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Richard Nixon’s second term as president consisted primarily of the slow unraveling of the crimes of the first term. George W. Bush’s second term seems increasingly consumed with the lethal consequences of his first term. The emerging theme of the Bush presidency is incompetence. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert:

The president who displayed his contempt for Iraqi militants two years ago with the taunt “bring ’em on” had to go on television Tuesday night to urge Americans not to abandon support for the war that he foolishly started but can’t figure out how to win.

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The incompetence at the highest levels of government in Washington has undermined the U.S. troops who have fought honorably and bravely in Iraq, which is why the troops are now stuck in a murderous quagmire. If a Democratic administration had conducted a war this incompetently, the Republicans in Congress would be dusting off their impeachment manuals.

The administration seems to have learned nothing in the past two years. Dick Cheney, who told us the troops would be “greeted as liberators,” now assures us that the insurgency is in its last throes. And the president, who never listened to warnings that he was going to war with too few troops, still refuses to acknowledge that there are not enough U.S. forces deployed to pacify Iraq.

Cartoonist Mark Fiore explains what Iraq needs before U.S. troops can come home.

Tom Tomorrow has it wrong, I think — Superman isn’t working for Halliburton. He seems to be undercutting them on price. This is not going to sit well with Dick Cheney.

The Bush Administration complains that we aren’t hearing the good news from Iraq. Their critics point to rising levels of violence that are impossible to ignore.

The truth about the situation in Iraq is more complex than we imagine. For the most part, I don’t think we see even the tip of the iceberg — the news we get is a bit of frost scraped from the tip of the iceberg.

This page lists many kinds of data from Iraq from May 2003 to May 2005. There seem to be some trends — some good, some bad. (I found the graphic labeled “View the Op-Chart” easier to understand than the text data.)

More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq remains a complex mix of tragedy and hope. To give a sense of the ebb and flow, this chart shows data for three key months: May 2003 (the first full month after the fall of Baghdad), June 2004 (the last month before the Coalition Authority gave way to the interim Iraqi government) and May 2005.

Karl Rove’s attempt last week to use the 9/11 attacks on America to divide and conquer is old news, but I’m slow. Speaking to the New York State Conservative Party, Rove said:

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

Al Franken says:

The thing I will never forgive this administration for is that we were united after 9/11 and they divided us, for their own petty political purposes. And they’re continuing to do it.

Rove continued:

In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to… submit a petition.

Actually, on September 12, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld argued against attacking the Taliban. He wanted to attack Iraq, instead.

Government terrorism experts knew almost immediately that it was Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda that had attacked us. Although no one had ever launched an attack quite like the 9/11 hijackings, the experts recognized many elements of al Qaeda’s unique modus operandi. For weeks, intelligence channels had been listening to elevated “chatter” from al Qaeda about “something big.” The passengers lists of the hijacked planes contained the names of known al Qaeda operatives.

Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon when it was hit. And yet, he didn’t want to fight the Taliban. He wanted war in Iraq.

At This Modern World, Billmon says Rove’s lashing out desperately, like a punch drunk boxer:

[Like Mike Tyson], Rove isn’t just telegraphing his punches, he’s also displaying the depths of his fear. The rhetorical ear chewing and head butting is a clear sign the champ doesn’t have the juice any more, and knows it. Rove is trying to get by on sheer intimidation. He’s pushing as many primordial conservative buttons as he can — leaning on them, in fact — in hopes he can once again make the dreaded liberals the story, not the march of folly currently sinking into the Iraqi quicksands.

In one old Bugs Bunny cartoon, a surly construction worker tries to uproot the little grey rabbit from his cozy rabbit hole in order to build a skyscraper on the site. Bugs won’t budge. He fights back to protect “the sanctity of the American home.”

Last week, the sanctity of the American home was dealt a fatal blow by the U.S. Supreme Court.

There’s nothing new about the practice of cities using the power of eminent domain to seize property from its owners for the benefit of other private interests.

