Enhanced Obfuscation

There's something sad about the hoopla surrounding the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library today, something beyond the humorous notion that a guy who seemed to place no value on intellectual attainment is now opening a library. That something is exemplified by this article in Foreign Policy by John Hudson:

Not sidestepping controversy, Condoleezza Rice will defend the Bush administration's enhanced interrogation and rendition program at the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on Thursday.

At Bush library, Condoleezza Rice to defend enhanced interrogation practices

Right off the bat, we see the deliberately obfuscating reference to "enhanced interrogation", which is torture by both U.S. law and common sense. To me, that particular euphemism epitomizes the cowardice and complicity of the part of the U.S. press that covers the federal government. No one will dare call torture for what it is, if a U.S. government official insists otherwise. After all, no one wants to be judgmental, right?

By the logic of the U.S. press, murder could be re-labeled as "enhanced use of weapons".

Sadly, that's not the worst of it:

"The president asked two very important questions in the decision to use these techniques," says Rice of her former boss's interrogation program. "He asked the CIA if it was necessary and he asked the Justice Department if it was legal. Both departments answered yes."

"Only when he was satisfied that we could protect both our liberties and our security did he signal that we could go ahead," says the former secretary of state. "The fact that we have not had a successful attack on our territory traces directly to those difficult decisions." At Bush library, Condoleezza Rice to defend enhanced interrogation practices

Nowhere does the article point out the obvious flaws in this argument. Maybe the author thought they were as obvious as I do, but the use of the phrase "enhanced interrogation" suggests otherwise. So, let me point out a couple of rather obvious ones:

First, that a President could appoint unethical sycophants to run government agencies who will tell him exactly what he wants to hear, and then hears what he wants to, shouldn't be a justification for any idea, no matter how brilliant. There were plenty of folks both at the Defense Department and the Justice Department who knew that torture was both illegal and unproductive.

Second, and maybe this is more important in light of this next quote, torture was clearly illegal both by U.S. law and international treaties we had signed. What in the world would possess a leader to not seek out alternative opinions? Only two possibilities occur to me - either he didn't want to, or he didn't care. Neither strikes me as a particularly desirable trait for a national leader.

Finally, there's this bit, which is why Barack Obama's picture appears at the top of this article:

The remarks may cause something of an awkward moment today, as they coincide with Barack Obama's visit to the Bush library. Though Obama and Bush have shared many counterterrorism policies, enhanced interrogation remains a key sticking point between the two administrations, with the president on record opposing Bush administration policies. "I believe that waterboarding was torture and, whatever legal rationals were used, it was a mistake," Obama said in 2009.

At Bush library, Condoleezza Rice to defend enhanced interrogation practices

What President Obama also said is that he wouldn't "look backwards", which means he refused to prosecute anyone for the acts he admitted were illegal. That's why Condolezza Rice and all the other sorry excuses for human beings who peopled that administration can go around bragging about what a great job they were doing when they grabbed up groups of random foreigners and brought them to our various "Black Sites" to be tortured, instead of enjoying a stay at one of those institutions.

If there's any justice in the world, the Barack Obama Presidential Library will be built right across the street from the G.W. Bush Presidential Library. It will be constructed using the worst practices possible, with absolutely no quality assurance or safety inspections. No one will be prosecuted or sued for this shoddy work, of course, because that would be looking backward. And, of course, there will be no windows placed anywhere it's possible to see that earlier library.

Twitter Message(s) Of The Day

Believe it or not, these two messages were sitting together in my Twitter stream this morning regarding the imminent opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library:

Twitter message by @davidsirota, April 25, 2013



Twitter message by @TheTweetOfGod, April 25, 2013

There's something wrong with this idea, that's for sure. When someone who couldn't be bothered to read a book is given lots of money to open a library, it just seems wrong somehow.

Progressive Idiocy: A Pundit Awakens

Progressive columnist William Rivers Pitt apparently noticed something recently:

From the moment the Supreme Court decision came down in 2000 that gifted the White House to Bush, to the moment he was finally and forever out of power, I resisted him and his works, because I knew what he represented, what he was about, and what he was doing to my beloved country. My instincts were finely honed, and I gave probably a million words - in print, and spoken aloud on the road for some 800,000 miles - to the cause of thwarting him and everything he stood for.

And now? Now I'm suddenly wondering where that guy has been. He sure as hell isn't the one I see in the mirror. He lapsed into a moral coma, lulled by his idea of America and by the election of someone who can talk the birds out of the trees even as the lumberjacks clear-cut the forest.

Waking From My Moral Coma

I should point out that at least Mr. Pitt seems to be waking up to the reality of what's been going on all these years since the Little Bush Administration went to the great pig ranch in the sky. He's way ahead of some of his colleagues in that department. Still, you have to wonder why it took so long. I think that portion I emphasized explains why. I'll get back to that in a moment.

The proximate cause of Pitt's awakening was the case of Tomas Young, an Iraq War veteran whose spinal cord was severed by an insurgent's bullet not long after he arrived there. The man's health has deteriorated so much that he is contemplating suicide. It would be a tragic story even if the war he'd been engaged in was a necessary one. Unfortunately, it wasn't, and one hell of a lot of other people suffered similarly awful fates.

As Pitt writes:

I believe in the idea that is America, but Tomas Young is dying because he believed, too. He is dying, and the people who delivered him to the slow sunset of his death remain utterly unmolested by the rule of law we Americans take so much misguided pride in. I live with my idea of America in one hand, and the dying light of Tomas Young in the other, and when I look in the mirror, I cannot meet my own eyes. I spent all those years fighting against everything that is ending Tomas Young's life, I made documenting their serial crimes my life's work...and then I let it slide, because Bush was gone, and I couldn't summon the necessary energy to remain outraged over the fact that they all got away with the crime of the millennium scot-free.

Waking From My Moral Coma

That Pitt is late to "the party", as John MClane put it is mostly interesting because Pitt is right - he should have known better. Even now, though, he still mostly seems to be berating himself for not staying outraged enough.

But Barack Obama was so much more articulate than W. had ever been, Pitt seems to be saying. This is something that has had me grinding my teeth ever since Obama was inaugurated the first time whenever a progressive has uttered those words. All I can ever seem to say in response is "Who frigging cares?"

