McCain’s voting record

As a West Wing junkie (at least for the first three or four seasons, via DVD!) I’m really tickled by the fiction-meets-reality of the current kerfuffle about whether McLame voted for Bush in 2000, as reported by the NYT.  Arianna made the charge on Monday:

On her Huffington Post Web site on Monday, Ms. Huffington, the liberal blogger, said she had heard Mr. McCain say at a Los Angeles dinner party shortly after the 2000 election that he had not voted for the president he has now publicly embraced in his own quest for the White House.

The McLame campaign begged to differ:

“She’s a flake and a poser and an attention-seeking diva,” Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest aides, told The Washington Post.

So far, so usual.  We’re starting to see the little cracks in the McCain facade, most of which are distinctly fishier than not voting for Bush.  The land deals, the secret family tax returns, the manifest contradictions between the talk and the walk on everything from mortage-crisis aid to education for GIs.  The McCain krew are starting to adjust to the fact that they have lost an ideal democratic opponent, despite the O’Reillyites best efforts to reverse the democratic verdict in Indiana (which appears to have succeeded—the final margin was a bit over 11,000 votes, well within the extrapolation from the number of self-professed republican Clinton voters who claimed in exit polling that will not vote democrat in November).  What they don’t understand quite yet is the unflashy but extraordinarily durable power of a candidate who sticks to his truth.

In the case of the immediate issue, a few experts have been stepping forward to back up her story.  Brad Whitford and Richard Schiff, better known as Josh Lyman and Toby Zeigler, deputy White House Chief of Staff and Communications Director, respectively, for President Martin Sheen (the best president we’ve had in a long time), both remember McCain saying he didn’t vote for Bush in 2000.  Brad was sitting at the same table:

Mr. Whitford, who played Josh Lyman, the deputy White House chief of staff on the NBC series, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that he was sitting across from Mr. McCain and next to Ms. Huffington at the small dinner and that he was startled to hear the senator sharply criticize Mr. Bush. The senator has long blamed the Bush campaign for smear tactics against his family in the 2000 South Carolina primary, but by the end of the campaign Mr. McCain was publicly supporting his rival.

“McCain was just sort of going off on how much he disliked Bush and the horrible things that the Bush campaign had done to his family in South Carolina, and his exasperation with Bush about his ridiculous tax cuts and he really wanted to talk to him about it, but he said the guy doesn’t have the concentration, and you talk for 10 minutes and then the guy wants to talk about baseball,” Mr. Whitford said.

Another guest then asked Mr. McCain, Mr. Whitford recalled, whether he had voted for Mr. Bush. “And he put his finger in front of his mouth and mouthed, ‘No way,’ ” Mr. Whitford said.

Toby, I mean Richard, was sitting at the next table, so we can discount his supporting evidence, plus everyone knows he’s always very preoccupied with evolving speeches and with his complicated personal life. 

Unfortuntately, Whitford’s testimony sounds too much like the sane opinion of a normal non-candidate, not to mention a guy who’s adoptive family, which is not lily-white, had been made into primary campaign fodder by George W in that very receptive state of South Carolina.

All we need now is for CJ (Allison Janney) to plant a question at the daily gaggle about whether President Bartlet has anything to say about McCain’s apparent inconsistency. 

What’s actually not quite so funny is his instinct to lie about it.  We’ve had quite enough of that over the last couple of terms…

 

Depart, I say!

You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing.  Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.  In the name of God, go!

—MP Leo Amery, using the works of Oliver Cromwell to berate Neville Chamberlain, 9 May 1940

No one can accuse Hillary Clinton of sitting around, but large numbers of us heartily wish she would depart.

As with her partner, she has no one to blame but herself.  She never trusted her own instincts, perhaps because she couldn’t hear them over the static of image management and positioning that has gone on since she arrived in the Senate.  Lots of people come to New York state to run for higher office, but few have been as effective as Senators, at least to judge by the breadth of her support there.  You might say her original campaign for the Senate was a 62-county strategy, no mean feat especially for someone not naturally at home in the rural burgs and depressed ex-factory towns of upstate and the west.

She never needed to get stuck with her husband’s political inheritance, and she could have managed some distance from it without at all appearing to be disloyal.  After all, she endured the worst kind of public private humiliation and stuck with him.  She didn’t need to belittle her primary opponent’s rhetoric about coming together to get problems solved—her record of bipartisan management in the Senate, even as a rank freshman, has been impressive.  She didn’t need to put on the tank-helmet of sniper fire in Kosovo—she has built a credible enough history on the Armed Services committee to withstand the sniping of misogynist Republican warmongers.  And she particularly didn’t need all the pretzel logic around her Iraq vote, when like many of the rest of us, she believed that the Bushrovers could never be so ultimately and criminally mendacious as to completely stack the intelligence deck about WMDs and hang Colin Powell out to dry, live, in front of a world-wide audience.

All she had to do was say she was wrong.

She might have had a good run from Barak Obama, who as we have since seen in abundance, would have conducted a campaign in no way detrimental to the greater interests of the popular Democratic Party.  She had the brand, the organization, the early money (and a lot of it), the personal fortune (as we have since come to understand), the cadres of field ops, managers, advisors, and in-place pols at every level of government.  Regardless of Obama’s obvious qualities, it’s been Hillary’s to lose all along.

And the fallout from the initial shock of not just walking away with the prize has been ugly and depressing to watch.  How long have some of us waited for a truly viable female Presidential candidate?  How ridiculous is it that this has not happened yet in the US?  And yet, the kind of mandate of democratic heaven that Hillary Clinton started with seemed to bemuse her with a sense of personal inevitability that is almost always a fatal condition in US politics.  The historical rectitude of a woman president somehow converted to a far-too-obvious sense of personal entitlement, which in the context of dynastic family presidential politics of late should have been the last sensation to exhibit to the voters, sick to death, some literally, of the Bushes and all their works.

Now, in the latter days of her grimly smiling impersonation of indomitability, she has produced a truly terrifying display of posturing and pandering to deeply suspect tendencies.  Interviewer: “Is Obama a Muslim?”  Hillary: “No, of course not, not to my knowledge”.  That sneaky little phrase, with its outrageous but deniable innuendo, has been followed by any number of essentially right-wing republican maneuvers, of which the gas-tax holiday is only the latest.  The charges of elitism are so manifestly more accurate when reversed.  The idea that she is valuable because she has a lock on the white man redneck vote, which is just a veiled piece of racism—these guys are never gonna vote democrat anyway.  The escalating tendency to lump the black vote into a pro-Obama block, as if her own race-baiting didn’t make it so.  (Certainly her’s is a subtler species of racial polarization than, say, George Wallace’s, but no less toxic.)  

And now, soldiering on in the face of any kind of populist mathematics, the bottom line of all her current rationales cannot be other than inciting the super-delegates to overturn a pledged delegate and popular vote plurality.  If it were to come to pass, the Democratic party in one blow would sever its future life in a country that is increasingly of color and, as politicians are always the last to understand, inherited by our children.  She would be crushed by the republican machine in a race of unequaled vitriol, fueled by over a decade of monomaniacal opposition research, unable to effectively counter McLame on the war, or on most other aspects of a disastrous Republican foreign policy which has destroyed our credibility abroad and our credit at home.    

It is very difficult to see how Hillary can understand the value of continuing to fight the battle at this point.  It is not as if she will be seen as a weakling by bowing out.  I think she has burned up a huge amount of good will all over her party, and with independents, but she cannot even at this moment be seen as other than a formidable politician.  

But she doesn’t seem to know how to stop.  That’s really the veridical resonance of Samantha Power’s offhand remark to The Scotsman: “She’s a monster.”  Of course, she isn’t—she’s a first class politician who could have been the first female president of the United States.  That’s a painful prize to surrender.  But it’s even more painful to watch her frantically twisting to outrace her self-induced defeat.

