Multi Medium

The Intersection

The AP tells a depressing-yet-somehow-familiar story:

The Iraqi prisoner had valuable intelligence, U.S. special forces believed, and they desperately wanted it. They demanded that expert American military trainers teach them the same types of abusive interrogation techniques that North Korea and Vietnamese forces once used against U.S. prisoners of war.

The trainers resisted, according to testimony prepared for a Senate hearing Thursday; the methods were intended to elicit confessions for propaganda use, rather than gather intelligence. They were overruled and ordered to demonstrate on the prisoner in September 2003, early in the war.

The interrogation went ahead before a lead trainer stepped in and stopped it. He and his team were sent home shortly thereafter.

(…)

“In far too many cases, we simply erred in pressing interrogation and interrogators beyond the edge of the envelope; as a result, interrogation was no longer an intelligence collection method; rather, it had morphed into a form of punishment for those who wouldn’t cooperate,” Col. Steven Kleinman said in his prepared testimony.

He headed the small team of military trainers from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency sent to Iraq in September 2003 to help special forces get more information from stubborn and resistant detainees.

“When presented with the choice of getting smarter or getting tougher, we chose the latter,” Kleinman stated.

This is the worst-case intersection of amorality and incompetence.  The Bush administration didn’t care about legality, decency, or even effectiveness - only cruelty and power.

Will we ever wash away the stain?

(h/t dakine)

Add comment September 25th, 2008 at 11:39pm Posted by Eli

Irony Continues To Be Dead

If it were almost anyone else, I would be amazed that he could say this with a straight face:

Vice President Dick Cheney, in the sharpest U.S. criticism of Russia since its brief war with Georgia, on Saturday accused Moscow of reverting to old tactics of intimidation and using “brute force.”

(…)

“This chain of aggressive moves and diplomatic reversals has only intensified the concern that many have about Russia’s larger objectives,” Cheney said.

“For brutality against a neighbor is simply the latest in a succession of troublesome and unhelpful actions by the Russian government.”

(…)

“At times it appears Russian policy is based upon the desire to impose its will on countries it once dominated, instead of any balanced assessment of security interests,” Cheney said in his prepared remarks.

He noted that a senior Russian military official threatened Poland with attack over its involvement in the missile defense system. “That is no way for a responsible power to conduct itself,” Cheney said.

“And it reflects the discredited notion that any country can claim an exclusive zone of authority, to be held together by muscle and threats,” he said.

“That is the old thinking,” Cheney said. “The old ways are gone, and the Cold War is over.”

Russia’s leaders should consider whether “bullying others will turn out well for their country’s future” and whether Moscow wants to “operate in the modern world as an outsider,” he said.

“Russia’s leaders cannot have things both ways,” Cheney said. “They cannot presume to gather up all the benefits of commerce, consultation, and global prestige, while engaging in brute force, threats, or other forms of intimidation against sovereign countries.”

I guess it’s only okay to threaten or invade countries that are really far away.

Add comment September 6th, 2008 at 02:04pm Posted by Eli

Sarah Palin’s Real Qualifications

Orange Clouds is correct, but doesn’t go far enough:

When WE think of someone as being qualified for president or VP, we imagine that they must be capable of governing. They need to have relevant experience. They should have proven over time that they understand the issues and the Constitution. They must be capable of diplomacy. But you need to think like a Republican for a moment.

Republicans don’t need to be able to think. They just need to be capable parrots. Can Palin follow in lockstep with the Republican line? Sure. It’s easy. I could even do it if I wanted to, although I’m not old enough to legally be VP so Sarah’s more qualified than me for that reason. Abortion is bad, death penalty is good, war is good, taxes are bad… it’s easy to figure out where you stand on the issues if you’re a Republican.

If Palin ever wonders what her opinion should be on an issue, she can ask Big Business. As a Democrat, you might assume that she would need to research it and think for herself about it, but that’s just a silly liberal idea. Big Business and lobbyists will tell Sarah everything she needs to know. And if they can’t answer a question, she can ask James Dobson or Pat Robertson or something and they’ll tell her.

What about her ability to do the job? Think about Brownie and FEMA. Think about Thomas Frank’s new book The Wrecking Crew. The idea isn’t to do a good job governing. The idea is to destroy government. Again, even I could do that if it were my goal. It can’t be too hard. Start wars, appoint your friends, outsource and privatize everything, take a lot of vacations, and make speeches about loving god and country. And if, as VP, Palin ever accidentally shoots someone in the face on a hunting trip, it’s OK.

Of course Palin isn’t qualified if you imagine that she should be able to govern well - especially if, for some reason, a 72-year-old John McCain doesn’t last 4 more years. Governing well is for Democrats. It’s a crazy, liberal idea. Republican qualifications are totally different, and Sarah Palin is perfectly qualified as a Republican.

Yes, this is all true, but it does Palin a disservice by overlooking her ability to abuse executive power, or to stonewall legislative investigations of said abuse by invoking dubious claims of executive privilege, or by simply saying, “Don’t wanna.  Make me!”  It also overlooks Palin’s much-valued ability to spew ridicule and hate at her political opponents; it would be simply unthinkable to have a Republican president or vice president who doesn’t know how to sneer.

In other words, it’s not enough simply to hold right-wing views; you must be committed enough to repeatedly break the law in service of those views, and brazen enough to accuse your opponents of hating America when they call you on it.

So yes, Sarah Palin is eminently qualified to be a Republican president or vice president, but that’s pretty much the opposite of being qualified to be a good one.

Add comment September 4th, 2008 at 11:38am Posted by Eli

Somewhere Under The Rainbow

My ridiculously talented almost-cousin Malcolm’s view of the GOP and McCain-Palin ticket.  Works for me.

(Click on image for full-size version)

Add comment September 1st, 2008 at 04:59pm Posted by Eli

When Will Reality Be Post-Partisan?

