brainrow

George W. Bush said this week that we’re not leaving Iraq, “so long as I’m the President”. Could this old cartoon (the top one) hold the explanation? Is Iraq payback for something that never happened?

The conservative movement is not monolithic. It has many branches, each with its own ideas of the right way — the far-right way — to run the world.

A Florida school board wants to ban a children’s book about Cuba from its school libraries. The book isn’t harsh enough on the Cuban government. And there’s no better way to fuel the mind of a child than to deny him access to ideas you disagree with.

A coalition of conservative groups is pushing for an FBI to crackdown on in-room adult movies in hotels. Adults, unlike children, can make their own decisions. But sometimes they choose incorrectly, and we have to put a stop to that.

A church in Watertown, New York dismissed a Sunday School teacher who had taught there for 54 years. Why? Because she was female. In a letter, the minister quoted the Bible as saying: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.” Over in Afghanistan, the Taliban are thinking, “This is the kind of American we can work with!”

Wired has the Bush Power-Grab Scorecard with details and status information about extraordinary rendition, torture, detention without trial, and warrantless surveillance.

Another Wired story lists ten privacy screw-ups in the Privacy Debacle Hall of Fame.

Between accidental breaches and deliberate ones, privacy’s been having a tough time lately.

Bob Geiger points out that today is day 1,800 since George W. Bush declared that we would get Osama bin Laden “dead or alive” and day 1,623 since Bush said “You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him” :

[Bush] stood on the rubble of the fallen World Trade Center and declared that the terrorists who attacked us would “hear all of us soon.” A few days later, he invoked imagery of the Old West and, with steely resolve, said that he was committed to getting Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.”

And here we sit, exactly 1,800 days later with a civil war in Iraq, the Taliban still killing American troops in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden very much alive and running free to podcast threats against our country from a Dick Cheney-like undisclosed location.

President Bush seems to have missed one of the central tenets of being a real tough guy: That you’re able to back up your words with action and, once you boast that you’re about to open a can of whoop-ass on someone, that it actually happen.

Right after 9/11, almost every American rallied around the Bush administration. Whatever our differences on other issues, we all wanted the same thing when it came to defeating the terrorists. Bush’s popularity soared because he was the guy who had the job.

I was glad to have Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell in charge. They had already fought a successful war in the mideast, and surely they understood the military, political and cultural forces in the region. In the years since, they had undoubtedly given a lot of thought to what had succeeded and what had failed. I told friends that we could hardly have chosen a better team to deal with this new threat from the mideast.

Boy, I couldn’t have been more wrong. I couldn’t imagine that on September 12, Rumsfeld would try to change the subject from bin Laden and al Qaeda to Iraq. I might have imagined that Karl Rove would try to divide the nation for political gain by exploiting the tragedy that had united us. But I couldn’t imagine that a president who had sworn to protect the nation would agree to that.

Crises will come no matter who is in the White House. It does matter what we do when a crisis comes. Polls still give Bush good marks on terrorism, but that’s really an emotional hangover rather than a rational assessment of this administration’s performance.

Unfortunately, we could hardly have chosen a worse team to confront the challenge of 9/11.

Via Crooks and Liars, Bob Geiger has collected some pretty good political cartoons.

The minute-by-minute coverage of recent events that might, or might not, shed light on a nearly ten-year-old murder case illustrates the news media’s fetish about beautiful dead girls. Actually, since TV news is ratings-driven, the fetish is probably our own.

Over on Daily Kos, there’s a different perspective, and it’s worth a look: some beautiful dead girls who haven’t had the same kind of media and public attention:

We hear a lot about beautiful dead girls in the US media.  Here are some that we haven’t heard about much.  Their smiles haven’t been plastered over the supermarket tabloid press, and they’re not likely to be.  One of the reasons is that they don’t fit the popular stereotype of beautiful-woman-as-helpless-victim.

Last week’s federal court ruling against the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping was a heartening reminder that the U.S. Constitution provides mechanisms against home-grown tyranny. Even when the executive branch claims monarchical powers, even when a rubber-stamp Congress abdicates its own responsibilities, there is an independent judiciary empowered to safeguard the Constitution and our rights. Back in June, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that even in wartime, the president can’t just scrap the concept of due process. The Constitution still lives.

But we mustn’t feel too comfortable about that.