Years ago here in Columbus, Ohio, a group of investors called the Capitol South Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation seized and leveled several city blocks south of the Statehouse, displacing or annihilating a number of small businesses, including an interesting old book store that I liked to visit whenever I went downtown. They built a high-end hotel, an outdoor skating rink which has long since been abandoned and demolished, and a new upscale shopping mall.

Rents at the new mall were too upscale for most of the small businesses it displaced. Shopping at the new mall was too upscale for many of the citizens of Columbus, including me. My finances have improved since the mall opened, but there’s not much reason for me to visit the mall downtown. Each time I go there, it seems more of the storefronts are vacant. The upscale stores have moved to newer, fancier malls out in the suburbs. Last time I was there, even the Cinnabon stall — which had long held some unholy power over me — was empty.

More recently, another group of investors called Campus Partners seized several blocks of property along High Street, which runs right past the Ohio State University campus. They evicted the tenants: bars, restaurants, clothing, music and grocery stores, dance clubs, pizza shops — everybody. They tore down every building on both sides of the street and put up lots of chain link fences. The site remained vacant for more than a year because the developers hadn’t yet bothered to line up tenants for the new buildings they planned to put there.

Maybe it’s unfair to suggest that the many OSU riots of recent years had anything to do with the annihilation of so many places where students could go to socialize and let off steam. Or, maybe not.

Construction is currently well underway on the new buildings that will provide upscale student housing and — surprise! — an upscale mall. Everything is supposed to be ready when students return for classes this fall.

As I’ve watched these things happen, I’ve always felt that it was an outrageous abuse of a legitimate government power to take property from one citizen for the private profit of other citizens. I’ve always imagined that some day, the Supreme Court would hear a case about this abuse of power, and would step forward to uphold the sanctity of the American home.

Well, they heard a case. They made a decision.

These words, from an 1879 speech by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe, seem fitting:

If we ever owned the land we own it still, for we never sold it. In the treaty councils the commissioners have claimed that our country had been sold to the Government. Suppose a white man should come to me and say, “Joseph, I like your horses, and I want to buy them.” I say to him, “No, my horses suit me, I will not sell them.” Then he goes to my neighbor, and says to him: “Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell.” My neighbor answers, “Pay me the money, and I will sell you Joseph’s horses.” The white man returns to me, and says, “Joseph, I have bought your horses, and you must let me have them.” If we sold our lands to the Government, this is the way they were bought.

Now that’s the law of the land.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich on the attempt to turn PBS into a domestic propaganda network:

Here’s the difference between this year’s battle over public broadcasting and the one that blew up in Newt Gingrich’s face a decade ago: this one isn’t really about the survival of public broadcasting. So don’t be distracted by any premature obituaries for Big Bird. Far from being an endangered species, he’s the ornithological equivalent of a red herring.

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That doesn’t mean the right’s new assault on public broadcasting is toothless, far from it. But this time the game is far more insidious and ingenious. The intent is not to kill off PBS and NPR but to castrate them by quietly annexing their news and public affairs operations to the larger state propaganda machine that the Bush White House has been steadily constructing at taxpayers’ expense. If you liked the fake government news videos that ended up on local stations – or thrilled to the “journalism” of Armstrong Williams and other columnists who were covertly paid to promote administration policies – you’ll love the brave new world this crowd envisions for public TV and radio.

There’s only one obstacle standing in the way of the coup. Like Richard Nixon, another president who tried to subvert public broadcasting in his war to silence critical news media, our current president may be letting hubris get the best of him. His minions are giving any investigative reporters left in Washington a fresh incentive to follow the money.

That money is not the $100 million that the House still threatens to hack out of public broadcasting’s various budgets. Like the theoretical demise of Big Bird, this funding tug-of-war is a smoke screen that deflects attention from the real story. Look instead at the seemingly paltry $14,170 that, as Stephen Labaton of The New York Times reported on June 16, found its way to a mysterious recipient in Indiana named Fred Mann. Mr. Labaton learned that in 2004 Kenneth Tomlinson, the Karl Rove pal who is chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, clandestinely paid this sum to Mr. Mann to monitor his PBS bête noire, Bill Moyers’s “Now.”