Out with the “new”

An interesting synchronicity is presenting itself on either side of the anglophone Atlantic—New is looking pretty Old.  In the UK, Gordon Brown’s New Labour (well, Blair’s New Labour and Gordon’s inheritance) has taken a blasting in local council elections.  The highlight of this disaster has been the replacement of Red Ken as London’s mayor by Boris Johnson, an Etonian friend of the Tory leader and poster boy David Cameron.  London is obviously highly visible politically, but also is hosting the 2012 Olympics, so Boris will be getting his hands on some lush greenery with which to ease the financial way of backers and constituents alike as London dolls up for the show.  

The BBC’s analysis projects the local council results to a national vote share model, showing a result of 44% Conservative, 25% Liberal Democrat, and a paltry 24% Labour.  While the relative balance of Conservative and Labour are reversed compared to the 1995 results, which presaged the 1997 rout that brought Blair and New Labour to power, the Conservative percentage lead over Labour where they do indeed lead is about a third of that of Labour over Tory in 1995.  Still, it’s a huge blow for Brown.

It’s also a huge blow for New Labour.  The party seems to have been deserted by its left and left/center base, not least over the Iraq War disaster and its concomitant lies.  This despite the fact that Blair has been unquestionably the most telegenic and rhetorically adept PM in recent history.  Desertion by the base is never an inevitable result of running to the center in the short term, but (I submit) it always is in the long.

And what’s up over here, in the US, with the New Democrats?  The Democratic Leadership Council, or DLC, was founded in 1985 as a way of repositioning the Democratic party to somehow metabolize the apparent lessons of Ronald Reagan’s success.  Bill Clinton left its chairmanship while the governor of Arkansas to run for president in the 1992 elections.  At first he was just one of the so-called Seven Dwarves, a phrase which captured the esteem that year’s candidates were held in by the then-traditional-leadership of the party.  But of course Bill broke away from the pack, and two terms and one impeachment later, his vice president lost in an election stolen by the Bushrovers with help from the Supremes.

This year, in synch with Gordon’s travails in the Motherland, the DLC is again running a candidate named Clinton.  On the surface, she seems to be doing a bit better than Gordon, given the near impossibility of a Democrat losing after eight years of the worst president in modern history, and considering the current spin that she’s fighting back from a delegate deficit versus Obama.  But really, this is just a fantasy narrative concocted by news reporters in order to stay with the campaign as a story, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Hillary is toast, and she hasn’t gone about getting toasted in a very constructive way, either.  In fact, the comparison to Brown breaks down a bit because we really can’t say he’s pandered to traditional Tory postures the way Hillary has to Republican (even down to an Iran policy by that bomber extraordinaire, Curtis LeMay).  

Looking underneath her supposed support, we can see that a new set of constituencies is forming within the Democratic party, out of disgust with the performance not only of the dominant Republican governments of the last decade or so, but also of the more recently bare majorities of Democrats as well.  The kind of centrist trimming that has gone on for years now amongst Democrats in opposition, trying to keep the New Democrat/DLC formula alive, has fatally sapped the Democratic congressional party (just as it is the Parliamentary Labour Party).  Only Obama can revive the Democrats for the future, and by building a new coalition that is unafraid to move left but is also determined to build a majority.  We will see how Gordon attempts to do the same—there does not seem to be an Obama in the Labour Party.

Why was *he* in Vietnam?

Something even Barak Obama has been doing this primary season has been irritating the heck out of me, and I wonder if I’m the only one. For context, I should say that I’m of an age to have the dubious pleasure of already loathing a US president so intensely that I don’t have enough room in my loathing heart to loath W as I know he should be loathed. I could only be talking about Richard Milhous Nixon. You know, the ex-Quaker president from 1968-1974?

Georgie is a frat boy whom They let have a little war to distract him while They were busy ripping us all off blind. By comparison, Nixon was They. Sure, not the Real They (after all, he was originally a poor sniveler from Whittier, California). But whereas one catastrophe at a time is enough to keep W occupied, Dick Nixon could manage both the contemptuous attitude as well as the serious felonious activity all at the same time. And actually give enough people the impression that he was a statesman.

Sure Dick didn’t start the Vietnam war, but he lied through his teeth to get elected on a peace platform and then let it go on and on and on. All this in the face of years of well organized and vociferous opposition from a wider and wider spectrum of even the US World of Whitepeople. Nixon certainly didn’t flip the voters off in public like W (and his henchman and handler, the other Dick) routinely does, but I was not in the least surprised when I heard the tapes he made of his Oval Office ramblings, full of psychotic threats and compensating profanity. (Pretty funny in a macabre way to hear Henry the K egging him on in his hyper-intellectual Mittleuropa diction.)

Besides over a million Vietnamese, who mainly did nothing to deserve annihilation beyond living in Vietnam, a lot of guys got wasted out there in the jungle. Everyone knew that the Navy was one thing, firing the big guns from some miles offshore (though swiftboats like Kerry’s were extremely dangerous) but boots on the ground totally another. If you were a Marine or in the Army, you not infrequently got to go through some unimaginable hell. And there were flyers who chose to get as crazy as the river boat patrols, and fly choppers into battle zones to deliver troops or extract them and the wounded, guys so nuts that even the soldiers thought they were beyond it, despite their gratitude.

High above it all, there were the the B-52s. These guys had a truly remote-control war. Somewhat closer to the fire, Navy carrier-based pilots flew (after the early part of the war when A-1s were used) the A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft. These had a couple of 20mm cannons, and could mount 4 Sidewinders, an air-to-air heat-seeking missile, although an official Navy history lists only one air-to-air victory by an A-4 in the entire war.

What they mainly carried were ASMs (air-to-surface missiles) and bombs. Missiles included Shrikes (anti-radiation missiles that homed on antiaircraft radars); Mavericks (air-to-ground missiles for use in close support of ground troops) as well as the Bullpup and Walleye glide bombs that the Mavericks replaced; a variety of anti-personnel cluster bombs; and a massive number of Mk. 81 and 82 “dumb” bombs. The Skyhawk could carry up to almost 5 tons of bombs on five external hardpoints. They flew close enough support to be vulnerable to North Vietnamese anti-aircraft fire, which around places like Hanoi and Haiphong created reputedly the most heavily defended airspace in the world.

This is where John McCain got shot down in late October 1967. Thus began for him a truly harrowing captivity including two years of solitary and frequent torture, on top of extensive and untreated injuries from his downing and subsequent beatings. Refusing to be released in a propaganda ploy ahead of those in longer captivity, merely because his father was named commander of all US forces in Vietnam, shows his enormous self-control in the situation.

So when Barak honors McCain for this military service, to which service is he referring? The self-sacrificing captivity? Or the 23 bombing missions?

McCain’s calvary was a part of an infinitely larger catalog of horrors and inhumanity. Nothing about this diminishes his suffering or his manifestation of a perhaps unusual level of self-abnegation. Neither does retelling the story of this famous white man warrior’s captivity recall to us the hundreds of thousands of equally horrific maimings, burnings, killings, rapings, tortures, mass conflagrations, poisonings of land, air and water, starvations and unimaginably painful deaths from pestilence and random fire amongst Vietnamese and fellow US servicemen alike. A feast, an overload of death that McCain fully and enthusiastically participated in delivering.

This is the contradiction we’re all carefully avoiding this primary season. Barak (and Hillary, who in any case has carefully constructed her White Warrior persona since becoming a Senator and at the same time Presidential candidate-in-training) feels compelled to “honor” McCain’s “service”. Why? Why was he in Vietnam?

Why are we in Vietnam?

The one time I saw Norman Mailer in the flesh, he was drunk, and getting drunker and cantankerous, fueled by Marty Peretz’s no doubt more than adequate quality bourbon. It was a gathering in the fall of 1972 of undergraduates in the common room of a Prestigious East Coast College. Norman was clearly convinced that he was surrounded by anything but real men (I cannot even project what he might have been feeling about the college women).

