One of those "girly boys" of the NRO is trembling with indignation again. The object of his ire, the Iraqi contingent of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Here's Cliff May's reaction to the news of the bombing at the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad on Monday.

"Of course we don't understand why somebody would attack the Red Cross," said Red Cross spokeswoman Nada Doumani. "It's very hard to understand.

No, Ms. Doumani, it's actually quite simple. The Saddamite remnants and their foreign jihadi allies don't want life to get better for ordinary Iraqis. That's why they attack you. That's why the attack American troops repairing water lines and guarding hospitals. That's why they attack Iraqi police cadets. That's why they attack U.N. headquarters. That's why they attack Jordanian diplomats.

What do the terrorists and their allies want? They want to get Iraq and its resources – e.g. oil, weapons, cash, -- back into their sweaty hands so they can utilize them to further for their viciously destructive aims. They can accomplish that by killing as many all foreign infidels and their allies as possible, and by driving the rest out of Iraq.

That includes you, Ms. Doumani. You too, represent the hated Judeo-Christian West and it won't help for you to say you never eat at McDonald's and that you think George W. Bush is a unilateralist and uncultured cowboy. The fact is you're working for the Red Cross and people who remember the Crusades and the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols remember what that cross used to stand for.

Can you feel the love, the sympathy, the moral imagination here? No? Okay, then notice the confusion; what point is being made by that last sentence; that the evil ones have obsessive memories of past atrocities and lack Christian forgiveness, or that they have a strong reason for being so angry?

What the context was for Ms. Doumani's remarks is ignored and Mr. May offers no link to the original news story. Couldn't it be that she was responding to a dumb question, that she was still in shock from what had happened. or that she was stating the obvious; aren't the motivations of anyone who blows themselves up in order to attack others for whatever cause ultimately hard to understand?

Other than its instinctive disdain for any international organization, even the Red Cross, for heaven's sake, what comes through most clearly in May's angry lecture to a group of people who have just experienced a profound tragedy, as it does in most of the comments about Iraq from this administration and its supporters, is a qualifty of abstraction. Their interest in Iraqis lacks immediacy, specificity, curiosity about the multiple and diverse actualities of what's going on in Iraq.

Does Mr. May know, for instance, any of what this article about the Red Cross's reluctant decision to withdraw foreign workers from it's Baghdad headquarters tells us about this ICRC? That it is a Swiss organization, that it stayed in Baghdad through-out our military campaign to remove Saddam, that it has about 600 Iraqi employees who will, of course, stay on duty, but that the important task of visiting prisoners held by the coalition, of which there are at least ten thousand can only be done by foreign personnel?

The ICRC is mandated by the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war to make such visits, to check on conditions and to enable prisoners to communicate with their families.

Do the folks at the NRO really want to win hearts and minds in Iraq? If they do, they need to pay a different kind of attention to what's happening there, the kind that Arthur Miller meant when he had Mrs. Loman say, "attention must be paid," specific attention, to the details, of individual, indivisible lives.

Like this young life, which is all about paying attention to what's around her.

The Red Cross have started pulling out their personnel. A friend of mine who works with the Red Crescent said that they were going to try to pull out most of their personnel, while trying to continue with what they're doing- humanitarian assistance. When I heard Nada Domani, the head of the ICRC in Iraq, say that they'd begin pulling out their personnel on Tuesday, I wished I could yell out, "Don't abandon us Nada!" But I realize that their first priority is to ensure the safety of their employees.

The Red Cross is especially important at this point because they are the 'link' that is connecting the families of the detainees and the military. When someone suddenly disappears, people go to the Red Cross and after a few grueling days, the missing person can often be tracked down at one of the prison camps or prisons.

Read the rest for a detailed, specific discussion of the complexities of understanding who is attacking what in Iraq, and why they might be doing it. Increasingly, Riverbend (also known as Baghdad Burning) is becoming mandatory reading for everyone who is committed to paying attention to what is happening in Iraq.

Match the following quote to its actual source:

"...spank me three times a day, until the inhalant demon leaves my body."

Was it...

1- A Rush Limbaugh recovery alert update?
2- Joel Mowbray's weekend with the Boykins?
3- A justice department memo leaked by a senior official close to John Ashcroft?
4- An Opus Dei summer camp counselor speaking to a group of 7th graders?
5- A line from the movie "Blue Velvet" starring Dennis Hopper?

No no, its none of those....it's - the General, in his Rehab Labyrinth

As you know from reading CNN, "assigning responsibility elsewhere" is atypical of the Bush Administration, which is why we had to wait a full 24 hours or so for them to do it again: Rice Faults Past Administrations on Terror. David Sanger's observation is a nice touch, I think:

Ms. Rice's comments make no reference to what the Bush administration itself did between Mr. Bush's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2001, and the Sept. 11 attacks.

What does Sanger mean? They did nothing, and she said nothing. I'd say that pretty much sums it up.

Ya sure can miss stuff when you go away for a little while.
So let me see if I have this right.

The "girly boys" at National Review Online have apparently worked themselves into quite a shin kicking titter and are now stalking about in a haughty agitated bow tied snit. And, all this prissy quivering the end result of, to cite one example, NRO cupcake Donald Luskin's very own column headline characterizing himself and NRO as the "We" who allegedly "stalked" Paul Krugman? As in: "We Stalked, He Balked". Krugman for his part, if we are to believe the headline, responded with some kind of baseball pitching violation. Which of course is much worse than stalking especially if you're a stalker.

Submit one Atrios, who has commented often on Luskin's noisome infatuation with Paul Krugman as well as NRO's characterization of themselves as the "We" who "stalked" the you know who. Atrios, commenting previously on the NRO "girly boy" gaggle's honkings on a variety of matters is now being stalked himself, in a manner of speaking, for engaging in what can only be described as pointing out and satirizing the obvious. Runts like Luskin, who soon found himself running around in circles like a rat trapped in a bucket, is now apparently convinced that shifting his fetish from an economist to a blogger will somehow free him from running around in circles inside of a bucket? Uh, Luskin, you stupid dizzy rodent. You're just jumping from one bucket to another. And hovering above this new bucket that you may soon jump into is a great big sack of snarling angry cats! Oh Luskin...you stupid dumb bastard you!

The stalker characterizations and pie heaving antics that NRO and Luskin himself helped primp and preen with regard to Krugman have now come home to shit all over the bottom of the gilded NRO cage. And because of this, NRO's thin skinned silver spoon fed busy bodies have threatened to pursue frivolous litigation via "further legal action" against Atrios and Eschaton should Atrios refuse to alter or remove his previous posts and reader comments criticizing and satirizing the NRO/Luskin cult and their own continuing thin skinned misfires and prowlings and excitable pie slinging ventilations.

Are these NRO sucklings for real? Boys, you're puling nerds from the National Review for Christ sake, you're not longshoremen. You guys are afraid of Ted Koppel. You couldn't beat up Liza Minnelli's husband even if you were drunk and booted full of methamphetamine and wearing a pair of advantage timber patterned Silent Snake microtex pants. That rubber chicken party hag Ann Coulter kicked your ass and you even had the jump on her. Do yourselves a favor, go home and take a long nap. It'll be ok, we all remember our first beer.

I doubt they'll heed my advice. Too bad for them. And ain't that always the way with petty overfed over pampered reprobates? They just can't resist bragging and gloating and drunkenly prating about their half-baked swindles and hijinks and frisky cavorts until someone calls em on their arrogant piffle, at which point they begin bellowing like schoolgirls being chased around the room by a garden spider. Luskin and his cowering momma's boys at NRO don't have the sack of berries to take it on the chin or defend their pursuits and rhetorical mutterings in the free market of ideas and debate and instead retreat straightaway to even more cowardly hijinks and capers and low-road show boating. In this case unleashing litigious legal lap-dogs and a good deal of general altogether phoney theatrics to cover for their lack of intellectual muscle or integrity. From stalking to skulking to pathetic self pitying sulking. These are the tough guys of NRO. Talk about yer cream pies.

I wonder if Jonah Goldberg's mommy -- that chain-smoking, troweled pancake-makeup warthog that emerged from some dank cavity of the Nixon legacy's bloated corpse -- consulted on any of these recent legal schenanigans? Dirty trick recipes from Jonah's mommy! Hmmm? Lets file false liens against the little people. That'll teach em to get uppity!

Anyway, this kind of ominous behavior from cowards like Luskin and the pampered dandies at NRO can only be described as bitchilly sinister. Bitchilly sinister as only rich pampered litigious sanctimonious silver spoon fed elitist ivory tower right wing boy-whelp sons-a-sinister bitches can be.

Well - I'm no legal expert and I'm not even sure bitchilly is a word but it also seems to me that dainty Donald and the little vibrating sniffs at NRO may have cooked up their own greasy tray of half baked torts simply to manufacture some grave threat which they can use to claw away at one high profile blogger's privacy, reveal his identity and sell more of their cheap-labor-conservative magazines as a result of such nosy personal obtrusions.

So listen up NRO, you spineless groveling greedy weakling geeks. You snooty elitist gilded cage dandy-boy conservative sucklings. Give it up! Quit yanking on your own shriveled stalks for a change. Before you go completely blind.

Ok, that's enough. Release the fucking cats.

"I can dish it out, but I sure can't take it."

Ridiculous. Even for the wingers. See Atrios.

Always glad to see a little frivolity injected into the legal system!

Donald Luskin had always struck us as more to be pitied than despised. It's not fun to be obsessed by another human being you want to hate but can't let go of, especially if that person insists on going about their life and work as if you didn't exist. All those words expended about Herr Krugman, and not a single phone call, not even an indignant protest, during those long Saturday nights, waiting by the phone. Who among us hasn't been there, and done that?

Early this AM, but later than almost everyone else, we found out we were wrong. In addition to being that "Terribly Unsuccessful Fund Manager," as Sullywatch is pointing out everywhere, Mr. Luskin is a despicable, unprincipled, shmuck.

Aside from all the fru fru window dressing of law firms and letters and threats and deadlines, Donald Luskin's pathetic attempt to intimidate Atrios, the Godfather of this blog as of so many others, has turned out to be an irritation more than anything else, an unimportant prick from a self-important one.

The response, witty, wise, generous, principled and outraged has been heartening, even inspiring. Misha at The Rottweiler has chimed in and provoked an interesting comments thread, and the NRO has at least had the sense to be embarrassed by Mr. Luskin's frivolous use of our Justice system.

We should note that Luskin is not alone in his obsession with Krugman; in fact, scroll down at The Corner, and you'll run into lots of free-floating Krugman bashing, "lots" compared to the single post questioning Luskin's actions. (It all has to do with this hilarious and witty notion that for each sign of improvement in the economy, Krugman kicks his cat, or a cat, or a friends cat; from this trope flows much snarky adolescent humor.) The distinguished economist and professor is providing more than mere irritation to much of the right in this country.

We were Atrios, for a little while; Mr. Luskin has provided us the opportunity, along with many others, to proclaim to Luskin, and his lawyer, and the world, that we are still Atrios. This petty attempt to use a bogus lawsuit to unearth the private identity of a blogger who's public identity is displayed daily at Escaton, is doomed; like so many others we hereby take the pledge that we endorse the post and the comments thread being objected to and that Mr. Luskin now needs to include this little upstart of a blog in any legal action he might be contemplating. You are a stalker, Mr. Luskin, you are a crybaby, Mr. Luskin, you are a winer, Mr. Luskin, and to end on a note that is not unduly negative, we are happy to acknowledge, Mr. Luskin, that this little incident probably rates as a personal best for you, in the annals of bad sportsmanship.

I know I'm supposed to be impressed by ABC's The Note, of which Josh Marshall and other bloggers are avowed fans, but I'm not. In fact, every time I read it I get the feeling I'm reading the syllabus for the next Daily Howler or issue of MWO. Today, for example, The Note announces "the seeming end of Howard Dean's amazing run to the front of the pack without getting anything like the normal level of scrutiny a leading candidate normally gets on issues as diverse as affirmative action, the death penalty, the assault weapons ban, tax cuts, the Social Security retirement age, veterans' benefits, the legitimacy of using old "votes and quotes" to attack an opponent, ethanol, matching funds, the war in Iraq, American troops in Iraq, NAFTA, Yucca Mountain, baseball, and others." (emphasis added)

If you're like me, you're now doing a Jon Stewart, rubbing your eyes while exclaiming, "Waaaa?" We all remember the "normal level of scrutiny" Bush got over his economic policies throughout the entire 2000 campaign for example; see The Great Unraveling for a reminder. And we also remember how the press would have gotten to Gore's policies but were thwarted by his refusal to stop wearing unapproved clothes, or saying things he didn't actually, you know, utter, thereby sucking all the oxygen out of the room for discussion of anything else.

So given this preening invocation by The Note of a hitherto unknown normative standard of professional political journalism, I assumed what it really signaled was more press clowning, and when the Note pointed as evidence of this new scrutiny to three "anti-Dean" pieces in The Boston Globe, where John Kerry's Jewishness is an obsessive topic of concern, my suspicions were all but confirmed. And indeed, the first piece exceeded even my soft bigotry of low expectations. Under the headline, Rivals Continue to Pick Apart Dean's Record, the Globe lede informs readers that,

Howard Dean has cited his support for a 1997 federal law curbing Medicare costs in an effort to fend off attacks from his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, but correspondence obtained under the Freedom of Information Act shows that Dean, as governor of Vermont in 2000, complained to federal officials about a significant provision of the cost-containment law signed by Bill Clinton.

Now, right off, the attacks alluded to were precisely because of his support for that law, making it odd for the Globe to switch the polarity of the issue--unless, of course the point is simply to screw Dean. Which is pretty much what the piece sets out to do.

What, exactly, is the story behind Dean's letter to Clinton, according to the article? Does it really attack "cost containment", as the lede coyly implies?

Not hardly. The reader who slogs through the article, without assuming that it documents what it purports to, will learn:

1) That the provision in question dealt with a loophole under existing Medicare law that set reimbursement fees for inpatient but not outpatient treatment, leading hospitals to shift more and more of its costs to the unregulated, outpatient side.

2) The provision tried to address this problem by setting a nationwide fee schedule for outpatient services as well.

3) Although hospitals in most states charged more for outpatient services than the fee schedule proposed under the provision, Vermont was an exception. Apparently the proposed fee schedule would be mandatory and not simply a ceiling (the article is too busy misdirecting readers to make this clear), so the end result would be that Vermont seniors would pay more on their copayments than before. As governor of Vermont, Dean found this objectionable.

So. A federal law designed to cut Medicare costs would have had the perverse effect in at least one state of increasing Medicare costs and patient copayments. By raising objections to this, Dean demonstrated that he was inconsistent on curbing Medicare costs.

You know, I think this qualifies as the "normal level of scrutiny" after all.

Someone else can read the other two Globe pieces. I don't have time for this horseshit.

On the flat-out lie by Bush about the "Mission Accomplished" banner, CNN had this to say:

Assigning responsibility elsewhere, especially to the military, is not a typical move for the Bush administration...

I wanted to think this was some kind of dry joke, but 3 years of servile Bush apologetics from outlets like CNN prevent me. Examples of shifting responsibility? Let's see: there's
The lie that the Clintonites trashed the White House
The failure to prevent 9/11
The failure of its economic policies
The explosion of the budget deficit
The failure to catch Bin Laden
Its role in the California energy crisis
The failure to get multinational support for attacking Iraq
The failure to secure virtually every major Iraqi institution after the fall of the regime
The "16 words" that came out of Junior's own mouth during SOTU
The intelligence failure about Saddam's WMDs
The ongoing anarchy in Iraq
Leaking Valerie Plame's name to the press

I'm sure our knowledgable visitors can supply many, many more. In fact, I can see it becoming a popular parlor game: "Shirk: The game where the biggest loser is the winner." Not a bad nickname for Junior either...

One journalist recounted how the California wildfires started this way:

On the morning of 26 October, Southern California woke up to perfect fire weather. Los Angeles Fire Chief Donald Manning accurately assessed "a potential day for disaster" and dispatched 10 city engines to the rim of the San Fernando Valley where chaparral meets suburb. And shortly after lunch, a blaze flared up....

Early [the next] morning, as a 50-mile-per-hour Santa Ana whipsawed power lines and ripped the fronds off palm trees, fires erupted one after another....As dawn broke...fires were out of control, five firefighters had already been critically injured, and new blazes were being reported throughout five Southern California counties....

[Firefighters] arrived too late to save the two dozen homes destroyed by the first...fire, which ultimately incinerated 39,000 acres. But events... were overshadowed by the fire that began [the next day] after lunch and with incredible speed consumed Laguna Beach "as if it had been soaked in gasoline."...

The Laguna Beach blaze... injured 65 firefighters, destroyed 366 homes (most of them valued at over $1 million) and caused $435 million in damage. It seemed to be the dramatic denouement to a catastrophic fire week. In fact, it was only the first act.

The fires are not those of the week of October 26, 2003, but rather of 1993, described by muckraking journalist Mike Davis in his prophetic Ecology of Fear. In "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn," Davis catalogs the stately procession of catastrophic wildfires that have rolled across Southern California almost since the dawn of time with a periodicity that makes Pacific ocean breakers look random by comparison, but which, unlike the latter, are steadily worsening. Chaparral ecology, he points out, is literally rooted in periodic wildfires as a means of regenerating its ecosystem. And this ecosystem's imperatives will not be denied:

A key revelation was the nonlinear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that "the probability for an intense fast running fire increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of age." Indeed, half-century old chaparral--heavily laden with mass--is calculated to burn with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chapparal is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil.

Prolonging and hence exacerbating the fire cycle has, of course, been human development with the attendant short-sighted policy of "total fire suppression." Moreover, under this policy, each wave of extreme fires has had the effect of worsening the prospect of the next one by damaging the overall ecology. Extreme fires actually transform the chemical composition of the soil, exacerbating erosion and flooding, while the successive waves of destruction favor speculative development in favor of the well-heeled, who have the political pull to neutralize zoning codes that might, for example, prohibit shake cedar construction, while socializing the costs of their pyrophilic habits onto others. The results are graphically on display here.

Again prophetically, Davis concludes:

Once again, politicians and the media have allowed the esstential landuse issue--the rampant, uncontrolled proliferation of firebelt suburbs--to be camoflaged in a neutral discourse about natural hazards and public safety. But "safety" for the Mailbu and Laguna coasts as well as hundreds of other luxury enclaves and gated hilltop suburbs is becoming one of the state's major social expenditures, although--unlike welfare or immigration--it is almost never debated in terms of trade-offs or alternatives. The $100 million cost of mobilizing 15,000 firefighters during Halloween week 1993 may be an increasingly common entry in the public ledger. Needless to say, there is no comparable investment in the fire, toxic, or earthquake safety of inner-city communities. Instead, as in so many things, we tolerate two systems of hazard protection, separate and unequal.

Predictably, the Bush Administration has already seized upon the current catastrophe to try to ram through a "forest policy" retrofitted to its pre-existing agendas, benefitting timber interests and few others. More surprisingly, a Senate alternative sponsored by Diane Feinstein and Ron Wyden would actually re-orient fire policy away from "ignition control" and toward managing chaparral accumulation in the form of regular thinning and prescribed burns. (It's unclear whether another alternative sponsored by Barbara Boxer and Jeff Bingaman would simply perpetuate the short-sighted total fire suppression policy currently in place.)

If the Feinstein/Wyden bill manages to snuff out the Administration's cynical giveway to timber interests, we might actually be looking at a semi-sane fire safety policy for once. If not, expect to meet here again on this tragic subject, another 10 years out.

According to the WaPo, early Sunday morning:

The U.S. occupation authority abandoned the al-Rashid Hotel after it was hit early Sunday by a fatal rocket barrage fired from a launcher disguised as a portable generator. A senior U.S. Army officer was killed and 17 people were wounded in the brazen strike at the core of the U.S. presence in Iraq. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who was in the hotel but unhurt in the attack, vowed that "we're not giving up on this job."

This morning, the AP informs us:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Suicide bombers struck the Red Cross headquarters and three police stations across Baghdad on Monday, killing about 40 people and injuring more than 200 in a coordinated terror spree that stunned the Iraqi capital on the first day of the Islamic holy month of fasting, Ramadan.

The string of car bombings, all within about 45 minutes, was the bloodiest episode yet in the city of 5 million by insurgents targeting the American-led occupation and those perceived as working with it.

It also appeared to mark a dramatic escalation in tactics, suggesting a level of organization U.S. officials had doubted the resistance possessed. In past weeks, bombers have carried out heavy suicide bombings but in single strikes.

What, you may be asking yourself, is the good news. That is the good news.

These attacks are a measure of the progress we've been making in Iraq, if the media would but tell you. That these evil ones, these terrorists, who just love to kill, and who hate progress, peace and freedom would feel compelled to attack the US occupation at its very heart, that they would target the International Red Cross, and police stations is evidence of their desperation. To quote our President:

"The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," Bush said. "And our job is to find them and bring them to justice. Which is precisely what General Abizaid briefed us on."

"These people will kill Iraqis. The don't care who they kill, they just want to kill, and we will find them," Bush pledged.

"There's a handful of people who don't want (Iraqis) to live in freedom," adding that do not support the reconstruction, including the restoration of electricity and oil production or the rebuilding of schools.

"They'll do whatever it takes to stop this progress. And our job is to work with the Iraqis to prevent this from happening."

This from the Oval Office, where the President was meeting with Viceroy Brenner, Ms. Rice, and Generals Meyers and Abizaid. There was even some good news about Iraq that didn't require being measured by the bloodiness of the resistence to our presence there.

Bush also hailed the outcome of the donors' conference for Iraq in Madrid which raised pledges of 13 billion dollars in addition to about 20 billion dollars from the United States.

"We spent time talking about the success of the donors conference, the fact that the world community is coming together to help build a free Iraq. And we want to thank the world for the willingness to step up and to help," Bush said.

And the world, I'm sure, is saying, you're welcome, Mr. President.