Really, what difference does it make? The man has delivered thousands more young men and women into the same hell Tomas Young inhabits. He has carried out assassinations at a rate Bush and his crew of thugs could only dream of, and most progressives haven't raised an objection worth noting. "Oh, you can't change things overnight", they'd say. Yes, he could. He had the power to order our armies home just as much as Bush had the right to order them there in the first place, maybe more. He didn't.

Pitt seems to disagree with that assessment, though:

Make no mistake, now: that's not an "Obama is the same as Bush" argument. Nobody is Bush, because Bush stands alone, and whoever makes that kind of equivalency either slept through the first eight years of this century, hit their head and forgot what those eight years were like, or is trying to sell you something.

Waking From My Moral Coma

I think that anyone who can write that has slept through the last five years, and let's not forget, Pitt is the one who said he was in a "coma". There's no difference that matters to me between those two. How they have conducted their business has been remarkably similar, and the differences don't always speak well of Obama. I'm outraged by Obama's actions for the same reasons I was outraged by the same actions when George W. Bush committed them. I was outraged when it was clear that Obama was going to give Bush and his torturers cover.

What someone does, measured against what he has the power to do, is what matters to most to me about a person. In that regard, Obama is as much of a failure as Bush. If Bush had made this country a better place while he was in office, or at least had tried to, I'd consider his bumbling verbal style nothing more than an amusing quirk. What matters is the work, and in that regard Obama has kept the Bush Administration alive into its fourth term.

Being articulate and educated doesn't impress me, in and of itself. What a person does with that education is what matters. When educated people do wrong, it's far worse than when people who might not understand the historical or social context do so. In short, educated people should know better. "Constitutional scholars" who violate the Constitution offend me more than lazy minded oafs who do the same.

Why do I think that's what Pitt was doing? This quote, for one thing:

I am finished with the moral geometry that says this is better than that, which makes this good. This is not good; this is, in fact, intolerable. Allowing the perpetrators of war crimes - widely televised ones at that - to retain their good name and go on Sunday talk shows as if they had anything to offer besides their ideology of murder and carnage is intolerable. Entertaining the idea that the billions we spend preparing for war cannot be touched, and so the elderly and the infirm and the young and the weak and the voiceless must pay the freight instead, is intolerable.

The pornography of America's global killing spree is intolerable, and, by the by, I am sick of hearing about drones. A child killed by a Hellfire missile that was fired from a drone is exactly, precisely as dead as a child killed by a Hellfire missile fired from an Apache attack helicopter, precisely as dead as a child killed by a smart bomb, precisely as dead as a child killed by a sniper, precisely as dead as a child killed by a land mine, or by a cruise missile, or by any of the myriad other ways instant death is dealt by this hyper-weaponized nation of ours.

Waking From My Moral Coma

Caption: A BLU-97 cluster bomblet found in Al Maajala, Yemen, in December, 2009.

Image credit: Amnesty International/Common Dreams

For that matter, dropping a cluster bomb on a "terrorist camp" is a war crime, too. It amazes me still that so many of the same progressives who proclaim loudly that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes have no comment on the indiscriminate use of our air power against targets in countries that we're not even at war with. At least our leaders in World War II had the excuse that they were fighting against real enemies with real armies, and they hadn't signed a treaty yet that made such things explicitly illegal. Using an area weapon like a cluster bomb in an area where civilians are located is the same thing, just on a smaller scale.

Obama is every bit as about those things Pitt decries as George W. Bush. It's just that Bush couldn't have come up with a phrase like "the moral geometry" to save his life. That kind of excuse-making is the sort that people with some logic and language skills devise.

So, if I were able to give Mr. Pitt advice, it would be this: don't worry about looking in the mirror. Everyone gets tired sometimes. I did. What I'd be thinking about if I were you is why you let it slide - what made you think that it was OK, or to use your terminology, what made you decide there was a "geometry" to the pointless deaths of innocent people when Obama was the Decider? Then, and I say this in all seriousness and with considered thought:

Don't fucking do it again!!

Pitt is still ahead of most progressives on this issue, if this recent article is any indication. So congratulations on waking up. Now pass it on.

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.

Obama Worse Than Bush On The Economy? Go Figure...

Image credit: Parody by Cujo359 (See NOTE)

You won't have to look very hard around here to see me declaring that I think there is no real difference between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama on economics issues. All you really have to do is look for this poster, and start reading. Matt Stoller may disagree with that notion, but not in the way you might think.

Discussing a recent interview Barney Frank gave to the New Yorker, in which Frank said that President Obama declined Bush Administration finance guru's offer to start a program of mortgage write-downs following the Crash of 2008, Stoller writes:

In fact, crisis response is the single most significant policymaking time imaginable, because all structural barriers are swept away. Think about it – this was literally a deal offered by Hank Paulson – one guy – to Barack Obama, with a multi-trillion dollar impact. No 60 votes in the Senate. No hearings. No confirmations. Just a handshake, basically. In other words, policy does matter, and Obama had a variety of choices and leverage, and he did what he thought was best. He did not want to write down mortgages, even though he was offered that choice by the Bush administration and Barney Frank. So he didn’t.

So yes, Barack Obama is worse than George Bush on economic inequality. While Paulson didn’t want to write down mortgages, the single biggest factor in determining whether the American middle class has any stored wealth, Paulson was willing to do so in response to pressure. Barack Obama was not.

Barney Frank: Obama Rejected Bush Administration Concession to Write Down Mortgages

Mortgage write-downs were something that was discussed rather often back then, because one of the reasons for the crash, and one of the reasons the recovery has been so slow and painful, is that there were so many homeowners whose mortgages were "underwater", meaning that the amount the homeowners owed was more than the houses were worth. Write-downs would have helped them stay in their homes, yet keep paying off some part of the debt. Instead, Obama chose the foolish course of trying to prop up the banks.

Given that it was the Bush Administration that first aided the auto industry with loan guarantees, I am not at all doubtful of this story. Nor is it counter to what we know about Obama's economic policies.