Before he became totally combative, he held forth for a while about a theory that as I recall wasn’t uniquely his: that the Watergate break-in was actually an attempt to bug the Federal Reserve Bank offices on the floor above the DNC headquarters where the actual entry occurred. He was impressed by the fact that, according to the experts he had consulted, you didn’t actually need to put bugs right where you wanted to hear something. In the case of the Fed at Watergate, you would put them into the DNC’s ceiling, concealed and still able to eavesdrop on the floor above.

After that, and some razzing of Marty as a college professor and therefore, by definition, wimp, Norman tried to stir up a bit of race war by baiting one of my black classmates, imitating his southern black accent and pretty much carrying on like any drunken guttersnipe looking for a fight. By that point, he was clearly too loaded for anyone to take him on with honor.

It’s hard to really mourn the passing of, among other less-than-admirable qualities, such an inveterate misogynist. But it is telling that even as an 80+ year old artist, his loss will be felt. Whatever the literati might have been saying at any point, his writing in all its forms has always seemed to me utterly committed and fearlessly itself, supremely unconcerned with anything beyond manifesting his concerns and sense of his art. I imagine him as someone who loved the act of writing so much that he had no time amidst its effort to worry about the critics. (For sure he didn’t mind going round-for-round with them afterward.)

More than that, he pursued a craft that I think is key to our survival, if that is still possible in any form we would welcome. There is a real world behind the one we see in the news, in the halls of Congress and on the campaign trail. It is the place where our lives and fortunes are actually disposed of. This is not a paranoid delusion. It is simply a recognition of the fact that the Roman Circus of the media and of our visible governance process is a critical feature of a dictatorship that seeks to preserve the illusion of participatory democracy.

I think Mailer believed that, while he couldn’t sit in the smoky rooms and record the disposition of true power, he could imaginatively reconstruct the parts of it that interested him, without conceding that the result was “only” fiction. He never stopped and never flagged in this—most recently re-imagining the family and youth of Adolf Hitler no less. This superb assurance that he could pierce the veil of misdirection in this way, by right and by the strength of his own hand, is what we have lost in his inevitable passing. If we don’t tell each other these kinds of stories, we have no hope of understanding how our world is being destroyed, much less striking back at the true villains to save ourselves and our descendants. That is a kind of pugnacity, in the defense of individual human creation, without which we will not survive.

Twisty’s law

Twisty at I Blame The Patriarchy has proposed a radical revision of the legal concept of rape. As a het guy who believes that the more I can internalize the Twisty creed, the better my life as a man will be, I sometimes hold forth over there along with the able resident commentariate. I’m always (even in agreement) in some discomfort that it ain’t my living room but a women’s space. (Let’s just stipulate to all the role definitions that are anti-hetero-normative in using these terms.)

So in recent strong agreement with her proposal that women be considered in a default state of “no”, where any entry of personal space sans explicit invitation constitutes a legal form of rape, I also felt like inviting other non-female (in non-hetero-normative terms) feminist men to have at this point over here, so as to declutter the Twisty virtual mansion of any male detritus.

Not sure about the blog-etiquette here, but given IBTP’s recent banning of some male logic-chopping commentary, I didn’t want to attract any more trolls, while still feeling impelled to explore what the Twisty Law might mean for men’s behavior and their standard-issue patriarchal set of conceptual norms.

Here’s a copy of a recent comment that invites “men” to participate in this exercise (trying reading Twisty’s original blog entry first):

I think the discussion of consent is useful only to remove it from the new situation being proposed—after all, Twisty’s Law is designed to vaporize the whole consent issue. What interests me at the moment is how the new situation might look in action.

First, forget about “romance” and “love”. The human spirit can soar, but not in those particular patriarchal coffins. What man can think about these concepts without an immediate context of hunt and chase? They are rooted in power-over and its uses, however witty and debonair.

Next, men have to deal with the fact that in a universe that continuously oppresses women in every manner available, only explicit agreement can be a basis for entering a woman’s space in any manner, let alone an intimate manner. (I’m not shying away from saying “sex” here, I’m just not sure what it means in the context of the Twisty Law.) The notion that the default situation is “no” makes this totally transparent and concrete as a personal interaction. The fundamental counterproposition to any male whining here is ask who would want to enter another’s space, no matter how previously intimate, when in any doubt of one’s welcome? To me the only answer here is simple—a rapist. Sure, its a strong term in the more subtle cases, but (a) lets own it because we do it, and (b) the intrinsic issue doesn’t change with the level of “subtlety”.

Furthermore, men who want to graduate to humanhood have to let go of our supposed right to “have sex”. This is just a removal of our object’s agency. (I mean, in terms of a “right” to “sex”, one can’t even speak of a “partner”.)

Rather than scare up any more male logic-shpielers here, don’t trash this tread with more mens’ rumination but join the comment thread on my blog (click my name).

Comments?

Comfort Women

The annals of the patriarchy manifested a particularly twisted conjunction today. I could not pass it up without some kind of deconstructive notice. The hook in the NYT story written with interesting diffidence by Norimitsu Onishi:

The long festering issue of Japan’s war-era sex slaves gained new prominence last week when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denied the military’s role in coercing the women into servitude. The denial by Mr. Abe, Japan’s first prime minister born after the war, drew official protests from China, Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines, some of the countries from which the sex slaves were taken.

We needn’t tarry too long to consider the amazing stupidity of this comment. Applying the Mayer Principle that almost all international politics is domestically motivated, it would appear that Abe is reacting to a proposed non-binding resolution in the US Congress that would request Japan apologize for its military’s institutional brutalization of several hundred thousand abducted women over a period of years during WW2, and playing in his politically weakened condition to his far right wing (a move familiar outside Japan).

As to any debate that it was actually the Japanese military’s direct responsibility,

Ms. Ruff was living with her family in Java, in what was then the Dutch East Indies, when Japan invaded in 1942. She spent the first two years in a prison camp, she said, but Japanese officers arrived one day in 1944. They forced single girls and women to line up and eventually picked 10 of them, including Ms. Ruff, who was 21.

“On the first night, it was a high-ranking officer,” Ms. Ruff said. “It was so well organized. A military doctor came to our house regularly to examine us against venereal diseases, and I tell you, before I was examined the doctor raped me first. That’s how well organized it was.”

Abe’s LDP cronies are trying to “soften” a 1993 statement by the government admitting some kind of military involvement in the Japanese sexual slave system—they apparently believe that 200,000 women were prostitutes who volunteered.

The occasion for the 1993 statement was the activity of

a Japanese historian, Yoshiaki Yoshimi, outraged by government denials, [who] went to the Self-Defense Agency’s library and unearthed, after two days of searching, documents revealing military involvement in establishing brothels. One was titled “Regarding the Recruitment of Women for Military Brothels.”

One point I take from this, cited from an earlier NYT story by Onishi linked below, is that the evidence was publicly accessible and easy to find.

This is a famous instance of mass, continuous rape, clearly understandable as such even if you are someone who does not want to consider prostitution a form of rape. It was visited on thousands of captive women from conquered populations by the most rigorously organized military force in the world at the time, operating from one of the greatest imperial powers of the last century.

Many in the US consider Japan as having gone to war in 1941—which of course is when they attacked Pearl Harbor. But the Japanese were at war long before even the Germans, invading Manchuria in 1931, fighting intermittently with China until full-scale war (which westerners call the Second Sino-Japanese War) starting in 1937.

In its opening phase, the Japanese army conquered the Chinese city of Nanjing (Nanking), inland from the recently conquered Shanghai, subduing the city on 13 December 1937. In what is popularly known in the west as the “Rape of Nanking”, Japanese soldiers raped, pillaged and murdered for six weeks, throughout the city and surrounding area. Some 300,000 murders are usually cited, although there is still a Japanese nationalist element that denies the Rape ever happened.