What is there to say about the use of this kind of logic, this rhetoric, so clearly PR rather than policy driven?

For a dose of reality, here's an early but detailed report of what it was like in Baghdad this morning from the NYTimes, and from the BBC, a report on the complicated reactions of actual Iraqis.

One more dose of reality, in the coordinated attack of the last several weeks on the media as deliberately witholding news of the progress being made in Iraq under our occupation, would you not agree that the unreported story most often referenced was the reopening of Iraqi schools? Here's just a small sampling of the stories covering that event that appeared at the time in the Christian Science Monitor, the BBC, another from the CSM, and yes, even Dan Rather's CBS. See what you think of the coverage.

One last question about the last two days - what was Sec. Wolfowitz doing in Iraq? Give him credit, as Atrios does, for at least staying in Baghdad, but why go there at all? Hard not to see it as a form of waving the bloody shirt, in this case, of our occupation. Mind you, I don't bebrudge the Secretary the warm welcome he received from the Kurds; their feelings of warmth towards him are perfectly understandable. But to the extent those feelings aren't as prevalent in neighborhoods in Baghdad, or in Najaf, or Karbala, to the extent he might not dare take a walk in those cities, isn't his presence in Iraq ultimately divisive in a way that impedes the result we want, a unified, democratic Iraq?

That today's suicide bombers may be foreign jihadists is hardly good news from an Iraqi point of view. What was the point of a visit that emphasized the American nature of this occupation? To reassure them that we're in it for the long haul? Somehow, I don't think that's what even the most sympathetic Iraqi is worried about.

Our informed visitors know that, according to Andrew Sullivan and others, the catastrophe in Iraq is actually a good thing, because the American presence there acts like "flypaper" to terrorists, thereby keeping America safer.

Time to admit it: Sullivan was right. And it looks like we've found a flypaper "best buy."

AFTER the 6:10 a.m. attack, a shaken-looking Paul Wolfowitz, the visiting deputy defense secretary, said the attack would not deter the United States in its mission to transform Iraq.

Maybe Cheney should go next? After all, didn't his boss famously say, "If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come and get me! I'll be at home! Waiting for the bastard!"?

Despite the demonstrated validity of the flypaper theory, however, something tells me we're going to go back to buying generic from now on--"other priorities" and all that. Besides, Kuwait City is lovely this time of year...

So the GOP thinks it's found a winning issue in '04: gay marriage. And to judge from a random sampling of the liberal blogosphere, it looks like our side is worried they're right, with folks like Kevin Drum, Hesiod and Atrios ginning up principled strategies for combatting them should they really decide to demagogue the issue. More of this, I say.

At the same time, I also have to say that if they're serious, it could once again demonstrate why the GOP's nickname is the Stupid Party. First, as the party in power, '04 is a referendum on their policies, which have, of course, been a disaster on every front. Playing the gay card practically begs for Democrats to point out the utter bankruptcy of everything else they ran on in '00.

But more to the point, 1992 and 1996 demonstrated pretty convincingly that culture war politics have a nasty way of backfiring. Though long forgotten by now, I sense, in 1991 the Republicans were crowing about making "political correctness" a major campaign issue, no doubt to cover up for Poppy's washout on the fiscal front. It never gathered steam and the Republicans continued to thrash about for wedge issues for the remainder of the campaign. 1996 was of course the high water mark of the culture wars, with Pat Buchanan addressing the Republican convention and scaring the beejeejus out of everyone in a speech Molly Ivins memorably described as "sounding better in the original German."

Indeed, as Joe Conason among others point out, Bush II was picked by the party largely to put daylight (dishonestly, to be sure) between itself and its extremist roots and tactics, which had backfired on them twice in a row. Now, having bankrupted the government, shed milions of jobs, and traduced every promise of moderation sold to the public in 2000, they seem prepared to revert to fearmondering, negative, divisive type. That's a good sign from my point of view, not a worrisome one.

UPDATE: In comments, Patrick Nielsen Hayden corrects my porous recollection about Buchanan's speech, which was in fact given in 1992. Mea culpa.

Of course the Kurds were dead set against it from the gitgo. Then the Iraqi leadership quickly added its opposition.

Now the Turks don't want Turks in Iraq either.

Another success for Bush diplomacy. Who says the guy's not a uniter?

What if they gave an occupation and nobody came?

How could anyone think such a thing?

Financial Times:

The US-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad on Thursday came under renewed fire for a lack of transparency as Christian Aid, a leading British relief organisation, said it had not properly accounted for $4bn in Iraqi assets.

My head hurts.

Look, can someone tell me the difference between Rummy's "long, hard slog", and a qWagmire? And, while we're at it, a cakewalk?

Oh yeah, the memo was leaked. It thought the Boy Emperor had issued a ruling against that?

John Podhoretz has managed to provoke the steady-as-steel Billmon with a Podhoretzian version of "a love note for our soldiers in Iraq from the support-the-troops brigade," as Billmon puts it, who provides this sample from the billet-doux

I'm about to say something nearly impermissible in the present-day discourse on the war in Iraq. Here it is: The death toll among American soldiers remains startlingly and hearteningly low, not horribly and frighteningly high.

That put Billmon in mind of some other well-known pontificators worthy of inclusion in a highly reputable roll of dishonor that includes a former first lady.

Billmon's post produced one of the best comments thread I've read in a long time; don't miss it. Several commentators added other worthies to the list, like George Nethercutt, who seem to think it okay to provide perspective on the toll of dead and wounded young Americans our Iraq project has taken thus far, by claiming they aren't really all that significant, compared to the importance of the task and our "success" in accomplishing it. If they really believe that, why do they always use only the number of dead from enemy fire, and completely ignore the wounded?

Inspired, I'd like to add another name to this Dishonor Roll; Andrew Sullivan. I had in mind a comment he made pre-war about why he was completely comfortable with the idea that young men and women in our all volunteer professional armed services would bear the brunt of the burden of an Iraqi war, but I couldn't find it in his archives. It made the round of blogs at the time, if anyone remembers what month it happened in, please do let me know.

In lieu of that, I'd like to cite the post in which Mr. Sullivan gave us the ultimate definition and justification of the "Iraq as flypaper" theory of the occupation. Reading it once again was a shock and a revelation, and reminded me that their articulation of that theory makes Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and even the President likely contenders for Billmon's increasingly distinguished dishonor roll.

What else did president Bush mean when he challenged the terror-masters to "bring 'em on," in Iraq? Those are not the words of a man seeking merely to pacify a country, but to continue waging war against terrorism. On August 25, Donald Rumsfeld said to a group called the veterans of Foreign Wars: "In Iraq moreover we¹re dealing not just with regime remnants but also with tens of thousands of criminals that were released from the jails by the regime before it fell, as well as terrorists and foreign fighters who have entered the country over the borders to try to oppose the Coalition. They pose a challenge to be sure but they also pose an opportunity because Coalition forces can deal with the terrorists now in Iraq instead of having to deal with those terrorists elsewhere, including the United States." Opportunity knocks.

In case it wasn't clear, that last two word comment outside the quotes is Sully's. Do not ask for whom opportunity knocks, it knocks for thee. Not. Not if you're a rich, snobbish, conservative swell.

It's this unified field theory of the occupation of Iraq that explains why the President finally went to the UN, to free our troops for the real task ahead, as explained by General Sanchez:

"This is what I would call a terrorist magnet, where America, being present here in Iraq, creates a target of opportunity... But this is exactly where we want to fight them. ...This will prevent the American people from having to go through their attacks back in the United States." You won't find a better description of the "flytrap" strategy anywhere - or from a more authoritative source.

Who could disagree?

Mr. Sullivan has nothing to say about the morality of invading and occupying Iraq in order to have a theatre far from home in which to fight our war against terrorism, though he has had much to say about how the anti-war left was oblivious to the suffering of the Iraqi people under Saddam.

There's more such foolishness, including an astounding description of the making of Iraq into a target for Islamic terrorists that isn't Israel as being the "extra beauty of this strategy." Brad DeLong and Jim Henley had some choice remarks to make about all this at the time that are well worth re-reading.

One of Billmon's readers suggests that this Dishonor Roll deserves to be archived; I agree, added to and made accessible on someone's sidebar. And before anyone accuses those of us who questioned this war from the beginning of cynically using US casualities to bolster our arguments, that's not the issue here. At issue is the readiness of so many supporters of the war to devalue the tragic nature of the loss being experienced by too many American families, and far too many Iraqis. Support for the war and the occupation is one thing; lying about its costs is quite another.

Liberal Strategy Needed. Don't count on any help from the so called "liberals" below.

Commentors responding to an earlier post featuring that celebrated bastion of right wing peasant ethic, The Nation.

Sorry, but I grew up amongst farmers, and they were to a man slack-jawed, right-wing, fundy christian gun nuts who hate the guvmint but cash the CRP checks.- Aaaargh

"To a man" - Wow. Got that all you rural farmer liberals out there...these are your so called allies on the "left" talking. Big help ain't they. Are you going to tell me next that all Jews are good with money or all Italians are in the mafia or.....
Heres another winner:

"I third Aargh's sentiments. I grew up in the Central Valley. A bigger group of racist motherfuckers sucking at Uncle Sam's teat,all the while bitching about welfare queens driving Cadillacs you couldn't hope to see. These were the pricks that put Reagan into office four fucking times during my life. Maybe there are some who aren't brain-dead slack-jawed yokels, but it's up to them to prove it to me - not the other way around." - dave

>>> Reagan: Yeah, well the proposition 13 crowd and the defense contractor community and big real estate business interests in Southern California aren't exactly rural enclaves. Unless your idea of a rural enclave is Long Beach. And thats a pretty big part of the crowd that elected people like Reagan.

The Central Valley of California is crawling with agribiz corporate farms and isn't representative of most small farms or farmers across this country. The big Central Valley farmers are the same farmers people like Woody Guthrie and Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers of America fought against and the same so called "farm" interest being fought against today from dozens of progressive farm activist goups across the country.

As for "proving" to you that all rural people and farmers are NOT right wing slack-jawed yokels....well, thats kind of what the Nation article is about. If you're to narrow minded to pay attention thats your problem...but you're wasting important allies in the rural parts of the country who are not right wingers and are ignored because people like you are too goddamned pig headed to listen up or help those of us out here trying to explain to people why the Republicans pandering to the big city business interests and big subsidized agribiz interests and corporations and big banks (located in big cities) are not in the best interests of average working rural peoples and communities.

And thats too bad because many rural counties went red only by narrow margins. If you're really interested in furthering the liberal cause with respect to farm policy and political affiliations you might try supporting other liberals who are living in conservative rural areas. Or at least recognizing that a whole lot of them aren't rednecks. Instead of painting all "farmers" and rural people as right wing nuts.

Heres another beauty from comments:

Aaarggh (?sp) has it right. I live among these people, and, while I understand the origins of their practices and preferences, they are profoundly incompatible with those (equally inevitable) of city dwellers. This basic and irreconcilable conflict has destroyed many nations in the past, mostly through efforts to paper it over. The present effort in the United States to impose a peasant ethic on an urban civilization is already disastrous and has nowhere to go but down. - Frank Wilhoit

This is one of those weird "these people" comments.
I'm not sure what this guy is jabbering about but he talks like hes a 19th century missionary living among the aboriginies or something. - "their practices"! - and "preferences"! As if "these people" were naked savages preparing to launch a bloody raid on the good folks at the fort. You want to find some rednecks Frank....take a drive through some of the wealthier suburbs of Columbus. You want to look at some liberals, take a ride through some of the hills and hollers of rural Athens county.

I'm not sure who tried to "paper over" what, (or even what that means) or why this guy thinks that some rural beast has launched some greater evil peasant revolt conspiracy to subdue the gentle city dweller or whatever boing-eyed homebrew he's stewed up about but he obviously lives in a loo-loo land of his own potent concoctions. Maybe Frank has some spooky secret documentation or photos of this impending "peasant ethic" takeover that he will share with us someday?

I'm not making the case that rural districts are not also composed of nutty right wing conservatives. They are. I'm trying to point out (and so is the Nation article) that not everyone who lives in rural America is a nutty right wing conservative. Including farmers.

Likewise - I'm not sure what is so profoundly imcompatible (as Frank says) about rural rednecks and city dwellers especially when you consider the Heritage Foundation (I don't suppose anyone thinks that people like Richard Mellon Scaife and Sam Walton and Bill Kristol live in cornfields?) and the American Enterprise Institute and Focus on the Family and the Free Congress Foundation and the National Review and the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times and Instapundit and the likes of high tech knuckledraggers from Little Green Screwballs and Liberty University and Coral Ridge Ministries and Steve Case and the Weekly Standard and the NY Post and Fox News and the Chalcedon Institute and that closet nazi from Free Republic.com.....on and on....seem to be perfectly compatable with most any redneck anywhere and they don't exactly own homes in Greast Bend PA. Do you think that the people who work for the institutions mentioned above and who drive the right wing message machine and who play the right wing Wurlitzer 24/7 live in the rural ruts of America? Do you think the editors of the National Review are farm boys? Who thinks Tom Delay or Trent Lott or Ken Starr or Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter or Karl Rove or Grover Norquist are country bumpkins? Those are the people driving the right wing message home to rural America. And they're city dwellers.

Well, for what its worth I think you'll find right wingers and racists pretty much anywhere you look these days. Try the fare on your local big city right wing talk radio call in show menu some time. And teat sucking corporate welfare mongers. No problem. That seems to be the Chicago School ideology chow being served up to all those economics students at backwater rural corndog gobbling schools like Harvard. Celebrated institution of provincial country livin that it is. But if you think that the average "farmer" milking 100 cows gets bales of subsidy boodle and corporate welfare checks then you don't have any idea what your talking about. Do you think the Chevron Corporation or Cargil is a "family farm"? All those city and suburban folks who work in suburban corporate parks and office buildings and so forth --- you know, the companies that threaten to lay everyone off and leave the city or state or country unless they receive big subsidized tax breaks and perks....you know those "high tech" companies - where the "liberal" city and suburban dwellers work. Well, if you work for one of those "farms" you've got a lot in common with the slack-jawed corporate welfare teat sucking motherfuckers in the Central Valley, in more ways than one.

As we are now almost daily instructed, things are going swimingly in Iraq, and pay no attention to that dead soldier behind the curtain. In fact, things are going so swimmingly that the Administration has apparently decided to declare the war over (again) and shut down what was starting to look like journalism over there: images of dead bodies, wounded lying in hospitals, that kind of thing. All that unpleasantness wasn't really "real", it was just the product of the media "filter," as Dear Leader has been informing the masses during interviews to select--one might say, filtered-- local media outlets. Nope, nothing disturbing to see here, might as well pack up and go home, or stay and cover school openings.

As if.

No doubt the Bushies feel that, on the basis of abundant past experience, the whore press will once again smile at this latest insult. But as they inevitably do, the Thug Right, drunk on its own arrogance, is stupidly overreaching. If history is any guide, they will have the press at their throats in short order. The reason is that the Bushies have forgotten the First Rule of Press Relations: Feed the Beast.

Mark Hertsgaard's unjustly forgotten critique, On Bended Knee, observed that the fundamental insight of the Reaganites was to avoid Nixon's mistake, which was to antaogonize the press. Instead the Reganites realized that they had what the 24/7 press in modern age most craves, namely footage, sound bites, and information. So instead of fighting them, like Nixon did, they plied them with stand-ups, sound bites and managed news. It didn't even matter particularly if the ultimate story was unflattering. The main thing was feeding the beast. Michael Deaver called it "manipulation by inundation."

Clinton in his first term nearly forgot this lesson, and it cost him dearly. Stung by petty press coverage, the Clinton White House retaliated by ending a longstanding perk of White House journalists that allowed them to hang out in the hallway, banishing them to the windowless basement press room; like Bush, he also began holding "town meetings" that eliminated the celebrity press from its jealously guarded role as interlocutor. The result was a frenzy of petulant, negative coverage that dwarfed the earlier, merely bad coverage. Only when the Clintonites restored their perks did semi-favorable press coverage (briefly) resume.

The Bushies seem about to repeat Nixon's and Clinton's missteps. True, Rove has successfully wielded access like a weapon against reporters in the past, but only against individual reporters. Unwilling to hang together, journalists have until now allowed themselves to hang separately. This latest clampdown, circumventing the prestige press as a whole and attempting to cut off its very life blood--which is, largely, bloody images-- is qualitatively different from anything they have tried so far, and one that historically has boomeranged on every Administration that's tried it. If they persist, the Bushies are going to experience a world of hurt.

I say, bring it on. Pass the popcorn.

From one of aWol's winger judicial nominees:

"You have described the year 1937 - the year in which President Roosevelt's New Deal legislation started taking effect - as 'the triumph of our socialist revolution,'" [Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill] said. "Given that the federal government and its role in our lives is your major responsibility if you're appointed to the D.C. circuit court, I hope you can understand why some people have taken great issue with statements you have made and the philosophy which you bring before this committee."

[Federal appellate nominee Janice Rogers Brown] said she was speaking to an audience of young law students and was trying to make them think. But she stood by the statements. "The speech speaks for itself," she said.

Do yourself a favor and fork over $2.95 for the November 3, 2003 issue of the Nation. Then read Barbara Kingsolver's article titled A Good Farmer. Because you won't regret it. And because its not posted online. At least not yet. Also read, in the same issue, John Nichols excellent article Needed: A Rural Strategy (posted online). Just buy the goddamed thing and read it because I suspect that it won't be long before many on the the so-called liberal left go back to characterizing "farmers" and "rural" folk as slackjawed goobers and corporate welfare sucking banjo playin' Jesus shoutin' hayseed parasite hicks. It doesn't matter that most of the Jesus shoutin' parasitic corporate welfare sucking culture war Christian Hick Nation hoo-doo originates from the basements of urban right wing elitist think tanks and multimillion dollar televangelist fun houses and corpoate office parks in expensive Virginia suburbs. (and other hotbeds of theo-corporatist fascism) From people who wouldn't know a real farmer or a real yokel if one dropped a fucking barn full of shit on their heads.

The sanctimonious self-important slackjawed company store courtesans at CNN and MSNBC and FoxNoise are of course more than willing to wallow in whatever shit is dropped on them as long as the price is right and their hair isn't mussed up. Character doesn't really matter to these people....its all about characterization - and The Cult of Personality.

People like Paul Wellstone and Woody Guthrie knew it, but of course they're both dead.

I did happen to catch a President Make Believe moment, speaking in Indonesia, babbling about the wonders of diversity and virtues of a pluralistic society. (Don't know if anyone else has blogged on this because I haven't had a chance to look)

But - Uhm...So whats the double talkin' hypocrisy deal this time? I thought diversity and pluralism was one of liberalisms great cultural demons gnawing at the fabric of our fabulous Christian Nation? At least thats the windy drift we were fed for years from from right wing culture warrior think tank bedwetters and the smug and self delighted Joe Scarborough and shrews like David Horowitz and Pat Buchannan and Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter and Rush Loodbaugh and on and on...and almost every fat preening overfed TV-Evangelist puffball that slides down the slop-shoot of cable TVnews-noise and right wing squawk radio.

Then again, he ain't called President Make Believe for nothin'.

An appeal to cultural conservatives / arguments for the institution of mantreemony.

Chastity and Purity and a Short History of Johhny Appleseed
Naturally one wouldn't want to be having actual sexual relations with an apple tree. Occasional hugging of course, but carnal funny business- NO. Sex is degrading and clammy and sweaty and mostly the fevered obsession of preening overfed fundamentalist Evangelical jackdaws and drunken rutting Catholics. Otherwise most people don't give it much thought one way or another. And certainly there is nothing particularly clammy or sweaty or degrading about an apple tree. This isn't about sex anyway. This is about civil union or marriage or apple husbandtree or whatever the hell you want to call it. Likewise, sex and marriage are two entirely different matters as anyone who has ever participated in either ritual understands. Plus, having sex with a tree is ridiculous. Its a fucking tree for christ sake. And besides, my apple tree has only one small hole in the trunk and god only knows whats living in it. Could be the great possum is living in there, or a nest of squirrels, even a downy woodpecker, and if I were to.....well you know, I shudder to think of it.

Also. Apple trees only get pregnant when Johnny Chapman Appleseed frolics about in the countryside each May blowing magic kisses into the wind while waving his magic pollination wand around and calling upon his children to be fruitful and multiply. Which sounds kind of like what I imagine a Log Cabin Republican voter registration drive might be like. In any case, Johnny Appleseed is not a Log Cabin Republican. First of all, he's married to Idhunn, keeper of the apples of perpetual youth and daughter of Svald the Scandinavian dwarf. Secondly, unlike Johnny Appleseed, Log Cabin Republicans don't actually live in log cabins. They live in tax shelters in Florida and beach houses on Fire Island. Which is why there aren't any apple trees on Fire Island. At least I don't think there are. Maybe there are. If there are it was almost certainly a youthful first time voter indescretion on the part of young Johnny. But, more likely, an apple seed popped out of the Big Apple and floated right up past Breezy Point and past Jones Beach and landed at Fire Island. Just like when Andrew Sullivan floated into Cape Cod Bay aboard the Mayflower and discovered Provincetown.

And besides that... if Johnny Appleseed were a Log Cabin Republican then you'd have wispy Pink Pampass Grass sprouting up everywhere from Appalachia to Applerouth Lane to Apple Valley California. Johnny Appleseed would be called Johnny Pampass Grass and New York City would be called the Big Johnny and you'd be bobbing for Pink Pampass Grass on Halloween and drinking Pink Pampass Grass juice for breakfast. Imagine Rush Limbaugh holed up in a tax shelter in Florida chasing back fistfuls of Seconal with a shot of fresh squeezed Pampass Grass juice each morning. Never happen.

Historical note: There are no apple trees in Florida because Idhunn, being of Scandinavian rootstock, refuses to travel in hot weather.