Marty Kaplan points out the sad reality of our time:

Ron Suskind’s new book reports that in 2003, the White House ordered the CIA to forge a letter to “prove” that Iraq had a hand in 9/11 and that Saddam was buying yellowcake uranium from Niger for his WMD program with the help of Al Qaeda.

When this came up on MSNBC, moderator Chuck Todd asked Politico’s Mike Allen whether this would lead “the anti-war crowd” in Congress to call for impeachment. Allen replied that it would “give the lefty blogosphere something to grab onto.”

And so, in less time than it takes to say “Dick Cheney,” the subject is changed from what would be one of the most outrageous violations of the Constitution in the history of the Republic to a left/right issue. Instead of taking a breath to consider the merits and consequences of Suskind’s charges, MSNBC’s It’s-Always-Super-Tuesday-Over-Here reframing machine instantly transforms a shocking allegation about the abuse of power into a piece of political football, a tactic, an occasion for the players in the grand political theater that cable news says Washington really is to assume their designated roles, like a Punch and Judy show.

…If the White House asked the CIA to cook up this disinformation aimed at the American people, why shouldn’t the righty blogosphere, too, be up in arms? Why doesn’t every American, regardless of political party, have a stake in the truth and the rule of law?

…Unfortunately, the closest that the MSM usually comes to weighing the evidence is saying: Ron Suskind charges X, and the White House denies it. This is what is now called reporting.

Every time the Bush administration gets caught breaking the law, conservative pundits and bloggers are either excusing it or pretending that it never happened.  Never do they say, “Okay, yeah, they’re on my team, but this really is so far beyond the pale as to be despicable and criminal.”  It just doesn’t happen.  (They do slam BushCo. with that kind of hyperbole sometimes, but it’s usually for stuff like trying to compromise on immigration or negotiate with North Korea.)

When did reality become so irrelevant to our discourse?  Was it just during the Bush administration, or during the Clinton administration, or has it always been like that and I just never noticed it?

Add comment August 6th, 2008 at 10:40pm Posted by Eli

Casus Belli Dancing

Hey, remember when we learned that before the Iraqupation, Dubya suggested painting a U2 spyplane with UN colors and trying to bait Saddam into shooting at it, thus providing a clear-cut case for war? (Never mind the fact that the UN would be well aware that it wasn’t their plane that got shot out - remember who we’re talking about here.)

Well, now Seymour Hersh says that Cheney’s staff talked about going him one better to start his much-coveted war with Iran.  Not satisfied to rely on Iran to be foolish enough to fire the first shot, this plan required no Iranian participation whatsoever!

There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.

(…)

Look, is it high school? Yeah. Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran.

Actually, I’m pretty sure that the game of Chicken requires two willing participants.

And, of course, as Drum points out in referring back to the U2 plane plan:

In the end, of course, we didn’t do this. We just didn’t bother with any pretext at all.

Pretext is for sissies.

4 comments July 31st, 2008 at 09:48pm Posted by Eli

A Whole Bushel Of Bad Apples

This is a lot like that report out of the Senate Intelligence Committee - you know, the one saying that BushCo. knowingly lied about the intelligence they had against Iraq before the invasion:

A Senate investigation has concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command, according to congressional sources briefed on the findings.

The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.

The reported evidence — some of which is expected to be made public at a Senate hearing today — also shows that military lawyers raised strong concerns about the legality of the practices as early as November 2002, a month before Rumsfeld approved them. The findings contradict previous accounts by top Bush administration appointees, setting the stage for new clashes between the White House and Congress over the origins of interrogation methods that many lawmakers regard as torture and possibly illegal.

“Some have suggested that detainee abuses committed by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and at Guantanamo were the result of a ‘few bad apples’ acting on their own. It would be a lot easier to accept if that were true,” Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote in a statement for delivery at a committee hearing this morning. “Senior officials in the United States government sought out information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”

(…)

[M]emos and e-mails obtained by investigators reveal that in July 2002, Haynes and other Pentagon officials were soliciting ideas for harsh interrogations from military experts in survival training, according to two congressional officials familiar with the committee’s investigation. By late July, a list was compiled that included many of the techniques that would later be formally approved for use at Guantanamo Bay, including stress positions, sleep deprivation and the hooding of detainees during questioning. The techniques were later used at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq.

(…)

The Guantanamo Bay visit and the effort to compile interrogation tactics appear to show that Pentagon officials were moving toward a formal policy on interrogation before military commanders at the detention camp requested special measures, the officials said. However, top military officers objected to the proposals in a series of memos in November 2002, much earlier than previously reported, congressional investigators said. In early 2003, Rumsfeld formally authorized the techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay.

(…)

“It is increasingly clear that the decision to abandon the rule of law and order torture and abuse was made at the very top,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office. “We look forward to the full investigative report from the Armed Services Committee and call on Congress to hold accountable any and all public officials involved in ordering illegal torture.”

A group of 56 Congressional Democrats last week asked the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate whether any Bush administration officials may have broken laws in approving the use of harsh interrogation techniques for suspected terrorists.

As with the Senate Intelligence report, this pretty much just confirms and documents what we already knew, and what the Bush administration has been consistently lying about.  In this case, it’s the fact that torture is official BushCo. policy, and they’ve been lying about it all along.

Can’t wait to hear John “I Hate Torture But Voted For It Anyway” McCain’s reaction to this.

Add comment June 17th, 2008 at 06:59am Posted by Eli

I’m Not Sure What’s Scarier…

That McCain would love to have Cheney serve somewhere in his administration, or that he said that he probably wouldn’t want him as vice president because “He and I have the same strengths.”

That’s just what we need in our next president, someone with the same skill-set as Dick Cheney.

Add comment June 11th, 2008 at 06:46pm Posted by Eli

Et Tu, Scotté?

I’m not the least bit surprised by the revelations/accusations, but I am pretty surprised by the source:

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.

Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”

• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

(…)

The eagerly awaited book, while recounting many fond memories of Bush and describing him as “authentic” and “sincere,” is harsher than reporters and White House officials had expected.