After the Hamdan decision, some in the rubber-stamp Congress offered to legislate new presidential authority to dispense with due process. And, of course, the administration will appeal last week’s ruling. The case will undoubtedly reach the Supreme Court.

In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, only five of the nine Supreme Court justices favored limits on absolute presidential power. (Chief Justice Roberts didn’t participate. He had already ruled on the case in a lower court, coming down in favor of unlimited executive power.) By the time the warrantless wiretap case reaches the Court, Bush may have had a chance to name one or two new justices.

If the Constitution is to survive, we must provide life support. And right now, the best way to do that is to take Congress away from the rubber-stamp Republicans.

If the Republicans hold onto either house by even a single vote, they will declare a decisive mandate for whatever new offenses they wish to inflict on us. They’ll continue to fill the government with incompetents and cronies. They’ll move again to wreck Social Security. While ruinous deficits grow, they will move to exempt the richest Americans from taxation. They will fill the courts with pro-monarchical judges, and none of our rights will be safe.

We must take Congress away from them.

Talking Points Memo says the Lamont vs. Lieberman is a trap:

Rove may be goading Democrats into fighting like hell amongst themselves in Connecticut, but that doesn’t mean we have to take the bait.

…

Lamont v. Lieberman is a carnival sideshow, a titilating and distracting spectacle. Rove is the carnival barker. So ignore the hoopla and keep moving on down the midway, folks. The main event is still to come, and it will be in places like Montana, Missouri, and Ohio. We’ve come too far to get side-tracked now.

I’ve given money to Sherrod Brown’s Senate campaign here in Ohio. There are a lot of races to be won, and it’s time to get serious about winning them.

Last night Keith Olbermann reviewed “The Nexus of Politics and Terror,” and considered how often heightened terror alerts seem to come just when the Bush administration wants to distract us from negative news, or needs a P.R. boost.

The basis of all this, at heart: remarks made on May 10, 2005, by a former Bush administration official discussing the old color-coded terror threat warning system. More often than not, he said, “We were the least inclined to raise it. Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment, sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don’t necessarily put the country on alert. There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, ‘For that?'”

The speaker was the first secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge. In the light of those remarks and his criticism this week of the vice president for politicizing terror in the context of the Connecticut senatorial primary, it is imperative that we examine each of the coincidences of timing since 2002, including the one last week in which excoriating comments by leading Republicans about leading Democrats just happened to precede arrests in a vast purported terror plot, arrests that we now know were carried out on a timeline requested not by the British, nor necessitated by the evidence, but requested by this government.

Crooks and Liars has the video. It’s a big file, but if you have high-speed internet access, it’s worth watching.

The great animation director Chuck Jones said his Roadrunner-Coyote cartoons were meant to be something his team could crank out quickly and inexpensively, so that time, effort and money could be diverted to more elaborate cartoons like “What’s Opera, Doc?” But in his later years, Jones got more philosophical about the Roadrunner cartoons. He would explain the behavior of the hapless coyote by quoting George Santayana:

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

We remember, of course, that the coyote always failed to catch the roadrunner. What we might forget is that he pursued ever more elaborate schemes that wouldn’t have done him any good even if they’d gone off without a hitch.

Today New York Times columnist Bob Herbert begins his column with that same line from Santayana.

There was something pathetic about the delight with which Republicans seized upon the terror plot last week and began trying to wield it like a whip against their Democratic foes. The G.O.P. message seemed to be that the plot foiled in Britain was somehow proof that the U.S. needed to continue full speed ahead with the Bush administration’s disastrous war in Iraq, and that any Democrat who demurred was somehow soft on terrorism.

The truth, of course, is that the demolition derby policies of the Bush administration are creating enemies of the United States, not defeating them…

Almost three years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, Jessica Stern, who lectures on terrorism at Harvard, wrote in The New York Times that the U.S. had created in Iraq “precisely the situation the Bush administration has described as a breeding ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders or provide for its citizens’ rudimentary needs.”

Ms. Stern went on to say, “As bad as the situation inside Iraq may be, the effect that the war has had on terrorist recruitment around the globe may be even more worrisome.”

…

The debacle in Iraq, and inhumane policies like torture, rendition and the incarceration of Muslims without trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, serve only to strengthen the appeal of militants who are single-mindedly dedicated to the destruction of American lives.