Yeah yeah....I know, its all stupid bullshit. But I'm busy and haven't had time to keep up with the news.

Read the whole thing in The New Yorker (No, I don't miss Tina a bit).

No nukes, lying exiles, neo-cons hearing what they want to hear, Cheney's closed mind, OBL taking a backseat to the Iraqi obsession ...

But here's one very interesting tidbit. Of the forged yellowcake papers from the Italian services that gave rise to the 16 words fiasco:

Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. “Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false—until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed.”

The documents were just what Administration hawks had been waiting for.

Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community.

[A former senior C.I.A. officer] had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the SISMI[Italian] intelligence.

The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”

Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush ...

Funny how the retired operatives assumed that (a) there was any intelligence analysis going on at all on the road to war, and (b) that anyone from the Bush regime is capable of appearing or even experiencing a sense of shame or embarassment.

Excellent review in The New York Review of Books (via The Horse) but The Daily Howler gives the usual incomparable perspective.

Our story thus far for those outside of Philly:

The mayoral election is very tight, with a (black) Democrat incumbent, Street, running against a (white) Republican, Katz. Last week, an FBI bug was discovered in Street's mayoral offices, and the FBI carted away papers from various municipal offices. Street says (and no one has contradicted this) that he is a "subject" of the investigation, not a "target"—i.e., he is not threatened with indictment. Meanwhile, Katz actually is being sued by a former business partner for shady business practices, but this story never seems to make the front pages.

Now Street may not be the greatest mayor. But there are some of us who find the timing just a little odd... And some of us ask whether, given that the Mayor's office is regularly swept for bugs, whether the bug was meant to be discovered when it was, just before the election...

Anyhow, the letters have begun to appear, with "silly" apparently being the new winger meme for the idea that, well, the Republicans might just be playing for keeps (i.e, for a one-party state). Here's the argument I like the most for why Democrats should support Katz even though he's a Republican:

If anything, a Republican mayor may bolster the Democratic organization. The desire to unseat a GOP mayor may make Democrats more motivated, thus increasing Democratic turnout in other elections.

Right. Kind of like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer, because when you stop, it feels so good.

Anyhow, after a billion dollars worth of winger funding led to the slow-moving, media-fuelled attempted coup against Clinton, after Florida 2000, after Texas, and after California, maybe there's good reason for Democrats to think that the Republicans might, just might, be taking an interest in a mayoral election in the largest city in Pennsylvania, a swing state.... A state where Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum is the kind of Pennsylvanian Republican who's really pretty middle of the road, if you're not from Philly or Pittsburgh...

My view: As usual, the Republicans are playing for keeps. Having taken over the parking authority, the convention center, and the public schools, they now want the whole thing. And why wouldn't they? (Every time they ram another parking garage into historic center city, it's not only more pollution for us and a degraded streetscape, it's money for their patronage operation. We have a winner!)

And suppose that Street is guilt of graft and corruption, which nobody is claiming he is. Given the crony capitalism under the Republican yoke in DC—Say, is Ken Lay in jail yet? Just asking—makes any mayor look like a piker. In fact, given the fraud and theft on the grandest possible scale under Bush, a little "honest graft" (as Boss Tweed put it) would a positive return to progressive values.

So, as usual in politics, things come down to a choice of lesser evils: And given that electing Katz could hand a swing state to Bush, I'm voting for Street.

What flaccid prose Brooks writes, to be sure:

Democrats have nominated presidential candidates who try to figure out Middle American values by reading the polls, instead of feeling them in their gut. If they do it again, the long, slow slide will continue.

I love it when conservatives try to "help" the Democrats. It's cute, and it doesn't do any harm, as long as we put whatever they say out of our minds as soon as we've finished reading it.

Here:

"My references to Judeo-Christian roots in America or our nation as a Christian nation are historically undeniable," Boykin's statement said.

Dan Milbak of WaPo writes:

Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of U.S. soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped caskets.

To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases.

Lovely...

For a long time, people have treated deaths as the proxy for the intensity of the war, not the number of wounded, and this is howIraq has been covered.

However, our troops now have new body armor; great stuff, but only covers the torso. The good news is that deaths are lower than they would have been in past wars; the bad news is that wounds are a lot worse, since a round that once would have killed and taken of an arm now just takes off the arm; and the better marksmen don't aim for the torso any more. This is the reason for the photos and stories about amputations, which the regime has not yet figured out how or whether to suppress.

And we put our troops into this based on lies.

UPDATE: Alert reader MJS suggests:

Can we have an Internet Day of Mourning for the deaths and injuries visited upon our soldiers and upon the people of Iraq? Complete with "illegal" images?

Good idea!

Mantreemony Protection Week PART II.
Nine talking points arguing the merits of treehugging and the benefits of mantreemony.
Previously: I Married a McIntosh" / PART I - point 1

PART II points 2 and 3

2- Fortitude, Resignation, Patience:
My feathered maiden is sound of limb and strong of trunk. A good apple tree can stand in a pasture wearing only what mother nature gave her, for months at a time, enduring the worst of winter's raw ungodly bark biting persecutions. Even if its five degrees outside for twenty one days in a row. You try that some time tough guy. But even so, little Vista Bella will be no worse for the wear and look especially fresh and beautiful the following spring when prospects for pollination hangs thick in the dells. All flush with the rosy pink blush of new floretes basking in the warm afternoon sun. Hello my little Duchess, what a lovely day for a picnic!

3- Contemplative, Benevolent, Practical:
Simply put, without an apple tree there is no apple pie for the picnic. A 100% all American apple pie. Just like apple trees have been providing for centuries. With names like Granny Smith, Maypole, Honeycrisp, Fortune, Enterprise, Liberty, Freedom, Discovery, Rome Beauty, Northern Spy, McIntosh, Jupiter and Mollies Delicious. Hows that for some heritage and tradition? Hmm?

To put it plain spokenlike, you can even eat your own offspring! You can even let wild animals eat your own offspring if you like. Uh, talking apples here by the way, so lets not get too jumpy. Anyway, try feeding little Billy or Sally Sue to wild animals. You can't do it. Well, you can, but its illegal and the screaming is something awful, enough to drive you right over the edge. And don't try to tell me that a baked apple pie or fresh homemade applesauce or drinking apple cider is a form of genocide or infanticide. Its not. Its applecide. In absolute black and white terms there is the good cide and the bad cide and the term apple cider derives its meaning from the good cide. Its not the same thing as those other bad cides, so please, lets keep this all in persepctive. I don't want some babbling half cooked meatball from the Apple Defense League shooting holes through my kitchen window one morning while I'm buttering a fresh baked apple muffin or trying to explain to the lady from child protective services how little Billy managed to get himself attacked by owls.

Furthermore, without apple pies there are no bake sales and no apple pie a la mode. There are only incestuous ice cream social fundraiser events. Which will lead to the love of pleasure, and perverted unnatural relationships such as French Vanilla Cough Syrup Swirl parfaits and sundaes topped with chunks of hotdog and yellow rice sprinkles. Lactose intolerance, gluttony, and confusion brought on by a myriad of lesser flavors all competing for vain glorious polytheistic ice cream supremacy which will turn our nation into a pluralistic parlor of debauched ice cream blasphemies and false idols. Like some kind of horrible Hieronymus Bosch meets Baskin Robbins nightmare. The traditional family unit will be reduced to an orgy of depraved ice cream saturnalia and virtue will melt away faster than an Eskimo Pie in hell.

Its important for conservatives to remember that the union of man and tree reinforces the traditional American family institutions of charity bake sales and picnics and pie a la mode. Thereby strenghtening the character of our nation and people as a whole. Afterall, its the apple pie that provides the foundation for the a la mode. Otherwise, all is lasciviousness and frozen deceit. Or even worse, Texas yellowcake a la mode - topped with whipped angry white froth, wing-nuts and hot thirty weight motor oil. Who wants that kind of crap in their picnic basket. I ask ya.

Tomorrow: Part III

Top Business News from The New York Times

- Citigroup Posts 20% Increase in Third-Quarter Earnings
- U.S. Posts Record $374.22 Billion Budget Gap

The juxtaposition - theirs, not mine - has some of the force of haiku.

Reflecting its vast size, Citigroup earned more than any company in the world last year, generating $15.3 billion of net income. It has earned more than $4 billion in each of the last three quarters.

Hmm...so even this giant among giants earned in three months what we the people are spending per month on our occupation of Iraq, minus reconstruction costs. They'd have had to borrow to meet that expense. Oh, that's right, so do we, the people, have to borrow that money. And we're able to, because of the power of government to tax. Because institutions that can loan that kind of money, or buy whatever paper IOUs plus interest our government issues know that the US of A will raise taxes before it defaults on interest payments.

Ever wonder who gets those interest payments on our debt? I've checked among my fairly wide circle of friends, not a one of them, as far as they know. Sorry, I don't have the answer, but I'd sure like to know, cue informed readers.

"It is very clear their earnings model is working," said Robert Albertson, chief strategist at Sandler O'Neill & Partners, a New York investment bank. "The only question is about the loan-loss provision."

Most analysts were not expecting that Citigroup's provision for bad loans would decline as sharply as it reported today.

But Citigroup and other big banking companies were under intense pressure from regulators to increase loan-loss reserves a year ago, Mr. Albertson said. That pressure has decreased over the last 12 months.

"It was a big mess a year ago," Mr. Albertson said. "Now we have cleaned up the mess, and this is a normal number. Time after time at the end of a cycle, the banks always over-reserve at the end."

"Given how big they are and that they reflect a pretty good microcosm of corporate and consumer financial conditions, it was good news" that Citigroup sharply cut its loan loss provision, said Guy Moszkowski, an analyst at Merrill Lynch. "But beyond that, the revenue trends from last quarter, which were basically flat, were not spectacular."

Comments by informed readers as to the implications of the above are welcomed and will be shared with other readers.

I'm not suggesting any of us should begrudge Citigroup any good news. And Mr. Moszkowski, despite his hesitation to pronounce revenue trends to be "spectacular," has listed Citigroup stock as "buy." Yes, the economy is recovering, the business cycle is reasserting it's up phase, but all is not right with the world.

When Max "speaks" I do tend to listen and I think he's right about the folly of liberals becoming orthodox deficit hawks. And the current announced deficit, though a record-setter, is less than the administration's own prediction. The real issue is what we're buying with all that borrowing? Nor does it help that the administration flat out lies about how much of the deficit is the result of tax cuts, and how easily that deficit can be managed in the future, not to mention the not so hidden agenda of starving the Federal government to undermine it's ability to do what the vast majority of Americans have made clear, again and again, they want their government to do, that is, to maintain the physical and social infrastructure that undergirds the very notion of the American dream.

Administration officials warned the deficit, which they blame on sluggish government revenues and rising expenses related to the war on terrorism, may be even larger in the current 2004 budget year, which began Oct. 1.

``Although the deficit is still projected to increase in 2004, and will likely exceed $500 billion even with a strengthening economy, we can put the deficit on a responsible downward path if we continue pro-growth economic policies and exercise responsible spending restraint,'' said Joshua Bolten, who heads the White House's Office of Management and Budget, in a statement issued with the budget figures.

Treasury Secretary John Snow said a rebounding economy should help the budget going forward. ``As the economy grows, government revenues will go up, which will help keep the deficit under control,'' he said in a statement.

Under their control, that is. Remember, according to the President, when the Federal government posts a surplus, it's been overcharging someone. Apparently, it doesn't work in reverse.

Daily attacks on the troops in Iraq: 22.

Babs sticks up for her boy.

First Laura and Chirac, now "American's favorite grandmother" (yeah, right). aWol's hiding behind his women awfully early, isn't he?


Meanwhile, aWol's Dad chimed in, accusing Democratic contenders of using "vicious rhetoric." If you can't stand the heat, Mr. Horton ....

From Stars and Stripes:

Spc. Joshua Breig of the 203rd Enginineer Battalion goes headfirst into the pool at Freedom Rest, a rest and recuperation hotel opened Saturday by the 1st Armored Division Task Force for its soldiers. The facility was once an officers club for Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard.

Man, if I were an Iraqi sweltering with no AC... All I can say is that I'd wish I had a pool too ...

Taking over one of Saddam's officers club for ourselves... Is there any wonder some Iraqis might think of us as an occupying power?

So the whistleblower college student who cracked the airline security system with box cutters, and then told the feds about it faces felony charges.

Meanwhile, the leaker in The Plame Affair—also a potential felon—who certainly did actual damage to our national security... Well, haven't heard too much about that... Though I'm sure Ashcroft and his career prosecutors are making great progres...

National Mantreemony Protection Week

Today, Oct. 20, kicks of the second anniversary of President Pontius Skybox Pilot's National Character Counts Week October 20 through October 26. Originally decreed in the year of our Lord 2002. Which follows hot upon the high heels of this years "Marriage Protection Week" (translate: National Don't Marry One Of Those Week) which is officially ended but not really over by any hyperventilated stretch of the pop-eyed partisan right wing fundamentalist Christian imagination.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, the farmer, blogger and resident of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim October 20 thru 26, 2003, as National Mantreemony Protection Week to coincide with the annniversary of National Character Counts Week. Each go branch in hand.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twentieth day of October, in the year of the Great Possum two thousand three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twenty-eighth. ~ the farmer

I am a serious treehugger and I'm gettin' hitched.
I have decided to marry, during a quiet private ceremony at my own home, the lovely little apple tree in my backyard. Because I love the apple tree in my backyard and because I think its the most beautiful apple tree in any backyard anywhere in the entire world of apple trees and backyards. Its the apple tree of my wandering spiritual eye. Oh sure, a few bad spots and an occasional late spring hoar frost that kills some blossoms every so often, if ya know what I mean, but thats all part of the growing old and gad-awful-ugly together thing. Whatever. Any way you look at it I still get all woody just thinking of her standing out there in the meadow, among the bluebirds and bees, overflowing with crisp Golden Delicious goodness and blushing like a Yellow Bellflower June bride.

I'm also hoping that strict family values conservative specimens, especially men-folk of the Christian conservative nomenclature, will strongly back me in my efforts to legally wed my little pippin, thereby allowing each of us to enjoy all the legal rights and benefits such a union provides. Thus providing a stable foundation from which to begin putting down the first rootstocks in our very own family orchard.

Therefore, I have provided a breakdown of nine good reasons why I think such legal civil unions should be easily acceptable to those conservatives who would argue otherwise. Rather, I propose that such man on tree arrangements are well within the bounds of traditional family values and imposing biblical decrees, canons, curfews, and other such hallowed squalls.

And hey, lets face it... if George W Bush were to dress up like Davy Crockett, stuff his basket with Cornish Gillyflowers and strut around the public square in Apple Springs Texas pretending he's Sir Edward Victor Appleton the Nobel physicist who discovered the F layer of the ionosphere, he'd be pronounced a seraph of the first order of angels by Joel Mowbray and a cinch for re-election to six more consecutive terms! So I don't think my humble proposal is all that weird or too far out on a limb.

Yup, character matters - and apple trees are dripping with ripe heavenly character. Therefore, I offer the following case on behalf of the sacred institution of mantreemony (pronounced: man - tree - mony), treehuggers everywhere, and as an appeal to those who cherish traditional family values. For better or worse.

1- Faithful, Humble, Industrious:
Apple trees are exemplars of fidelity and gentle domestication, an asset to any family garden and they love working in the kitchen. Your apple tree will never talk back or walk out on you. Apple trees won't just up and leave if they become upset with you. An apple tree won't run off with some stunted little shrub or cockspur thorn while you're off digging for grubs at the base of the rotten money tree. When you wake up each morning your apple tree is right there where it should be, all covered with fresh morning dew and blossom wilt. Right where you left her the night before. Good morning my little Collet you will burble each morning for better or worse - you made a lovely apple-betty last night.

Tomorrow - point 2 / Fortitude, Resignation, Patience...

Mike Allen and Glenn Kessler of WaPo here:

BANGKOK -- President Bush said yesterday that he is willing to commit to a written guarantee not to attack North Korea in exchange for steps by the country toward abandoning its nuclear weapons programs.

"We will not have a treaty," Bush said during a photo session with Thailand's prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. "That's off the table."

Hmm.... "written guarantee" but "no treaty"... Maybe Bush thinks he couldn't get a treaty through the Senate? Who knows?

Meanwhile, why on earth would anyone believe Bush about anything? First thing the administration does when it gets into office is tear up every treaty they can think of. Then they lie their way into a war. Actions have reactions...

Here.

I never grasped the connection between aWol pissing away the Clinton surplus and our energy policy before ... No wonder Cheney kept those task force records secret! He didn't want to give away the undisclosed location of the tubes....

WaPo's Dana Priest writes:

Officials Correct Bush on Indonesia
President Bush misspoke when he said last week that the United States was ready to "go forward with" a new package of military training programs with Indonesia, according to a White House official questioned about the president's remarks.

Asked to explain Bush's remarks, a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: "We want to move ahead with increased military-to-military cooperation with Indonesia, which is in both of our interests.

"Progress in building a broader military-to-military relationship with Indonesia," he said, however, "will be pinned on continued cooperation from Indonesia on the investigation into the murders of two Americans" near the town of Timika, in Papua. "The investigation is moving forward due to the improved cooperation by the Indonesia government."

Oops! A leak! Wasn't it just yesterday that Bush said he didn't want any leaks?

Could be be... it's because they have a single payer system that can exert market power over big pharma?

So why are we tinkering around the edges and arguhing about importing drugs? Why not just fix the problem?

Nice column and metaphor by WaPo's William Raspberry, recently woken from slumber.

Daschle:

"All we want is to be in the room when the decisions are made."

Oh? You don't actually want to make the decisions? What a farce!

Google ("Plame"):

(http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&q=Plame&btnG=Search+News).

And again Google ("Joseph Wilson"):

(http://news.google.com/news?num=100&hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&newwindow=1&edition=us&q=%22Joseph+Wilson%22)

AP:

The search for "Elvis" - the troops' nickname for Saddam ... goes on ...

Says it all, doesn't it?

And way to manage that morale, Rummy!

... the wingers always use anecdotes, and the liberals use statistics and cite sources?

Over the weekend, I've read Krugman, Hightower, and Ivins... Wow... Go thou and do likewise.

Howie the Whore with the air of innocent bewilderment that becomes him so well:

Mainstream journalism, with its traditional parameters, has somehow failed to connect with the notion that there are lots of Americans who walk around sputtering about Dubya -- despite fairly healthy approval ratings for a third-year incumbent. The press was filled with stories about Clinton-haters, but Bush-hating is either more restrained or more out of control, depending on who's keeping score. ...

I love it... "Somehow failed to connect"...

... why couldn't God have come up with a better way of doing it than the Florida 2000 debacle?

... does that mean that she has put the hypocrites and Pharisees in charge?

(“Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 6: 1 – 18)

... does that mean that She has abolished the Ninth Commandment?

("Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour")

... then why hasn't She smitten Saddam in the most visible way?

... can't he just ask Her to reveal the identity of the Plame leaker to him?

No matter how much I try to imagine how ridiculous things are getting under the Bush regime, it's just never enough!

Here's more lunacy from Army Lt. Gen. William G. "Could it be—Satan?" Boykin:

Dressed in his Army uniform, Boykin told an Oregon religious group in June that radical Islamists hate the U.S. "because we're a Christian nation and the enemy is a guy named Satan." ... The United States' "spiritual enemy," Boykin told the Oregon group, "will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus."

Gosh, I wonder if these remarks are getting any play in the Islamic world? And, if so, will more troops die as a result? Probably....

Speaking of spiritual enemies.... Is greed a sin, and is Kenny Boy Lay still on the street? Just asking...

Way back in The Newspaper of Record—Not!:

Mr. Gonzales said White House officials "have already forwarded on a rolling basis thousands of pages of documents" to the Justice Department in response to investigators' request for relevant records on Mr. Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame.

On a "rolling basis"? What does that mean?

We're waiting for the thunderous editorials from Pravda and Isvestia on bringing the felon in The Plame Affair to justice... Just to tie up the loose ends... Not that it's important, like a blowjob or a ten-year-old failed land deal...

From a caption on the front page of The Times:

The Last Emperor
From defectors and former aides, a portrait of ________ is emerging of family dysfunction, palace intrigue and imperial menace.

...

...

...

No, silly! It's Kim Il Sung!

That Cubbies "fan" who tried to grab the ball...

... and blew it for the Cubs team, 40,000 people in the stands, the city of Chicago, and Cubs fans everywhere—

Is Ken Lay grabbing his millions at the expense of his employees, his stockholders, and the pensions of thousands....

Is Halliburton grabbing its million, at the expense of the taxpayer...

Is Bush grabbing Iraq for the PNAC and his re-election, at the expense of the lives of the troops and the taxpayers....

Yep, it's a smash and grab economy—force and fraud.

Holycrat Tines

Down from the mountain they came
like a thundering biblical rain
The message was clear
no skeptics round here
they're dangerous sinful and vain

They took to the road like a hack
all political moonshine and quack
Spouting their views
on redemtion and news
for conjecture, none did they lack

In God were the answers we sought
for Jesus our forefathers fought
Not the secular lies
of Enlightenment guys
but the dogma of reformed Christian thought

From the mountains and valleys and rills
they come bellowing Scriptural trills
And parade their wares 'round
the publicity ground
of TV and squawk-radio mills

Like Moses, Levi and Divine
Old Testament law they do mine
As answers for this
and answers for that
perish else to the waves with the swine

And low and behold not a blink
pampered press nor public did think
About what was at stake
should a theocrat rake
emerge as our number one shrink

So now we have holycrat tines
who govern our morals with rhymes
Clipped from a book
whose authors mistook
bad weather for fabulous signs

If you care for your feedom and rights
beware of the theocrat's spites
Whose fears light his Way
commands, Thou shall obey!
All kneel - or bow for the smite

From the Dear Abby column in WaPo yesterday:

I was recently hired at a company that seems to be way out of my league. When I walked in, I saw young, beautiful, thin, well-bred, middle-class folks everywhere. I am none of those things. (Well, I am young.) How does a person from one class work with another class without being noticed?