McClellan was one of the president’s earliest and most loyal political aides, and most of his friends had expected him to take a few swipes at his former colleague in order to sell books but also to paint a largely affectionate portrait.

Instead, McClellan’s tone is often harsh. He writes, for example, that after Hurricane Katrina, the White House “spent most of the first week in a state of denial,” and he blames Rove for suggesting the photo of the president comfortably observing the disaster during an Air Force One flyover. McClellan says he and counselor to the president Dan Bartlett had opposed the idea and thought it had been scrapped.

But he writes that he later was told that “Karl was convinced we needed to do it — and the president agreed.”

“One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term,” he writes. “And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”

(…)

“I still like and admire President Bush,” McClellan writes. “But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.”

(…)

McClellan repeatedly embraces the rhetoric of Bush’s liberal critics and even charges: “If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

Wow.  History’s judgment continues to trickle out, doesn’t it.  My only complaint is that Scottie is a little too willing to let Dubya personally off the hook and blame everything on his advisers.  Who hired the advisers?  Who made the decision to listen to them even when their advice was obviously flawed at best, insane and evil at worst?  Bush is either a monster or a chump, and history will not be kind either way.

Add comment May 28th, 2008 at 07:20am Posted by Eli

Surprise!

Coming soon to a theater of operations nowhere near you:

The Jerusalem Post reports that a senior Israeli official said that President Bush and Vice President Cheney are of the belief that military action against Iran is necessary and that such an attack could be coming soon:

US President George W. Bush intends to attack Iran in the upcoming months, before the end of his term, Army Radio quoted a senior official in Jerusalem as saying Tuesday.

The official claimed that a senior member of the president’s entourage, which concluded a trip to Israel last week, said during a closed meeting that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action was called for.

However, the official continued, “the hesitancy of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice” was preventing the administration from deciding to launch such an attack on the Islamic Republic, for the time being.

I’m not sure how credible (if at all) the Jerusalem Post is, and this is essentially a reporter saying that an unnamed Israeli official told him that an unnamed American official told him that Bush & Cheney want war, so take it all with a great big shaker of salt.

But it would be in character for Dick and Dubya - no doubt they miss that delicious new war smell, and they know that this might be their last chance to bomb Iran unless McCain is elected. Which, incidentally, they might also be trying to ensure with an attack on Iran, since everyone knows that Republicans are totally credible and serious when it comes to matters of national defense.

(f/t Attaturk)

Add comment May 20th, 2008 at 11:18am Posted by Eli

Welcome To The 2008 Campaign Metanarrative

I think the #1 story - and deciding factor - of the 2008 campaign is going to be the efforts of McCain and downticket Republican candidates to distance themselves from the unpopular awfulness of the Bush/Cheney administration and position themselves as Reasonable Pragmatic Moderates.

Dick Morris thinks it’s doable, at least for Straight-Talking Maverick McCain:

McCain needs to not run as a traditional Republican, which is easy, since he’s not one. After all, how did an anti-torture, anti-tobacco, pro-campaign finance reform, anti-pork, pro-alternative-energy Republican ever emerge from the primaries alive?

I wasn’t aware that one did.

…McCain can win by running to the center.

His base will be there for him; indeed, it will turn out in massive numbers. Wright has become the honorary chairman of McCain’s get-out-the-vote efforts. It would be nice to think that race isn’t a factor in American politics anymore, but it is. The growing fear of Obama, who remains something of an unknown, will drag every last white Republican male off the golf course to vote for McCain, and he will need no further laying-on of hands from either evangelical Christians or fiscal conservatives.

So McCain doesn’t have to spend a lot of time wooing his base. What he does need to do is reduce the size of the synapse over which independents and fearful Democrats need to pass in order to back his candidacy. If the synapse is wide, they will stay with Obama. But if they perceive McCain as an acceptable alternative, there is every chance that they will cross over to back him in November.

(…)

Earlier in the race, Iraq might have been a deal-breaker. But a kinder, gentler war has emerged. U.S. combat deaths are way down, and the de facto U.S. alliance with Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province against al-Qaeda in Iraq seems to have dramatically improved the security situation. Still, most Americans don’t like the war, and McCain must deal with their opposition if he wants to win.

(…)

….Unlikely as it sounds, the soon-to-be former president needs to get out of the White House, reenter the political arena (much as it will pain him) and go around the country telling us two things: First, we are winning in Iraq; second, the economy is not as bad as most people think….

Right, because Dubya hasn’t been doing that at all for the past four years.

Bush can help McCain, but that doesn’t mean that McCain should support Bush. As Bush makes the case for himself, McCain must put distance between them. A lot of distance. Once, McCain ran against Bush. But since then, he has basked in the glow of Bush’s warm welcome back to the mainstream of the party. Now McCain needs to free himself of Bush’s spell, go out again into the cold and show the country the difference between his agenda and Bush’s.

Meanwhile, McCain should highlight his credentials as a reformer and a maverick to attract Democrats and independents who worry about Obama. Forget about the base. It will be there. Obama’s liberalism, his pro-tax agenda and his proposed weakening of the USA Patriot Act — as well as fears that he would appoint to office people such as Rev. Wright and William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground — will all assure the full mobilization of the right. Immigration reform and McCain’s other acts of apostasy will be forgiven for the sake of beating Obama. So McCain needs to go after the swing voters:

[Laundry list of things that McCain will mostly never do, but might conceivably pretend to have intentions of doing]

(…)

Meanwhile, the right wing will carry the attack against Obama. McCain is not a mudslinging politician by nature, but he doesn’t need to be. The collected quotes of Rev. Wright will be a bestseller this summer. Obama once had to prove to us that he was not a Muslim; now he must convince us that he never really went to church much….

Wow, Dick really has put all his eggs into the racism/Reverend Wright basket, hasn’t he?  And he obviously wants us to believe that McCain really is as honorable and independent as he pretends to be.