Yes, This Is Despair, And It's Depression

There hasn't been much here on the "debt crisis", the latest made-up drama to grip our nation's capital. There are any number of reasons for that. The reason I refer to it as "made-up" is that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution clearly states that the government cannot simply ignore its financial obligations. What's more, at least in the case of Social Security, there is a specific law in place that says the checks have to go out.

David Dayen has listed several ways the President could avoid defaulting on debts within the law, should he choose to.

Still, up to this point, no one had put the political and social ramifications of this nonsensical theatre as well as William Rivers Pitts did yesterday in an op-ed at Truthout:

Oh, but we weren’t done yet. The “Grand Bargain” was still in the offing, now splintered into two or three or twelve different iterations, but all ultimately coming down to the same thing: trillions in cuts for the most vulnerable Americans, no new tax revenues from the rich or anyone else, and the bonus prize sought most passionately by the Democrats was the chance to kick this whole fight down the road to 2013, so none of these failures would be forced to address the question before their next all-important election cycle.

Sell out Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for a chance at an easier ride at the ballot? Where do I sign?

So This Is Despair

This is where we are: despair. At least, it's where I am. The Congress is demanding, after the people who run the financial system in this country looted it, and have not been made to pay anything, that the rest of us must foot the bill. The President is fully on board with this agenda.

Yet Americans continue to let this happen. Progressives still overwhelmingly approve (PDF - see page 7) of the job that Barack Obama is doing as President. That is insane. If anything, his ratings should be that high among conservatives. In his first two years in office, he's done virtually everything that George W. Bush did before him, for which these same people almost universally roundly criticized the man. They called the people who supported Bush, after all the failures and the broken economy, "dead enders", or "thirty percenters", as in the the thirty percent or so who still hadn't bought a clue. Now, Obama stands poised to do something that Bush couldn't manage - cut Social Security and Medicare.

So who are the dead enders now?

It's hard to imagine how we will recover from this. Progressive Americans don't want to punish these people by removing them from office for failing to do what we need them to do. They just think that since Obama's a Democrat, and at least part of Congress is still in Democratic hands, that this is as good as things can be. Since progressives aren't willing to do this, and conservatives are, conservatives will continue to be the ones the politicians try to please.

So yes, this is what despair looks like. It looks like progressives who won't demand that their politicians do what we need them to. It looks like a country that won't make its leaders stop screwing them, even when it's leaving us in the depths of a depression many of us may not see the end of.

UPDATE: Forgot to add that Ian Welsh has some suggestions about how Obama could proceed if he actually wanted to save SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and the economy in general.

Yet Another Sign Of The Fall

It's sad to realize, but I didn't even think about this issue when I read about the start of U.S. military action against Libya:

The U.N. Security Council Resolution authorizing military force in Libya does not, on its face, compel U.S. involvement, but news reports (and common sense) suggest that American participation is likely. That has led to debates over whether the President is constitutionally empowered to order military action in Libya without Congressional approval, whether it be in the form of a declaration of war or at least some statutory authorization to use military force (my views on the substance of this new war are here).

Obama On Presidential War-Making Powers

I understand that there might be times when military action is required on short notice - far shorter than Congress can manage to decide in. That's not the case here. The Libya situation has been in the news for weeks now. The President could have asked for a preliminary authorization to use force, contingent on United Nations approval. That's what George W. Bush did before the Iraq War, albeit just barely.

This time, the President didn't even bother to ask.

What I find really sad about this is that I didn’t even think about this when I read that we’d started military action. It’s been so long since I can remember that Congress even asserted that it had this right that it’s scarcely worth thinking about anymore. Progressives don’t care, because it’s “our guy” doing the lawbreaking. Conservatives don’t care, because they’re not real conservatives, and they just loves them their defense spending even more than Democrats do.

As texan4hillary points out, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton both said that a President could not take this kind of action without the consent of Congress when they were running for President.

So, you see, elections really do matter.

Even though we have a House of Representatives that’s controlled by the opposition party, whose leaders mostly can’t contain their contempt for the current occupant of the White House, there won’t be impeachment hearings on this apparent usurpation of Congress's power. That’s how far gone we are on this issue.

No wonder I didn’t think about it. It's like just about everything else in politics these days - the people who are supposed to care don't, and too few Americans seem inclined to make them.

Quote Of The Day

Ian Welsh, reacting to this quote from the Financial Times:

The venue was the Oval Office. A group of British dignitaries, including Gordon Brown, were paying a visit. It was at the height of the 2008 presidential election campaign, not long after Bush publicly endorsed John McCain as his successor… Trying to be even-handed and polite, the Brits said something diplomatic about McCain’s campaign, expecting Bush to express some warm words of support for the Republican candidate… ‘I probably won’t even vote for the guy,’ Bush told the group, according to two people present. ‘I had to endorse him. But I’d have endorsed Obama if they’d asked me.’

[Sorry, don't have a link. FT is a pay site.]

Ian's reaction:

And why not, it’s not hyperbole at all to say that Obama is Bush’s third term. He has embraced Bush’s wars, Bush’s approach to executive power, Bush’s civil liberties doctrines and Bush’s economic doctrines. The differences exist, but they are not significant. In almost every way that matters, Obama took Bush’s constitutional order and institutionalized it, giving it a bipartisan imprimatur.

Bush would have endorsed Obama if asked

Yep, that's it in a nutshell. McCain was just a crazy guy who wanted to be President. Anyone looked good next to him, except maybe his running mate.

It's both sad and hilarious that, at this point, there are still so many people who don't see this.

At Long Last

At long last, people who want to contrast the Obama Administration with its predecessor have a talking point, thanks to Jane Hamsher:

If Obama had the least little bit of interest in protecting his staff, he too would have demanded that Breitbart release the entire video before making any decision regarding Shirley Sherrod.

How Many Democrats Does It Take To Stand Up To Andrew Breitbart?