Feels Like a Fraud in Florida

Funny... I thought this America was supposed to be a class-less society? Not any more, I guess. Not with the increasing gap between CEOs and ordinary people... Not with the children of the powerful getting powerful jobs themselves...

From Wapo's front page on that same day:

The record receipts -- more than triple the top Democrat's fundraising for the quarter -- were driven in large part by just 285 men and women, who collected $38.5 million or more, which was at least 45 percent of Bush's total take.

Gee, I wonder what class those 285 people are from? And whether their "votes" count more than "Feels Like a Fraud in Florida"s?

What's tragic is that "Feels Like a Fraud in Florida" blames herself. As Frank Herbert wrote: "Good subjects must feel guilty. The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace. " Just what the administration is doing.

Of course, those 285 people know all about fraud, what it means, how to do it, and all about fraud in Florida too ...

From "our" Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin:

"Why is this man [Bush] in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.”

And get this... This loon is in charge of the hunt for OBL. Maybe that's why it's going so well?

Well, potential ones, anyhow. Not the felon in The Plame Affair, though—The Gaseous One! Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung here:

The Armed Forces Network intends to keep the controversial radio commentator Rush Limbaugh on the air as long as listeners want to hear him, despite his admission that he abused prescription drugs and reports that he is under investigation for obtaining them illegally.

That's the stuff to give the troops!

AP has a list.

Wonder how many of them are big contributors to the Republicans?

Say, is "Kenny Boy" Lay still on the street? Just asking...

Tapped on The Plame Affair:

Funny thing: Pravda and Isvestia aren't writing any editorials on it. Guess revealing the name of an undercover operative isn't in the same league as a ten-year-old failed land deal or a blow job....

Another "Get out of jail free" card for aWol from the MWs.

The ever-excellent Orcinus has more. Among other things, he points out that the White House has refused to rule out using Exective Privilege—a direct signal of possible involvement by Bush.

Yep, a whole "evenhanded" screed on The Clenis™ versus Yawnold (thanks, Leah).

Why can't these people get it through their skulls that Bill Clinton's thing with Monica was consensual and Der Groper groping 15 women was not?

Rep. George "What's a couple of dead soldiers a day?" Nethercutt is, of course, a chickenhawk. From his online bio:

Nethercutt was born in Spokane on October 7, 1944. A graduate of North Central High School, he earned a B.A. in English from Washington State University in 1967. In 1971, he graduated from Gonzaga University School of Law, and was admitted to the Washington State Bar Association in March 1972.

Guess he had "other priorities" during Vietnam.

Look! Up in the sky! It's a condor! It's a spotted owl! No, it's the Bushmaster!

Apparently all improvements in the environment over the last 30 years are properly credited to Bush's underappreciated environmental policies, according to Gregg Easterbrook. And those Herculean labors entitle the Bushmaster to slack off more or less continually in the present, time travel being so exhausting and all. (Don't talk to the Bushmaster about jet lag!) Who knew?

Meanwhile if the whiners in the environmental movement would just recognize what a friend they have in the Bushmaster, he might do more for them. Instead, they just hurt his feelings. Bad enviros. Bad, bad! If the Bushmaster doesn't feel like helping us any more, it's their fault.

And if enviros can't make up other people's minds to want mileage limits on SUVs, they can't complain if the Bushmaster's friends reluctantly drill on public lands as a result. It's a simple matter of logical consistency.

Interestingly, Easterbrook was making pretty much the same arguments in 1995, yet, curiously without crediting the Bushmaster. See "Rush Limbaugh with Book Learning". Probably figured no one would believe him.

Thank goodness now the truth can be told.

Just because Shrub appears to have caught a bounce in his overall approval rating in that CNN/USAToday/Gallup poll?

Reader Hobson is, a bit, but then he is self-described as a default pessimist. Hobson brings the poll to our attention as discussed, rather briefly in the Chicago Tribune. Fifty-six % is surely a healthy bounce. But what does it really mean?

Well, for one thing, it means that his descent in the polls is over, for now. It also means that CNN and MSNBC, those bastions of the SCLM, can crow with relief that they won't have to change the basic narrative they've already worked out for the coming election. Both cable outlets trumpeted the plus 50 % who thought the president deserved a second term, without pointing out what even the Tribune manages to:

In the survey, 53 percent of respondents said the president deserves a second term, 45 percent said he does not. Thirty-eight percent said they would definitely vote for Bush, 38 percent said they would definitely vote against him and 24 percent said they were unsure.

Might it also mean that the glamor of Yawnold has burnished all things Republican?

Or could it mean that the self-described PR offensive by the administration to convince Americans that they can't trust a free media unconstrained by government to tell them the truth about Iraq is already paying off?

Billmon gives us a glass half full, and a glass half empty;an interesting theory about what might be behind those overall approval numbers, and a reminder of some chinks in the Bush armor that are show up even in a positive poll like this one, paired with this caution:

It's also possible, however, that Bush truly is covered with a coat of Gipper-brand telfon. The emotional bond that many Americans (especially those of little brain) formed with Shrub in the aftermath of 9/11 may very well be unbreakable -- and impervious to fact or reason.

If the latter is true, Shrub's reelection would seem to be inevitable -- an incumbent that goes into a campaign with the rock-hard support of something like 50% of the electorate is pretty much home free.

I find Billmon's other theory more compelling, but then I'm a default optimist.

One undeniable aspect of the public's view of its current president, the majority of Americans want to believe that this president is an honorable man, straight-foward and honest. I know that is infuriating, but there it is. If we're going to win the next election, there's very little value to be had in railing against the stupidity of our fellow Americans. At least some of those same Americans who want to believe in the decency of George W. Bush are the same Americans we're going to have to convince that Bush is leading America in the wrong direction. That may well be the challenge, and one thing we can be certain of, it won't be met by calling those we seek to convince "stupid."

For another fascinating take on that Gallup poll, check out Digby's comments on this discussion at Ray Teixeira's excellent site

In praise of satire, sarcasm and battle royal:

There are three things that are real: God, human folly, and laughter. The first two are beyond comprehension. So we must do what we can with the third. -John F. Kennedy

So let me say just a few things to this Convention. We are a big, brawling political Party, and we fight. Somebody said that when Democrats assemble a firing squad, they always gather in a circle.

But when we get together, watch out, and tonight we are together, and I am up here to see that in this critical next 100 days this Party stays together, and that it deliver a beating to those Republicans that they richly deserve, and we are going to give it to them.

[...]

And so, my friends, tonight I say to you one final thing, America is a good country and we are a good people. Our country isn't working very well. We have lost our confidence and we lost our way, and with the help of the Independents and the sensible Republicans that go with us when we are right, we are going to win a victory in November. We are going to turn this country around and we are going to make America work again.

This good country is going to work again, and thank you very much.

Address of the Honorable Morris K. Udall.
Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention, 1976.

***

Of course, there are those Scrooges who think that humor and the serious business of politics should never be mixed. One adviser of President James Garfield warned him, "Never make the people laugh. If you would succeed in life you must be solemn, solemn as an ass." Solemn as an ass he was--and somebody shot him 3 months into his term. It is true, however, that the business of Government is serious business, and in politics, as in any other endeavor, wisecracks are no substitute for substance. But, used adroitly, wit is something more than oratorical ornament; rather, it is a gentle pry bar with which to open the minds of your constituents and colleagues. If your speeches have a humorous slant it is less likely that their substance will be rejected out of hand. - Morris K. Udall.

File your repartee trigger.

Dohiyi Mir photo-op!
NTodd is sponsoring a write that photo caption contest.
Help define a Rumsfeldian moment and win a valuable prize!
Now in progress.

How cheerfully he seems to grin
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

That would be my submission for the caption. But since its not really mine, and is really that Lewis Carroll guys, it might not count. But if it did count, well, then, that would be it.
Deadline for submissions:
midnight Tuesday, Oct 13 ...oops... 14 that is - Tuesday, October 14.

Taking the debasement of "fair and balanced" even lower, Illinois Senate Republican candidate Chirinjeev Kathuria has responded to an unflattering article in the Chicago Tribune by filing a lawsuit for defamation against the paper. The press release from the campaign does not dispute any factual errors in the story (though it airily promises an imminent rebuttal), but rather suggests a novel legal theory of defamation: failure of the Tribune to provide "fair and balanced" commentary:

This type of irresponsible trash reporting will never stop, unless someone takes a stand against it. I will carry this fight to save my reputation on behalf of all the people of Illinois and make politics a level playing field for all candidates. May this type of character assassination and negative and biased reporting never occur again.

The article in question points out, inter alia, that candidate Kathuria rarely voted, coasted through the Ivy League, embellished his credentials, and left a highly touted string of business ventures deeply in debt while personally enriching himself. Republicans as powerful as Grover Norquist touted his prospects.

One can understand Kathuria's frustration: after all, the same bullshit story worked for the squatter in the White House.

Meanwhile, the right-wing demonstrates its abhorrence of defamatory character assassination and smear jobs here.

(Via Archpundit.)

There ought to be hazard pay for any columnist who's willing to try, but Bill McCllelan of the SL Post Dispatch succeeds with such perfect pitch in creating an on-air Rush reaction if Bill Clinton had made, in the exact same words, the admission that Rush did last week that even though you've probably read it over at Eschaton, where I also got the link, read it again, it's that good.

"It's interesting to see the way the liberal media are playing this. I'm looking at a copy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Saturday, October 11th, edition - the day after the big announcement. Well, the story is on Page 2, and right next to his photograph, in large boldface print, is the following quote: 'I take full responsibility for this problem.'

"That's interesting, folks, because if you look at his actual statement - not what the liberal media say he said, but what he really said - you get a different take on it. First, he says he's got back problems. So he's blaming it on that. Then he says he had surgery, but the surgery wasn't successful. So he's blaming it on the doctors. Then he says the pain medication was addictive. So he's blaming it on the pharmaceutical companies. Folks, he blames it on everybody but himself! But as long as he puts in that obligatory line about taking responsibility, that's what the liberal media are going to grab: Clinton takes full responsibility!

It gets even better. You can email Mr. McClellan to thank him for his superb act of imaginative compassion: bmcclellan@post-dispatch.com; you can also do what I'm doing, bookmark his column for future regular reading.

You can do one other good deed.

Here's how Howard Kurtz started out his "Reliable Sources" this Sunday:

KURTZ: In checking into a rehab clinic for 30 days, Limbaugh leaves America's most popular radio show in a swirl of controversy. He has to deal with a Florida drug investigation into the matter, and has to kick the habit, which may be far harder than struggling to cope with deafness, as he discussed with me in an interview last fall.

LIMBAUGH: It's just something to deal with. I mean, it's a medical miracle to be able to hear.

KURTZ: But the real problem is this: Rush Limbaugh is a two- fisted conservative who smacks people around. Bill Clinton, feminazis, environmental whackos, the liberal media, and, on occasion, drug addicts. So Limbaugh's detractors -- and there are many -- are already saying, "What a hypocrite. He doesn't deserve our compassion because he shows so little for his political opponents."

(edit)

KURTZ: But I suspect that most people will be careful about condemning him for struggling with his personal demons. Liberals who believe addiction is a disease, who defend coked-up movie stars in rehab, will look hard at themselves if they use a different standard for their nemesis.

LIMBAUGH: Now I want to ask for your prayers.

KURTZ: Limbaugh, in my view, should be hammered the way he hammers others. But for his political views not his drug problem.

If only we liberals, besotted with our admiration for "coked-up movie stars," can pull ourselves together and behave rhetorically with the same wit, discretion, restraint, and civility as Rush Limbaugh.

Has this guy ever actually listened to so much as an hour of Rush Limbaugh?

And just what coked-up movie stars in rehab has anyone on the left defended?

One could go on, but one won't.

Instead, let me suggest that as many of you who happen by here send the link to the McClellan column to Mr. Kurtz at reliablesources@cnn.org, or just send the whole column.

Keep it polite, but ask Mr. Kurtz if he considers this column appropriately fair-minded, and ask him if he can fault by so much as a comma this rendering of a Lambaugh reaction to a turn of the tables situation with Bill Clinton, and finally, ask if Mr. Kurtz would have been as censorious of Rush as he is of some mythical coked-up-movie-star-defending liberals.

In a just filed story, the AP is reporting that a new US draft resolution is being circulated at the UN which proposes that by December 15th, the Iraqi interim Governing Council should have developed a timetable for both a constitution and elections.

Needless to say this is a big concession on the part of the US, although a policy change of direction will, doubtless, be denied by the usual Administration deniers.

What could have motivated this new resolution will also, doubtless, remain a mystery. We already know that the President is uninfluencable by polls, never changes his mind, and is never wrong.

Perhaps it was hearing someone like Senator Lugar, over the weekend, try and remind the President that he is the President. Personally, I suspect Rove's hand here.

As the AP notes:

The latest draft also addresses concerns from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who had demanded a lead role for the organization or little role at all.

It says the United Nations ``should strengthen its vital role in Iraq,'' saying it can do so by providing humanitarian relief, promoting economic reconstruction and help to restore ``institutions for representative governments.''

By conceding to many of the international questions about the original proposed resolution, the ball flies right back in the UN's court. If troops and money are not forthcoming, then the administration can say, it wouldn't have mattered what we did. If they are, they've effectively neutralized one of the growing criticisms of its policies, both among Democrats and Republicans.

But shouldn't we all be pleased that the administration is finally listening to something besides the President's gut? So why not welcome this change of policy, we shall doubtless be asked by administration partisans, and join hands with Republicans in a spirit of non-partisanship to make our occupation of Iraq the best damn occupation of Iraq there's ever been?

Because there is no such thing as non-partisan in this administration. Because even though the new resolution may be a better one, it's quite late in coming, and it's as much a ploy as it is a policy. There is no middle ground with this administration, because all policies are ultimately about getting re-elected. It won't matter that Democrats like Biden, like Kerry, yes, even like Lieberman have been urging the administration to travel in this direction, the assault on them as Saddam supporters will continue. There is the separate issue that window dressing like this new resolution alters not a wit the logic of occupation, which in and of itself is the chief impediment to the democratic future I have no doubt the Iraqi people are capable of achieving. (more on this in another post)

So, what do we have here? From my perspective, yet another stink bomb.

Men are not responsible for knowing that 'no' means no, but Jewish elites in Hollywood, "who worship money above all else," are responsible for marketing "the adulation of violence" to ignorant Third Worlders by cranking out an homage to kung-fu movies that I don't like.

And I'm not responsible for any bigoted, fact-free idea that comes into my pointy little head.

Familar name? To me, too.

Matt Blivens of The Nation's Daily Outrage column, reminds us of who she is by way of a compare and contrast story of the treatment by Ashcroft's Justice Dept. of two journalists, Robert Novak, and this "novice crime reporter." Coming back to you, is it?

In both cases, the reporters in question refused to reveal sources. I'll bet you can guess the difference in the outcomes. Even if you can, take a look at Matt's post.

This is not a story about leaks in any case. This is a story about the White House attempting to dirty up an administration critic by suggesting that there was something fishy about his Niger trip undertaken at the behest of the CIA because his wife also worked for the CIA and she might have had something to do with his appointment. All this blather about how difficult it will be to prosecute is beside the point, which should be about following up the leads already out there in numerous WaPo stories in order to see not only who leaked to Novak, but if the White House took further advantage of his column by calling the attention of journalists to it. It's a story about the administration's attitudes towards those who disagree with it. This is about politics and governance, not about crime and punishment.

What amazes me is the willingness of so many on the right to dirty up the CIA itself, one its own favorite institutions in the past, or perhaps they now think of it as Clinton's CIA, a CIA not utterly subservient to the administration's desire to use it as a ministry of propoganda.

For any of you who missed the NIGHTLINE of Oct 6th, in which four ex CIA operatives, all self-pronounced Republicans spewed forth their contempt and disgust at administrationi's actions against the Wilsons, you can look at some video and read a summary of what got said here.

Well, perhaps traitor is too harsh a word.

In dealing with l'affair Plame, I think all of us would do well not to talk about treason.

However, from the Bush administration's point of view, whoever got the bright idea, (even if, as claimed by Novak, it was an unpremeditated inspiration of the moment) to divert attention from the content of Joe Wilson's op ed piece to something unkosher about Amb. Wilson and his CIA employed wife, to make the Wilsons the story, as Novak's original column claimed they were, is certainly a traitor to the high ideals of this administration.

As administration supporters have rightly pointed out, the search for whodunnit is complex and will be as exhausting as it is exhaustive; personally I don't blame any of them for feeling beseiged. It's not as if they don't have a lot on their plate already: dragging this economy out of the Clinton recession; formulating a forward-thinking fossil-fuel based energy policy; shoring up our homeland defense without actually investing huge sums (like 87 billion dollars) in retrofitting nuclear/chemical sites, or ports of entry; creating democratic governments in both Afghanistan and Iraq; assidously ignoring all other troublespots around the world, like, say, N. Korea, or the horror that is happening between the Israelis and the Palestinians; I don't know if you've ever consciously tried to ignore something, but even that takes up a lot of time and energy.

So please stop griping, and take one of the two ways offered below to help out the Bush administration.

The first way you've already probably heard about. MoveOn has had the brilliant idea of limiting the scope of the necessary investigation by providing affadavits to all who are willing take themselves out of the potential leakers pool. If you had nothing to do with leaking information re: either Joe Wilson or his wife, sign the affidavit and make the work of the administration that much easier. If you did have something to do with sliming the Wilsons, please DO NOT sign the affidavit, that would be LYING.

True Majority also has a way to help out; send a free fax to congress urging them to urge the White House to appoint a Special Prosecutor. Initially, the Bush administration may not be as grateful for this intervention, but it is certainly in their own best interest. Does anyone question the President's deeply felt desire to find out who did this? And doesn't the Justice Department have enough on its own plate, not to need this headache? Isn't what's needed here a little tough love?

AP via the Houston Chronicle:

"Rush admitted a problem and that is the first step. It is when you keep lying about it that you get in deep and lose respect," declared Lawrence, a Republican who used to deliver groceries to the Limbaugh house.

Remind anyone of Max Cleland? Same strategy, minus the vicious advertising.
Chuck Lindell of the Austin American-Statesman writes:

The Republican-drawn congressional map approved Friday by the Texas House delivers a brisk one-two punch: It targets a number of conservative and moderate Democrats in Congress and jeopardizes the re-election of vigorous GOP opponents Lloyd Doggett and Martin Frost.

Four of the targeted Texas Democrats are members of the Blue Dog Coalition, party conservatives and moderates who focus on a balanced budget while attempting to steer Democrats on a more centrist policy course.

Granted, though, that the Democrats haven't been as creative with new ideas as they can and should be.

  YARL Threat Alert!             
Business as usual!
This one's so routine it doesn't really warrant jacking up the alert level... We'll leave it at green....

Rick Pearson of the Chicago Tribune writes:

If Republican U.S. Senate candidate Chirinjeev Kathuria makes it to the March primary ballot, the one vote he may not be able to count on is his own.

The 38-year-old Oak Brook business promoter isn't registered to vote. According to election officials in DuPage County, where he grew up and still lives with his parents, he never has been.

That is only one of the striking inconsistencies surrounding Kathuria, whose campaign is built on highly embellished claims of success as an international business tycoon.

A firm he until recently touted as a groundbreaking Internet site for health information is on life support, $3 million in debt, and has been sued by suppliers.

After looting and bootlicking, lying is what Republicans do best!

Patrick Cockurn of the Indepedent writes:

US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.

Thanks, Rummy!

... would be one reservist at one of Bush's boy-in-the-bubble speeches to the troops standing up and asking the following question:

"Mr. President, when are you going to tell us what you did and where you were during your missing year of Texas Air National Guard duty?"

Yep, Condi has a new bauble (besides aWol's brain, that is). But it won't help any:

In Rice, "you've never really had a national security adviser who's ready to discipline the process, to drive decisions to conclusions and, once decisions are made, to enforce them," said one former senior NSC staff member. In particular, he said, "she will never discipline Don Rumsfeld" when he undercuts decisions that have been made. "Never any sanctions. Never any discipline. He never paid a price."

In one sign that Rice is trying to address the problem, she recently appointed Robert Blackwill, a mentor and former ambassador to India, to run a new committee that will seek to plan the administration's response to possible crises and help the NSC reach consensus on a huge backlog of unresolved policy questions.

Yeah, that's the ticket... A new committee...

But if Condi isn't minding the store, who is? Not aWol—but then what did we expect?

"The president has to be the president, over the vice president and over these secretaries," the chairman, Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., said on NBC's "Meet the Press." (Via Atrios.)

Even the Republicans are starting to realize that aWol has no credibility...

Throw all gay people out of the Episcopal Church according to some.

WWWD? Milk bigotry for all it's worth in 2004, of course.

Surprise!

Two whoppers in one press conference:

  YARL Threat Alert!             
Yellow Bellied Sap Sucking LIE!

Mr. Schwarzenegger also swatted away a question about when he would address accusations of sexual misconduct that arose near the end of the campaign. He said last weekend that he would answer the matter after the election. But on Thursday he dismissed the accusations as "old news" and refused to discuss them further as he strode from the room.

  YARL Threat Alert!             
Yellow Bellied Sap Sucking LIE!

Mr. Schwarzenegger said there was "no White House connection in our transition team." But one of its members is Gerald Parsky, a top Bush fund-raisers and the White House's point man in California.

After looting and bootlicking, lying is what Republicans do best!

Missed this one...

During various campaign appearances, Schwarzenegger has said that he plans to seek more money from the federal government. Currently, he said, California gets 77 cents back from each dollar it sends to Washington.

Yep... Subsidizing the Red States that voted for Bush. Another one of the "causes" of the budget "crisis" that had nothing to do with Davis... Wonder how far The Ar_nis™ will get with Bush on this one as he tries to be governor of all the people?