Frank Rich doesn’t think it’ll work:

The G.O.P.’s best hope would be for both the president and Dick Cheney to lock themselves in a closet until the morning after Election Day.

Republicans finally recognized the gravity of their situation three days after Jenna Bush took her vows in Crawford. As Hillary Clinton romped in West Virginia, voters in Mississippi elected a Democrat [by eight points] in a Congressional district that went for Bush-Cheney by 25 percentage points just four years ago. It’s the third “safe” Republican House seat to fall in a special election since March.

(…)

The vice president’s visit was last Monday, the centerpiece of a get-out-the-vote rally in DeSoto County, a G.O.P. stronghold. “We’ll put our shoulders to the wheel for John McCain,” the vice president promised as he bestowed his benediction on Mr. Davis. Well, he got out the vote all right. In the election results the next day, the Childers total in DeSoto County increased 142 percent, while the Davis count went up only 47 percent.

(…)

The McCain campaign is hoping that… showy, if tardy, departures from Bush-Cheney doctrine will constitute a galaxy of Sister Souljah moments, each with headlines reading “McCain Breaks With Bush on…” and the usual knee-jerk press references to Mr. McCain as a “maverick.” Enough of these, you see, and those much-needed independent voters might be flimflammed into believing that the G.O.P. candidate bears no responsibility for the administration’s toxically unpopular policies.

(…)

But are independents suckers? They’d have to be to fall for the pitch that Mr. McCain is an apostate in his own party in 2008. He has been an outspoken Bush defender since helping him sell the Iraq war in 2002 and barnstorming for him in 2004. Despite Mr. McCain’s campaign claims to the contrary, he never publicly called for the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. He is still one of the president’s most stalwart supporters in Congress, even signing on to the president’s wildly unpopular veto of an expansion of children’s health insurance.

(…)

Hard as it is for Mr. McCain to run from the Bush policies he supports, it will be far harder to escape from Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney themselves. When Mr. McCain accepted Mr. Bush’s endorsement at the White House in March, he referred three times to the president’s “busy schedule,” as if wishing aloud that the lame-duck incumbent would have no time to appear at, say, get-out-the-vote rallies. Alas, Mr. Bush and company are not going gently into retirement.

Just look at Mr. Rove. Some Democrats are outraged that he is now employed as a pundit by Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal as well as Fox News. Instead of complaining, they should be thrilled that Mr. Rove keeps inviting Republican complacency by constantly locating silver linings in the party’s bad news. His ubiquitous TV presence as a thinly veiled McCain surrogate has the added virtue of wrapping the Republican ticket in a daily and suffocating Bush bearhug, since Mr. Rove is far more synonymous with his former boss than Mr. Obama is with his former pastor.

And what of the loyal base that Dick Morris doesn’t think the Republicans have to worry about?  Check out the comments on this NRCC blog post where Tom Cole hypes the rollout of a kinder, gentler Republican Party.  They uniformly bemoan the sellout big-government liberalism and vow to stop contributing and stay home on Election Day.

So this is the dilemma that McCain and the Republicans face: How do they thread the needle between pretending that they have absolutely nothing in common with Dubya, nope, never heard of him, and pissing off the die-hard conservative base that is completely unaccustomed to not being pandered to? Even with the corporate media’s unstinting assistance, I don’t think it can be done - not if American voters still have functioning memories.

I’m looking forward to watching the Republicans alienate both the independents and the base for a truly epic implosion.  And if Bob Barr really does end up running to siphon off the crazy base vote, McCain will have absolutely zero chance.

(h/t dakine, Mike Stark, & Julia)

2 comments May 18th, 2008 at 02:13pm Posted by Eli

Uh-Oh, Part I

This does not sound good…

A second American aircraft carrier steamed into the Persian Gulf on Tuesday as the Pentagon ordered military commanders to develop new options for attacking Iran. CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that the planning is being driven by what one officer called the “increasingly hostile role” Iran is playing in Iraq - smuggling weapons into Iraq for use against American troops.

“What the Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen and -women inside Iraq,” said Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

U.S. officials are also concerned by Iranian harassment of U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf as well as Iran’s still growing nuclear program. New pictures of Iran’s uranium enrichment plant show the country’s defense minister in the background, as if deliberately mocking a recent finding by U.S. intelligence that Iran had ceased work on a nuclear weapon.

No attacks are imminent and the last thing the Pentagon wants is another war, but Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen has warned Iran not to assume the U.S. military can’t strike.

“I have reserve capability, in particular our Navy and our Air Force so it would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability,” Mullen said.

Targets would include everything from the plants where weapons are made to the headquarters of the organization known as the Quds Force which directs operations in Iraq. Later this week Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is expected to confront the Iranians with evidence of their meddling and demand a halt.

If that doesn’t produce results, the State Department has begun drafting an ultimatum that would tell the Iranians to knock it off - or else.

Bush & Cheney just can’t bear the idea of leaving office without starting a disastrous war with Iran.

Oh, and way to go, CBS, for uncritically repeating the administration’s talking points on Iran smuggling weapons into Iraq, harassing American ships, and developing nuclear weapons.  Bravo.

(h/t Siun)

Add comment May 1st, 2008 at 07:17am Posted by Eli

Why Talking Head Interviewers Frustrate Me

They’ll ask Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama why they were in the same building as Charlie Manson, but never mention that it was in a different decade.

They’ll ask Dick Cheney whether he prefers puppies or kittens, but never about his choice of sauce.

Add comment April 18th, 2008 at 10:23pm Posted by Eli

Debunking Defib Dick

The All-Seeing Eye Of Froomkin hits the highlights:

Here [Cheney] is talking to Sean Hannity:

Hannity: “What did you make of Senator Barack Obama’s comments that he would talk to [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier who’s repeatedly threatened to blow up and remove Israel from the state — from the map, the world map, and obviously is pursuing some nuclear capability?”