Along with military freedom to murder civilian populations goes freedom to rape. During the Rape of Nanjing,

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East [the Pacific War's version of the Nuremburg Tribunal, for Japanese war crimes] stated that 20,000 (and perhaps up to 80,000) women were raped—their ages ranging from infants to the elderly (as old as 80). Rapes were often performed in public during the day, sometimes in front of spouses or family members. A large number of them were systematized in a process where soldiers would search door-to-door for young girls, with many women taken captive and gang raped. The women were then killed immediately after the rape, often by mutilation. According to some testimonies, other women were forced into military prostitution as comfort women.

As to the “comfort women”, of whom one might argue (if they had been unlucky enough to live in Nanjing during the Japanese occupation) that they fared better than some of their raped, mutilated and murdered sisters, we have some useful analysis from a Japanese legislator allied with Abe (quoted in Onishi’s first NYT story at the time of Abe’s statement):

“Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies, who recruit their own staff, procure foodstuffs and set prices,” Nariaki Nakayama, the leader of 120 lawmakers who want to revise the declaration, said Thursday.

“Where there’s demand, business crops up,” Mr. Nakayama said, according to The Associated Press. “But to say women were forced by the Japanese military into service is off the mark. This issue must be reconsidered, based on truth, for the sake of Japanese honor.”

For anyone in their right mind, this needs no further comment.

One graf in particular in today’s NYT story seemed to me to be positively booby-trapped and ready to explode in readers’ hands, with its presentation of complex layers of painful patriarchal logic:

Japan’s deep fear of rampaging soldiers also led it to establish brothels with Japanese prostitutes across Japan for American soldiers during the first months of the postwar occupation, a fact that complicates American involvement in the current debate.

This paragraph says that Japanese in the immediate post-war period, whose army murdered, raped and pillaged its way across much of Asia, and to a dependable level of historical certitude sexually enslaved several hundred thousand women from occupied populations in order to service the Japanese armies of occupation, feared the same treatment during their own occupation. To prevent this danger, they sexually enslaved Japanese women in order to service the Allied armies of occupation.

This is not an entry intended to slam Japan or Japanese. The sexual enslavement of Japanese women in order to prevent mass rape by the Allied occupation is just another example in an endless line of evidence that for women as a sex class, there is no liberation in sight.

_________________________________________________________________

Norimitsu Onishi’s March 2 article; March 8 article

First peep in ages

Almost a year—the environment has continued to leave me basically speechless. But it doesn’t have to be a totally vacant lot. As The General says,

There is so much to learn about the glorious Republican candidates running in the service of our Bush…here is a list of reading material so that you can bone up on Republican candidates in the hottest Senate and House races in the country.

Share these links with your friends and family, and plaster the links all over your blogs and web pages!

–AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl
–AZ-01: Rick Renzi
–AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth
–CA-04: John Doolittle
–CA-11: Richard Pombo
–CA-50: Brian Bilbray
–CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave
–CO-05: Doug Lamborn
–CO-07: Rick O’Donnell
–CT-04: Christopher Shays
–FL-13: Vernon Buchanan
–FL-16: Joe Negron
–FL-22: Clay Shaw
–ID-01: Bill Sali
–IL-06: Peter Roskam
–IL-10: Mark Kirk
–IL-14: Dennis Hastert
–IN-02: Chris Chocola
–IN-08: John Hostettler
–IA-01: Mike Whalen
–KS-02: Jim Ryun
–KY-03: Anne Northup
–KY-04: Geoff Davis
–MD-Sen: Michael Steele
–MN-01: Gil Gutknecht
–MN-06: Michele Bachmann
–MO-Sen: Jim Talent
–MT-Sen: Conrad Burns
–NV-03: Jon Porter
–NH-02: Charlie Bass
–NJ-07: Mike Ferguson
–NM-01: Heather Wilson
–NY-03: Peter King
–NY-20: John Sweeney
–NY-26: Tom Reynolds
–NY-29: Randy Kuhl
–NC-08: Robin Hayes
–NC-11: Charles Taylor
–OH-01: Steve Chabot
–OH-02: Jean Schmidt
–OH-15: Deborah Pryce
–OH-18: Joy Padgett
–PA-04: Melissa Hart
–PA-07: Curt Weldon
–PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick
–PA-10: Don Sherwood
–RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee
–TN-Sen: Bob Corker
–VA-Sen: George Allen
–VA-10: Frank Wolf
–WA-Sen: Mike McGavick
–WA-08: Dave Reichert

Big Balagan’s new home

Hello—this is the new home of Big Balagan, formerly lodging at bigbalagan.typepad.com.  I've transfered the old content.  And I feel another fit of blogging coming on…

The People v. Bush

It is a pleasure to see the Bushrovers being dealt with like the little criminals they are. 

It’s not only that Libby has been indicted.  The whole process that Fitzgerald and his team have pursued is a classic of prosecutorial form, in particular the way in which they are winding it up.  They are dealing with the inner Bush team like any other band of gangstas—starting with the smaller fish, leaning on them to provide the scaffolding into the main arena, corroborating (or, mainly, anti-corroborating) statements with various press tools used in the Bush spin cycle, letting the principal targets twist in the wind for as long as possible (gaining, no doubt, additional ‘cooperation’ along the way); and for the piece de resistance, putting a big arm on the VP’s COS. 

The grand jury has run through its maximum allowable tenure—but Fitzgerald has mentioned that he may call them back for one or two bits and pieces as he wraps up  (or another grand jury, its not clear).  Having landed Libby for five counts, what could be left?  And, really, why Libby?

Libby is one of the more self-effacing of these operators.  Rove is a star, though he may appear to slave for W—W is his creation in so many ways.  Cheney is absolutely his own creation, and sui generis as well.  So Scooter is a junior G-man—can anyone imagine that he pursued the Wilson vendetta without clear direction from Cheney? 

Luckily, Fitzgerald was able to catch Scooter in some lies.  As he insists, this is not a trivial matter in a national security investigation—in fact, he was pretty clear that, in terms of his personal theory of prosecution, going after prejury and obstruction is continuously necessary for the health of the justice system.  It is only when viewed amongst his co-conspirators that Libby’s indictment seems a bit of a denoument.

But wait, there is more.  For gentle reader, know that Fitzgerald is still using leverage.  We didn’t see Hannah or any other apparently cooperating minion hauled away in chains.  They were useful in hooking Libby.  But Libby is also only bait—for Rove, or better yet, for Cheney.  Because Libby is going to think hard about the cost and pain  if the trial goes forward, and is going to worry in a way that Rove would not (he can write his own ticket with any rightwing national candidate in the country) and that Cheney will never have to (Dick could pay a lot of legal bills without running through all that blind trust money from his Halliburton days).

Fitzgerald has pulled of a very elegant piece of plotting.  He has landed on Libby like a ton of bricks, in the most public and humiliating way possible (the guy didn’t even reveal a secret agent, he is just a liar).  This sets Libby up for the next phase.   If his trial goes forward, we get Cheney and Rove on the stand—will all sorts opportunity for perjury.  Alternativly, Scooter can cop a plea—but there is a price for that: Cheney and/or Rove.  For all of his air of "I’m done and I’m heading back to Chicago", Fitzgerald is still heading for the real finale.

[Elliot Ness over on the right]

UPDATE 11/11/05:  see Murray Waas’ piece in National Journal (lead grafs here):

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald delayed a decision on whether to seek criminal charges against Karl Rove in large part because he wants to determine whether Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, can provide information on Rove’s role in the CIA leak case, according to attorneys involved in the investigation.

Even if Fitzgerald concludes in the near future that he does not have sufficient evidence to charge Rove, the special prosecutor would not rule out bringing charges at a later date and would not finish his inquiry on Rove until he hears whatever information Libby might provide — either incriminating or exculpatory — on Rove’s role, the sources said.

Where are the Weapons of Mass 1st Amendment Destruction?

