearly wasn't one. Hussein clearly had no motivation to do more than give Al Qaeda lip service. He certainly would not have permitted a rival for power to exist on his territory. That's an elementary lesson of Hussein's career - he quickly and ruthlessly eliminated or marginalized all possible competition for his power. Yet we were asked to believe, with no credible evidence, that he welcomed Al Qaeda.

While reaching a definite conclusion really requires a proper criminal or scientific investigation, it's clear that this charge against the Vice President and others is a credible one. It should also be one that Americans find disturbing. That we could have deliberately tortured people as part of a pretense for war is as serious a charge against a government as I can imagine.

Scooter In The Dock

image credit: Vieux Montreal website

This is Old Montreal, in Quebec, Canada. Scooter and his cohorts have me thinking fondly again of places that aren't in the U.S. Of course, they have their share of low-lifes, too. Otherwise, they'd be willing to import more of ours, wouldn't they?

I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was sentenced to thirty months in prison and a $250,000 fine today. The overly-optimistic among us would probably conclude that a little justice was done today. My bet is: fat chance. He'll be pardoned before he gets within ten miles of a prison. Former Senator and current part-time actor and full time dimwit Fred Thompson, who if voters hold to their pattern will be our next President, has been shilling for a pardon for Libby for some time. Clearly, it's about time to pull the trigger, or Libby will almost certainly start cooperating with U.S. Attorneys by identifying Leaker Zero, the one who first identified Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA agent to Cheney. If that person was Cheney himself, then he certainly knew that her identity was a secret, and is either culpable for identifying her to Libby and others without explaining her status, or did it deliberately to cause Ms. Wilson's exposure.

And that pardon had better happen soon:

While numerous public officials have been investigated, charged and even convicted in the three decades since Watergate, they almost always avoid prison by appeal, plea bargain or pardon. But at the sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton raised the possibility that he would order Libby to jail even while he pursues an appeal.

Libby sentenced to 30 months in prison

There's no way Libby is going to jail. If Judge Walton decides that Scooter's going to jail in a few weeks, the pardon will happen before Independence Day. Bet on it.

UPDATE: Think I'm cynical? Read Juan Cole on the topic. Here's a sample:

Libby was not charged with the leak, which was probably illegal and certainly grossly unethical. Since Valerie was undercover working against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, especially with regard to Iran, in running a deliberate leaking operation against her Libby was essentially functioning as an agent of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

...

The same is true for Cheney himself and for Karl Rove, Bush's political adviser. They are all traitors who betrayed an undercover US operative who was attempting to work against the ayatollahs in Tehran.

Hmmm. Parlez vous quebecois?

Was Cheney Leaker Zero?

image credit: House Oversight Committee; converted from PDF by Cujo359

To me, this has been one of the big mysteries of Plamegate: Who is Leaker Zero? That's the person right in the big black box in the center of this chart, which I've reproduced as a plain graphic image (just click on the small image to see the full image, which is rather large). This is the person who told Dick Cheney that Valerie Plame Wilson was an employee of the CIA. While I'm sure there are folks to whom this is no mystery, a logical suspect for Leaker Zero is Dick Cheney.

Rather than try to rewrite the basis for this conclusion, I'll just quote grammamarge, a commenter at No Quarter:

I don't believe Ms. Wilson was collateral damage. I believe she was the target. The tell was during the [Kucinich] questioning. Dennis asked her whether having Cheney looking over the shoulder of a CIA officer would be considered intimidating and would that agent feel undue pressure. Valerie smiled and said yes it was. While the question did not refer to her as the officer she answered it as if it did. Cheney knew who she was and knew that she was pushing back, not confirming WMD in Iraq. He outed her and destroyed her entire operation.

Undercover, Covert, and Classified (Also Hush Hush): grammamarge's comment

[I corrected the spelling of Rep. Dennis Kucinich's name for clarity.]

OK, so maybe I'm just late to the party again, but part of this makes sense. Dick Cheney is known to have visited the CIA many times trying to scare up some evidence that Saddam Hussein had WMDs:

Two congressional panels are opening new rounds of investigations into the Administration's prewar claims about WMD. One of their immediate inquiries, sources tell Time, involves Vice President Dick Cheney's role in reviewing the intelligence before the bombing started. Cheney made repeated visits to the CIA in the prelude to the war, going over intelligence assessments with the analysts who produced them. Some Democrats say Cheney's visits may have amounted to pressure on the normally cautious agency.