George W. Bush, whatever his failings, didn't jettison his people when they became liabilities. He kept Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney on well after they became political liabilities. The thought of him doing what Obama has done to Sherrod, and Van Jones, ACORN, Dawn Johnsen is almost mind-boggling. These are all people Obama and the Democrats simply refused to stand up for, not to mention labor unions. Ian Welsh put that tendency in perspective a few days ago:

Democrats made a play for corporate money and in so doing, they sold out constituencies which were actually loyal to them, and could actually be counted on. Wall Street will never be reliably loyal to Democrats, neither will the very rich. At best they will play Democrats and Republicans off against each other, but realistically, they prefer Republicans whenever Republicans can win.

You reap what you sow. Sell out the interests of your core supporters, and they can’t help you as much as they could if you helped them. When will Democratic politicians learn this lesson?

Democrats Face 200 million Republican War Chest Without the Strong Allies They Should Have

In answer to Ian's question, my guess is about when a mythical underworld location freezes over. These are the same people who couldn't wait to call unions foolish for supporting a Democrat who was friendly to their interests in the Arkansas primary. The one thing this should teach us is that there is no such thing as being a friend to the DC Democrats. The best you can hope for is that they won't tell us it's raining as they're pissing on our backs.

If you think these Democrats can ever be trusted to support what we progressives want, then you're an even bigger fool than whoever fired Shirley Sherrod.

So yes, there's a difference between the last Administration and this one. Don't it make you proud?

Quote Of The Day

Quote of the day goes to Steve Clemons, via Talking Points Memo:

The White House is working hard to secure deals that yield fluffy, feel good commentary about the Obama White House. One American White House reporter used colorful terms to describe the arrangement. The reporter said, "They want 'blow jobs' first [in the press sense]. Then you have to be on good behavior for a bit or be willing to deal, and then you get access."

"Axe" and "Gibbs" know who needs access to get their books pushed forward. They know who will pay for play -- and are taking notes on who has been naughty and nice in their reporting.

Communications Corruption at the White House

If you've wondered why supposedly progressive reporters have been giving President Obama a pass on his regressive policies, I suggest you read this article. It provides an example, which is that there are reporters perfectly willing to fudge stories in exchange for the inside access necessary to write a successful book about Obama. Right now, books about Obama are in demand. Politics being what it is, that could change fairly quickly, so the time to sell out is right now.

Anyone familiar with Robert Woodward's books about George W. Bush will recognize this phenomenon. Woodward's books were initially overly respectful, one might even say "fawning", of Bush. The later ones, after Bush was re-elected and his poll numbers were in the toilet, were more critical.

Clemons' use of the word "corruption" in the title is apt. This is corruption, and since we depend on reporters for an understanding of what's going on in the White House, it's a particularly dangerous form.

How Can We Miss You ...

How can we miss you when you won't go away?
Image credit: Bob Collins/Minnesota Public Radio

The Obama Administration resembles the Bush Administration more every day, and yet there are people in America who, it appears, miss having an inarticulate thug as the leader of their country:

A little more than a year has passed since the Bush administration limped into the history books. The legacies of the Bush era include two wars, financial collapse, Guantanamo Bay, a nationwide housing market disaster and economic dysfunction. But memories are short – so let the revisionism begin, via an advertising billboard.

Next to a highway outside Minneapolis, a billboard appeared (pictured, above) with the familiar smiling features of America's 43rd president, and the headline: "Miss me yet?" Time passed without anyone owning up to funding the billboard's appearance, and the mystery deepened. For obvious reasons, many people thought it was a joke.

Missing George Bush Yet?

Just as there were people in the former U.S.S.R. who were nostalgic for Josef Stalin, who may have managed to murder more of his people than Hitler did, there are people who long for the "good old days" here of bombing or invading any small country that pissed us off, and when it really was OK to hate people who were different from you.

Someone is conducting an online poll in which roughly 25 percent of the respondents say they miss Bush and his "certainty". (NOTE: It will be open for another day or so.)

Don't worry, folks, those days will be here again soon enough. The economic collapse your hero and his enablers engendered will be here for a generation thanks to Obama's cluelessness, and we'll probably be ruled by a string of tinpots until enough Americans learn to pay attention to what's important.

I don't miss George W. Bush, largely because his work endures.

(h/t P.Z. Myers)

What Would The Buddha Say To Abu Gonzalez?

I wrote this in a comment two years ago on the subject of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, who enabled much of the lawlessness and torture of the Bush Administration:

I think the truth is that evil is done mostly by ordinary people who just ignored the implications and did it anyway. That was undoubtedly true of some of the folks who designed Dachau, and it's probably true in lots of other situations. You can't always blame them - people sometimes have to do those things to survive. But often they have alternatives and they don't take them. That was certainly true in Abu's case.

He'll Always Be Abu To Me (Comment #2)

Looking over the assembled quotes from Buddha at Thinkexist.com, I found this:

“The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.”

That's as close as it gets to inspirational around here.

UPDATE (Jan. 5): If you want inspiration, or motivation at least, read this, and take it to heart.

Obama Wins Nobel Aspiration Prize

To say I was surprised by this is an understatement:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009

Anyone who clicks on the Barack Obama keyword here will see that I'm no fan of our President's. In fact, among the original field of Democratic presidential candidates last year, he was in a tie for last, for differing reasons, with "Crazy Mike" Gravel.

It's not fair, of course, but my attitude about this is also shaped by what President Obama has failed to do in the area of international relations. He's failed to close Guantanamo and other black sites. He's failed to hasten the end of our involvement in Iraq. He's failed to bring to justice the people who kidnapped and tortured foreigners, not to mention American citizens.

On the other hand, if you look at people who haven't received this prize and yet deserved to, former President Richard Nixon certainly comes to mind. His thawing of relations with both the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and China have to count as some of the most important peace initiatives of the time. Yet the only prize he received, albeit vicariously, was Henry Kissinger's prize for negotiating with North Vietnam to end the Vietnam war. Nixon's spectacular failure to end that war, and his habit of trying to "screw" his political enemies, no doubt contributed to his being overlooked by the Nobel Committee. So what a head of state fails to do can have an effect.

Incidentally, I despise Richard Nixon. That doesn't blind me to his accomplishments.