An explosion of indictment rumors has been coruscating through blogland and the MSM in the past couple of days.  One pair of sparks was the publication in last Sunday’s New York Times of both Judy Miller’s statement about her grand jury testimony as well as (finally) coverage of her situation in depth by a team of NYT professionals (Van Natta, Liptak and Levy).  (There is excellent rumor-parsing, news aggregation, and commentary in Dan Froomkin’s Washington Post column,  the bunch at Needlenose, those at firedoglake, and Laura Rozen at Warandpiece.)

The Times’ front page effort carries, unobtrusively, a nevertheless bright thread of scepticism, including the last subhead, "A Puzzling Outcome".  Along the way, it implies that editorial management was fragmentary and lax, and even after the jailing, unable to come to grips with the intricate plotting via multiple agendas in the case.  It does not paint a complimentary picture of Ms. Miller, but one has to say it is far easier on her than a number of other commentaries by fellow journalists that have emerged.  (Just scan through the recent entries at Romenesko.)

Those of us who were disgusted by the sychophantic reporting of US correspondents from the Iraqi front during the invasion phase of the war have good reason to recall Judith Miller’s work from that period, not least since it appeared in lead positions in the blessed Newspaper Of Record.  In the US, war reporting has been carried out with neither fear nor favor since WW2 and certainly so during the Vietnam War.  George Clooney has apparently constructed a large extended middle finger aimed at the news media in his just-released Murrow film, for example, celebrating Murrow’s courage in calling out Joseph McCarthy on the air.

Judy, on the other hand, has functioned as a virtual mouthpiece for the Bushrovers, especially in justifying the Iraqi invasion based on supposed WMDs in Hussein’s possession.  Eventually, in May 2004, the Times published some retrospective criticism.

Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.

The mea culpa cites a number of "problematic" articles, without citing authors, but as Sunday’s professional Times coverage summarizes,

The note said the paper’s articles on unconventional weapons were credulous. It did not name any reporters and said the failures were institutional. Five of the six articles called into question were written or co-written by Ms. Miller.

One has to feel for the embittered pros on 43rd Street.  Reporters are famous for protecting their turf, but Judy is infamous for it.  The story about her supposed Secret clearance, claimed by her to other reporters on the battlefield as grounds for excluding them from her particular place in the WMD search, is either an indication that she will lie for exclusive control of her sources, or will utterly compromise her journalistic objectivity for them.  Yet after all that specious coverage of the run up to the war, and after virtually gagging her colleagues for months on a story that potentially is leading to a governmental traffic accident of Watergate proportions, once waivered by viva voce she still won’t break a crust with them:

In two interviews, Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.

And three of the last four grafs of their piece must have been particularly ironic to write:

On Tuesday, Ms. Miller is to receive a First Amendment award from the Society of Professional Journalists. She said she thought she would write a book about her experiences in the leak case, although she added that she did not yet have a book deal. She also plans on taking some time off but says she hopes to return to the newsroom.

She said she hopes to cover "the same thing I’ve always covered - threats to our country."

The Times incurred millions of dollars in legal fees in Ms. Miller’s case. It limited its own ability to cover aspects of one of the biggest scandals of the day. Even as the paper asked for the public’s support, it was unable to answer its questions.

The First Amendment award from the professional society, the book deal, the millions in legal fees, the damage to other reporters’ work and the paper’s image with its readership—and, hopefully, a return to covering "threats to our country"—its a wonderful bloody life in journalism. 

I expect to see some high-level damage at the Times in the near future, including (one can only hope for the sake of the other reporters who have sweated and occassionally lost blood for their work) the departure of Ms. Miller herself—despite her attempt last Sunday to out-parse the parsers.

From her account, she seems lost in a parallel journalistic universe in which protecting her special governmental access is the only public good she can serve.  So sensitive is she to the rights of endangered "sources" that she must wait patiently by the phone until these sources call her direct, and she can monitor by the tone of their voice for a desired absence of coercion, before spilling the beans.  Despite signed waivers that permitted other reporters to cooperate with the grand jury, Judy claims to be receiving contradictory signals on some sideband no one else can pick up:

At the behest of President Bush and Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Libby had signed a blanket form waiver, which his lawyer signaled to my counsel was not really voluntary, even though Mr. Libby’s lawyer also said it had enabled other reporters to cooperate with the grand jury.  [from Miller's "personal account"]

Ms. Miller authorized Mr. Abrams to talk to Mr. Libby’s lawyer, Joseph A. Tate. The question was whether Mr. Libby really wanted her to testify. Mr. Abrams passed the details of his conversation with Mr. Tate along to Ms. Miller and to Times executives and lawyers, people involved in the internal discussion said.

People present at the meetings said that what they heard about the preliminary negotiations was troubling.

Mr. Abrams told Ms. Miller and the group that Mr. Tate had said she was free to testify. Mr. Abrams said Mr. Tate also passed along some information about Mr. Libby’s grand jury testimony: that he had not told Ms. Miller the name or undercover status of Mr. Wilson’s wife.

That raised a potential conflict for Ms. Miller. Did the references in her notes to "Valerie Flame" and "Victoria Wilson" suggest that she would have to contradict Mr. Libby’s account of their conversations? Ms. Miller said in an interview that she concluded that Mr. Tate was sending her a message that Mr. Libby did not want her to testify.  [from Sunday's Times Van Natta, Liptak and Levy piece]

Mr. Tate was "sending a message", or "signaling" the opposite of what he was saying.  When, rather than risk the extension of her heroism to another grand jury term, Miller authorized one of her attorneys (Bill Bennett) to contact Libby’s lawyer on August 31, Tate told him

Mr. Libby had given permission to Ms. Miller to testify a year earlier. "I called Tate and this guy could not have been clearer - ‘Bob, my client has given a waiver,’ " Mr. Bennett said.  [again, from Van Natta, Liptak and Levy]

I guess it wasn’t clear enough when it was clear the first time.  Alternatively, even if (as it appears from Murray Waas’ article) the issue of permissive versus tampering communication from Libby’s lawyer to Miller’s lawyer is a potential grand jury issue, it is hard to understand why a journalist with a waiver wouldn’t write the story.  After all, we are talking about a source who is blatantly trying to control news spin, after the fact of a collosal failure of policy and of governmental intelligence (of several varieties), not some whistle-blower on the low end of the GSA scale.  Judge Hogan, who sent Miller to jail, said "She has the keys to release herself.  She has a waiver she chooses not to recognize."

And there turns out to be no difficulty at all in navigating the supposed conflict between Tate’s supposed representation of Libby’s testimony that he told Miller neither Plame’s name nor anything about her undercover status, and the fact that Miller found variants of Plame’s name in her notes.  In summarizing (we assume accurately) her testimony in last Sunday’s piece, Miller says

My notes indicate that well before Mr. Wilson published his critique, Mr. Libby told me that Mr. Wilson’s wife may have worked on unconventional weapons at the C.I.A.

My notes do not show that Mr. Libby identified Mr. Wilson’s wife by name. Nor do they show that he described Valerie Wilson as a covert agent or "operative," as the conservative columnist Robert D. Novak first described her in a syndicated column published on July 14, 2003.

These points are important, because it is illegal to expose the identity of a covert agent.  But by Miller’s account, Scooter didn’t do it, so what’s the problem?

What is ironic, and may become more so as we learn the extent, if any, of Fitzgerald’s indictments and the actual charges, is that all this havering about what Libby meant or didn’t mean to convey, which is necessary to protect her sacred news source and the First Amendment, has potentially contributed to what current speculation defines as Libby’s greatest technical exposure: witness tampering.  Laura Rozen quotes Murry Waas:

Evidence indicating that Libby or his attorney may have tried to discourage or influence Miller’s testimony is significant for two reasons, outside legal experts say. First, attempting to influence a witness’s testimony might in and of itself constitute obstruction of justice or witness-tampering, said the experts.