The U.S. needs to be much, much smarter in its efforts to counter this mortal threat. We should be focused like a laser on the fight against Al Qaeda-type terrorism. We need to ramp up our security efforts here at home. (Even as the terror plot in Britain was emerging, the Bush administration was trying to eliminate millions of dollars in funding for explosives-detection technology. Congress blocked that effort.) We need a new approach to foreign policy that draws on the wisest heads both here and abroad. And we need a strategy for withdrawal from Iraq.

My congressional representative is Deborah Pryce. She often shows up on TV when the Republican leadership appears en masse to face the microphones, because she’s Chair of the House Republican Conference.

Last week she sent me this.

Oh, it may look like campaign literature — the Ohio Republican Party has decided to make immigration a big campaign issue this November. It may smell like campaign literature. But this mailing was produced and mailed entirely at taxpayer expense.

Apparently it counts as Deb’s community service — er, constituent outreach — because it includes this little “survey”:

Deborah Pryce’s position: we are all too dumb to notice how she’s using taxpayer money.

Me not so sure about that.

Orville Schell, a journalist and the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, on the PBS program NOW:

I read even Bill Keller, the editor of the New York Times, who made remonstrations against the government, and in it one sees all sorts of self-doubting, self-questioning, ombudsmen, self-lacerations — I mean, it’s the very healthy actual liberal impulse to find whatever fault one can within oneself, before blaming someone else.

It’s not a bad human instinct.

It dates back a while. From Luke 6:41:

…why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Either how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Schell continues:

In the world in which we presently live, that is a sign of weakness, and people like Bill O’Reilly or the administration — they’ll just drive a truck right through there and mow you down.

And Jesus continues:

Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.

Tomorrow is primary election day in Connecticut, and right now it looks like Senator Joe Lieberman will lose the Democratic nomination to Ned Lamont. I think Lieberman hurt himself by declaring that, if he loses, he will run as an independent. That kind of talk doesn’t charm a lot of Democratic primary voters, but Lieberman seems to be targeting Republicans who want a rubber-stamp for Bush war policies and Democrats who aren’t paying any attention.

Lamont is challenging Lieberman mostly because of his continuing support for the war in Iraq, and his uncritical endorsement of the administration’s handling of the war.

In all honesty, I don’t know what we should do now in Iraq. We shouldn’t have invaded, but it’s too late to fix that now. I worry that simply packing up and leaving will leave a lawless state like Afghanistan — a sanctuary for the worst kinds of extremists — but it might be better than the current policy: do what fails until it works.

Because I’m full of uncertainty, I don’t want to see Lieberman defeated just because he supports the war. No, I want to see him defeated because he’s incapable of learning from experience, and because he scolds Democrats for daring to think there’s got to be a better way.

If Lieberman loses tomorrow’s primary, he’s still got his independent race in November, and if he wins that, probably a switch to whichever party has the majority in the Senate, in hopes of getting some nice committee assignments.

Via Colorado Jyms: If Lieberman loses big, Gary Hart says we should look for an October Surprise:

Depending on the fate of Senator Joe Lieberman on Tuesday, it should come as no surprise to anyone when (not if) the Bush administration announces a dramatic plan to exit Iraq sometime before the Congressional elections this fall.

…

Since, with precious few exceptions, political careers trump principle, and since the cabal of neoconservatives and the religious right intend to govern forever, the genius Karl Rove will concoct a patently phony Iraq exit strategy.

Books, books, books!

From the very beginning of Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine comes this quote from Thomas Jefferson:

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience quotes Professor Robert G. Vaughn summarizing Alan Westin:

Authoritarian governments are identified by ready government access to information about the activities of citizens and by extensive limitations on the ability of citizens to obtain information about the government.

See, if the people aren’t well-informed, they can’t be trusted with their own government, and that means full employment for those who keep tabs on the citizens.

Finally, a long passage from Paul Krugman’s 2003 book The Great Unraveling:

Back in 1957, Henry Kissinger … published his doctoral dissertation, A World Restored. One wouldn’t think that a book about the diplomatic efforts of Metternich and Castlereagh is relevant to U.S. politics in the twenty-first century. But the first three pages of Kissinger’s book sent chills down my spine, because they seem all too relevant to current events.

In those first few pages, Kissinger describes the problems confronting a heretofore stable diplomatic system when it is faced with a “revolutionary power” — a power that does not accept that system’s legitimacy…. It seems clear to me that one should regard America’s right-wing movement — which now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media — as a revolutionary power in Kissinger’s sense. That is, it is a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.