Who Lost the WMD?

Valerie Plame Wilson was working on finding WMDs in the Middle East, particularly Iraq and Iran. It makes perfect sense that he could have been introduced to her or heard of her while he was doing that, although her covert status at the time makes it less likely. He apparently was interested in the analysis and raw evidence. Anything even remotely like evidence of WMDs would almost certainly have been sent to the Office of Special Plans, Cheney's own little intelligence agency at the Pentagon. The OSP, you may remember, was run by the man fellow neocon Gen. Tommy Franks honored with the title "Stupidest Fucking Guy On the Planet", Doug Feith. (I never get tired of that one). Valerie Wilson was helping to collect that raw evidence.

That doesn't prove that he was trying to destroy Valerie Wilson rather than Joe, of course. It lends credence to the idea, but it's by no means proof. My guess is that he was probably pleased that the collateral damage included her. But he certainly could have been aware of her identity, and so had no need for someone to leak that information to him.

Anyone have any other suspects?

Scooter's Gonna Skate

Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, the reprehensible little man who did whatever Vice President Cheney wanted him to do, is going to receive a pardon, guaranteed. The only thing that will stop the pardon is if the jury decides he's not guilty. The reason it's so obvious is former prosecutor Victoria Toensing's article on the Libby trial. That awful Patrick Fitzgerald, she is saying in essence, is picking on poor Scooter because he can't find anyone else to charge with a crime. Toensing's essay is a masterstroke of rhetorical fallacy and misinformation, and almost completely ignores what has actually been demonstrated in the trial. It's pretty clear that Libby lied multiple times during the investigation, and at least partly to obscure his own role in the exposing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA agent. The only hiccup I can see is that to convict Libby, the jury will have to place more trust in Tim Russert than I'd be inclined to do. Well, not really. They mostly have to trust him more than Scooter Libby, which I think I could manage.

If you're looking for serious rebuttal of the piece, I suggest you check out Jeralyn Merritt or Larry Johnson. Personally, I think "Are you freakin' kidding me?" is enough of a rebuttal, but much more is available if you disagree.

That Toensing is willing to write such nonsense tells me either that Toensing was exactly the person who should never have been given the power to prosecute crimes, or that she is just setting up Libby to be pardoned in case of a guilty verdict. After all, in a case where there is a clear motivation for the President to pardon someone, which is that he kept his mouth shut and didn't implicate his bosses, some other narrative needs to be used to cover up that motivation. The Bush Administration has shown that the only thing it's good at is convincing a certain segment of the public, we'll call it the lowest thirty percent, that they bear no responsibility for their screwups. The exposing of a covert CIA agent is, by any measure I can think of, a massive screwup for a government, particularly since none of the people involved have lost their jobs, or even their security clearances, without first being indicted. The Washington Post, where Toensing's article appeared, has been happy to carry the water for this administration, no matter how grievous the error they've committed, so even that part fits the pattern.

So, you read it here first. Well, probably not. This just occured to me in regard to Toensing's article. There are probably about a million other people who figured that out yesterday. But you can bet on it. The trick will be finding someone foolish enough to take that bet. I suppose you can find one if you ask enough people "do you think the Feds are picking on Scooter?" If the answer is yes, you may have found someone stupid enough.

By the way, looseheadprop has a great discussion of possible defense strategies up at Firedoglake. If you're a little behind on events in the Scooter trial, you might also want to check out this YouTube page, which contains many of the PoliticsTV videos of the ladies and Swopa discussing the case.

UPDATE: Murray Waas, probably the leading journalist on the Plame investigation, published a story today about what Libby told the Vice President at the time the Novak story broke:

At the time that Libby offered his explanation to Cheney, the vice president already had reason to know that Libby's account to him was untrue, according to sources familiar with still-secret grand jury testimony and evidence in the CIA leak probe, as well as testimony made public during Libby's trial over the past three weeks in federal court.

Yet, according to Libby's own grand jury testimony, which was made public during his trial in federal court, Cheney did nothing to discourage Libby from telling that story to the FBI and the federal grand jury. Moreover, Cheney encouraged then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan to publicly defend Libby, according to other testimony and evidence made public during Libby's trial.

The Libby-Cheney Connection

If you're not all that familiar with the stories surrounding this case, read this article from beginning to end. It's an excellent overview of the major point of contention in the trial. It also helps paint a picture of the fecklessness with which Cheney and Libby handled the secret of Valerie Wilson's identity.