Newsweek's David Graham published an interesting article of Nobel Peace Prize winners of dubious merit. There are some, like Presidents Carter and Wilson, who I think should not be on that list, but there are plenty who deserve to be, including Kissinger. Even those, though, generally received their awards for long-term projects that didn't come to fruition, or careers that had both positive and negative contributions to world peace. In that latter category are both Kissinger and Elihu Root, who brokered several peace treaties, but was also responsible for the conduct of the Phillipine-American War.

What I'm getting at here is that most of the winners of this prize either accomplished something concrete, or spent considerable effort trying. That wouldn't seem to apply to Barack Obama yet. Reuters put together a list of the sort of things that he's done since taking office that might have earned him the award. Here are the highlights:

* In April, Obama launched a plan to create a world free of nuclear weapons in a speech in the Czech capital Prague. He said the United States would reduce the role of nuclear weapons in its national security and urge others to follow.

* In June, Obama told the world's Muslims that violent extremists had exploited tensions between Muslims and the West, and that Islam was not part of the problem but part of promoting peace.

* Last month Obama made his first address to the U.N. General Assembly. Obama pressed world leaders on Wednesday to help confront challenges ranging from the war in Afghanistan to nuclear standoffs with Iran and North Korea instead of expecting the United States to do it all alone.

* In September, Obama also chaired a historic meeting of the U.N. Security Council, which unanimously approved a U.S.-drafted resolution calling on nuclear weapons states to scrap their arsenals.

FACTBOX-Barack Obama Wins The Nobel Peace Prize

Of these, most are speeches he gave. The last point about chairing the Security Council meeting on disarmament strikes me as significant, but it's a preliminary step. For a guy who always seems to talk bigger than he walks, the speeches don't strike me as anything remarkable.

Ironically, it's quite likely that Obama will do something someday worthy of this prize. He certainly has the skills. His speech on race last year shows that he has the capacity to see an issue from different points of view. He's articulate, displays a profound curiosity about the world, and seems to pride himself on being able to make political deals. While ordinary citizens like me might see him as a con artist, or as someone who always does the politically necessary or expedient thing rather than what the country needs him to do, those are characteristics that most of the world's leaders will probably share. He'll fit right in, in other words. That's the sort of person who can make deals between parties that don't agree on much of anything except the need to make a deal.

Awards usually aren't given for potential, though. Under the circumstances, it's hard to avoid the impression that this award came to Barack Obama because he isn't George W. Bush, as Steve Benen observes:

It's indicative of a degree of relief. Much of the world has wanted America to take the lead again, and they're rightly encouraged to see the U.S. president stepping up in the ways they hoped he would. It's hard to overstate the significance, for example, of seeing a U.S. president chair a meeting of the United Nations Security Council and making strides on a nuclear deal.

Nobel Announcement

However, a later Benen article included this quote from the Nobel Committee:

Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland told the AP, "Some people say, and I understand it, 'Isn't it premature? Too early?' Well, I'd say then that it could be too late to respond three years from now. It is now that we have the opportunity to respond -- all of us."

An Aspirational Record

So, it may not be that the award was given to Obama as a thank you for no more "Yo, Blair!", and no more unwelcome massages. The 2009 award does seem to fit in with the Nobel Committee's criteria:

Since World War II, however, the committee has strayed far from its original mandate. Between 1946 and 2008, only one quarter of the prizes (17 of 69) went to those promoting interstate peace and disarmament. An increasing number of awards (16 of 48 since 1971) sought to encourage ongoing peace processes -- in line with a traditional understanding of peace -- but they often intervened in processes that had born little fruit to date or still had a long road ahead. At the same time, the awards increasingly equated peace with overall human well-being.

Dangerous Prize

It's not the first time I've written this, but the prize wasn't awarded to piss off George Bush. What it is about, however, may be almost as futile.

The article's title "Dangerous Prize" reflects the author's notion that sometimes Nobel Peace prizes awarded on the basis of aspiration have backfired, or been shown to be made mostly of hope. Even so, there seems precious little to reward at this point.

Let's hope that Obama can live up to at least some of the Nobel Committee's aspirations.

An Old Question Answered

Quite some time ago, back when the Bush Administration suddenly fired eight U.S. Attorneys with what amounted to no explanation whatsoever, I wrote this:

So, the question remains, who really authorized the firings? Clearly, it wasn't Catherine Martin or Harriet Miers. They might have had the authority to fire someone in their own departments, but that's about it. The "juice", to coin a term, needed to fire someone in another department lies elsewhere in the White House.

Who Fired The USA Eight?

It now appears that we have an answer for at least one of those eight USAs, and it's none other than Mr. Douchenozzle himself, as Talking Points Memo relates:

Perhaps the key takeaway from the just released documents on the U.S. attorney firings is this:

Karl Rove claimed recently that he and his staff acted merely as a conduit for passing on concerns about David Iglesias. But it's now clear that Rove's office pushed from 2005 for Iglesias to be canned, and was intimately involved in the decision.

Docs Show Rove Pushed For Iglesias Firing

Rove certainly did have the "juice" (a term used in the documents available at that time, by the way). He was on my short list of suspects, mainly because it had been clear for some time that he was after Iglesias' head, among others. Until now, though, there hadn't really been a paper trail to prove his connection. That is no longer true. Part of that "paper" is apparently an interview former White House Counsel Harriet Meirs had with the House Judiciary committee:

In a June 15 interview with House investigators, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers detailed a remarkable 2006 contact with Karl Rove, then on the road in New Mexico, regarding US Attorney David Iglesias.

Rove, Miers recalled, was "very agitated" about Iglesias, who was later ousted in the Bush Administration's purge of US Attorneys. Rove was getting "barraged" with complains by "political people that were active in New Mexico."

'Very Agitated' Rove Called Miers From New Mexico To Complain About Iglesias

For those just tuning in, the problem with these firings, along with their seemingly abrupt and arbitrary nature, was that in at least the case of five of those USAs, it was alleged that the reason they were fired was because they refused to press bogus vote fraud cases in the interest of enhancing the chances of Republicans in their district. As Miers testified, Iglesias' case was particularly blatant:

President George W. Bush and Karl Rove, the former White House political adviser, both appear to have helped orchestrate the firing of former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias after receiving numerous complaints from Republican activists that the federal prosecutor would not pursue charges of voter fraud, according to a report on the U.S. attorney purge released Monday by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog.