So let’s review the position.  Judy prefers not to testify about her conversations with a senior public official.  The only way to avoid this is to ignore the de jure waiver she has from him, and pretend that representations made by his lawyer constitute a form of message from him requesting that she not testify.  But in explaining these implicit "messages" that drove her to source-protective silence, Judy damages her source in another way, by reinforcing a suspicion that Libby was trying to tamper her testimony as a grand jury witness.  Finally, why does she care?  Perhaps Libby has answered this in his own poetical way, to quote from his September 15 letter to his reporter friend:  "Out west, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning.  They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."

But these apparently directive "messages" are of course different from the kinds of information Libby was supplying during the meetings in question.  Journalism-tampering is not a crime, at least (so far) not at the Times.

Is Baghdad Burning?

Who controls communication about this war?  That has become more a question about peoples’ information consumption habits, rather than about control of the channels themselves.

Consider a comparison of today’s Presidential video con with the troops and the blog Baghdad Burning. 

W, like all recent presidents, has an awesome information machine at his disposal.  It used to be (starting with Ike) that for personal TV coverage of the Pres, there was a news conference—going to that level of real time was reportedly a scary loss of control for the handlers in those days.  Now, the news pump can be always on, and hooked into the zillions of fibres carrying propaganda to your home instantly.  This level of saturation and message control is the logical evolution of a process that started to pick up steam in the 60s.

Of course, all the imperfections get instantly transmitted as well (Nixon’s five-oclock shadow, for example).  With W, you get that funny sense that his words are not quite connected with his brain—I don’t mean that he seems stupid, just that he seems to be working very hard to say the thing he thinks he should or has planned to say, while also trying to seem folksy and spontaneous as if he had no plan to say it.

The medium is so open and omnipresent now that big imperfections also are sometimes revealed.   Like today’s totally scripted prep for W’s up-to-six questions of the troops, caught ahead of the actual call via the already open cable feed.  From ThinkProgress:

Earlier today, Pentagon communications aide Allison Barber “insisted” to reporters that questions during President Bush’s photo-op teleconference “were not rehearsed,” and that no “specific questions” were prepared.

Unfortunately, she was caught on tape acknowledging just the opposite — that she had “drilled through” “all six” of the questions that Bush was going to ask:

BARBER: So here’s what you to be prepared for, Captain Kennedy, is that the president is going to ask some questions. He may ask all six of them, he may ask three of them. He might have such a great time talking to you, he might come up with some new questions. So what we want to be prepared for is to not stutter. So if there’s a question that the president comes up with that we haven’t drilled through today, then I’m expecting the microphone to go right back to you, Captain Kennedy, and you to handle [it].

If W’s usual cardboard folksiness didn’t destroy the attempt at spontaneity, this news certainly did. 

But lets assume all came off as "planned"—what would the best case have looked like?  W, talking from a podium (as Wonkette points out) "cheated toward the press cameras with one quarter turn", spilling out the rhetoric fewer and fewer citizens are buying, sucking whatever political life he can from the obvious patriotism and bravery of soldiers in the field.  That is the best he could have hoped for.  It falls pretty far short of convincing, or even of having its own kind of integrity though you disagree with the position.

No amount of communications technology can substitute for the acute observation of a single, engaged, critical observer.  In contrast to Bush’s preamble to the scripted questions today

We got a strategy, and it’s a clear strategy. On the one hand, we will hunt down these killers and terrorists and bring them to justice, and train the Iraqi forces to join us in that effort.

The second part of the strategy is a political strategy, based upon the knowledge that you defeat a backward, dark philosophy with one that’s hopeful. And that hopeful philosophy is one based upon universal freedom. I’m very impressed that the Iraqi government has continued to work to have a constitution that attracts Sunnis and Shias and Kurds. They’ve worked hard to get a constitution, and now the people of Iraq are going to get to vote once again, on a constitution, in this case.

you can get an entirely different point of view on that wonderful constitution from the author of Baghdad Burning, a blog apparently by a young Iraqi woman living there.  She (I believe in both her girlness and Iraqi-ness, so I’ll honor that possible truth) has, unusually often for her, posted every week for the past three, discussing and dissecting the drafts of the constitution (from the Arabic as well as English language NYT translations).  Her most recent entry is more about how the constitution does or does not fit into Iraqi life, as she knows it anyway, describing her irrascible neighbor’s use of her copy of the Arabic draft to clear up some tooki berries pruned from a shared tree.

I frowned and tried to hand her the Arabic version. “But you should read it. READ IT. Look- I even highlighted the good parts… the yellow is about Islam and the pink is about federalism and here in green- that’s the stuff I didn’t really understand.” She looked at it suspiciously and then took it from me.

I watched as she split the pile of 20 papers in two- she began sweeping the top edge of the wall with one pile, and using the other pile like a dustpan, she started to gather the wilted, drying tooki scattered on the wall. “I don’t have time or patience to read it. We’re not getting water- the electricity has been terrible and Abu F. hasn’t been able to get gasoline for three days… And you want me to read a constitution?”

“But what will you vote?” I asked, watching the papers as they became streaked with the crimson, blood-like tooki stains.

“You’ll actually vote?” She scoffed. “It will be a joke like the elections… They want this constitution and the Americans want it- do you think it will make a difference if you vote against it?” She had finished clearing the top edge of the wall of the wilting tooki and she dumped it all on our side. She put the now dusty, took- stained sheets of paper back together and smiled as she handed them back, “In any case, let no one tell you it wasn’t a useful constitution- look how clean the wall is now! I’ll vote for it!” And Umm F. and the hedge clippers disappeared.

Riverbend (apparently her nom de plume) only has a PC and a connection (intermittent, no doubt) to a web service.  W has total, permanent, always-on, massively connected infrastructure at his instant disposal.  Today, who do you believe is giving you the real story on Iraq? 

Juan Cole cites Brit journalist Robert Fisk, quoted more fully here from the online Independent:

He said that the portrayal of Iraq by Western leaders ­ of efforts to introduce democracy, including Saturday’s national vote on the country’s proposed constitution ­ was "unreal" to most of its citizens. In Baghdad, children and women were kept at home to prevent them from being kidnapped for money or sold into slavery. They faced a desperate struggle to find the money to keep generators running to provide themselves with electricity. "They aren’t sitting in their front rooms discussing the referendum on the constitution."

With insurgents half a mile from Baghdad’s Green Zone, Fisk said the danger to reporters from a brutal insurgency that did not respect journalists was increasing. "Every time I go to Baghdad it’s worse, every time I ask myself how we can keep going. Because the real question is ­ is the story worth the risk?"

I’m not listening to a huge amount of TV news—has there been much visibility there of the fact that (for many, many months now) reporters can’t actually report, as we normally understand the word, from Iraq?  By the way, this is a big mistake on the part of the insurgency.  If most Americans could see what is really going on (what Riverbend is already telling us, along with many others) we’d be out of there in no time flat.  Between the pre-scripted bullshit we get from from the Bushrovers and the fearful jabbering silence of the talking heads in the Green Zone, there is no bad news, or news at all.

There is a cancer on the Presidency

Think I’m crazy for yesterday’s post on IMPEACHMENT?  Hot off the blogs and wires just today:

Andrew Card’s disquisition on Harriet Miers and constitutional law, pointer thanks to Laura Rozen at Warandpiece.com (my daily read along with the WSJ and NYT).  Laura calls out coverage by Harold Meyerson in a TAPPED account of a talk by Andrew Card about Ms. Miers’ qualifications, delivered last night at the Hudson Institute in front of Robert Bork among other right wingnut luminaries.

According to Meyerson’s account of Andrew’s talk:

As White House chief-of-staff, he [Card] found the most intriguing article, he said, to be Article II, which established the presidency and the executive branch. Miers, he continued, understood Article II as well, and would defend it "when challenged by those given the power to challenge it by Article I [i.e., the Congress] and Article III [i.e., the courts]."

[...] At minimum, he suggested that Miers would be the staunchest proponent of executive power over that of the other two branches that the Court had seen in a very long time.