Cheney: “Well, he is, and I think the position we’ve taken with respect to that is that we would be prepared to talk when they stopped enriching uranium. Of course, they’ve never met that condition, so we haven’t had talks at that level.

(…)

Just over two hours later, [Cheney was on with] Hugh Hewitt.

Hewitt: “Do you — Mr. Vice President, do you have a personal sense of whether or not the Iranian leadership is actually motivated by this end-times, bring-back-the-12th-Imam sort of theology that we’ve read so much about?”

Cheney: “…The one guy who talks about it repeatedly is Ahmadinejad. And — in other words, a report even at one point that when he went to Iraq on a visit, that at least on one occasion, he insisted on there being a vacant chair at the table for the 12th Imam…. I mean, if I look at what his beliefs supposedly are, the allegation that the — a return of the 12th Imam is something to be much desired, and that the best contribution that a man can make is to die a martyr facilitating that return, and all that goes with it — I always think of Bernard Lewis, who said that mutual assured destruction during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviets meant peace and stability and deterrence, but mutual assured destruction in the hands of Ahmadinejad may just be an incentive. It’s a worrisome proposition.”

The 12th Imam

Cheney’s talk of the 12th Imam marks his revival of an old neocon chestnut.

The 12th Imam, or the mahdi, is considered by devout Shiite Muslims to be a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed who disappeared in the ninth century and will reappear before judgment day to end tyranny and promote justice.

The man Cheney cites as an authority on Iranian apocalyptic thinking, controversial mideast scholar Bernard Lewis, hinted in an Aug. 8, 2006, Wall Street Journal op-ed that Ahmadinejad might be planning a nuclear attack on Israel just two weeks later, on the date in the Islamic calendar when the Prophet Muhammad made his mystical journey to Jerusalem.

(…)

Needless to say, the day went by without incident.

Noah Feldman wrote in the New York Times Magazine on Oct. 29, 2006, that “the relative absence of a contemporary Shiite trend to messianic brinkmanship suggests that Ahmadinejad’s recent emphasis on the mahdi may be interpreted more in terms of an attempt to summon [Ayotollah] Khomeini’s legacy and Iran’s revolutionary moment than as a desperate willingness to bring the nation to the edge of war. . . .

“Ahmadinejad surely understands the consequences of using a nuclear bomb, and Shiite Islam, even in its messianic incarnation, still falls short of inviting nuclear retaliation and engendering collective suicide.”

As for Wiping Israel Off the Map

Back in March, William Branigin of The Washington Post shed some light on the administration’s continued insistence that the Iranian government had expressed its desire to wipe Israel off the map.

Branigin wrote: “In an October 2005 speech to a conference on a ‘World without Zionism,’ Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted by a state-run Iranian news agency as agreeing with a statement by Iran’s late spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, that ‘Israel must be wiped off the map.’ Iran’s foreign minister later said the comment had been incorrectly translated from Farsi and that Ahmadinejad was ‘talking about the [Israeli] regime,’ which Iran does not recognize and wants to see collapse.

“According to Farsi-speaking commentators including Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, Ahmadinejad’s exact quote was, ‘The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.’ Cole has written that Ahmadinejad was not calling for the ‘Nazi-style extermination of a people,’ but was expressing the wish that the Israeli government would disappear just as the shah of Iran’s regime had collapsed in 1979.“

Only one teensy little detail that Froomkin leaves out, though.  Ahmadinejad isn’t the guy with the button.  The ayatollahs are the ones with all the power in Iran - if the Bushies want to make someone their scary Iranian boogeyman, they should be trying to convince us that the leaders of Iran’s theocracy are bloodthirsty and insane.  The fact that they have not done so makes me suspect that they can’t.

Add comment April 11th, 2008 at 09:00pm Posted by Eli

Principals Without Principles

Does this really surprise anyone?

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.

Contacted by ABC News today, spokesmen for Tenet, Rumsfeld and Powell declined to comment about the interrogation program or their private discussions in Principals Meetings. Powell said through an assistant there were “hundreds of [Principals] meetings” on a wide variety of topics and that he was “not at liberty to discuss private meetings.”

Hey, you hear that flushing sound, Colin?  That’s the last remaining scraps of your reputation.  Remember when everyone thought you were a statesmanlike man of integrity?  Pretty awesome, wasn’t it?  And now you’re just another of Dubya’s war criminals.

According to a former CIA official involved in the process, CIA headquarters would receive cables from operatives in the field asking for authorization for specific techniques. Agents, worried about overstepping their boundaries, would await guidance in particularly complicated cases dealing with high-value detainees, two CIA sources said.

Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later Porter Goss along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas.

“It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time,” said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. “They’d say, ‘We’ve got so and so. This is the plan.’”

Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved.

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”

Ashcroft sounds a lot more concerned with optics than ethics.  Powell had a little more of a big-picture concern, but didn’t do squat about it:

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns — shared by Powell — that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it.”

So Condi is incompetent and evil!  Maybe she would make a perfect running mate for McTrainwreck.  And did Colin Powell always completely lack balls, or did he hand them over to Dubya when he assumed the Secretary Of State position?  Wasn’t this the point (or one of the points) where a Principled Man Of Conscience  says, “I cannot be party to this,” and resigns?  As opposed to, “Gee, I sure wish you guys wouldn’t do that, but okay.”  Heroic.

3 comments April 10th, 2008 at 07:08am Posted by Eli

Question Of The Week

John Yoo, 3/14/03 torture memo:

“…The Eighth Amendment… applies solely to those persons upon whom criminal sanctions have been imposed. As the Supreme Court has explained, the “‘Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause’ was designed to protect those convicted of crimes… The Eight Amendment thus has no application to those individuals who have not been punished as part of a criminal proceeding, irrespective of the fact that they have been detained by the government… The Eighth Amendment therefore cannot extend to the detention of wartime detainees, who have been captured pursuant to the President’s power as Commander in Chief…”

“The detention of enemy combatants can in no sense be deemed ‘punishment’ for purposes of the Eight Amendment… Indeed, it has long been established that captivity in wartime is neither a punishment nor an act of vengeance, but merely a temporary detention which is devoid of all penal character…”

Tony Scalia, 2/12/08 BBC interview:

To begin with, the constitution refers to cruel and unusual punishment, it is referring to… cruel and unusual punishment for a crime. But a court can do that when a witness refuses to answer or commit them to jail until you will answer the question — without any time limit on it, as a means of coercing the witness to answer, as the witness should. And I suppose it’s the same thing about “so-called” torture.

Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited under the Constitution? Because smacking someone in the face would violate the 8th amendment in a prison context. You can’t go around smacking people about. Is it obvious that what can’t be done for punishment can’t be done to exact information that is crucial to this society? It’s not at all an easy question, to tell you the truth.

Did Yoo and Scalia come up with this torture-is-okay-as-long-as-they-haven’t-been-convicted-of-anything angle independently, or did someone pass the idea to or between them?

Makes one wonder just what Dick and Tony might have talked about on those hunting trips, eh?

Add comment April 4th, 2008 at 09:55pm Posted by Eli

Another Endorsement

Flying Apocalypse Fish weighs in. Not exactly a surprising choice.

(Picture from Married To The Sea)

Add comment March 28th, 2008 at 11:29am Posted by Eli

Great Moments In Timing

March 24: Vice President Dick Cheney says of the 4,000 dead American troops, “we are fortunate to have a group of men and women, the all-volunteer force, who voluntarily put on the uniform and go in harm’s way for the rest of us.”

March 27: The movie Stop-Loss comes out.

Oops.

Add comment March 27th, 2008 at 07:18pm Posted by Eli

Another Republican Who Speaks For Me

First Lincoln Chafee, now Mickey Edwards:

I do not blame Dick Cheney for George W. Bush’s transgressions; the president needs no prompting to wrap himself in the cloak of a modern-day king. Nor do I believe that the vice president so enthusiastically supports the Iraq war out of a loyalty to the oil industry that his former employer serves. By all accounts, Cheney’s belief in “the military option” and the principle of president-as-decider predates his affiliation with Halliburton.

What, then, is the straw that causes me to finally consign a man I served with in the House Republican leadership to the category of “those about whom we should be greatly concerned”?

It is Cheney’s all-too-revealing conversation this week with ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz. On Wednesday, reminded of the public’s disapproval of the war in Iraq, now five years old, the vice president shrugged off that fact (and thus, the people themselves) with a one-word answer: “So?”

“So,” Mr. Vice President?

Policy, Cheney went on to say, should not be tailored to fit fluctuations in the public attitudes. If there is one thing public attitudes have not been doing, however, it is fluctuating: Resistance to the Bush administration’s Iraq policy has been widespread, entrenched and consistent. Whether public opinion is right or wrong, it is not to be cavalierly dismissed.

(…) The decision to go to war… — to send young Americans off to battle, knowing that some will die — is the single most difficult choice any public official can be called upon to make. That is precisely why the nation’s Founders, aware of the deadly wars of Europe, deliberately withheld from the executive branch the power to engage in war unless such action was expressly approved by the people themselves, through their representatives in Congress.

Cheney told Raddatz that American war policy should not be affected by the views of the people. But that is precisely whose views should matter: It is the people who should decide whether the nation shall go to war. That is not a radical, or liberal, or unpatriotic idea. It is the very heart of America’s constitutional system.

In Europe, before America’s founding, there were rulers and their subjects. The Founders decided that in the United States there would be not subjects but citizens. Rulers tell their subjects what to do, but citizens tell their government what to do.

If Dick Cheney believes, as he obviously does, that the war in Iraq is vital to American interests, it is his job, and that of President Bush, to make the case with sufficient proof to win the necessary public support.

That is the difference between a strong president (one who leads) and a strong presidency (one in which ultimate power resides in the hands of a single person). Bush is officially America’s “head of state,” but he is not the head of government; he is the head of one branch of our government, and it’s not the branch that decides on war and peace.

When the vice president dismisses public opposition to war with a simple “So?” he violates the single most important element in the American system of government: Here, the people rule.

Amen to that. Bush and Cheney have completely forgotten - or completely dismissed - the Constitution’s fundamental premise, which is that the president is not the king or the boss of all Americans, but rather the other way ’round. And look at how well that’s worked out for us.

(h/t dakine)

3 comments March 22nd, 2008 at 04:05pm Posted by Eli

Americans Tell Cheney To Go Cheney Himself

Well, this is not exactly a surprise:

In contrast to Vice President Dick Cheney’s dismissive attitude toward Americans’ dissatisfaction with the Iraq war, a recent World Public Opinion poll found that 81 percent of Americans believe that “when making ‘an important decision,’ government leaders ’should pay attention to public opinion polls because this will help them get a sense of the public’s views.’” Moreover, in a sharp rebuke to White House press secretary Dana Perino’s recent claim that Americans only “have input every four years” regarding policy matters, the poll also found that “94 percent say that government leaders should pay attention to the views of the public between elections.”

Dick Cheney’s response: “So?”

Add comment March 22nd, 2008 at 03:12pm Posted by Eli

If You Liked The Chart, You’ll Love The Database

George W. Bush: Lyingest president ever. All other presidential liars pale before him.

Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that the Bush administration racked up 935 lies on the way to Iraq; they lied every time they opened their vile mouths (boy, it sure would have been nice to have this 4 years ago, eh?). And it’s not just the Republican Congress that covered for them:

So what, you may well ask, ever happened to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s promised inquiry into whether the White House intentionally deceived the public in the run-up to war? That, presumably, would provide an accountability moment of sorts.

You may recall that more than two years ago, in November 2005, Democrats were so upset about Republican foot-dragging on the inquiry that they brought the Senate to a halt with a rare closed session to demand that work resume.

The Republicans, not surprisingly, continued to stall anyway. But the Democrats have controlled the Senate for more than a year now. Where is the report?