The 390-page report is the culmination of an 18-month joint investigation by Inspector General Glenn Fine and the head of the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility, H. Marshall Jarrett. Their report concluded that Iglesias’s firing was the most “controversial” and that his dismissal was “engineered” by New Mexico GOP lawmakers Sen. Pete Domenici, Congresswoman Heather Wilson and former White House political adviser Karl Rove over complaints about Iglesias’s refusal to secure indictments in voter fraud cases and in a public corruption case.

Many election integrity experts believe claims of voter fraud are a ploy by Republicans to suppress minorities and poor people from voting. Historically, those groups tend to vote for Democratic candidates. Raising red flags about the integrity of the ballots, experts believe, is an attempt by GOP operatives to swing elections to their candidates as well as an attempt to use the fear of criminal prosecution to discourage individuals from voting in future races.

Bush’s Concerns About Voter Fraud Led To Iglesias’s Firing

What will become of this now is a good question. Certainly, such attempts at meddling shouldn't go uncorrected, but at this point I don't know what can be done.

Perhaps in a year or two we'll be able to answer that question.

Irony Abounds In Right's Response To DHS Report

The right-wing blogs, Fox News, and the usual gang of idiots are all up in arms, so to speak, about a report that was released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently. Glenn Greenwald provides a summary:

Right-wing polemicists today are shrieking in self-pitying protest over a new report from the Department of Homeland Security sent to local police forces which warns of growing "right-wing extremist activity."  The report (.pdf) identifies attributes of these right-wing extremists, warning that a growing domestic threat of violence and terrorism "may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration" and "groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority."

Conservatives have responded to this disclosure as though they're on the train to FEMA camps. The Right's leading political philosopher and intellectual historian, Jonah Goldberg, invokes fellow right-wing giant Ronald Reagan and says: "Here we go Again," protesting that "this seems so nakedly ideological." Michelle Malkin, who spent the last eight years cheering on every domestic surveillance and police state program she could find, announces that it's "Confirmed:  The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real!"  Lead-War-on-Terror-cheerleader Glenn Reynolds warns that DHS -- as a result of this report (but not, apparently, anything that happened over the last eight years) -- now considers the Constitution to be a "subversive manifesto."  Super Tough Guy Civilization-Warrior Mark Steyn has already concocted an elaborate, detailed martyr fantasy in which his house is surrounded by Obama-dispatched, bomb-wielding federal agents.  Malkin's Hot Air stomps its feet about all "the smears listed in the new DHS warning about 'right-wing extremism.'"

The ultimate reaping of what one sows: right-wing edition

[links from original]

As Glenn points out, the same people who are now complaining about this situation were some of the main cheerleaders for the domestic surveillance and human rights abuses of the Bush Administration. This report has opened a rich vein of irony that may supply all our needs for decades.

As Blue Girl notes, if there's any group of radicals that has proved themselves dangerous to public safety in the last couple of decades, it's those on the right.

As Dana Hunter observes, these people identify themselves with militias and other armed and potentially dangerous cranks. They haven't shown any similar concern for the rights of liberal, progressive, LGBT, or anti-war groups that have confined themselves to peaceful protest.

As Brendan Calling points out, this is something we've been warning about for years.

In fact, I have deliberately invoked the specter of a Hillary Clinton presidency to get my point across. I didn't do that because I found her to be particularly scary. I did it because I knew the Right finds her scary. Here's what I wrote on the subject of domestic surveillance in 2007:

I'll just add parenthetically that I don't trust any government with my civil rights and liberties. Governments are supposed to serve their people, not the other way round. That's as true for a Clinton Administration as it is for a Bush Administration. Everyone who has been in politics for a while has enemies and antagonists. You'd think all these bozos who assume that they can trust President Bush would think about that for a moment. Of course, if you're foolish enough to trust Bush, thinking probably isn't your strong suit.

Finally, A Definite Answer

In all the articles I've written on the subject of human rights or domestic surveillance, you'll have to look hard to find mention of left-wing or Democratic Party organizations in particular being at risk. My worry is that any government can abuse its powers, and that many do.

That's clearly not the case on the Right.

Today, Think Progress showed that the irony runs much deeper than we imagined:

Yesterday, a Department of Homeland Security report about the rising radicalization of “rightwing extremists” was leaked. The right wing was immediately incensed, viewing the report on radical “extremists” as an attack on “conservatives.” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, for example, tried to suggest it was a report about Republican “loyalists.”

However, this morning, Fox News’s Catherine Herridge revealed that the report, along with an earlier report on radicalized left-wing groups, was actually “requested by the Bush administration” but not completed until recently:

HERRIDGE: Well this is an element of the story which has largely gone unreported. One looks at right-wing groups, as you mentioned. And a second is on left-wing groups. Significantly, both were requested by the Bush administration but not finished until President Bush left office.

Herridge’s reporting undermines her network’s own “reporting” over the past 24 hours. Since news of the DHS assessment broke yesterday, Fox anchors and guests have been seizing upon the report as evidence that the administration is trying to intimidate tea party goers or “stifle speech”[.]

Fox Reporter Contradicts Fox: DHS Report On Right Wing Was ‘Requested By The Bush Administration’

I suspect that with reporting instincts like those, Ms. Herridge will soon be the go-to correspondent for Big Disastrous Fires and Bizarre, Scary Street Crimes. She certainly is far too inquisitive to be covering Washington politics for Fox News.

It's delicious that their own hero, George W. Bush, was the one who ordered these reports. It's even more delicious that, while these same people have been lamenting every step the Obama Administration has taken in the direction of the rule of law and respecting our rights, the Obama Administration has mostly chosen to continue the abuses of the Bush Administration. In view of the fact that this is a project left over from the prior administration, the protests ring particularly hollow.

It's hard to imagine that there will be more irony content in this story, but I'm sure if it's there, the right wing will find it and expose it for us.

UPDATE: It was Blue Girl, not Blue Gal, who made noted the relative danger from right and left-wing radicals. I've now corrected that oversight, thanks to Blue Gal's comment.