Now, why would Mr. Tomlinson pay for information that any half-sentient viewer could track with TiVo? Why would he hire someone in Indiana? Why would he keep this contract a secret from his own board? Why, when a reporter exposed his secret, would he try to cover it up by falsely maintaining in a letter to an inquiring member of the Senate, Byron Dorgan, that another CPB executive had “approved and signed” the Mann contract when he had signed it himself? If there’s a news story that can be likened to the “third-rate burglary,” the canary in the coal mine that invited greater scrutiny of the Nixon administration’s darkest ambitions, this strange little sideshow could be it.

Read the whole article.

Washington Post reporter Dana Milbanks on the Denver Three:

Individually, they are ordinary citizens and political unknowns. But collectively, they are the Denver Three — a political sensation in Colorado that is causing agita to a White House that has bested far more sophisticated foes.

The Denver Three’s quest: to learn the identity of the “Mystery Man” who, impersonating a Secret Service agent, forcibly removed them from a taxpayer-funded Social Security event with President Bush three months ago because of a “No More Blood for Oil” bumper sticker on one of their cars.

Hold it just a second — those so-called “town meetings” on Social Security, where the audiences were pre-screened to agree with the Bush privatization plan — those fraudulent road shows were taxpayer-funded? Grrrrr…

It started when the three got tickets to Bush’s March 21 Social Security town hall meeting in Colorado. They flirted with protesting at the event and wore “Stop the Lies” T-shirts underneath their business attire. But Weise worried about getting arrested.

Even so, they were identified after they arrived as potential troublemakers, and then forcefully removed by a man who, they had been told, was a Secret Service agent. Only later did they learn that the man wasn’t an agent at all. The Secret Service launched an investigation (it’s a crime to impersonate a law enforcement official), and the agency and the White House have both learned the impostor’s identity — but they’re not talking.

No matter. The Denver Three say, in a memo they’re distributing, “ALL ARROWS POINT TO WHITE HOUSE.”

The White House says that’s bunk. But a series of similar events have left the administration vulnerable to such charges. In February, a Bush spokesman blamed an “overzealous volunteer” for a 42-person blacklist used at a Bush event in North Dakota. Complaints have also come this year from New Hampshire and Arizona, and during the campaign, event participants were once required to sign loyalty oaths for admission.

The Republican Party has “overzealous volunteer” training camps scattered across the country, turning out a rugged band of Freedom Fighters. They fight freedom wherever they find it, ever ready to stamp out free speech, free thought, and any concept of fair play.

The conviction of 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen for his part in the murders, forty-one years ago, of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner reminds me of a story told in the Ken Burns documentary, Baseball. The first Commissioner of Baseball was a former federal judge named Kenesaw Mountain Landis:

As a judge, he had once sentenced an aging bank robber to fifteen years in jail.

“Your honor,” the man said, “I’m 72 years old. I can’t serve that long.”

Landis replied, “Well, do the best you can.”

Justice may sleep, and sleep for a long time, but it still lives.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne says maybe the Bush Administration didn’t lie to get us into war with Iraq. Maybe, he suggests, they just don’t know what they’re doing:

The notion that the president led the country into war through indirection or dishonesty is not the most damaging criticism of the administration. The worst possibility is that the president and his advisers believed their own propaganda. They did not prepare the American people for an arduous struggle because they honestly didn’t expect one.

How else to explain the fact that the president and his lieutenants consistently played down the costs of the endeavor, the number of troops required, the difficulties of overcoming tensions among the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds? Were they lying? The more logical explanation is that they didn’t know what they were talking about.

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The assertion of the “Downing Street Memo” that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of invasion has understandably become a rallying point for the war’s opponents. But in some ways more devastating are other recently disclosed documents in which British officials warned that “there was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” The British worried at the time that “U.S. military plans are virtually silent” on the fact that “a postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise.”