If this isn’t from the horse’s mouth (or perhaps, given its undoubted effect on those exercising their power of advice and consent, from its other end), I don’t know what is. 

Then there are all the Nixonian twitches, ticks, and tensions, summarized today by Dan Froomkin in his Washington Post White House Briefing.  Froomkin quotes reporting by WaPo columnist Dana Milbank on the topic:

"The fidgeting clearly corresponded to the questioning. When Lauer asked if Bush, after a slow response to Katrina, was ‘trying to get a second chance to make a good first impression,’ Bush blinked 24 times in his answer. When asked why Gulf Coast residents would have to pay back funds but Iraqis would not, Bush blinked 23 times and hitched his trousers up by the belt.

"When the questioning turned to Miers, Bush blinked 37 times in a single answer — along with a lick of the lips, three weight shifts and some serious foot jiggling."

He continues to paraphrase and quote Milbank:

Milbank also touches on Bush’s habit of making inappropriate facial expressions. At one point, he writes, Bush "seemed to lose control of the timing. He smiled after observing that Iraqis are ‘paying a serious price’ because of terrorism."

And Milbank doesn’t even mention the tic that has been the subject of intense speculation in the blogosphere for several months: Bush’s bizarre, shifting lower jaw movement that increasingly punctuates the ends of his sentences.

 

In fact, Froomkin’s whole column is a nice little slice o’ Watergate.  He covers (I’m using his subheads):

• Tension city (above)
• Rove, Card at War—over Iraq? (Chris Matthews asks Newsweek editor Howard Fineman, "You believe that the fight between those who may be headed toward indictment, the vice president’s [deputy] chief of staff, Karl Rove, there is a war between them and the people who are going to survive them, Andy Card, etcetera?&quot
• Rove, Card at War—over Miers? (quoting National Journal’s Hotlineblog "Is it just us or is there already a storyline developing about ‘who’s to blame for Miers’? And if so, is WH CoS Andrew Card about to be on the wrong end of this blame game?&quot
• Et tu, Cheney? (circumstantial blogospheric evidence of cooling love between W and The Vice)
• David Ignatius writing in the Post "that the GOP is entering the post-Bush era. A war of succession has begun, cloaked in a war of principles. "
• Plame Endgame:

Signs are everywhere that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is tightening his noose, possibly around Bush’s and Vice President Cheney’s two most essential aides: Rove and Scooter Libby. But even more than that, it also looks more and more like his investigation, once it’s made public, could pull back the curtain on some less than savory White House efforts to incite the country to war in Iraq and then prevent the press from exposing its secrets.

Froomkin quotes Carol Leonard’s Post reporting:

"Numerous lawyers involved in the 22-month investigation said they are bracing for Fitzgerald to bring criminal charges against administration officials. They speculated, based on his questions, that he may be focused on charges of false statements, obstruction of justice or violations of the Espionage Act involving the release of classified government information to unauthorized persons."

• Impeachment Watch

After waiting fruitlessly for a polling company to repeat a question first asked by Zogby in June, a group that supports a congressional inquiry into Bush’s decision to invade Iraq paid another polling company to do so.

The question: "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him."

AfterDowningStreet.org reports on the results .

"By a margin of 50% to 44%, Americans say that President Bush should be impeached if he lied about the war in Iraq, according to a new poll. . . .

"The poll was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company. The poll interviewed 1,001 U.S. adults on October 8-9."

The Zogby poll in June found 42 percent of respondents agreed with a very similar statement.

Laura Rozen has a good collection of reporting, current and recent, on the White House Iraq Group.  This seems to have been a Big Lie-type propaganda committee designed to put over the Iraq War in just the way that so many Americans object to, including in its weekly convocations Rove, Scooter, Card, Matalin, Rice, Hadley, and a couple of others (here, here, here, and, in large part, here).

Another interesting sign for me, again highlighted by Laura, is in the testimony of Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff, talking on Hardball:

Well, I—I mean, I think the whole White House in is turmoil over this [the special prosecutor's Plame investigation].

And I would slightly disagree with Howard, that I‘m not sure it‘s so much of a division as lots of people running around and trying to protect themselves, because—because this could—this could wash over everyone. I mean, one of the—one of the reasonable questions here is—is, what were the guys in the Oval Office thinking?

In fact, Mathews’ whole leadin for Hardball last Monday is amazing, given his usual orientation:

Karl Rove, the president‘s political ramrod, has been called back to the grand jury probing the CIA leak case.  If you don‘t think this leak case matters, ask yourself, what was the most frightening case you heard for going to war with Iraq?  Probably it was that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium yellow cake in Africa to build nuclear weapons.  The president said it in his 2003 State of the Union address.  The vice president repeated it with military precision, almost like a Gatling gun, Saddam Hussein, nuclear weapons, Saddam Hussein, nuclear weapons, again and again. 

But it wasn‘t true.  There‘s no evidence even now that Saddam tried to by nuclear materials in Africa.  We know that now because the man the CIA sent down there to Niger to check it out, sent there after Vice President Cheney asked the CIA to check it out, wrote a “New York Times” article a few months after the war started that there was no deal.  Worse yet, the former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, wrote that the people around the president must have known there was no deal, even when the president and his people kept telling the country there was. 

What did they know, and when did they know it?  I’m sure that’s the Special Prosecutor’s main question.   Now, will W execute him at dawn (actually on a Saturday night) like Nixon did Cox?

Call me a sentimental old Watergate fool (what a fascinating summer I had watching the daily rushes from the Ervin committee each evening on WNET in New York).  But it’s strangely familiar.  The special prosecutor chewing on the top aides.  The military longing to pull out, the CIA closely watching for an opportune moment to dump more toxins into the Presidential publicity bloodstream.  The crimes allegedly committed to cover up for more serious breaches of the public trust.  The snarling, self-appointed guardians of American virtue, the legacy of a hopeless war, and—more than anything—the religious conviction of the Chief Executive that he is the right man at the right time and can do no wrong.

The key moment inside the Watergate White House was the point at which the enormously ambitious, slavishly Nixonite, highly organized machine degraded from political juggernaut to a bunch of lawyered-up victims of someone else’s hubris and wrong-doing.   It happened suddenly, after the application of thousands of small cuts like those we’ve been seeing lately.

We need to watch very carefully, without the gloating we deserve, when, after the trashing of our country, our economy, our military, our national security, our childrens’ fiscal future, our reputation, and our elective system, the Bad Guys start receiving it in the neck.  These are junkyard dogs, Cheney and Rove most of all, and they will not go gentle into that good night.

    

Macbush

The right wing is certainly unhappy with their commander in chief on the Supreme Court front.   For once, right wingnuts have better arguments against the Bushrovers than the lefties.  The execrable Michele Malkin provides a great roundup.

One of the more practical arguments from this right side of the debate questions what pragmatic use Ms. Miers will be in any issue before the Court that is related to what she worked on as White House counsel.  The "worst" case assumes that this includes prisoner of non-war policy, partial-birth abortion, and the legality of administration activities in prosecuting their so-called Global War on Terror.

(subliminal telegraphing of my argument!—do you recognize this man?)

John Wohlstetter, writing in American Spectator, covers this anti-Miers position in "The Recusal Trap".

Under federal law, if Ms. Miers is confirmed, and has professionally advised on a matter that subsequently comes before her on the bench, she must recuse herself. Federal law is quite specific here. Title 28 U.S. Code sec. 455 covers recusal of judges, justices, and magistrate judges. Sec, 455 (b)(3) recites one ground for mandatory recusal: "Where [a judge, justice, magistrate judge] has served in governmental employment and in such capacity participated as counsel, adviser or material witness concerning the proceeding or expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case in controversy." Sec. 455 (e) adds: "No justice, judge or magistrate judge shall accept from the parties to the proceeding a waiver of any ground for disqualification enumerated in subsection (b)." 