!! BREAKING NEWS !!

EXCLUSIVE:
FBI investigating mysterious email solicitations discovered in Robert Novak's inbox!

ATTN: TRANSMITOR

Sir,

I CRAVE YOUR INDULGENCE AS I CONTACT YOU IN SUCH A SURPRISING MANNER, BUT I RESPECTFULLY INSIST THAT YOU READ THIS MAIL CAREFULLY AS I AM OPTIMISTIC THAT IT WILL OPEN DOORS FOR UNIMAGINABLE FUTURE REWARD FOR BOTH OF US. THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THIS INFORMATION TRANSACTION MIGHT NOT FALL WITHIN THE WIDE SPECTRUM OF YOUR PROFESSIONS ETHICAL ACTIVITIES, BUT I PLEAD YOUR ASSISTANCE AS YOUR FLAIR FOR PROFITABLE POLITICAL INSIDER PATRONAGE IS HIGHLY APPRAISED

I am KARLA ROV SOTUA from island nation of IVORY TOWER COAST and I am the personal driver to an important leader of my country till now when SPIES come striking and make recent situation uncomfortable.

On earlier date, I informed my leader of the need for less discomforting influences in certain sensitive ongoing supranational policy matters. Needs which might allow me to open a window where some unwelcome tension might be allowed to escape and send a particular message to others that discomfort is not welcome within my office and will not be tolerated when it makes tension for the designed purposes of my peoples and office.

Upon opening this window even slightly I might help particular significant insights to find a way to escape and visit themself upon those who bring tension to my family and organization. These particulars then being allowed to flow freely where they might and therefore deliver a valuable corrective educational lesson to those in need of such correction.

To my utmost amazement I suddenly find that I am in possesion of such valuable secret corrective educational particulars and insights! Which, should they be delivered effectively, provide exciting future career enhancing $opportunities$ to anyone willing to help me distribute such valuable secret knowledge through established high profile channels. Whats more I will tell you how you can add 10 twitching thick grisly patriotic inches to the length of your penis while at the same time introducing you to a weight loss program that will trim pounds of ugly taxing government regulatory oversight off any future penis enhancing investment opportunities you may like to consider!

That given. I would like to manage to find my way to a secret undisclosed location and share this valuable secret information in secure company with a coded professional consignment. Hoping therefore to target my valuable message to New York or London or especially select home addresses in Virginia USA. I need to distribute this valuable secret information so that it may impress itself upon any discomforting extraneous influences as soon as possible. Hence I am soliciting for your assistance. I trust you understand my offer.

Your compensation for further assistance will be lucrative, while the whole sum will be mapped out in future good-will installments which will continue well beyond November 2004.

Furthermore, you must keep this secret to the end and assure me of loyal representation on your part. I really require an ideologically sound partner who must be a GOD FEARING person and reliable. Again, I don't know much about your current personal needs, so I seek YOUR guidiance.

I beg for the few following favours:

(1) Accept to be my secret partner.
(2) Advice me on the best way you feel this valuable knowlege can be conveniently invested for maximum impact and profitable return.
(3) Assist me to secure an anonymous persona and a safe network of communication.
(4) I request that you take a two days working visit to contact me for further clarifications and faster safer transactions.
(5) Assist me to make contact for us to disseminate this valuable secret knowlege and information I will give to you.

I stop here for now, Hope to hear from you soon by phone or return e-mail or disposable runaway teenage prostitute. You may reach me on: (K_rov_1600@subrosa.gov).

KARLA ROV SOTUA

Let's not do that, OK?

A powerful Shia Muslim movement warned US troops on Friday not to enter Baghdad's largest Shia neighbourhood after a gun battle there on Thursday night killed two US soldiers and two Iraqis.

As Josh Marshall is suggesting, one line emerging from the President's lickspittles is that the leaker of Valerie Plame's identity didn't know she was undercover, so there was no crime.

I suppose the obvious answer to that is, then why hasn't anyone come forward? Oh, I know: Daddy will be very mad, and the leaker will have to go sit in a corner and think real, real hard about what he has done, but if there's one thing we know about the Bushes, treason means never having to say you're sorry. Ask rehabilitated Iran-contra liar Eliot Abrams {cough}.

Perhaps the failure of the "innocent" leaker to come forward might be explained by walking through the "explanation," beanng in mind that Plame was working under nonofficial cover, meaning that as far as the world knew, she had no connection with the U.S. government whatsoever. So, the "modified limited hang-out route" would have us believe that the leaker knew that Plame's public identity was false, but somehow failed to make the inescapable inference that followed from this fact, instead concluding, in the teeth of elementary logic, that she was merely a garden-variety CIA analyst who just happened to have one of the rarest cover identities on the planet.

Alternatively, the leaker could have "learned" of Plame's CIA identity without knowing of her public one through White House gossip, which implies that the identities of deep-cover NOCs are bandied about over the water cooler at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

So, either a) there is an innocent explanation that makes no sense unless one assumes the White House is criminally negligent about extremely sensitive national security matters or b) the innocent explanation is a lie. Someone should ask Scott McClellan which it is.

CNN:

In a letter to President Bush, Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and [Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware, ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Carl Levin of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Charles Schumer] said the White House has made "at least five serious missteps" in the leak probe so far.

The biggest is leaving Attorney General John Ashcroft in charge of the probe ...

Other missteps the senators cited in their letter Thursday include:

• Failing to order employees to preserve evidence until three days after the Justice Department probe began.

• Not delivering that order to all staff until the following day.

• Waiting another day to extend that order to the Pentagon and the State Department.

In addition, the senators wrote, White House press secretary Scott McClellan's declaration that three senior officials were not responsible for the leak "has now put the Justice Department in the position of having to determine not only what happened, but also whether to contradict the publicly stated position of the White House."

What we've been saying about The Plame Affair since it broke is making the mainstream (Time, Useless News)—and people get it.

It's a story on a human scale; though the regime's all-too-human traits on display in the Plame Affair (ideological fervor, vengefulness, lying) are exactly those that brought us the Iraqi war, the Affair brings their effects down to a man, his wife, and the people she works with.

People understand, for example, that the vengeful felon(s) in the White House not only put Plame at risk for her life, but all her contacts too.

Meanwhile, The Gaseous One gives the latest defense of the regime apologists: The Plame Affair wasn't a crime; just a blunder: a "bumbling effort" to slam a critic. So, it turns out Bush is stupid, after all? With friends like these...

Let's start with the NOW:

As you've no doubt heard, a bugging device was discovered in the office of the Mayor of Phildelphia this week, only four weeks from an election. The FBI has confirmed it's theirs. Mayor Street is a Democrat. The election is a rematch with his previous Republican opponent, one Mr. Katz.

Happily, all the proper people are properly shocked, and are properly demanding that the FBI offer an explanation. Gov. Rendell, D. is, and Senator Spector, R. is, and even Mr. Katz is, "breathtakingly shocking" is how he put it, though what aspect he found shocking wasn't specified.

The federal prosecutor on whose behalf the FBI planted the bug has specified that Mayor Street is not the "target" of whatever investigation required the bugging of the Mayor's office. More information will not be forthcoming, although the prosecutor has reassured all who might worry that his office remains, as ever, non-partisan.

Thus far, I have heard no demands for a congressional investigation. Nor has any media commentator I have thus far read or heard suggested that this incident could spell trouble for the Bush administration, especially following so closely on the matter of Ms. Plame.

I haven't mentioned that Mayor Street is black, and Mr. Katz is, well, not, because we live in a color-blind society.

We don't have to imagine how differently might a similar occurance have been handled by a Republican congress during the Clinton administration. All we have to do is remember "Filegate."

But of course, that was THEN:

June, 1966, in the midst of a presidential election, congressional Republicans discovered that the Clinton White House had asked for and received from the FBI hundreds of background files of White House employees, many of them from the previous Bush administration. The White House confirmed that such had happened, but denied any of the files had been gathered for the purpose of finding "dirt" on political opponents. The President, Vice-President and their chief of staff, Leon Panetta, weren't entirely sure for what reason the files had been requested, promised to investigate, and admitted upfront that such a request should not have been made, said it must be some sort of bureaucratic snafu, but agreed the FBI should not have surrendered the files.

Without objection from the White House, the matter was added to Ken Starr's portfolio, and various committees of congress vowed to have as many hearings as necessary to get to the bottom of what had gone on. Interestingly, not one Republican was able to point to a single incidence of leaked information from the files having been used against any so-called Clinton foe, whether directly by the White House, or anyone else, but shades of the Nixon enemies list were invoked often.

Most of the immedate coverage has long since disappeared behind archived walls, but you can get the flavor of the moment, so like the flavor of so many other moments during Clinton's White House years, from these classic two sentences by Sen. Hatch:

The White House conducted what appears to be "a definite effort to find dirt on Republicans," Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, charged Sunday. "Now, whether that's true or not, I don't know. That's why we have to do this investigation."

In the same CNN report, dated June 23rd there is also this from then Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich:

The administration also was being pressed by Republicans on another front. House Speaker Newt Gingrich Saturday renewed his threat to have White House officials declared in contempt of Congress if they don't turn over 2,000 pages of travel office files.

"These people cannot continue to stonewall, obstruct, delay and lie. And they need to turn over those 2,000 pages by next Wednesday," Gingrich said. The White House has claimed executive privilege over the papers, which have been subpoenaed by a House committee.

The committee is investigating the firing of seven travel office employees early in the Clinton administration and how the administration reacted to earlier inquiries into those dismissals. (emphasis mine)

The firing of the Travel Office employees had occurred in the early months of 1993. There had been copious congressional hearings about the incident by the Democratic controlled congress, the first Independent Counsel had investigated and found nothing illegal; Ken Starr, having decided to throw out all the work of the previous Counsel and start over, "travelgate" was under investigation once again, so what 2000 pages of information could possible have been so vital to the furtherance of the "common good?" How could there even be 2000 pages of files?

Here's how.

The subpeonas being resisted by the White House were asking for any material from any White House official or lower rung staff member, who had had any meetings, phone calls, shared mash notes or email exchanges with any other official or lower rung staff member, in which the word "travel" or "office" was uttered. If I exaggerate for effect, so was Speaker Gingrich. He was manufacturing a Clinton administration claim of Presidential priviledge. Much later, of course, when both "gates," travel and file, were shown to be groundless shams, Ken Starr still included in one of his impeachment counts, Clinton's misuse of such priviledge.

Remember when the GAO asked to see who the members of Cheney's energy task force were, and executive priviledge was invoked, without provoking much comment or outrage, except from those nasty, uncivil, partisan Democrats? The explanation was that policy makers needed the freedom to consult honestly with advisors and couldn't if constantly fearful that such discussions might be made public. I happen to agree with that. But Clinton's right to presidential privacy was assaulted on an almost daily basis for most of his eight years in office. And what was at stake in "travelgate" that had anything to do with the daily lives of most Americans? Especially in 1996?

On the other hand, Cheney successfully stonewalled all attempts to find out how the Bush energy policy was evolved at a time when the California governor, Gray somebody, was asking the federal government to inquire into the possibility that the energy crises was being artificial created by energy traders. The Bush administration's answer was no, and no. Now we know that it was a manufactured crises. In large part by Ken Lay, the biggest fraud since the Wizard of Oz, and one of those whom Cheney, we now know, met with in framing Bush energy policy.

Anyone who paid attention to the first round of hearings about the FBI files would have known there was no scandal there. The files were part of a project started by the previous Bush administration and handed over to Craig Livingston during the transition. It had been an attempt to bring up to date the White House list of who should and did have White House access. Mr. Livingston had handled things carelessly, testified as such, claimed no priviledge, and promptly resigned, as did his assistant. That's what happened when you made a mistake in the Clinton White House; you resigned. Your resignation was then taken as further evidence of corruption, else why would you have resigned?

Two years later, filegate was still being investigated. The more the White House turned over to congress, the more Republican staff members found to question. And then there were the Judcial Watch suits on behalf of various agrieved Republicans whose files might have sat on Craig Livingston's desk. Mr. Livingston for his part, the part of a young man who'd become involved in the Clinton campaign, and then in serving in that administration, was treated, during his several appearances before congressional committees like a Mafia foot soldier; Republican staff members had made known that Mr. Livingston had once worked as a bouncer, a piece of private informationm, like that gathered in those FBI files, they felt no hesitation in releasing; if irony is dead nowhere else, it is certainly dead in the sensibilities of young Republicans. Henceforth, Craig Livingston was constantly referred to as the ex-bouncer who became head of White House security. Such are the nicieties of civil discourse David Brooks is so discouraged to see Democrats eschewing.

There was also an attempt to show that Mrs. Clinton was responsibile for hiring Mr. Livingston, which in the fevered imaginations of wingers everywhere would have proven that Hillary was behind "filegate."

Finally, in March of 2000, the new OIC, Robert Ray, released his finding regarding "filegate," that there was no there there, though he managed to phrase it in such a way that it sounded as if what he was actually saying was that he couldn't really prove anything bad had gone on, but probably it had. Not that Ray's nakedly partisan spin satisfied key elements of the right, who continue to insist that everything that was ever alledged about the Clintons (scroll down to find "Filegate" but there's lots to look at on the way there) was and is true.

Why bother with all this? Aren't the Clintons the past? Didn't all real liberals think they were fairly tacky anyway? We get what the media whores did; so why make ourselves look bad by defending the Clintons?

How about this? How about defending the truth? Because the assault on the Clintons continues, and it's part of the same machinary of scandal, smears, distortions, misdirection and divisiveness that the Republican Party honed to near perfection in the eight years of the Clinton presidency.

I don't suggest this as a primary task. But the failure to vigoursly defend the truth about the Clintons helped defeat Gore, continues to allow a Chris Matthews to compare a President Clinton unfavorably with an Arnold, and is making it harder than it should be to lay a glove on a Bush administration that, increasingly, is the true embodiment of every lie ever told about the Clintons.

WaPo:

"What Leno's presence did is give legitimacy to the notion that it wasn't a partisan event, it wasn't a political event, it was somehow an American cultural event," said Marty Kaplan, associate dean of the of University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. "It was like welcoming home an astronaut from a safe voyage. In so doing, it played into a campaign strategy that this was a campaign for all, beyond politics. Which is not true; he's a Republican candidate."

Let's hope this whorish-ness on Leno's part is just a temporary aberration. Of course, Letterman is better anyhow...

Beauty!

"[BUSH] Americans are not the running kind."

[GEORGE BUSH THOUGHT BALLOON: Do—not—mention—my—missing—year—in—National—Guard—Mom—will—kill—me—]

Who put the "W" in aWol?

You know, some enterprising Democrat attack dog (if there is such an animal) might think about mentioning that while today's National Guard is being sent off the the Iraqi desert, Bush himself blew off his own Guard duty.

This greeted me on my home page and it seemed a more eloquent insight than anything I could add.

Top Stories from The New York Times

- Car Bombing and 2 Other Attacks in Iraq Leave at Least 10 Dead

- Palestinian Suicide Bomber Wounds 2 Israelis and an Arab

- Bush, Campaigning in N.H., Points to Successes and Threats

Archie and the gang are enlisting in a NY anti-teen drinking campaign.

Great idea. What next? Nancy stands up for abstinence? The Katzenjammer Kids take on teen gangs?

This is your brilliant ad campaign. This is your brilliant ad campaign on OxyContin.

Any questions?

Vanessa Gera, Associated Press Writer, and conduit for greater global fluids, reminds us that the "World Marvels at Schwarzenegger's Victory", October 8, 2003, 7:12 AM EDT.

GRAZ, Austria -- From an Internet chatroom in China to Arnold Schwarzenegger's boyhood home in Austria, the world marveled Wednesday at a uniquely American political triumph with more suspense than a Hollywood script.

Oh sure, the suspense was gripping. After two months of gadrooned platiutudes, ga-ga and fluff and slow-pitch fatman whiffle-vetting from the television news pol-op punditry, free round the clock all Arnold all da time campaign commercials camouflaged as news reporting courtesy of the MSNBCCNNFOXNoise corporatist cable cabal, and an Arnold campaign strategy whose motto was essentially - you get to look under the hood after you buy the hummer - the entire runaway bus freeway pileup stunt comes to a predicable end. The leader hero emerges victorious with the heroine at his side. Credits roll. Another brainless action idol thriller rakes the box office markers into the drawer, tallies up the boodle, pays the catering truck and announces the dawn of a new era of starmaking. The nectar America craves. Style trumps substance and the television news-reader media minks and company store trumpets begin honking like geese harkening a new equinox.

A Revolutionary tour-de-force! - A terrific end of the summer feel good comedy drama musical for the whole family! - Fabulous! - An exhilarating monosyllabic action adventure romance. - Titilating! --- did I mention it was Titilating! And, Fabulous? Fabulous and titilating!

Chris and Peggy loved it! Each squealed with breathless delight as the action unfolded before their wide impressionable eyes. The suspense mounts as a Republican wave curls and crashes and rolls up the beach, pumped ashore to the throbbing soundtrack of Wagner's Der fliegende Hollander and Parsifal. Peggy coos and warbles and reminds Chris of the faithful majesty of it all. Chris reminds her of the young Austrian immigrant who leaves home to make it big in the arts and politics, unrelenting, impelled, succeeding on pure muscle and rank celebrity, a driven charismatic personality, merciless raw ambition and a truculent predisposition to terminate any and all opposition. A popular rags to power conquest kickshaw exalted by cheering adoring unquestioning starstruck throngs in his adopted increasingly easily provoked new homeland - saluted as a victorious expatriate gladiator by his native countryman - a profligate conquerer barbarian magnifico come to lead the beer hall booboisie into the next tax shelter from the storm. Peggy swoons as Chris reels, each barks up some profuse commentary on defying the conventional wisdom and the triumph of will.

It all sounds eerily familiar.

Chris lurches rightward toward Peggy who sits quivering, pitter-patter, like a fledgling bird in a spring wind, excited with expectations which challenge her cognitive dissonance. His large marauding paws grope for her pert heaving breasts and she welcomes his advances, submits, two hungry searching tongues quarry each others hot breath in the glimmering lambent light of the theater of the absurd - fireworks explode, the surf crashes and roars through the piles and pillars beneath the Santa Monica pier. Arnold Schwarzenegger is declared the Governor of California. Somewhere in America a predator falls upon its prey.

Lawrence O'Donnell, watching the show from the second row, leans forward and slaps the balmed paramours upside the head. "Hey, take it to an all expense paid executive suite will ya! - We got adults here!." To no avail.

In South Florida a crazed right-wing radio talk show codeine junkie chug-a-lugs another half gallon bottle of morphine derived analgesic and lapses into an hypnotic babble about huge black hermaphrodidic centipedes, "this Great Beast" and "writhing orgasims of purience."

An enormous polished gasoline drunk vintage 1953 combination Sno-Cat and sugar cane harvester rolls to a stop beyond the roped heave and roil of the worshiping media vulgas and bobble-bewitched fanforande while marketing consultants and GOP image thaumaturgists twitch with intoxicted arousal like bald-headed hermits at a French can-can dance.

MSNBC's "liberal media" mole Alex Witt squirms with captivated delight and licks at the bulbous knob of a hot microphone. The driver side door swings wide open, red ballons cascade from above like blood drops from a sacrificial gambit strung from the firmament and America's newest high school homecoming clod elect emerges from the cab grinning like the hideous engorged head on a fiberglass puppet in a Mardi Gras parade.

Conan the Rotarian is - arriviste, baby.

AP:

Alec Baldwin came bearing a gift when he attended a fund-raiser for House Democrats: a box of dog biscuits for Republican Gov. Rick Perry.

"I wanted to give this to Tom DeLay's lap dog, Rick Perry," the actor said Tuesday.

The bad news: it looks like the Texas Republicans have agreed on redistricting. Anyone strung up "Quitmire"—the Texas Democrat who broke ranks and handed half a dozen House seats to Delay and Rove—by his tiny, shrivelled testicles yet?

I'm sure this is so obvious it must have been stated a million times already, but Bush can hardly claim that there are "too many leaks" when he sits down for five hours with Bob Woodward speaking candidly about classified material. That's not a leak? And of massive proportions?

The elephant in the room here is this: Bush doesn't even know when he's lying.

That's why he needs the handlers and the ear-piece; not stupidity.

At the best, he's got NPD big time (Narcissistic Personality Disorder). At worst, he's just doing classic Orwellian doublethink ("We have always been at war with Oceania.")

YABL, YABL, YABL!

Question: Why do we never hear this from the Bush regime? Because FDR said it?

Joe McDonald of AP writes that the "taikonauts" will be taking green tea.

Of course, the PNAC has China on the list in the next decade or so, so look for lots of warmongering from the regime on this one.

Condi's not talking to Rummy, and Rummy's not talking to Condi.

And aWol hasn't called them into his office to straighten it all out. What a farce.

So if the mission was accomplished and everything's lovely, what's this "Iraq Stabilization Group" bauble that Condi is flashing all about, anyhow? PR?

UPDATE: Rummy and Condi share their feelings in this scenario concocted by alert reader MJS:

DOC: Now, Condi, how did that make you feel when Rummy said those things about you...

CONDI: I...I don't know. I try to please him, but...the rules keep changing.

RUMMY: Oh, what a load of...

DOC: Now, Rummy, we agreed to a few ground rules earlier, and one of them was for you to stop swearing whenever you felt threatened. Do you feel threatened now?

RUMMY: No.

CONDI: (sotto voce) Cracker ass cracker...

RUMMY: Did you hear that?

DOC: How did that make you feel, Rummy, when Condi said those things about you?

CONDI: I barely whispered...

RUMMY: I'm old, honey, but I ain't deaf.

DOC: How did that make you feel?

RUMMY: Like hurting her, like I wanted to squish her under my Hummer.

CONDI: Try it flyboy, just try it. I'm Shrubaroo's #1 Kelly Girl and you know it, so just try it, Grandpa!

DOC: Hey, you two...