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Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska says in the current issue of U.S. News & World Report that “the White House is completely disconnected from reality” and that “it’s like they’re just making it up as they go along.” Unfortunately, the evidence of the past suggests that Hagel’s acerbic formulation may be exactly right. Those who still see the invasion of Iraq as a noble mission don’t need to protect the policy from the war’s critics. They need to rescue it from its architects.

I thought the invasion of Iraq was a terrible idea. Unfortunately, history doesn’t offer do-overs. No matter how bad an idea it was to go in, we are in, and we must deal with that fact. I keep looking for evidence of competence from our government, and I keep getting disappointed.

Before we invaded Iraq, I had a heated argument with a friend who supported the invasion. He asked derisively whether I thought we would lose the war.

I said, “We’ll win the war. But then we’ll lose the peace. Which means we’ll lose the war.”

Please, please, please — prove me wrong.

Right after the election last year, George W. Bush said, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.” I think he bought himself some Twizzlers.

Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin:

When the president of the United States says jump, people jump.

But with President Bush, it seems like more and more often they’re jumping in the opposite direction.

Polls show that all of Bush’s talk about Social Security has caught the public’s attention — except that the more they hear about his proposals, the less they like them.

Bush’s increasing insistence that things are going well in Iraq has been accompanied by a dramatic loss of support for the war.

And the latest backfire would appear to be in Iran, in response to Bush’s denunciation last week of Iranian elections as a sham.

Brian Murphy writes for the Associated Press: “Iran’s spy chief used just two words to respond to White House ridicule of last week’s presidential election: ‘Thank you.’ His sarcasm was barely hidden. The backfire on Washington was more evident.

“The sharp barbs from President Bush were widely seen in Iran as damaging to pro-reform groups because the comments appeared to have boosted turnout among hard-liners in Friday’s election — with the result being that an ultraconservative now is in a two-way showdown for the presidency.”

The consensus view in the press today is clear: Bush is losing his touch.

America slaps its forehead and says, “We could have had a good president!” Yes, well, you should have thought of that on Election Day!

I feel sorry for Bill Frist, a little.

As a physician, he must have developed a bit of a scientific mindset — enough to respect the facts some of the time, at least, when backed into a corner by them. Embarrassed by the Terri Schiavo autopsy report showing his video diagnosis from the Senate floor had been wrong, Frist appeared on the Today Show and denied he had ever made such a diagnosis.

As a politician, Florida Governor Jeb Bush is not bound by the scientist’s respect for evidence and logic. When the Schiavo autopsy showed no evidence of trauma or abuse, he leapt into action and put a prosecutor on the case.

Jeb is the eternal optimist. Despite polls showing public revulsion over the way politicians have attempted to feed on the misery of Terri Schiavo’s family, he’s sure there’s a political bonanza in there somewhere.

In March, while a memo circulated among Republican senators calling the Terri Schiavo case “a great political issue,” Dr. Bill Frist, a cardiologist and the Senate Republican Leader, stood up “more as a physician than as a United States Senator,” to voice his opinion on the issue. He had spent an hour watching a videotape of Schiavo, he said. Despite the contrary opinions of doctors who had actually examined and treated the patient over fifteen years, he concluded that Terri Schiavo was not in a persistant vegetative state.

In a blog entry at the time, I wrote:

Either Frist is one hell of a doctor, or he’s a very poor excuse for a man.

Well, now we know.

Via Atrios: Billmon says that, for all our faults, we’re still quantitatively better than Stalin.

If the inhabitants of greater Dachau could ignore the smoke billowing from the chimneys of the invisible, unmentionable camp up on the hill, why shouldn’t we expect most Americans to ignore what’s going on in Guantanamo, or Bagram or Abu Ghraib — or any of the other islands in the archipelago?

Conservatives, of course, froth at the use of such terms, which is why the propaganda machine immediately zeroed in on Durbin’s reference to an extreme nationalist party that flourished in a certain central European country in the 1930s and early 1940s. Just as they popped a vein over Amnesty International’s use of a Russian word for forced labor camp.