Flashback To 2004

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons




I've finally connected my computer up to my stereo, and all the music I've been digitizing over the years is now being played through the biggest speakers in my house. I'm hearing many tunes that I haven't heard in a while. The great thing about computers is that you can just tell them to play a bunch of songs in random order. They can even learn what songs you like, and play those more often if you like it that way.

The one that came up just now is this one:

Don't want to be an American idiot.
Don't want a nation under the new mania
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mind fuck America.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Where everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
For that's enough to argue.

Green Day: American Idiot

Green Day's American Idiot was released in Fall, 2004. The first time I heard it was while I was on what was, by then, an interminable string of road trips for the company I was working for at the time. I was in Colorado Springs just before Thanksgiving. On a day off, I'd gone to one of the local music stores and bought the CD. I put the CD in my laptop computer, and when I heard these lyrics, all I could think was:

Yes, this is the America I'm living in.

This was a couple of weeks after John Kerry had lost his bid to replace George W. Bush as President. It was a time when you couldn't hear a single word on TV about how foolish the war in Iraq was, or how short-sighted nearly everything the Bush Administration had done to "fight terrorism" was. Anyone who criticized Bush or the "War On Terrorism" was an unpatriotic soft-headed pinko, according to the loud, thoughtless voices all around us, which seemed to be the only ones speaking. It was a time when I kept asking myself "Don't these people remember Vietnam and Communism?", and "Don't they know what freedom really means?"

There isn't a time in my life when I remember being more pessimistic about our future as a country than I was that year.

And then these kids, who were too young to remember Vietnam, probably too young to even remember how afraid we once were of Communism, and whom I'd only known as a group who wrote clever songs about teenage angst, showed that they got it. They understood, without having to live through the hysterias of our past, that we were in another full-blown hysteria then.

That realization restored what little optimism you who read this blog are seeing today.

For that I have to thank Green Day, and all the other young people who demonstrate that some of their elders really need to pay more attention to the world around them.

OPR To Release Report On Torture Advocacy Soon

Image credit: GWU National Security Archive



The Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has been reviewing the conduct of attorneys involved in the decision to sanction torture during the Bush Administration, according to a report by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff:

An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics is causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials. H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department's ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos "was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys." According to two knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, a draft of the report was submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration. It sharply criticized the legal work of two former top officials—Jay Bybee and John Yoo—as well as that of Steven Bradbury, who was chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the time the report was submitted, the sources said. (Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

A Torture Report Could Spell Big Trouble For Bush Lawyers

It's too bad they couldn't reach Yoo. I just love listening to smirking sadists justifying their actions.

As befits their name, the OPR is investigating whether the DoJ opinion was, shall we say, fixed:

OPR investigators focused on whether the memo's authors deliberately slanted their legal advice to provide the White House with the conclusions it wanted, according to three former Bush lawyers who asked not to be identified discussing an ongoing probe. One of the lawyers said he was stunned to discover how much material the investigators had gathered, including internal e-mails and multiple drafts that allowed OPR to reconstruct how the memos were crafted. In a departure from the norm, Jarrett also told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee last year he would inform them of his findings and would "consider" releasing a public version. If he does, it could be the most revealing public glimpse yet at how some of the major decisions of Bush-era counterterrorism policy were made.

A Torture Report Could Spell Big Trouble For Bush Lawyers

I and most folks who became cynical about the Bush Administration suspect this to be true already. What I expect will come out of this is proof. That reference to e-mails is crucial. One thing that became clear during the U.S. Attorneys scandal is that even though the principles found ways to eliminate their e-mails, the subordinates implementing policy did not. Their e-mails often told interesting tales.

What I'm less sure of is what will become of all this. Despite Attorney General Eric Holder's declaration that waterboarding is torture, and that the President has no right to authorize it, it's pretty clear to me that President Obama and Holder would just as soon wash their hands of the issue of torture during the Bush Administration. If this reports is damning enough they might not be able to, but I'm not holding my breath. Sad to say, the spirit of justice is a very weak one in DC.

(h/t: Hilzoy)

UPDATE: Over at FireDogLake, Selise provides another possible explanation for why the urge to make all this torture and rendition stuff go away is so bipartisan:

Did the USA engage in torture by proxy during the Clinton years? A criminal investigation into published reports could answer that question. And if such an investigation were to show that torture was used, then we ought to hold Democrats as well as Republicans accountable for their crimes. Only if we, the citizens who have donated, volunteered and voted for Democrats, refuse to apply the same standards of accountability to both the Clinton and Bush administrations can [Salon columnist Joe] Conason fairly make the claim that it's about partisanship and not accountability.

A Challenge For Joe Conason And For Us

Personally, I see no difference practical difference between some of the alleged abuses Selise cites and the ones perpetrated by the Bush Administration. Both should be prosecuted, if it's possible. These abuses are a stain we'll wear as a country for a long time, and they seem to have netted us absolutely nothing. The more likely people underneath a President fear they may be prosecuted for doing something illegal on his behalf, the less willing they'll be to do it.

An Intriguing Question

Today at Salon, Glenn Greenwald asked an interesting hypothetical question:

Suppose (for the sake of discussion) that: (a) the U.S. learns exactly where Osama bin Laden is located in Pakistan; (b) there is ample evidence that bin Laden (i) perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and (ii) is in the advanced stages of planning new imminent attacks on the U.S.; and (c) the Pakistani Government is either unwilling or unable to apprehend bin Laden in order to extradite him to the U.S. for trial. Further suppose that efforts to compel the Pakistanis to do so through the U.N. are blocked (because, say, China or Russia vetoes any actions).

What, if anything, is the U.S. (under current facts) permitted to do about Osama bin Laden, who -- we're assuming for purposes of these discussions -- clearly perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and is in the process of plotting new attacks? As far as I can tell, the options would be: (a) drop a bomb on him and kill him with no due process; (b) enter Pakistan, apprehend him, and bring him to the U.S. for a trial (i.e., rendition); or (c) do nothing, and just leave him be.