Wendy Morigi, spokeswoman for Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, told me this morning that it will be out before the end of spring.

Why the delay? Due to the “lack of comity on the committee” when Rockefeller took over the chairmanship, he decided that pushing ahead with the inquiry right away “would again create tension,” Morigi said.

Nevertheless, the committee staff has “continued to work” on the report, she said. And a hearing on the matter will be held “within the next few months.”

Uh-huh. I’ll believe that when the image of the report is seared into my hot little eyeballs. Here’s how I see it playing out:

Report encounters delays, possibly due to White House stonewalling (the hell you say!). Report release pushed back to late summer/early fall. Rockefeller then decides that it would be inappropriate to allow it to influence the imminent election (God forbid voters should ever be reminded if what dishonest criminals the Republicans are at a time when it might actually make a difference), and delays release until December/January.

It’s not like the Democrats have given me much cause for optimism.

3 comments January 23rd, 2008 at 09:15pm Posted by Eli

He’d Know, Wouldn’t He?

George McGovern says Bush/Cheney worse than Nixon/Agnew:

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

(…)

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising.

(…)

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly “high crimes and misdemeanors,” to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team’s assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged — perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis… and laid waste their country….

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of killing, immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an “imminent threat” to the United States. The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks — another blatant falsehood….Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August that Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to the country and the world. This is the same strategy of deception that brought us into war in the Arabian Desert and could lead us into an unjustified invasion of Iran. I can say with some professional knowledge and experience that if Bush invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark the end of U.S. influence in the crucial Middle East for decades.

Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of their administration, their policies — especially the war in Iraq — have increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States….

Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil strife. It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, all opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: “I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans.” Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, “it wasn’t until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country’s laws — that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate. . . . A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law — and repeatedly violates the law — thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors.”

I figure when George McGovern says Bush/Cheney are more deserving of impeachment than Nixon/Agnew, that’s gotta mean something.

If impeachment was a legal/criminal proceeding rather than a political one, Bush and Cheney would have been convicted and ejected by now.

(h/t TeddySanFran)

1 comment January 6th, 2008 at 03:06pm Posted by Eli

How Not To Be Seen, Pt. II

These three congressmen have figured out how not to be seen…

Apparently Democratic congressmen and House Judiciary Committee members Robert Wexler (D-FL), Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) have shopped this op-ed around to major papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times without any takers (h/t dirk). They’re calling for Cheney’s impeachment, which is kind of a big deal:

On November 7, the House of Representatives voted to send a resolution of impeachment of Vice President Cheney to the Judiciary Committee. As Members of the House Judiciary Committee, we strongly believe these important hearings should begin.

The issues at hand are too serious to ignore, including credible allegations of abuse of power that if proven may well constitute high crimes and misdemeanors under our constitution. The charges against Vice President Cheney relate to his deceptive actions leading up to the Iraq war, the revelation of the identity of a covert agent for political retaliation, and the illegal wiretapping of American citizens.

I think this is the money quote, however:

Some of us were in Congress during the impeachment hearings of President Clinton. We spent a year and a half listening to testimony about President Clinton’s personal relations. This must not be the model for impeachment inquires. A Democratic Congress can show that it takes its constitutional authority seriously and hold a sober investigation, which will stand in stark contrast to the kangaroo court convened by Republicans for President Clinton. In fact, the worst legacy of the Clinton impeachment - where the GOP pursued trumped up and insignificant allegations - would be that it discourages future Congresses from examining credible and significant allegations of a constitutional nature when they arise.

This is absolutely right, and I sometimes wonder whether it could have been deliberate, whether the Republicans were using it to immunize their next president from impeachment so that he would be completely unaccountable, completely unbound. Tempting as that idea is, here’s probably no need to assume conspiracy where petty vengeance will suffice.

But regardless of the reason, reclaiming the impeachment process as a tool to protect the government’s integrity would be very beneficial indeed. It’s just hard to imagine it actually happening.

Add comment December 14th, 2007 at 11:54pm Posted by Eli

Sabotage

Hey, remember 2004?

Remember when Cheney were telling us that if Kerry was elected, we would be attacked by terrorists? I have to wonder if BushCo. wants to actively invite a terrorist attack under their (presumably Democratic) successor’s watch:

The Bush administration intends to slash counterterrorism funding for police, firefighters and rescue departments across the country by more than half next year, according to budget documents obtained by The Associated Press. The Homeland Security Department has given $23 billion to states and local communities to fight terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks, but one document says the administration is not convinced that the money has been well spent and thinks the nation’s highest-risk cities have largely satisfied their security needs.

The department wanted to provide $3.2 billion to help states and cities protect against terrorist attacks in 2009, but the White House said it would ask Congress for less than half - $1.4 billion, according to a Nov. 26 document. The plan calls outright elimination of programs for port security, transit security, and local emergency management operations in the next budget year. This is President Bush’s last budget, and the new administration would have to live with the funding decisions between Jan. 20 and Sept. 30, 2009.

Yeah, they’re real committed to the War On Terror, all right. Fortunately, it sounds like Congress isn’t real enthusiastic about the administration’s Cunning Plan. Hopefully the Democrats will be able to make some campaign hay on this next year. Being labeled soft on terror is pretty much the worst thing that could possibly happen to the GOP.

(h/t ellroon)

1 comment December 2nd, 2007 at 05:07pm Posted by Eli

I, For One, Welcome Our Impartial Robot Overlords

How bad could it be?

Kung Fu Monkey’s friend Tyrone makes a good point:

John: … No.
Tyrone: Listen, all I’m asking is that you give the idea a decent –
John: Robot overlords. You are “pro-robot overlords”.
Tyrone: They bring world peace, universal health care –
John: At the cost of our freedoms!
Tyrone: MY POINT EXACTLY. We’re already giving up our freedoms — our right to privacy, gone. Warrantless arrest, gone. Right to have your vote counted is super-gone depending on the state you live in, right to stand trial, gone — we have torture. We already have all the downsides of a supposed robotic takeover, but we’re being cheated of the upside! I say, if this is the world we’re gonna live in anyway, at least let the robot overlords have their shot. World peace, technological utopia — and no crime! The robot overlords’ crime control is swift and merciless.