Strictly on the facts of the case, they are correct: The American archipelago is just a series of flyspecks compared to its Soviet predecessor. At its peak, the Soviet gulags held an estimated 2.5 million prisoners. The number of deaths — by torture, execution, disease or deliberate starvation — has to be counted in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The KGB, meanwhile, set a record for the assembly-line murder of political prisoners that I don’t think has been matched since, not even by that wannabe Saddam.

As for the central European extremist leader, well, we all know what he did.

I guess that’s enough to satisify most conservatives. (Maybe they should print up some bumper stickers: “America: Still better than Stalin.”) But some of us have slightly higher expectations of a modern parliamentary democracy. Quantitatively, the case against moral equivalence may be open and shut, but qualitatively . . . well, it’s getting a little more dicey.

The Flintstones and The Jetsons are far more interesting now than they were when they first aired roughly forty years ago. It’s not because they’re funny or witty. It’s not because they have any lasting artistic value. It’s certainly not because they show us anything about the past or the future.

They’re interesting today because they provide an unwitting document of the American world view in the early 1960s. As someone who lived through the 1960s, that’s an embarrassing thing to admit.

I picked up a special edition of Life magazine called “Greatest Americans.” It’s based on a Discovery Channel poll and program series that asks viewers to nominate the hundred greatest Americans. That sounded interesting to me — I enjoy the Discovery Channel.

What we have here is another unwitting and embarrassing document of the American mind in the year 2005. We don’t seem to know much history. Even the categories come off looking pretty silly. Some names definitely belong on the list, and others are debatable, at least. But, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that this is our list of 100 Greatest Americans.”

Great Leaders

• George W. Bush
• Laura Bush
• Bill Clinton
• Hillary Clinton
• George H. W. Bush
• Barbara Bush
• Ronald Reagan
• Jimmy Carter
• Richard M. Nixon
• Lyndon Baines Johnson
• Robert F. Kennedy
• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
• John F. Kennedy
• Harry S. Truman
• Dwight D. Eisenhower
• Theodore Roosevelt
• Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Eleanor Roosevelt
• Abraham Lincoln
• Thomas Jefferson
• Alexander Hamilton
• George Washington
• Colin Powell
• Condoleezza Rice

Great Statesmen

• John Edwards
• Barack Obama
• Rudolph Giuliani

Great Military Heroes

• George Patton
• Audie Murphy

Great Religious Leaders

• Billy Graham
• Joseph Smith

Great Activists

• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Rosa Parks
• Malcolm X
• Frederick Douglass
• Harriet Tubman
• Cesar Chavez
• Helen Keller
• Susan B. Anthony

Great Innovators

• Thomas Edison
• Benjamin Franklin
• Alexander Graham Bell
• Jonas Salk
• George Washington Carver
• Nikola Tesla
• Albert Einstein
• Henry Ford
• Carl Sagan
• Walt Disney
• George Lucas
• Steven Jobs
• Bill Gates

Great Adventurers

• John Glenn
• Charles Yeager
• Neil Armstrong
• Charles Lindbergh
• Orville and Wilbur Wright
• Amelia Earhart

Great Entertainers

• Marilyn Monroe
• John Wayne
• James Stewart
• Tom Cruise
• Tom Hanks
• Bob Hope
• Bill Cosby
• Katherine Hepburn
• Lucille Ball
• Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Christopher Reeve
• Steven Spielberg
• Michael Moore
• Mel Gibson
• Clint Eastwood

Great Hosts

• Johnny Carson
• Oprah Winfrey
• Rush Limbaugh
• Phil McGraw
• Ellen Degeneres

Great Music Makers

• Frank Sinatra
• Elvis Presley
• Michael Jackson
• Madonna
• Ray Charles

Great Writers

• Mark Twain
• Maya Angelou

Great Athletes

• Jackie Robinson
• Muhammad Ali
• Babe Ruth
• Lance Armstrong
• Jesse Owens
• Michael Jordan
• Tiger Woods
• Pat Tillman
• Brett Favre

Great Entrepreneurs

• Howard Hughes
• Andrew Carnegie
• Hugh Hefner
• Donald Trump
• Sam Walton
• Martha Stewart