The L.A. Times, Obama & renditions

Actually, he asked two interesting hypothetical questions, thanks to one of his readers:

Suppose (for the sake of discussion) that in 2007: (a) Afghanistan learns exactly where George W. Bush is located in the U.S.; (b) there is ample evidence that W. (i) illegally detained and tortured its citizens and (ii) is continuing these policies with the intention of doing so indefinitely; and (c) the U.S. government (both Dems and Republicans) is either unwilling or unable to apprehend W. in order to extradite him to the the Netherlands for trial. Further suppose that efforts to compel the U.S. to do so through the U.N. are blocked (because, say, the U.S. vetoes any actions).

What, if anything, is Afghanistan (under current facts) permitted to do about Bush, who -- we're assuming for purposes of these discussions -- clearly committed war crimes and is continuing to do so? . . . .Why are the rules different for us?

The L.A. Times, Obama & renditions

To answer the last question first, besides the obvious, which I've illustrated in graphic form with the picture that begins this article, I can't think of any good reason. Needless to say, the bar would be higher for Afghanistan, unless you assumed hypothetically that there's no chance we'd try to snatch Bush back.

My objections to extraordinary rendition as Greenwald has defined it is that it has usually ended with people either being tortured, whether by us or someone else, or left in prison indefinitely with no trial or indictment. As he observes, the previous Administrations that did this allegedly did it either to people who were to stand trial, or who had been convicted in absentia.

We aren't the only country that's ever kidnapped someone to put him on trial. Perhaps the most famous instance of this happening prior to 9/11 was Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann, an accused Nazi war criminal, was kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli agents and taken to Israel for trial.

My own feeling is that the act of rendition itself may be necessary for some time, since there's no way of enforcing any edict of the World Court or other international justice system in a country that doesn't agree to abide by it. Perhaps in the long run, though, the only acceptable way of doing this will be to go through an international court to obtain a warrant. Messy as that idea sounds, it's probably better than letting everyone do it on his own.

What do you think?

Olmert Gets Everything Wrong But The Timing

If only this had happened a couple of weeks from now ...

A couple of days ago, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert bragged about how he'd persuaded President Bush to abstain on the United Nations resolution demanding a cease-fire between Israel and the Gaza Strip:

Upon receiving word that the US was planning to vote in favor of the resolution - viewed by Israel as impractical and failing to address its security concerns - Olmert demanded to get Bush on the phone, and refused to back down after being told that the president was delivering a lecture in Philadelphia. Bush interrupted his lecture to answer Olmert's call, the premier said.

America could not vote in favor of such a resolution, Olmert told Bush. Soon afterwards, Rice abstained when votes were counted at the UN.

PM: Rice Left Embarrassed In UN Vote

Any Americans noticing a teensy problem here? Like as in a foreign head of government is bragging about being able to have our President dragged off a stage to talk to him about how he should vote on a U.N. resolution? Reactions to this announcement over at Sic Semper Tyrranis like this one:

Yet the topic of what extent US national interest and Israeli national interest intersects is never allowed to enter public discourse at a national level. In fact, the entire subject appears to be a forbidden topic to the powers that be. I often wonder why Americans put up with this nonsense.

Olmert Ordered US Abstention: Comment by Medicine Man

sum up pretty well why this should have been a huge mistake on Olmert's part if he wants the U.S. - Israel relationship to continue as it has. Why make the head of state of your most useful ally appear to be your puppet? The question that Medicine Man asks, in one form or another, would occur to most Americans if they knew about this.

That's what makes Olmert's timing so exquisite. The President is a Republican today, and so the news, TV in particular, won't tell us about this. It's embarrassing to their guy. Oh, sure, that mouthy lady and the Sports Night guy would have, but no one who's serious pays attention to them, right?

If this had happened two weeks from now, Barack Obama would have been President, and you can bet that Fox "News" would have picked up on this in a flash. They would have made the connection between Israel's interests and our President's behavior, and made the inference that they were too closely related. Then CNN would have done their level best to ape Fox's skepticism, and this would have been, to use a West Wing expression, a "thing".

That, I think, is why Olmert will get away with this, at least for now. Just wait a couple of weeks, though. Soon, we'll be a much more independent nation.

As appalled as I am at the reason that will be true, maybe that's a good thing.

Why I Like Jim McDermott

Image credit: Deborah Lawrence.

Updated below

When he first ran for Congress, I got to vote for Jim McDermott. I say "got to" rather than "had to" for many reasons, but this is one of them:

Laura Bush asked members of Congress to pick local painters to decorate ornaments for this year's 20-foot Fraser fir in the Blue Room. The globes (to be unveiled by the first lady tomorrow) are supposed to showcase something special about each congressional district. Washington state's Rep. Jim McDermott contacted a local arts organization, which asked [Deborah] Lawrence, a collage artist, to create the local entry.

"I was at first nauseated, then realized it was an opportunity," said Lawrence, 55, who frequently combines politics and satire in her work and saw this as the perfect way "to highlight Jim McDermott because he's a hero of mine."

Christmas Colors for the White House: Red, White and Impeach

She decorated the tree ornament with text celebrating McDermott's support of a resolution to impeach President Bush. Sadly, the White House has declined to hang this particular ornament. I'm sure McDermott and his staff must have realized that would happen.

In contrast to my largely worthless congresscritter, who to this day sees no reason to impeach Bush, McDermott has been a breath of fresh air for most of his stay in the Capitol. I like his friends, too.

(h/t Taylor Marsh)

UPDATE: According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, this isn't a case of Jim McDermott deliberately tweaking the President. Instead, it appears to be a case of too much delegation:

Lawrence was chosen after McDermott asked Jim Kelly, executive director of the King County arts commission, known as 4Culture, to pick an artist. Kelly asked his staff. Heather Dwyer, 4Culture program manager, suggested Lawrence.

Mike DeCesare, McDermott's communications director, said his boss had nothing to do with Lawrence's political message.

"We didn't have a role in this," said DeCesare. "We saw the ornament for the first time Tuesday morning. We agree with the first lady's decision to remove it. The holiday is meant for peace and understanding. We support artistic freedom, but we wake up in the morning like anybody else and say, 'Not today.' "

Seattle ornament banned from White House Christmas tree

I still like McDermott's taste in friends.