RUMMY: Take that back, you bony-assed Media Whore!

CONDI: Media Whore! Lick me, you pompous buttfucker!

DOC: I see we're just about out of time here...

RUMMY: Take this, you skanky piece of...

CONDI: (Slap!)

RUMMY: Clear the room! Clear the Room!

(SLAM! CRASH! &*!?%!)

DOC: (in the hall, talking to the door) Same time next week?

One more in the long series of Republican dirty tricks? Part of the Republican strategy for permanent electoral dominance?

Funny thing. In the largest city in a swing state, just before a close mayoral election, a bug is discovered in the office of the Democratic mayor.

I bet the administration is really, really, really upset about all this.

Yech.

Leah will probably have something more analytical to say. But what amazes me about the whole thing is really the beauty part from the Republican standpoint: that is, the issues that brought Davis down were all engineered by the Republicans.

The California economy? That's down to aWol.

The power crisis? Down to manipulation by the power companies, Bush contributor Enron prominent among them.

The budget crisis? No worse than the last one, and only a logjam because of Republican obstructionism in the legislature.

So the real story here isn't that voters were angry; the story is how the anger was manipulated.

And this "for the people" stuff The Ar_nis™ is trying to pull...

Hey, the power companies took $250 from each Californian and got back cents on the dollar when FERC finally came to the conclusion there was fraud. If the The Ar_nis™ is truly for the people, he can start by getting the power companies to disgorge the fruits of their frauds and thefts.

UPDATE: From CNN exit polling via KOS: the Democrats blew it on turnout. Check the amazing statistics.

Bush & co have an odd view of international leadership according to which the quality of such leadership, especially in the case of the last standing superpower, is to be measured in inverse proportion to how few countries are persauded to follow it. Or is it just me?

This time, wasn't it the stated aim of this administration to engage the UN and member nations in an alliance, broader than that covered by the overused phrase, "coalition forces," to help with money and troops in the rebuilding of Iraq? Or was I misinformed?

According to the NYTimes, it isn't going well.

The Bush administration has run into such stiff opposition at the United Nations Security Council to its plan for the future government of Iraq that it has pulled back from seeking a quick vote endorsing the proposal and may shelve it altogether, administration officials said Tuesday.

Two weeks after President Bush appealed at the United Nations for help in securing and reconstructing Iraq, administration officials said, his top aides will decide soon whether it is worth the effort to get a United Nations endorsement.

Originally, the administration said United Nations approval of American plans for the next phase of postwar Iraq would encourage other countries to contribute money or troops. Now the tone has shifted to one of living without such help, if necessary.

"We don't want to play this game for a long, long time," said a senior administration official, reflecting a certain exasperation with the Security Council. "This is as much a choice for the Council as it is for us. They can be multilateral and be part of it, or they can tell us to do it ourselves."

The new pessimism about winning United Nations support results from the cool reception accorded to the administration's most recent draft on Iraqi self-government, which was supposedly redrawn to take into account suggestions of Security Council members

Hmm, what could have caused such stiff opposition, now that the administration was "courting" the UN? Here's a Reuters report published before the Times' bylined article.

Despite divisions in the 15-member U.N. Security Council, U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte on Tuesday ruled out making any substantial changes to the Bush administration's draft resolution on Iraq.

Consequently, council diplomats said the United States had to decide soon whether to drop the effort entirely or push for a split vote in the council that might limit its impact.

Easy passage of the resolution, aimed a broadening military and financial support, was assured until Secretary-General Kofi Annan last week turned down U.N. political participation unless Iraqi sovereignty was accelerated.

At a Security Council session on Monday, most members wanted the resolution to deal with some of Annan's suggestions but Negroponte virtually excluded this. (emphasis mine)

The reasons the members of this administration have so little respect for the UN is that they have no idea how to get their way there. By definition, the problem can't be them, so, it must be....fill in the blank.

Among the 15 council members, France, Russia, Germany, China and Syria were expected to abstain while only Britain, Spain and Bulgaria were sure votes, diplomats said.

The other six council members, Chile, Mexico, Pakistan, Angola, Cameroon and Guinea, expressed misgivings but might support the resolution under U.S. cajoling, the envoys said.

Cajole? Cajole, you say? Why kind of diplomat would do that? A self-important jerk like Joe Wilson? Amb. Negroponte is made of sterner stuff. He's the kind of ambassador who's more comfortable lying to congress on behalf of Central American thugs pretending to be national armies, but whose only purpose is the use of violence to limit the human rights of its citizens.

In the Reuters report, a foreign policy expert makes the point that the administration's approach to the UN has been "lukewarm" because there isn't sufficient counter pressure on or within congress, as yet, to put that $87 billion (gulp) supplemental at risk. If there were, the administration might have to rethink their approach.

This is not your cue to go off on how the rotten Democrats aren't being sufficiently oppositional. Becaue they are. And in as public a way as they can - floor speeches in the Senate presenting alternative funding devices - in the House, four or five member discussions during after session "Special Orders," questioning everything about our occupation of Iraq; last night Corzine was impressively eloquent and fierce. The Democrats have not been the least bit ready to rubber-stamp this appropriation. DeLay must sense some breaking even in his own ranks because he's pushing a scheduled vote for next week. The House Dems can inform citizens, but without grassroots help from voters taking the time to contact other house members, that's all they can do. Check out C-Span's Senate coverage during the day, if you have a job that allows you to do that, and the House coverage at night. You'll be proud you're a Democrat.

Get ready for renewed attacks by administration cohorts on the irrelevant, immoral UN, and especially on Kofi Annan. Look for a Tom Friedman column excoriating Annan for towing the French line, proclaiming, that for all their many mistakes, on this one the administratioin is right, and pointing out, without irony, that such a policy would mean turning over authority to their own hand-picked Council, exemplified by the much-compromised Chalabi, which will be viewed by Iraqis as US puppets. In case you're wondering how the Bush administration could embrace such a view without having to admit a colossal blunder, here's a hint from the Times' bylined piece.

"We just have a basic difference with the secretary general on this," said a senior administration official. "He has the model of Afghanistan in mind. He wants us to use an old constitution, set up an interim government right away and move toward elections later on. But that's not the right model."

Indeed, many American officials say that if the United States tried to set up the existing Iraqi Governing Council's handpicked by the American-led occupation authority last summer � the attacks on American forces and Iraqi targets would only intensify. "The Governing Council is not seen as legitimate by the Iraqi people," said the administration official. "They're not ready to take power."

Among other things, various officials say, the Governing Council is dominated by former exile groups installed by the occupation but widely disliked by many Iraqis. (my emphasis)

No kidding, guys.

Who among us wouldn't agree? Too bad it took so long.

The Reuters report gives a slightly different perspective on Annan's position.

Although it is similar to proposals by the French and the Germans, I take it that the ceeding of sovereignty in Annan's view is fundamental to changing the perception among Iraqis and among Muslims around the world that what is going on in Iraq is an American occupation of the country. Whether the time period should be three months or five months, he isn't suggesting that such sovereignity should be vested solely in the Council. The details are negotiable; they always are among diplomats. Except in the Bush administration, whose chief emerging characteristic is its rigdity, which the President mistakes for strength.

After all, if Iraq is indeed the flypaper by which we have transferred there the frontline of the war on terror, why should the UN volunteer to be cannon fodder. Question to supporters of this occupation; when did Iraqis volunteer to become cannon fodder?

Remember when Republicans were aghast, simply aghast, at Hollywood's depraved indifference to cultural mores, its degrading portrayal of women, and its corrupting effect on youth through mindless, violent movies, to the point of making it a high-profile Presidential campaign issue?

That was so, like, 2 1/2 years ago.

"We live in a culture of moral indifference, where movies and videos glamorize violence and tolerance is touted as a great virtue." --George W. Bush, v. 1.0, 10/2000

His campaign manager doesn't think so.

[Wesley Clark's campaign manager] Donnie Fowler told associates he was leaving over widespread concerns that supporters who used the Internet to draft Clark into the race are not being taken seriously by top campaign advisers. Fowler also complained that the campaign's message and methods are focused too much on Washington, not key states, said two associates who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Hmm....

Surprise!

"[BUSH:] I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is, partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers,"

Just one big happy family! And "Due respect" is very, very nice, isn't it?

Meanwhile, a terrific headline in Isvest—WaPo from one Randall Mikkelsen: "White House Rules Out Three Aides In Leak Probe. Uh, no, Randy. The White didn't rule them out; they said they were ruled out. And they were "senior administration officials" not "aides"...

Yes, it's how the essential parts of this story keep getting lost. Let's try to help the SCLM find them:

1. Plame was an operative (not an analyst) and it's a felony to reveal her identity.


2. Her identity was shopped around to six different journalists/news organizations before Novak revealed it


3. The felon who did the shopping was a senior administration official


4. The motive was revenge by the White House on a whistleblower

So, what do we have instead of an investigation? Republican tactics 101: Change the subject. We have:

1. Continued character assassination of both Plame and her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, the whistleblower in the Niger yellowcake affair)


2. The FBI rounding up the usual suspects here, there, and everywhere in the executive branch, except in the White House, where senior administration officials are to be found


3. Continued mischaracterization of the issue as "leaking," when in fact the issue is revealing the identity of an intelligence operative
   
4. Persistent characterization of the DOJ investigation as independent when in fact:
   
   
   
   1. White House Counsel Gonzales will decide what to turn over to DOJ, and what not to turn over (that was the 5:00 deadline today). And it's gong to take him at least two weeks to do that
   
   
   2. Ashcroft continues to refuse to recuse himself in The Plame Affair, even though he has done so for less cause in other cases
   
   
   3. Aschroft has to sign off on every subpoena, regardless of whether the "career prosecutors" are handling the case or not
   
   
   
   
5. And Bush could solve the problem right away (and save the taxpayers a little money) simply by saying the following single sentence:
   

   
   If any journalists have given pledges of confidentiality to whoever revealed Valerie Plame's identity, I'm releasing them from those pledges.
   

   
   Maybe if he did that, one of the six people the White House felon shopped Plame's identity to might, just might, come fofward? How long will we be waiting for Bush to say that, I wonder?
   

Also, let's not forget that Plame was a WMD operative, which may provide an additional motive to revenge in the Affair. (This may help the MWs who just can't understand.)

Some have thought that the doctrine of preventive war depends on having good intelligence—about WMDs, for example. Not so; Bush already knows the wars he wants to fight; the PNAC lays it all out, as did the "Axis of Evil" speech. So the purpose of an intelligence agency (in Bush's view) is not to provide facts or analysis; rather, the purpose of the agency is provide cover for wars of choice that the administration has already decided to fight. (This is the operational definition of "faith-based intelligence.") However, not everyone in the intelligence community shares this view.

Plame was a WMD operative. There are real WMD concerns (i.e., nuclear, not fake like Iraq) with both North Korea and Iran.

Therefore, the felon in the The Plame Affair might have had an additional motive beyond revenge: to message to the WMD community that if they disagree with the White House, not only will their careers be destroyed, their lives (if they are operatives) will be endangered, as Plame's has been. It's a two-fer!

Finally, it looks like the White House defense starting to emerge Sure, Rove might have talked to a journalist about Plame, but only to "set the record straight," and only after her identity had already been revealed. The difference between a felony and standard operating procedure? I was about to say "a simple matter of timing," but that would imply that the Bush White House knows or cares about the distinction.

... can Liberals be far behind?

According to some "Episcopalians," split the church so only "ex-gays" are part of the congregation.

Who was it who warned about people who are "holier than thou"? Not these guys. Who was it who sat down to dinner with prostitutes and tax collectors? Not these guys, for sure.

And WWJD? Let's worry about WWWD—"What Will W Do" to win in 2004. To which we already know the answer: Whatever it takes.

This nastiness is just a straw in the wind, a small beginning. Look for plenty of appeals to raw prejudice from Republicans in 2004.

"Dear Laura," the poem began, "Roses are red, violets are blue, oh my lump in the bed, I miss you." Uh oh, theres even more..... at Uggabugga

I can't wait to see the watercolor paintings.

And while your at it - consider Thunder Kelly's Seventh Seal:
Official Voter Info. via Uggabugga

"And when he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven,
as it were for half an hour."

Welcome to the Pentagon Pennysaver, for all your scary end-timer crazy-guy shopping needs.

Via ABCNEWS.com - October 7, 2003 Bargain Basement - Congressional Report: Terrorists Could Buy Special Equipment From Pentagon

The Pentagon could inadvertently be providing terrorists with special equipment that would enable them to make biological weapons, according to a draft report from the General Accounting Office obtained by ABCNEWS.

According to the report, which is due to be released Tuesday, Congress ordered the GAO -- its investigative arm -- to set up a phony company to see how easy it would be to buy surplus lab equipment from the Pentagon.

More:

Via Newsday - AP:Pentagon Said Lax in Protecting Chem Labs

Using a fake company, congressional investigators were able to buy off the Internet excess Pentagon lab equipment and protective gear that terrorists could use to make chemical and biological weapons, the investigators told a House hearing Tuesday.

Fellow shoppers on the Internet site also resold the items to buyers in the Philippines, Malaysia, Egypt, and other countries, the General Accounting Office said in a report to the House Government Reform's national security subcommittee.

"Public sales of these Department of Defense excess items increase the risk that terrorists could obtain and use them to produce and deliver biological agents within the United States," it said.

Gregory Kutz, the GAO's director for financial management and assurance, said that, using a fictitious company, they were able to buy $4,100 worth of items, including a biological safety cabinet, a bacteriological incubator, a centrifuge, an evaporator and chemical and biological protective suits and related gear.

He said the original acquisition value of the items purchased was $46,960.

[...]

The Pentagon in January stopped sales of protective gear, but the GAO found that some 4,000 suits, and 26,000 other items such as gloves and hoods, were sold after that date.

Kutz said that in the past three and a half years the Pentagon sold at least 18 safety cabinets, 199 incubators, 521 centrifuges, 65 evaporators and 286,000 protective suits.

Anthrax - Aisle 5!

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Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have written an article titled "Seige Heil: The Bush-Rove-Schwarzenegger Nazi Nexus and the Destabilization of California" which is published at the Free Press website. The entire article is also mirrored at Common Dreams

Wasserman and Fitrakis detail past Bush family ties to the emerging Nazi Party in Germany and also make mention of their relationship to industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a well known admirer and financial backer of the Nazi cause and it's rise to power. Below are excerpts from the Fitrakis and Wasserman article as well as additional informantion with respect to Fritz Thyssen's association with the Nazi movement.

Fitrakis and Wasserman write:

The Bush family ties to the Nazi party are well known. In their 1994 Secret War Against the Jews, Mark Aarons and John Loftus use official US documents to establish that George Herbert Walker, George W. Bush's maternal great-grandfather, was one of Hitler's most important early backers. He funneled money to the rising young fascist through the Union Banking Corporation.

[...]

The bank helped Hitler rise to power. It also helped him wage war. As late as July 31, 1941---well after the Nazi invasion of Poland---the U.S. government froze $3 million in Union Banking assets linked to Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen was noted in the American press as a "German industrialist and original backer of Adolph Hitler."

Loftus writes that Thyssen's "American friends in New York City [were] Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker, the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States." That would be the current president's father, George Herbert Walker Bush, also the former CIA director.

Read the full Wasserman and Fitrakis article at the links above.

Thyssen - Part 2

In addition to the above, Ian Kershaw, (author of Hitler; Hubris / Nemesis) makes note of Thyssen's involvement with the "Keppler Circle" signatories. Kershaw writes:

On 19 November, the day that Hindenburg received Hitler as part of his meetings with the heads of political parties, the Reich President was handed a petition carrying twenty signatures from businessmen demanding the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor. [...] Eight of the "Keppler Circle", headed by Schacht and the Cologne banker Kurt von Schroeder, signed the petition. The results with indistrialists were disappointing. A single prominent indistrialist, Fritz Thyssen, signed. But he had for long made no secret of his sympathies for the National Socialists.

Thyssen was also fond of Hermann Goring, who apparently enjoyed puttering around his Berlin digs in "a red toga and pointed slippers" like some kind of bloated djinni swine, and who benefited personally from Thyssen's cheerful high livin' largesse.

Likewise, Thyssen contributed at least 100,000 Gold Marks to the early Nazi party efforts in Munich in the early 1920's. In 1931 Thyssen, who was charmed with the National Socialist German Workers Party's corporatist agenda, attended a get to meet Adolph dinner arranged by Goring. Thyssen, at the time, was the United Steel Works supervisory board chairman.
A sidenote: SA (Storm Trooper) membership totaled approximately 80,000 in early 1931. By the end of the summer of 1932 membership had swelled to approximately 450,000.

The Brownshirt House

David Clay Large, author of Where Ghosts Walked - Munich's Road to the Third Reich, describes Hitlers new party headquaters in Munich, financed by Fritz Thyssen.

In January 1931 the party moved into a bombastic new national headquarters, the Brown House. Formerly the Barlow Palace, the building was located on the fashionable Brienerstrasse. Purchased in 1930 with a loan from the industrialist Fritz Thyssen and a tax of two marks on every party member, the building had been thoroughly renovated by the pro-Nazi architect Professor Paul Ludwig Troost. A tour de force of Nazi vulgarity, it boasted a grand entrance with swastikas on either side of a giant bronze door. On the first floor was a Flag Hall containing banners from the early years of the party, including the sacred Blood Flag from the shooting during the Beer Hall Putsch. On the second floor were the offices of the party leadership, the national SA cheif, national treasurer, and - sanctum sanctorum - Hitler's private study.

By the late 1930's the Nazi offensive against the Jewish community had escalated and Thyssen was one of the industrialists who profited from the assault. As Ian Kershaw recounts:

Party activists in the Movement's various formations needed no encouragement to unleash further attacks on Jews and their property. 'Aryans' in business, from the smallest to the largest, looked to every opportunity to profit at the expense of their Jewish counterparts. Hundreds of Jewish businesses - including long-established private banks such as Warburg and Bleichroder - were now forced, often through gangster-like extortion, to sell out for a pittance to 'Aryan' buyers. Big business gained most. Giant concerns like Mannesmann, Krupp, Thyssen, Flick, and IG-Farben, and leading banks such as the Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank.

In any event, Thyssen's close involvement with the early Nazi Party and Adolph Hitler extends beyond any kind of conjectural peripheral business relationship some apologists might try to suggest, and was far more intimate than is even outlined in the Wasserman and Fitrakis article. One can only speculate as to the content of conversation that took place between members of the Bush family and Fritz Thyssen during those years 1934-1942. How'd ya like to be a fly on that oily wall. Yee-Gads.

You know, my wife and I were out one night walking the street, when we saw a couple alighting from a gleaming Toyota Land Cruiser adorned with Bush/Cheney bumpersticker, just as a couple of black teenagers walked by. And what was interesting was that not only didn't they immediately leap back into the car and lock all the doors--they actually said "Hello" to them!

Imagine: conservatives acting like human beings. My spouse said, "I just wanted to run over and hug them!" I agree: We need to see more of that. After all, in a nation where so many media conservatives demonstrate complete cluelessness about minorities, it was great to see two conservatives acting like equality is a natural fact of human interaction. And it felt good, it did, to cheer these all-too-rare displays of basic human decency from a segment of the population that is beset on so many sides by obstacles to tolerance: gated communities, fear-mongering periodicals, white demagogues, unadmitted drug dependencies, religious hypocrisy, and let's face it, just pig-ugly ignorance.

We all want conservatives to succeed at being fully human. It's a basic human trait. And that's the beauty of keeping a constant mental tally of conservative behaviors the rest of us take for granted, because it also reminds us of our own superiority. I'm sure conservatives appreciate being recognized this way too.

What could be wrong with that?

That was more or less a lie.

Lying is lying, we're told by the strict non-relativists among us. Since there are occasions when they turn into the most gelatinous of relativists, as for instance on the questions of Arnold and women, these non-relativists are completely capable of taking into account "context" when they need to.

Well, all lies have a context, and those who would be fair need to acknowledge context in all situations, but in spite of that, I can see with absolute non-relativistic certainty, all lies are not equal.

Atrios has an example of a bait and switch lie, among the more common committed by Bush & Co that is beyond comment.

So says our President.

Buoyed by the first increase in the nation's employment since January, President Bush campaigned in the Middle West today, where he declared that his tax-relief policies would lead the country out of government deficits and toward wider prosperity for the American people.

"It's based upon this theory," Mr. Bush told an audience estimated at 1,000 in the Milwaukee convention hall. "When somebody has more money in their pocket, they're more likely to demand a good or a service; and in our society, when you demand a good or a service, somebody's going to produce the good or a service; and when somebody meets that demand with production, it means somebody is more likely to be able to find a job.

"The tax relief we passed, letting people keep more of their own money, is an essential ingredient to making sure people can find work in America," Mr. Bush said as his audience applauded

Gee, thanks for that wonderfully clear, not to say simple-minded explication of your theory of free market economics, but not so fast, Mr. President. Let's take a moment to check out what well-known, universally admired, distinctly left of center, and always witty economist, Max Sawicky has to say on the subject.

There is a new employment report out today, and the job growth number has finally turned around from negative to positive. 57,000 jobs were added in September, the first positive month since January

(edit)

How big is 57,000? Not big enough to reduce the unemployment rate, since the labor force grows faster than this rate of change implies.

Still, up is better than down. Does it mean the tax cuts are working, or that they could work? No and no. The tax cuts have already failed, the Congress has failed, and the President has failed. All we're doing now is plumbing the depths.

One thing about the moral clarity of our President, you never have to wonder if this President might be aware of alternate views outside the particular box in which his own opinions are formed. The chances that any of the President's staff, who by his own admission do his reading for him, would ever have acquainted him with the work of a Max Sawicky can reliably be projected as nil. Not surprisingly considering sentiments like these:

The fiscal policy mandate for the Federal government is to do its utmost to alleviate job losses. We are now looking at four million jobs lost since the start of the recession. Job losses mean individual bankruptcy, mortgage foreclosure, eviction, repossession, loss of health insurance, homelessness, hunger, and other bad stuff.