Am I overstating the case? In fact, there’s ample evidence that key elements of the coalition that now runs the country believe that some long-established American political and social institutions should not, in principle, exist — and do not accept the rules that the rest of us have taken for granted.

… If you read the literature emanating from the Heritage Foundation, which drives the Bush administration’s economic ideology, you discover a very radical agenda: Heritage doesn’t just want to scale back New Deal and Great Society programs, it regards the very existence of those programs as a violation of basic principles.

Or consider foreign policy. Since World War II the United States has built its foreign policy around international institutions, and has tried to make it clear that it is not an old-fashioned imperialist power, which used military force as it sees fit. But if you follow the foreign policy views of the neo-conservative intellectuals who fomented the war with Iraq, you learn they have contempt for all that — Richard Perle, chairman of a key Pentagon advisory board, dismissed the “liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.” They aren’t hesitant about the use of force; one prominent thinker close to the administration, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, declared that “we are a warlike people and we love war.” …

… The separation of church and state is one of the fundamental principles of the U.S. Constitution. But Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, has told constituents that he is in office to promote a “biblical worldview” … (DeLay has also denounced the teaching of evolution in schools, going so far as to blame that teaching for the Columbine school shootings.)

There’s even some question about whether the people running the country accept the idea that legitimacy flows from the democratic process. Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal famously praised the “bourgeois riot” in which violent protesters shut down a vote recount in Miami. (The rioters, it was later revealed, weren’t angry citizens; they were paid political operatives.) Meanwhile, according to his close friend Don Evans, now the secretary of commerce, George W. Bush believes that he was called by God to lead the nation. Perhaps this explains why the disputed election of 2000 didn’t seem to inspire any caution or humility in the part of the victors. Consider Justice Antonin Scalia’s response to a student who asked how he felt making the Supreme Court decision that threw the election to Bush. Was it agonizing? Did Scalia worry about the consequences? No: “It was a wonderful feeling,” he declared.

Suppose, for a moment, that you took the picture I have just painted seriously. You would conclude that the people now in charge really don’t like America as it is. If you combine their apparent agendas, the goal would seem to be something like this: a country that basically has no social safety net at home, which relies mainly on military force to enforce its will abroad, in which schools don’t teach evolution but do teach religion and — possibly — in which elections are only a formality.

Yet those who take the hard-line rightists now in power at their word, and suggest that they may really attempt to realize such a radical goal, are usually accused of being “shrill,” of going over the top. Surely, says the conventional wisdom, we should discount the rhetoric: the goals of the right are more limited than this picture suggests. Or are they?

Back to Kissinger: his description of a baffled response of established powers in the face of revolutionary challenge works equally well as an account of how the American political and media establishment has responded to the radicalism of the Bush administration over the past two years:

Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent, they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework. the defenders of the status quo therefore tend to begin by treating the revolutionary power as if its protestations were merely tactical; as if it really accepted the existing legitimacy by overstated its case for bargaining purposes; as if it were motivated by specific grievances to be assuaged by limited concessions. Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane…. But it is the essence of a revolutionary power that it possesses the courage of its convictions, that it is willing, indeed eager, to push its principles to their ultimate conclusion.

As I said, this passage sent chills down my spine, because it explains so well the otherwise baffling process by which the administration has been able to push radical policies through, with remarkably little scrutiny or effective opposition.

In recent months, some Republicans have tried to back away from Bush and some of the policies Congress has been rubber-stamping for years. Mustn’t lose control of the House or the Senate in November’s elections. If they manage to hold their majorities by even a single vote, rest assured their radical agenda will be right back on the front burner.

I think the single most important U.S. battle of World War II was not D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge, but the Battle of the Kasserine Pass in North Africa in February 1943. It was the war’s first major encounter between U.S. and German forces, and it was a shocker. The U.S. forces held out, through superior numbers (and British reinforcements), but the battle showed that the Germans were more disciplined, more experienced, tougher, better-equipped, better-trained, and better-led than the Americans.

Virtually nothing had gone according to plan. It seemed suicidal to send this U.S. army to face the German army in Europe. We weren’t good enough.