(…)

Tyrone: Sure, the robots rend criminals with horrible tearing jaws. But if you’re telling me they eat white and black criminals equally –
John: I get it.
Tyrone: They use that as a selling point, the robot overlords will be ass-deep in brothers with oil cans and subpoenas.
John: …
Tyrone: Robot overlords don’t give Scooter Libby pardons. No rich man can bribe his way out of the robot overlord court. You telling me you don’t want to see the robot overlords kick in Dick Cheney’s door –
John: I would buy that DVD. The two disc box set, with robot overlord commentary.

(…)

John: …But look,the Democrats won in 2006!
Tyrone: Suuuuuuuure they did.
John: What are you — Congress changed parties! We took over!
Tyrone: Absolutely. Remember when the Democratic Congress ended the war?
John: Ummm …
Tyrone: How about when they changed the Bankruptcy Bill, so middle class people didn’t get reamed. When they passed that children’s health care plan over the lame duck president’s veto. Or when they finally reclaimed America’s moral high ground when they bravely stopped the approval of an Attorney General who thought waterboarding was a grey area. When they shut down Gitmo …

Even without their obvious ability to influence voting machines, I’m pretty sure the robot overlords would totally split the conservative vote.

Add comment November 15th, 2007 at 10:12pm Posted by Eli

Angel & Devil

The All-Seeing Eye Of Froomkin asks a very scary question:

Whose advice does President Bush value the most? Who is the last person to whisper in his ear?

The answer to that question has never been entirely clear, although Vice President Cheney has generally been the most likely suspect — certainly when it comes to foreign policy.

But now Bush appears to be facing an ever-deepening rift among his chief advisers, with Cheney and his loyalists advocating a more confrontational response to international challenges and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice marshalling support for diplomacy. Given how trigger-happy Cheney appears to be, and how little credibility this White House has on the international stage, Bush essentially faces the choice of whether to end his tenure with a bang or a whimper.

The latest backdrop for this struggle appears to be the mysterious Israeli bombing raid on Syria five weeks ago.

Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper write in the New York Times: “A sharp debate is under way in the Bush administration about the significance of the Israeli intelligence that led to last month’s Israeli strike inside Syria, according to current and former American government officials.

“At issue is whether intelligence that Israel presented months ago to the White House — to support claims that Syria had begun early work on what could become a nuclear weapons program with help from North Korea — was conclusive enough to justify military action by Israel and a possible rethinking of American policy toward the two nations.

“The debate has fractured along now-familiar fault lines, with Vice President Dick Cheney and conservative hawks in the administration portraying the Israeli intelligence as credible and arguing that it should cause the United States to reconsider its diplomatic overtures to Syria and North Korea.

“By contrast, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her allies within the administration have said they do not believe that the intelligence presented so far merits any change in the American diplomatic approach.”

Am I the only one picturing a little Condi angel perched on one of Dubya’s shoulders, and a little Cheney devil perched on the other? But come on, this is the guy who blew up frogs, challenged his dad to a drunken fight, mocked an executed prisoner, and dropped bon mots like, “Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out,” “Feels good” (just prior to blowing up Iraq), and “Bring it on!” - who do you think he’s going to listen to? Violence is always the answer in his shriveled little sociopathic brain. Anything else would make him look like one of those sissy Democrats.

Damn, I wish I had me some Photoshop skillz…

4 comments October 11th, 2007 at 07:54am Posted by Eli

Must-Read Of The Day

Sidney Blumenthal mines the Robert Draper biography of Dubya, and comes up with a very creepy portrait of an insecure and borderline deranged president, easily manipulated, in thrall to his father’s enemies and his own insecurity and grandiose ego.

It is a telling statement on just how unmoored from reality he is, that he was willing to voluntarily tell an interviewer all of this stuff, apparently thinking that it cast him in a positive light, as if boasting about his own decisiveness and how History would vindicate him somehow makes those delusions real.

1 comment September 20th, 2007 at 07:17am Posted by Eli

Scott Ritter Is Shrill

My mother sent me this great Scott Ritter piece, in which he takes some great shots at Rove, Cheney, and feckless Democrats.

Bit long, but definitely worth a read.

1 comment August 26th, 2007 at 03:32pm Posted by Eli

Been There, Done That

Scarecrow suggests that we trade Bush and Cheney (plus cash and some incompetents to be named later) to Iraq for al-Maliki, whose incompetence is a lot less… vigorous.

I just don’t see it happening - the last thing the Iraqis want is another narcissistic, sadistic dictator who gets them invaded again.

Besides, I hear al-Maliki has a totally ironclad no-trade clause.

2 comments August 22nd, 2007 at 11:15am Posted by Eli

Quote Of The Day

MoDo can be pretty good when she’s not slagging Democrats over petty bullshit:

“How I Look on My Mistakes,” by George W. Bush

The people trusted me with an important position. I didn’t live up to expectations. I let Dick supersize the executive branch and cast Democrats as whiners and traitors. Why did I not suspect that Dick might be power-hungry when he appointed himself vice president? Why did I let him take over my presidency and fill it up with warmongers? I was so afraid to be called a wimp, as my father once was, I allowed Dick and Rummy to turn me into a wimp. I should never have allowed Dick to conspire with energy lobbyists and steer contracts to Halliburton. A tip-off should have been when Dick kept giving himself all the same powers that I had. Or when he outed that pretty lady spy.

(…)

Being the Decider is so confusing. I regret stealing the presidency and wish I could give it back.

“How I Look on My Mistakes,” by Dick Cheney

Buzz off.

Add comment July 15th, 2007 at 07:39am Posted by Eli