The President and other tax cut supporters promised huge job gains as a result of their policies. Instead we are seeing huge shortfalls, relative to their promises.

How many of you can even begin to imagine this President having any concrete awareness of the connection between high unemployment and that list of social ills, raise your hands?

Nor is that connection something that your SCLM is going to be talking about the minute there are any continuing upticks in economic outlook. That is going to be our challenge in the next fifteen months.

I know I'm repeating myself, but this challenge is one that can't be repeated, analyzed, and acted upon too often.

Max's own think tank, Economic Policy Institute, has an important site, "Job Watch, Tracking jobs and wages" you should bookmark, and return to often to renew your arsenal of information about the exact dimensions of the failure of Bush's economic doctrines.

One could ask, what doctrines, since other than paying lip service to them, the only legtimate economic role for government the President appears to genuinely believe in is cutting taxes. So don't be surprised that there are more cuts in the (clearing of throat here) pipeline, and as ever, they're skewed to make sure the haves keep on having, in a manner worthy of robber barons.

The point here has nothing to do with anything as exotic as class warfare; if any statement that comments on economic inequities is to be taken as class warfare, then class warfare has been going in this country long before Marx was a gleam in the eye of Papa Marx. Max has one up by Benjamin Franklin; here at 'corrente,' we're planning to replace Monsieur Voltaire with some shockingly radical market-doubting comments by Thomas Jefferson, and yes, the sainted Lincoln.

The point, as John Edwards points out in most of his speeches, better than the other candidates do, even Dr. Dean, is the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the upper economic rungs of our society, by leveling progressive taxation on wages in multiple ways, many hidden, while reducing taxes on unearned income in ways just as hard to keep track of.

The Center on Budget Policy & Priorities has all the gruesome details here.

Study, remember, share.

Memo to Maureen Dowd:

There's a difference between removing a politician over unconfirmed groping allegations by known liars (to say nothing of consensual relations with a third, truthful one) and not voting for someone over admitted, worse assaults.

So Novak was on MTP this morning once again pinning responsibility on CIA for not warning him off naming Plame. CIA warned him, he said, it just didn't warn him strongly enough. It remained for Dana Priest, also on the program, to gently point out that CIA can't do so without blowing her cover and violating the very law at issue.

You'd think that Novak, with 40 years in journalism, would know this.

Welcome to the Wal-Martocracy.
The bloated pecksniffian Burkha-Mart of bottom-feeding American corporate gluttony.
Hey, isn't gluttony one of the seven deadly sins? Yeah, I think it is. But that won't discourage the self anointed high pontifices of Sam Walton's white Christian Nation retail whale. Nope. Onward Christian family values Babbittry. Onward slackjawed holyrollin' frivol-sheep and pious patriotic wowsers of the fabulous Philistinoi Wal-Mart Word. Wasting their oxygen wandering up and down the antiseptic avenues of a fucking mindless labor rights perverting consumer junkie Gehenna.

Travel not with a ruthless man,
lest he weigh you down with calamity;
For he will go his own way straight,
and through his folly you will perish with him.
- Sirach, 8:1

Behold a white horse:

In a Washington Post article headlined 'Lobbyists Set Sights On Money-Making Opportunities in Iraq,' a partner at New Bridge Strategies, a company headed by Joe M. Allbaugh, President Bush's 2000 campaign manager and the former director of FEMA, said: "Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products would be a gold mine. One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out 30 Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country." Via Cursor.org Oct 2, 2003.

Feel the patriotic "small business" Republican love?
Welcome to 9-Eleven and Bush-Mart's "New Bridge" to the 21st century.
Dominus Capitalis Expendere.

More:
Many thanks to reader "lea-p", commenting at NTodd's Dohiyi Mir blog, for pointing to Mark Morford's June 2003 SF-Gate op-ed titled "In A Wal-Mart Hell."

This is Wal-Mart. The glorious consumer mecca, the epic wonderland/wasteland of prefab landfill merch, not only the world's largest and most powerful retailer and the most aggressive snarling frightening happy-place marketer and quite possibly the most hideously overlit soul-draining monster empire you will ever know in your entire lifetime, but also the very multibillion-dollar pseudo-Christian kingdom that censors their offerings and refuses to sell certain music CDs and bans "risqué" beer-'n'-babes mags like Maxim and FHM and Stuff, because, you know, pretty girls are evil.

Read all of Morford's smote of the Wal-Mart beast here:
In A Wal-Mart Kind Of Hell; Censored magazines, banned music and pseudo-Christian fun at America's scariest retailer. Truely, if you have never read it, do so, you won't regret it.

And always read NTodd's regular column at Open Source Politics. Because OSP is one of the best blog shops on main street - and - NTP knows his inventory.

That is all. I'll be in the barn looking at dirty naked lady tractor calendars if anyone needs me.

Kenneth "The Threatening Storm" Pollack in the NYT proves that he was really a double agent for the appeasers and quislings in the Democratic Party all along:

But within the C.I.A., the exposure of Ms. Plame is now considered an even greater instance of treachery. Ms. Plame, a specialist in nonconventional weapons who worked overseas, had "nonofficial cover," and was what in C.I.A. parlance is called a Noc, the most difficult kind of false identity for the agency to create. While most undercover agency officers disguise their real profession by pretending to be American embassy diplomats or other United States government employees, Ms. Plame passed herself off as a private energy expert. Intelligence experts said that Nocs have especially dangerous jobs.

"Nocs are the holiest of holies," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former agency officer who is now director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. "This is real James Bond stuff. You're going overseas posing as a businessman, and if the other government finds out about you, they're probably going to shoot you. The United States has basically no way to protect you."

Nothing to see here, folks. She was clearly just an analyst, and besides everyone knew she was an operative, and besides if her identity was secret, no harm was done. And in any event, she was a Democrat.

Gloating Republicans used to taunt us for defending Clinton over Lewinsky, but I really don't see how one can sink much lower than defending this. Clinton was Alfred Dreyfus compared to the leakers and their accomplices in the Bush Administration.

Over at Slate, where John Kerry's hairdo is a constant matter of grave concern, Jack Shafer assures us that the Plame scandal is likely much ado about nothing.

1) Shafer commits every armchair lawyer's biggest mistake, which is not reading the entire statute. Instead he bases his entire argument on paragraph (a) of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, and the assumption that the leakers were not authorized to receive classified information, to conclude that the leak to Novak did not reach the threshold for prosecution. Unfortunately for Shafer, paragraph (c) reads,

Whoever, in the course of a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents and with reason to believe that such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States, discloses any information that identifies an individual as a covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such individual and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such individual’s classified intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned not more than three years, or both. (emphasis added)

No requirement that the leaker be "authorized" here, Jack, and I daresay that shopping the same leak to 6 journalists before finding the not-too-bright Novak qualifies as a "pattern". As for the mens rea element of the offence, well, that's what trials are for, aren't they? Until you have a defendant you can't very well make that determination. But note that even here, the statute does not care much about actual motive or knowledge of the leaker, but whether the the leaker has "reason to believe" that the leak would harm intelligence activities.

I for one would be happy to listen to Bush Administration officials testify as to why there was no reason to believe that blowing the identity of a covert operative working on WMD's would have any effect on national security. It would certainly be a bracing change of pace from their usual imputations of treason to any critic of their policy, not to mention its carefully burnished image as Selfless Protector of the Nation.

2) Shafer ignores the background to passage of the Act. Here's what one person had to say at the Act's signing:

The Congress has carefully drafted this bill so that it focuses only on those who would transgress the bounds of decency; not those who would exercise their legitimate right of dissent. This carefully drawn act recognizes that the revelation of the names of secret agents adds nothing to legitimate public debate over intelligence policy. It is also a signal to the world that while we in this democratic nation remain tolerant and flexible, we also retain our good sense and our resolve to protect our own security and that of the brave men and women who serve us in difficult and dangerous intelligence assignments. (emphasis added)

The law is broadly intended to bar the revelations of agents' names for the purposes of influencing public debate over intelligence policy; it's not a narrowly tailored "Stop Phillip Agee Forever Act." Gee, it's almost like Reagan was channeling the Plame scandal. Imagine that.

3) Shafer is, as usual, missing the forest for the trees. Hell, he's even ignoring the trees. This is, it bears repeating, about sliming a career diplomat, ruining his spouse's career, and harming national security as political payback for publicly crossing the Bush Administration about lies told to lead us into a disastrous, illegal war. If that is legal, it only compounds the scandal.

Shafer should try working standing up for a change.

WaPo:

Wilson and his wife have hired Washington lawyer Christopher Wolf to represent them in the matter.

The couple has directed him to take a preliminary look at claims they might be able to make against people they believe have impugned their character, a source said.

I bet everyone named by the Wilsons will raise national security as a defense against having to answer questions. And the press will nod along.

Good profile of Wesley Clark's conduct of the Kosovo campaign in the NYT that throws cold water on several of the memes being circulated by smearmongers on the Right, such as the Pristina airfield episode:

General Clark's plan was to put NATO troops on the airfield to make it impossible for reinforcements to land. But a British general, Mike Jackson, who was in charge of the peacekeeping force that was to stabilize Kosovo after the Serb troops withdrew and who now serves as the head of the British Army, complained that it was too risky, famously asserting, with some hyperbole, that it would be risking World War III.

Britain was the United States' staunchest ally, and so the Clinton administration decided to defer to the British position. Still, General Clark's recommendation was not rash; it was a judgment call that had been discussed in detail in Washington and that was initially supported at senior levels of the American government.

The reporter, Michael Gordon, covered the Kosovo war. Firsthand experience with his subject probably makes him automatically subversive to Clark's detractors on the Right, but sane people might want to go check out the article.

Good news from the NYTimes:

The nation's unemployment rate held steady at 6.1 percent in September as businesses added to payrolls for the first time in eight months, suggesting a turnaround in the weak job market.

A survey of U.S. companies showed a net increase of 57,000 jobs last month in wide-ranging industries, the Labor Department reported Friday, and there was new hope for recovery in the slumping manufacturing sector. Some 29,000 factory jobs were lost, but that was considerably fewer than in previous months.

(edit)

Job losses in August, initially reported at 93,000, were sharply revised to 41,000, a positive sign, he said.

Wall Street extended its gains into a third day on the encouraging data, which reinforced investor hopes that the economy was recovering. In morning trading, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 103 points and the Nasdaq gained 11 points.

But this President is not about to rest on such narrowly based laurels. No siree.

The Bush administration said the reports were positive news. But President Bush will not be satisfied because ``people are still looking for work,'' said his chief spokesman, Scott McClellan.

As long as there is a single American who can't find work, this president will not rest from the arduous task of promoting exactly the same economic ideas with which he took office.

Bush is touting the job-creating power of small businesses as he looks to blunt news about an economy that is not generating enough jobs. He was meeting Friday with small business leaders in Milwaukee before giving a speech on the economy.

Bush was to renew a call for six steps that he has said would build confidence among employers and strengthen the economy, ranging from health care measures, streamlined regulations and restrictions on medical lawsuits to a comprehensive energy plan, expanded trade and tax breaks. Bush also has challenged Congress to make recently enacted tax cuts permanent rather let them expire on schedule.

On the other hand:

The number of jobless people looking for work for 27 weeks or more rose to 2.1 million last month. Also, people working part time because they can't find full-time work increased to nearly 5 million, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said.

If my arch tone suggests some skepticism about the president's sincerity, it's not meant to. What the president does or does not genuinely feel about unemployment seems to me to be an irrelevancy, and surely one of the more obnoxious aspects of this administrations policies is its insistence that George Bush's personal, deeply felt commitment to this or that program is precisely how that policy should be judged.

Is it not the sourest of ironies that two of the most persistent raps on Bill Clinton, that there was something unseemly about his public display of "caring," and that such caring was a function of his own narcissism which meant that it was always about himself, turn out to be far more applicable to George W. Bush? What could be more narcissistic than the White House's schedule of events around the country, designed entirely to present evidence that the president cares about this or that issue, followed by an evening fund raiser at which the faithful are reassured for whom his true heart will always beat.

What matters is that Bush is continuing the madcap economics of the Reagan era, cut taxes, cut social spending, increase beyond all sense military spending, ignore deficits, but make sure their true dimension isn't ever glimpsed by using the surpluses of Social Security receipts to obscure that fact, yes that same supply side theory that Clinton won his first term by criticizing as a failed economic theory, and then spent the next eight years trying to clean up the mess that theory had made not only of the economy but of the social contract.

Since the SCLM always writes most about the large overarching storylines, as the economy picks up steam, that SCLM is going to create an illusion of growing economic strength, however unevenly is the distribution of its benefits, and however oblivious this administration remains to long-range problems like the underfunding of private pensions, or the continued reliance on non-rewnewable resources, all investment in renewable resources limited exclusively to lip service.

So it's not too soon for all of us who think that the advances in the quality of lilfe for growing numbers of Americans accomplished by Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, none of which even Nixon dared undo, are worthy of defense, to begin to consider how we at the grassroots level can assure that to the drumbeat we can expect from the finely tuned Republican propoganda machine, a countervailing flow of information will be getting out to the voters, even if it means a lot of us standing outside of supermarkets passing out flyers that reproduce stories that tell it like it is for far too many Americans, like this one published recently in the CSMonitor:

Underemployed: a euphemism for violent lifestyle change

By Barbara Card Atkinson

In our house, Bush's child-tax rebate checks went to past-due utility bills, groceries, and a full tank of gas. So much for stimulating the economy.

My husband and I are two of the almost 1 million "underemployed" in this country - a demure label for a violent lifestyle change. We, with our college degrees and previous incarnations as latte-swilling yuppies, are now attempting - and failing badly - to keep our family of four afloat on an average combined income of substantially less than $1,000 a month.

Like those others, we're holding our breath, waiting for the economy to rebound. For us, it's been more than a year. Our personal trajectory in the high-tech flameout happened to so many others that it's now cliché: the faltering of a dotcom job, the bankruptcy of a software company. We had great connections, my husband and I, so finding another job wouldn't be a problem, we thought.

Read the whole thing, it's a story worth remembering.

With that inimitable sense of innocent wonderment that so becomes him, Howie wonders what on earth the connection, the thread out of the labyrinth, the elusive common factor could possibly be ... between The Ar_nis™ being outed as Der Gropester, Rush Limbaugh being outed as a racist and a man whose maid brings him back drugs in a cigar box, and the as-yet-not-outed White House official who outed Valerie Plame?

What could the connection be? Could it be .... liberal bias in the media?

Howie, no. There is a commmon factor, and I'll tell you what it is:

Republicans breaking the law in shamelessly scummy ways!

In reality, not as part of some ginned-up two-bit VWRC-funded whore-churned scandal...

Say, how's your wife, The Ar_nis™'s press secretary, doing on that Nazi thing?

Bush on tax cuts.

Yep, they're responsible for our low, low unemployment rate of 6.1%!

Has excellent analysis of the Limbaugh flame-out, as well as a fine series (which I missed when it was first published) on the origins of the Bush family fortune.

AP in time for lunch:

The Justice Department also sent a new letter to the White House requesting that it turn over some materials, spokesman Scott McClellan said Friday.

"Some materials" ... Hmmm...

Meanwhile, the Democrats continue to hammer on Ashcroft's refusal to recuse himself. Schumer points out that Ashcroft did recuse himself in the 2001 probe of former Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., because Torricelli had campaigned against Ashcroft in the attorney general's unsuccessful bid for re-election as a senator from Missouri in 2000. And in 2002, Ashcroft recused himself from an Enron investigation because he had received $60,000 from Enron in campaign contributions. So why doesn't he recuse himself in a situation where he paid one of the (potential) suspects in a criminal investigation $300,000 in consulting fees?

And ABC's The Note tells the White House to brace themselves "for some new bylines to show up on the Wilson story perhaps quite soon." Seymour Hersh would be nice...

Speaking of bylines: The Howler deconstructs a piece by Jennifer Harper of the Washington Times. It seems that in her coverage of public opinion "beyond the Beltway" she manages not to mention that 82 percent of the American people called The Plame Affair "serious" until the last third of the piece. Isn't 82% is a lot of "beyond"?

UPDATE: AP gives detail on a memo from White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to White House staffers on how to comply with DOJ's request for more documents. Staffers have until Tuesday to turn everything over to him and will have to sign a "certificate" saying they've turned everything relevant over. The story says that Gonzales wants "electronic records, correspondence, computer records, notes and calendar entries." From DOD and State, however, DOJ wants "phone logs, e-mails and other documents." Interesting that phone logs (and cell phone bills?) are on DOJ's list, but not on the White House list. Just the reporting, or something more? Again, "some materials" ...

The Plame Affair today (is Bush off the hook?); versus Whitewater (back).

So he's a recognized screwup on the economy, and now he's a recognized screwup on foreign policy. Yet he's still perceived as a "leader." And if that's not risible enough, he's also perceived as having "more honesty and integrity than most people in public life and 6 in 10 credit him with making the country safer from terrorist attack."

The "leadership" question didn't rule out "leading the country off a cliff," so perhaps that poll result doesn't prove that 60% of Americans are complete imbeciles. But honest? There's some deep, deep denial going on. Someone you love needs a copy of this under the Christmas tree. As Atrios observes, at 300+ pages, this must just be Volume I.

MoveOn, against Der Groper.

Well, the Plame Affair seems to be losing steam—NPR gave it a sentence this morning, placed in the context of the larger "struggle for Iraq" (as the Times would put it). However, as alert reader anonymous reminds us, these things take time. And alert reader Melanie points out that the CIA will drive the schedule.

The original story is as compelling as ever: A White House official shops a story all around DC designed to undermine the reputation of Niger yellowcake whistleblower Joseph Wilson, for revenge, and in the process reveals the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative in WMD, which is a felony. Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame agrees, saying "It seems to me appropriate to find out if somebody in the White House put ideology above the law."

To repeat: A potential felony, committed by a high White House official. Motives: intimidation and revenge. That should be the story.

Three factors are converging to reframe and bury the story—not all, it must be said, driven by the White House.

First, the press is framing the story under the heading "Iraq"; that is what NPR did this morning, and that is what the Kremlinology yesterday did as well.

This takes the focus off the commission of a crime, and puts the focus on Inside Baseball-style political commentary and "analysis." (The keyword is "partisan squabbling" or putting the word scandal in quotes.) Here the press is much more comfortable, since no legwork or reportage is required, and little in the way of actual work. Moreover, no offense need be given to powerful sources. (Today, the Post put "Steno Sue" Schmidt on the case, presumably hoping that the great work she did with Ken Starr's "career prosecutors" will be repeated with the DOJ investigators in The Plame Affair.)

Second, the press will not focus on its sourcing, nor on its behavior. Obviously, it's necessary for the press to protect sources, or there'd be no whistleblowers at all—and indeed, the intricate dance of "anonymous sources", "administration officials," "White House aides," "confirmation" and so forth would come to a halt. This predictable story is how the news is done. So the idea of simply subpoena-ing Novak, in whose column Plame's name first appeared, for the name of the criminal who revealed Plame's identity is not on. (Incidentally, the statute under which the criminal would be prosecuted protects Novak.)

However. The criminal shopped the story to six different journalists/news organizations. As Atrios wrote yesterday, every Beltway insider already knows the name of the criminal. Only the American citizen doesn't know. As Richard Cohen wrote yesterday of the original story, "Somehow, someone got in with a conscience." But the person with a conscience was the administration official who broke the original story of the crime.

We have yet to see a person with a conscience come forward from journalism. For example, the Post wrote a "balanced" editorial this morning on whether an independent counsel might shield the investigation from political pressure. Well and good—but suppose that one of the six different journalists to whom the criminal shopped the story was a Post reporter?

Will the Post break the logjam by asking its reporters to see of their source will release them from their pledge of confidentiality in this matter? From its side, will the White House break the logjam by asking its officials to release journalists from their pledge of confidentiality in this matter? If not, the press and the White House are colluding to maintain business as usual regarding sourcing and the creation of the news, and that is a new story.

Third, DOJ and the White House together have reframed the story. The story is a felony committed by a White House official. The FBI, however, is treating The Plame Affair as a leak of classified information. This shifts the focus from the White House to the White House, DOD, and State. That is, instead of a circle of suspects of perhaps twenty people—remember, the original story said quite explicitly that the criminal was an administration official, not some underling at DOD or State—the circle of suspects is in the 100s. Still, the circle of 20 is where the DOJ intends to start. According to several reports, the the DOJ will "move quickly" "within days" to interview those who have been named in the press as possible perpretrators. However, as a letter from Ashcroft to Hastert, cc Cheney, makes clear if you read between the lines, the whole purpose of "investigating" leaks is not to catch anyone. That is the true "expertise" of the "career prosecutors" in this field at DOJ. (Letter via Atrios alert reader Sovok.)

In the days of Nixon, the press would have called that stonewalling. Stories headlined "Leak investigation could go beyond White House" signalled the success of this tactic, as did the analysts who agreed that the investigation is going to take a very long time. (It would, as Josh Marshall has suggested, be simpler to release Karl Rove's phone logs, which the White House has done when it served their purposes.) Of course, "where there's a will, there's a way" as John Dean points out in Salon (get the one-day). Judge Norma Holloway Johnson tried Starr leaker Bakaly during Whitewater, with success.

The bottom line for today: Bush thinks he's off the hook, and he might be right.

"I'm against leaks," Bush said, to laughter. "I would suggest all governments get to the bottom of every leak of classified information." Turning to the reporter who asked the question, Martin Mbugua of the Daily Nation, Kenya's largest daily newspaper, Bush said, "By the way, if you know anything, Martin, would you please bring it forward and help solve the problem?"

"Everybody needs to have a good abogado," Bush said, drawing laughter as he used the Spanish word for "lawyer." "I've got a really good one," he added, to more laughter. "Al Gonzales is my lawyer and close friend."