The thing that made the Battle of the Kasserine Pass so important was what happened next. U.S. leadership acknowledged the problems and went back to the drawing board. Ineffective officers were replaced. Coordination of forces was improved. Tactics changed. Battlefield commanders were given greater authority to deal with rapidly-changing situations on the ground. Soldiers griped as they were drilled, and drilled, and drilled and drilled, but the U.S. Army that landed in Europe on D-Day was a far more formidable force than the one that faced the Germans at the Kasserine Pass. Without that early setback, and the corrective measures taken as a result, we might not have been good enough to win the war.

Imagine, if you will, that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld had been in charge then. Would they have made the necessary changes, or would they have insisted on the policy they follow in Iraq: repeat the things that fail until they succeed?

The Washington Post says we’ve forgotten the lessons of Vietnam:

[T]here is … strong evidence, based on a review of thousands of military documents and hundreds of interviews with military personnel, that the U.S. approach to pacifying Iraq in the months after the collapse of Hussein helped spur the insurgency and made it bigger and stronger than it might have been.

…

On May 16, 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-run occupation agency, had issued his first order, “De-Baathification of Iraq Society.” The CIA station chief in Baghdad had argued vehemently against the radical move, contending: “By nightfall, you’ll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground. And in six months, you’ll really regret this.”

He was proved correct, as Bremer’s order, along with a second that dissolved the Iraqi military and national police, created a new class of disenfranchised, threatened leaders.

…

“When you’re facing a counterinsurgency war, if you get the strategy right, you can get the tactics wrong, and eventually you’ll get the tactics right,” said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a veteran of Special Forces in the Vietnam War. “If you get the strategy wrong and the tactics right at the start, you can refine the tactics forever, but you still lose the war. That’s basically what we did in Vietnam.”

…

[R]etired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, an expert in small wars, was sent to Baghdad by the Pentagon to advise on how to better put down the emerging insurgency. He met with Bremer in early July. “Mr. Ambassador, here are some programs that worked in Vietnam,” Anderson said.

It was the wrong word to put in front of Bremer. “Vietnam?” Bremer exploded, according to Anderson. “Vietnam! I don’t want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!”

Bremer got a medal from George W. Bush.

George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Is there a special circle in Hell — some special kind of condemnation — for those who remember the past, but deliberately choose to ignore it?

Via Backup Brain: The Huffington Post has a list of 50 Easy Questions to Ask Any Republican. The idea is to carry the list and pull it out “next time someone begins quoting from a Republican talking points memo.”

Anyone can ask tough, intricate, confrontational questions. But all that ever does is start an argument, and it gets people nowhere. On the other hand, these are…well, easy. These are friendly questions. These are questions that allow another person to actually explain their thoughts, and explain fully. And to do so in as comfortable, as simple a way as possible.

Personally, I don’t think I’m going to work my way through the list with anyone:

16. Do you like the government collecting personal data on you without a warrant?

17. How much money do you have in your bank account, stocks and investments?

18. What’s your partner’s favorite sex position?

19. If you have nothing to hide, why aren’t you answering?

Is that more likely to open the other person’s eyes, or to get me a sock in the eye?

I’m tempted to say “this list is for entertainment purposes only,” but there are some worthy questions in the list — tough, non-confrontational questions that might make people think. Questions to keep in mind for when the occasion presents itself.

I’d like to see a list of non-confrontational, thoughtful questions for Republican congressional candidates — questions to ask when the candidate appears before a community group, for example. Confrontational questions tend to turn off listeners who don’t share the questioner’s burning passion to nail a devious politico.

The ideal question would force the candidate to think, and not just lean on some pre-programmed sound bite. It would give him a real chance to shed light on the subject, and it would clearly delineate the area we want illuminated, in such a way that everyone will know if the answer doesn’t shed any light at all.

I like this question from the Huffington Post list:

3. After three years thus far, when do you think Iraq might be able to “stand up” so that America can “stand down”?

This is how I might put that question to a congressional candidate:

We’re all hoping for the Iraqi government to “stand up” so that America can “stand down.” Is there any objective way to measure progress toward that goal? Is there any way to set milestones so we can tell whether things are going well or poorly? Or is this just one of those “I’ll know it when I see it” situations?

Yes, it’s three questions. Yes, the candidate can answer “Yes, yes and no.” No, I don’t think he would score any points with undecided listeners by answering in that way. A good candidate might knock that question out of the park, ideally by shedding actual light on the subject. That’s good, isn’t it?

Can we come up with a list of tough but fair questions for congressional candidates of both parties?