As before, the answer is for someone with a conscience to step forward. Will it happen? Who will write the J'Accuse for The Plame Affair?

Other aspects of The Plame Affair include:

• the administration's "slime and defend" tactics (Krugman) and
  intimidation of critics


• whether Ashcroft should recuse himself, since Rove billed Ashcroft for over $300,000 in consulting fees. (It's no good saying the matter is up to the "career prosecutors," since Ashcroft has to sign off on every subpoena.)


• the intricate nature of the law under which the potential felony would be prosecuted


• Spector's recantation


• Payback from the CIA to the White House as a spark for the initial story


• Loose use of intelligence for political purposes by the White House; Bush, for example, often speaking candidly about classified information to Bob Woodward (via Atrios.)


• Plame's classic good looks, via Kos


• The Oedipal ironies that the law the White House criminal broke was passed under Bush's father.


• The fact that the Plame and Wilson can bring a civil suit (Salon; get the one-day) (thanks to alert reader gabe)


• The still conveniently antiquated White House phone system

OBL...

WMDs...

Saddam Hussein....

The criminal in the White House who outed Valerie Plame...

Why is that?

UPDATE: Thanks to alert reader radish for reminding me of Saddam. I knew there was something....

Helpful Democrats have suggested a variety of ways for the criminal investigation in The Plame Affair to proceed expeditously (great Newsday coverage), including having White House officials sign affidavits or take polygraph tests to the effect that they didn't identify intelligence operative Valerie Plame, and that any staffer who refused to participate should be fired—apparently all standard investigative techniques in cases of this kind. (Interestingly, the Heritage Foundation advocates this course as well.) At this point, however, no investigators have showed up, and the realization is dawning that the probe could take a long time. No White House staffers have hired lawyers, as of yet.

This morning, an anonymous Republican Senator also tried to be helpful: "The lesson that all of these people never learn is: Cut your losses... The mistake they are making is the classic error - deny, obfuscate, delay, etc."

Could that helpful Senator have been (notoriously loose though Pennsylvanian cannon) Arlen Spector? Says Spector this afternoon: "[R]ecusal is something Ashcroft ought to consider." Interestingly, Spector was not on the list we gave earlier of Senators that the White House was watching, suggesting that the White House political operation is less efficient than usual right now. In fact, the White House assessment only this morning of "So far so good"—"There's nervousness on the part of the party leadership, but no defections in the sense of calling for an independent counsel"—has already collapsed. (Who would the Attorney General recuse himself in favor of except an independent counsel?)

Meanwhile, White House spokesman Scott McClellan seems to be taking refuge in technicalities. He categorized the above suggestions as "hypothetical" and refused to say whether Rove had encouraged journalists to write about Plame. "We're not going to go down every single allegation that someone makes. We can do that all day long. Let's stay focused on what the issue is here."

And speaking of technical details, the 11 hour delay between DOJ's "heads up" to the White House and the formal criminal referral was just about the time that Ollie North needed to destroy evidence back in the Iran-Contra affair, according to John Barrett, former federal prosecutor and law professor at St. John's university.

And speaking of criminal referrals, the process goes like this:

Justice Department officials say they received a CIA "crime report" about possible disclosure of classified information soon after Novak's column, then sent the agency a list of 11 standard questions to answer about the case. Those answers were received last week, leading to the decision to begin a probe.

So what did the DOJ ask, and what did the CIA answer? And what will the DOJ ask the other agencies, and what will they answer?

The Plame Affair today here; as treason here; versus Whitewater here. Oh, and there's Kremlinology from The Times and MSNBC.

UPDATE: Ashcroft's DOJ now expects other agencies, like the DOD and State, to be involved in the probe as well. This is interesting, since the original story involved White House officials, limiting the circle of suspects to about twenty. Widening the probe (what for?) would expand that circle to hundreds and take months. But surely there's no need for that? ABC's The Note reports that WaPo has returned to the language suggesting that the criminal was a "senior administration official" motivated by a desire for revenge.

UPDATE: The newest line seems to be that the White House didn't really want vengeance—the motive for the crime assigned by the officials who originally sparked this story (back)— the White House simply had "the desire to explain why, in their view, Wilson wasn’t a neutral investigator" when he did the investigation of the Niger yellowcake story. This line has its problems: if the White House only wanted to attack Wilson's neutrality, why not just do that, instead of revealing his wife's identity as an intelligence operative, which is a Federal crime?

UPDATE: DOJ's acting deputy Robert McCallum "is an old friend and Yale classmate" of Bush's; "both were members of the secret Skull & Bones Society at Yale."

UPDATE: Thanks to alert reader Sidhe.

UPDATE: Although the administration proposes to leave the matter in the hands of its career prosecutors, this will be difficult to carry out in practice, since DOJ regulations require the Attorney General to sign all subpoenas.

Like the one numbered N8354N.

Thank heavens for Google caching, where we can look at the (now scrubbed) site for this (former) Republican staffer's views:

The title of this blog ["N8354N"] marks an inflection point in current Missouri politics -- on that day, the worm began to turn.

Right. "N8354N" was the number of the small plane that crashed, killing Democratic Senator Mel Carnahan.

Some "inflection point," the death of an opponent, eh?

Wonder what's up with that Wellstone investigation....

So says the father of Johnny "Mike" Spann, another dead American intelligence operative.

"If someone in the Bush administration leaked this, they need to be punished, and they need to be made an example of, because that's not just a leak, that's treason," Spann, of Winfield, Ala., told The Associated Press. "They should appoint an independent counsel so the American people can be sure, and let the chips fall where they may."

As Clyde Prestowitz remarked on ABC

Politics is a contact sport, of course. But even in football, you have rules against illegal contact and I think this one clearly is in that category.

Except that this is not a game....

No, I don't think the White House's "leaks are bad" line is going to stick ....

The Plame Affair today here; the Plame Affair versus Whitewater here.

The Freeper thread on the providentially nicknamed Rush is just too delicious. Highlights:

"Look at there full court press, going after Arnold on the groping, GWB and Ashcroft on this CIA thing, and Now Rush with a Drug Habit.

If this isn't Hillary and Co. and the Art of Personal Destruction Crowd trying to pull down ALL GOP numbers so she can throw her hat in the ring, I am Richard Millhouse [sic] Nixon.

I am not a Tim Foil Hat Type but ..."

"I agree with you - this is the beginning of something that I can't even imagine.

I need to remember to take a deep breath (a VERY deep breath) and - being a Christian - I will then remember that God IS in Control!!

May God have mercy on us."

"OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH LORD PLS HELP ME!!!!

OH LORD!!!

THEY COULD NEVER GET RUSH ANY OTHER WAY!!!
NOW THEY FOUND SOMETHING ON HIM!!!
THEY ARE GOING THE LEGAL ROUTE!!

HELP!!!

DO NOT SURRENDER!!!!!!!!
DO NOT SURRENDER!!!!!!!! "

"Rush - say it ain't so - Rush --PLEASE, say it ain't so!!"

To quote Morpheus: "Welcome to the real world."

Life being a heavy-handed ironist, I am of course listening to that Great Republican, Stevie Ray Vaughan, when I pull up the latest news about El Rushbo:

A wall of denial
Is fallin' down
Wo it's fallin' so hard
Down to the ground
Never knew something so strong
Could be washed away by tears
But this wall of denial
Was just built on fear

Bill "The Bookie" Bennett, Plame-gate, the Gropinator, now this.

The way things ought to be, indeed.

Looks like some folks are having trouble detoxing, however. Maybe David Brock can organize a group intervention?

The Plame Affair is viewed as "very serious" by 48% of those polled by the Washington Post. 68% of them think that an outsider should be in charge of the criminal investigation. (Here is the law.)

Of course, an insider is in charge: John Ashcroft, who is in a "delicate position" because of his deep ties to all the officials he is about to investigate for the commision of the crime. In particular, Karl Rove (a leading suspect) was a paid consultant on three of Ashcroft's campaigns. Interestingly, even Rove associates think that Ashcroft is going to have to recuse himself. It doesn't help that someone at DOJ gave the White House a "heads up" before the officially notifying them of the investigation (Atrios); some might see that as giving a criminal the chance to destroy evidence.

Unless the White House can keep the lid on. Reframing the story as a "leaks are bad" story (example) has brought the Bush damage control team some success, if the metric is headlines. (Though see AP here.) Most of the headlines use the word "leak," and the story has dropped off the breaking news on the wires.

However, the "leaks are bad" line is so weak that it's hard to believe that it will hold up for long; the polling data above suggest it's already been discounted by the public. Richard Cohen of WaPo risks stating what must be obvious to all: "[H]ypocrisy was on display Tuesday when President Bush indignantly declared war on leaking, asserting that there are 'just too many leaks.' The president, as is his wont, misspoke. What he meant to condemn are leaks that do damage to his administration." So DeLay distributing paper sacks labeled "Leak Hyperventilation Bags," while cute, probably won't have much impact outside the Hill. (It's hard to see how the atmosphere there could be more embittered than it already is.)

So fresh damage control tactics are already emerging from the White House, as Tresy has already seen (back). The White House is now trying to make Plame's husband, Ambassador Wilson, the issue, asserting that Wilson, the yellowcake whistleblower, contributed to the Democratic Party (example). Josh Marshall deals with that high floater by pointing out that Wilson also contributed to the Republican party; and whether he did or not, that has nothing to do with whether a White House official committed a crime by revealing the identity of Ambassador Wilson's wife, an intelligence operative.
Unlike Whitewater (back), this one is serious.

Meanwhile, the defense that Plame was just an analyst—that the criminal could not have blown her cover since she had no cover to blow—has been quietly dropped; it turns out that Plame was, indeed, an operative, and so the law applies. Condi Rice's line that the CIA's criminal referral to the DOJ was just a routine matter has also been dropped.

With regard to the potential for an independent investigation, the Republicans are trying out the "overreaching" meme for themselves, but it's hard to see how that will stick, given the prima facie case for the commission of a felony. Here again, the Republicans are trying a line that the polling data suggests people have already discounted.

Republican tactics depend on making sure that no Republicans break ranks. The Republicans the White House is watching include Senators John McCain of Arizona, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John W. Warner of Virginia, and Representative Porter J. Goss of Florida. And it looks like Hagel is breaking ranks already.

Finally, a new suspect has emerged: "Scooter" Libby from Cheney's Office (Josh Marshall). (Readers may remember the Veteran Intelligence Professionals and the work they did to bring Cheney's intimidation of the intelligence community to light as the White House built the case for the Iraq war.)

In the world outside the Beltway, crises fester. It's unfortunate that accurately assessing and interpreting North Korea's announcement that it has plutonium and will make bombs with it depends on the WMD intelligence community—exactly the community that Plame worked in as an intelligence operative.

Unless, of course, the Bush administration has already decided to go to war.

More than half a billion to cover aWol's narrow ass.

That's one expensive ass!

1. With the Plame Affair, there's a prima facie case that a crime had been committed. Revealing the identity of an intelligence operative is a felony. Not so with Whitewater. There, investigation was needed to determine whether a crime had been committed.

2. With the Plame Affiar, the national security is involved. Plame worked as an operative, and worked in the WMD field. Not so with Whitewater, a decade-old failed real estate speculation.

3. With Whitewater, there was never any sense to it. That's why the story kept changing. Everyone knew that whatever Bill Clinton cared about, it wasn't making money in real estate. (When we got to Monica, there was a story that made sense at last, but that was several years down the line, and had nothing to do with the real estate deal that sparked the initial investigation.)

In The Plame Affair, by contrast, the motivation of the Bush administration is quite straightforward: to intimidate whistleblowers by ruining their careers. Anne Gerhart of WaPo has a real thumbsucker trying to "puzzle out" the logic of the crime (not "leak," crime).

Could it just possibly be intimidation—not just of whistleblowers in the intelligence community, but whistle blowers in Plame's field, the WMD community? After all, with North Korea and Iran posing proliferation issues—and most of our strength tied down in Iraq—the administration has every incentive to keep very tight control of WMD intelligence. (They may have concluded that the lesson of Iraq was not that the intelligence was bad, but that the story broke.)

4. With Whitewater, there was an entire quasi-journalistic cottage industry and meme tranmission apparatus funded—note that word—by the right-wing (Scaife, et al.) dedicated to keeping the story before the public by constantly generating scandal. There is no VWRC in The Plame Affair.

5. With Whitewater, the regular press (especially the Times) brought the memes transmitted by the into the mainstream. There is no equivalent to the VWLC in The Plame Affair.

6. In Whitewater, the "independent" counsel statute was in force. Not so with The Plame Affair. For the crime to be investigated properly, and for justice to be done, professionals in both the criminal justice system (John Dion, a 30-year career prosecutor at DOJ) and the press will have to be allowed to do their jobs, will have to do them, and will have to be seen to do them.

7. Whitewater was never genuine grounds for impeachment; it was not a "high crime." The Plame Affair, since it involves both the national security and the commission of a felony, is.

8. In Whitewater, the elected President was a Democrat, and the government was divided. In The Plame Affair, the President is a Republican, and all three branches of government are in Republican hands.

Bennett, Savage Weiner, now Colonel Blimp himself.

The Bushies are continuing to push the notion (as parrotted by Tucker Carlson on Crossfire today) that there's a scandal of some sort in the CIA sending the allegedly "negligent" Joe Wilson to Niger, seemingly forgetting that the Administration itself has long since admitted that the uranium claim was bogus, confirming Wilson's report.

If only we'd sent someone who didn't let facts get in the way of ideology, seems to be the argument, we wouldn't have all these problems.

Smear your critics, and when that blows up in your face, throw rationality overboard and smear them some more. It's like some collective form of mental illness with these people.

*Here.

Wingers Coulter and convicted felon Ollie North at an official Boy Scout rally, trashing Democrats as quislings and finding gay people "personally offensive."

And speaking of gasbags going down in flames...

Yes, they're still running that headline, "The Struggle for Iraq," but under it are the following bullet points:

• Text: White House Counsel's E-mail


• Justice Dept. Starts Inquiry on Leak of C.I.A. Officer's Identity (Aug. 8, 2003)


• Joseph C. Wilson's Op-Ed: 'What I Didn't Find in Africa' (July 6, 2003)

Really, these items don't have a lot do with the "struggle" for Iraq, do they?

They have to do with the (now potentially criminal) nature of the Bush regime and the character of those who have gained power within it—a subject the Times has resolutely refused to face up to, with the honorable exception of some of its editorial writers, like Paul Krugman.

C'mon, guys! WaPo is beating you like a gong on this story!

It's important to remember, as the White House desperarately tries to make the Plame Affair an issue of leaking in general, or a problem with the press, or a "routine matter," or anything but what it is—a case where a White House official (potentially) broke the law— to keep using the word "criminal."

Remember, Plame was a CIA operative, and revealing the identity of an operative is a felony.

Felonies are committed by criminals.

Therefore, there is a potential criminal in the White House, and we need to discover who it is (or who they are). That's the issue, and let's keep the focus on it.

Freeway blogging.

Probably seen by more eyeballs than Atrios, too.

Following on the timid Molly Ivins, who wants Democrats to confine themselves to polite disagreement about Bush's "wrong" policies, Bob Somerby thinks Jonathan Chait should have kept his big mouth shut instead of running "to hand his head to the cons" with his New Republic piece, Mad at You." Chait's thought crime? Saying he "hates" Bush, thereby supposedly vindicating the current vogue for exposing vile "Bush hating" among liberals.

Digby has had typically trenchant things to say about the GOP's sudden, touching concern for Democrats' mental health that I can't possibly improve upon. However, Somerby's chastisement of Chait, and Ivins' advocacy of unilateral disarmament, marks a peculiar turn in the evolution of this debate that cries out for response.

It's certainly true, as Somerby amply documents, that "Clinton hating" during the 90s had a much wider and more demented cast to it, than "Bush hating" does now. However, in so doing Somerby commits the fallacy of treating "irrational hate" as a redundancy, so that it is not possible to properly and validly hate someone.

On the contrary, as Robert Wright would agree, hate is one of the moral emotions, whose evolutionary utility is to enforce social values by mobilizing the collective disapproval of society at flagrant violations of those norms. Simply put, hate is healthy when it functions to identify and punish the most serious malefactors. The question, then, is whether a given hatred is well-founded, or if it is simply the hypocritical expression of the hater's own aggrieved self-interest tricked up in moral garb.

This is where the spuriousness of the comparison between Bush- and Clinton hating completely breaks down. Unlike the case for hating Clinton, the case for hating Bush does not depend in any way, shape or form on manufactured evidence, speculation about motives, or unwarranted inferences from known facts. (No, I'm not saying Clinton didn't do anything worthy of censure.) You don't have to believe in the Bush family's connection to the Nazis, his possible desertion from the Air National Guard, whether he "let 9/11 happen," or even the role of oil interests in motivating the rush to invade Iraq. The real grounds for hating Bush, which Chait eloquently lays out, is the complete mockery his life, persona, and policies make of the very Christian values that he and his followers claim to promote, of honesty, hard work, compassion, frugality, humility, and sincerity, to name just a few.

This is a professedly "moral" man (and movement), after all, who has knowingly set us up for an unavoidable fiscal crisis a decade from now by repeatedly lying to the voters about his policies (and appealing to their short-sightedness) in order to line his own class' pockets; in the process he is undermining, likely intentionally, social institutions and compacts between generations that have taken decades to nurture. And that's just for starters. What's not to hate?

If we aren't allowed to state this baldly and with a healthy sense of outrage, we're not being fully human, and we're certainly not fulfilling our responsibilities to each other as moral citizens. As Chait puts it in a rebuttal to David Brooks and others yesterday, "[I]f Brooks wants to proscribe all Bush-haters, not just the conspiracy-mongers, then what he seeks isn't a higher level of discourse but raw partisan advantage." Hating Bush openly is not "handing one's head to the cons"--that's holding one's head up, and speaking the truth to illegitimate and abusive power.

The standard GOP gambit when caught in yet another scandal is to define culpability as narrowly and irrelevantly as possible, and then shout vindication when they successfully stonewall investigation on that issue. This was successfully deployed in Iran-contra, where the failure to prove that the demented Regan "knew" of the sale of arms to a terrorist nation was used to paint the entire investigation as a witchhunt and ultimately justify Bush I's pardons. The dodge this time, as Lambert reminds us, is to shift the discussion onto leaks generally to minimize this particular one. So let's keep the big picture in focus here. Someone in the White House:

repeatedly leaked the name of a CIA agent to the press

breaking federal law and jeopardizing national security

to exact political payback

for the exposure of lies

uttered by the President

to the public

to justify putting American lives at risk

in a war that itself was illegal.

It doesn't get much uglier than this. We can't let them get away with reframing the issue.

link to this post - by Tresy :   9:50 AM | |

The crime: Revealing the name of a CIA operative is a felony that carries a penalty of up to 10 years in jail and a $50,000 fine. In this case, the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, was revealed to two journalists (Robert Novak and Time magazine). Note that the law applies not on the journalists for printing the name, but on their source, who revealed it.

Means: The White House shopped the story involving Plame to at least six journalists and/or publications, two of whom (Robert Novak and Time) printed it.

Motive: The administration officials involved in the story suggest "vengeance" (back). Valerie Plame is the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, the whistleblower on the Niger yellowcake uranium story. Wilson suggests the additional motive of intimidating whistleblowers by attacking their families.

Suspects: The prime suspect is Karl Rove (Borger in the Guardian). The body language of the press suggests Karl Rove (scroll down); however, Cheney's office is also a possibility. (An otherwise mysterious comment by Bush at at a Chicago fundraiser suggests that Cheney is indeed the criminal: "Our country has had no finer vice president than Dick Cheney. Mother may have a different opinion."

Opportunity: Any White House official with sufficient clearance, whose job involves dealing with critics of the administration by neutralizing them. It's possible that the criminal was simply ignorant of the law; this would suggest a domestic Republican operative (i.e., Rove) rather than a national security apparatchik.

The investigation: Run by the DOJ, with the FBI doing the legwork. The investigation was immediately compromised by DOJ informing the White House on Monday evening that the probe was underway, while White House counsel Alberto Gonzales only issued a memo to staff to retain records the following morning. Whether the delay was inadvertant or not, it would give the criminal plenty of time to destroy any records of his (or her) crime.

White house tactics: The most recent memos from Gonzales, and Bush's recent talking points, try to take the focus off the actions of the criminal, and make the story one of leaking in general. This has the two-fold advantage of (a) taking the focus off the White House and putting it on the SCLM, and (b) intimidating the press and securing more favorable coverage. (Atrios; Josh Marshall.)

Interesting questions:

1. Why not simply subpoena the phone logs for the White House to find out who the criminal talked to on or around the date of Novak's column, which the White House has already done when it was to their advantage? (Josh Marshall) Assuming that the criminal didn't use a cell, of course.

2. Will the DOJ pull an Ollie North? That is, grant immunity to members of the press or White House officials as a way of damping down the scandal and making sure the criminal goes free? (Atrios.)

3. Who are the administration officials who gave details of the crime to WaPo and the press?

4. Who are the other 4 journalists that the criminal shopped the story to?

5. The original column from the now backtracking Novak was printed months ago, and journalists Paul Krugman and David Corn immediately wrote that it was evidence of the commission of a crime by an administration official. Why was a felony committed by a White House official not a story then?

6. Why did Tenet spark the scandal by referring the case to the DOJ?

7. Was Plame (merely) an analyst or an intelligence operative? The backtracking Novak suggests the former, but CIA officials (quoted by Drudge using an (uncited) transcript from Atrios) say otherwise.

And last but not least: 8. What is a good name for the scandal? One that will keep the focus on the White House criminal, and so defeat the tactics of the Bush gang?

UPDATE: Kos is going with "The Plame Affair" as well. I like it because "gate" is a cliche by now. "Affair" also pays homage to the Dreyfus Affair, which was a battle for the soul of France, much as resistance to the Bush regime is a battle for the soul of America.