Wohlstetter is associated with the Discovery Institute, one of the "non-partisan" organizations spearheading the drive for intelligent design creationism.  If we need further provenance for his point of view on this as right wingnuttery (though perhaps cogent as well), Dumb-as-a-Bag-of-Krauthammers weighs in contra Miers in his Washington Post column:

But what does she bring to the bench?

This, say her advocates: We are now at war, and therefore the great issue of our time is the powers of the president, under Article II, to wage war. For four years Miers has been immersed in war-and-peace decisions and therefore will have a deep familiarity with the tough constitutional issues regarding detention, prisoner treatment and war powers.

Perhaps. We have no idea what her role in these decisions was. But to the extent that there was any role, it becomes a liability. For years — crucial years in the war on terrorism — she will have to recuse herself from judging the constitutionality of these decisions because she will have been a party to having made them in the first place. The Supreme Court will be left with an absent chair on precisely the laws-of-war issues to which she is supposed to bring so much.

Of course, we should take into account Scalia’s response to the motion of the Sierra Club to recuse himself from In Re: Cheney (Docket #03-475, related to the Energy Task Force case):

Let me respond, at the outset, to Sierra Club’s suggestion that I should "resolve any doubts in favor of recusal." Motion to Recuse 8. That might be sound advice if I were sitting on a Court of Appeals. But see In re Aguinda, 241 F. 3d 194, 201 (CA2 2000). There, my place would be taken by another judge, and the case would proceed normally. On the Supreme Court, however, the consequence is different: The Court proceeds with eight Justices, raising the possibility that, by reason of a tie vote, it will find itself unable to resolve the significant legal issue presented by the case. Thus, as Justices stated in their 1993 Statement of Recusal Policy: "[W]e do not think it would serve the public interest to go beyond the requirements of the statute, and to recuse ourselves, out of an excess of caution, whenever a relative is a partner in the firm before us or acted as a lawyer at an earlier stage. Even one unnecessary recusal impairs the functioning of the Court." (Available in Clerk of Court’s case file.) Moreover, granting the motion is (insofar as the outcome of the particular case is concerned) effectively the same as casting a vote against the petitioner. The petitioner needs five votes to overturn the judgment below, and it makes no difference whether the needed fifth vote is missing because it has been cast for the other side, or because it has not been cast at all.

So we may imagine there is a circumstance where an unnecessary recusal might impair the functioning of the Supreme Court, and is therefore not prudent.  (How about when the outcome of a presidential election is before the court?)

The White House has its own interesting reasons for soliciting right-wing support for Miers.  Ken Mehlman ticked off three main points in a 10/6 RNC/White House concall with other conservative do-bees (summary notes from Savethecourt.org here, transcript from nocrony.com here, audio from CrooksAndLiars here, thanks feministing):

So we’ve . . . other speakers are going to talk about other issues but I think these are three very important things, number one, how do we avoid what those in the, what I like to call [4:27] people who grow in office, which is to say who would do up things do differently than we expect them to. I think the way we know that is cause this president knows his nominee better than ever before. Second, top advisor at a time when this president has made some incredibly effective decisions, and third her unique ability to understand how bad judicial activism is on the [4:50] critical issue of the global war on terror.

Talking point number three loosely translates as "she’ll trample on civil rights and judicial  prerogative in the name of the GWoT".  Not an unreasonably Rovian maneuver.

So—known quantity? Key advisor on incredibly effective decisions? Paid-off vote to cover GWoT civil-rights abuses? 

My money is on none of these.  I think they’re setting up for the impeachment.

They know that things are very dicey for Rove and Scooter (despite Judith Miller’s best attempts to go away and shut up). They know that DeLay won’t be in the House to cover their corrupt posteriors, and suspect that Frist will not be arranging the chairmanships of select committees in the near future.  Cheney was Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, and a close observer of the drama and aftermath of the Nixon resignation. The key issue in defending the Oval Office (as the key lieutenants fall in the cross-fire) will be Executive Privilege. W will need to keep his bidness private in order to survive. His very own Supreme Court Justice will certainly know where the landmines are.

Let’s not loose sight of the context—we’re talking about strategists who are playing the ultimate power game. These are  not people who will let judicial process, law, or a few thousand dead soldiers or a few hundred thousand dead foreign civilians prevent them from striving toward their ends.  There hasn’t been this level of frank corruption in executive politics since—well, that’s a tough one.  My sense is that on a dollar basis, the Bushrovers are far and away the modern world record holders.  In this league, covering the Presidential ass is not just a political game, it is about the continuity of power and influence, and of the flow of greenbacks and oil, all under political attack now as never before in this administration.  The current extreme level of political threat should lead us to look for correspondingly extreme countermoves by the Bushrovers.  Buying a Supreme Court Justice is no big deal, if it ensures a key support in a time of constitutional need.

Wouldn’t you think of it yourself if that very Court had made you the President illegally in the first place?

Idiot Wind

Back in April, I started to think that Bush was finally heading for the public fall that he so richly deserves.  I was remembering how slowly and inescapably Nixon’s political opponents built his gibbet during the months of the Watergate hearings, a public hanging to which he himself brought all the rope his opponents would ever need.  In that case there was no rapier thrust of public exposure that suddenly toppled the presidency, but an careful, insidious death of a thousand cuts.  The closest moment to an explosion was the revelation, offhandedly, by Alexander Butterfield, that Nixon had compulsively taped himself.  As dramatic as that was, it had to be followed by  weeks of legal bickering and counter-maneuver before the tapes themselves started to add inexorably, conversation by conversation, to the President’s political doom.  (Then Justice Rehnquist abstained from the Supreme Court vote in United States v. Nixon which sustained the special prosecutor’s subpoena of the White House tapes.)

It is a game that Washington insiders understand very well as an art form, especially as it does not produce, at first, any of the publicity that is their lifeblood.  As the wounded victim bleeds, more sharks circle, with no need for planning or coordination.  This phenomenon is at the root of Hillary Clinton’s "gigantic right-wing conspiracy", for example—its practitioners can claim that they never breathed together, while it inescapably appears to be a well-coordinated attack.

One of the signs, for me, was the bolting on Bolton.  This was followed by the bi-partisan anti-filibuster Gang of Fourteen.  None of these events were in themselves enough to halt the administration in each particular moment.  But in sequence they sent the blood-in-the-water signal that should tell the target that it would be a good time to stay out of the water.

The administration has been veering more sharply away than ever from the planet on which its Iraqi war is happening.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the public is starting to veer away from the line of fantasy and spin that has been pumped out of the White House like toxic waste from the scene of a chemical accident.  It is no longer possible to imagine that combat operations are over, or even that the "insurgents" are killing more people out of a feeling of being desperately cornered. 

The only thing holding the show together, the only thing that has ever held this show together, is the administration’s ability to manufacture and dominate its own publicity.  This started with the PR campaign that stole the 2000 election and buffaloed the Supremes into bowing down before a bogus concept of recounting as a national emergency.

In this circumstance, the ultimate signs of catastrophic failure of the political machine can be seen in a number of public processes and moments.  The last pseudo-justification for invading Iraq must surely have evaporated in front of even the eager fantasists in the White House if the chilling post hoc ergo propter hoc argument of enduring more death in order to honor previous deaths is now emerging from the press room.  And how thin must they feel the ice is under their feet to avoid simply walking down the driveway at the ranch to hear out Mrs. Sheehan?  Finally, how incredibly disconnected must they all be to allow their poster boy to fly over the flood damage en route from weeks of vacation back to the eye of the storm of ineptitude in Washington DC?

What political country are these guys living in?  I really don’t mean that as a rhetorical question.  Just imagine you are the president.  You are in Texas, next door to Louisiana, where the worst natural disaster in living memory is rapidly unfolding.  Don’t you head right for the scene, even if you are the most cynical political manipulator in the history of American politics?  With what mindset would his handlers allow the President to conduct a fly-by, much less to let pool photographers capture him looking pensively out the window?

  Jim Watson / AFP - Getty Images

Can you imagine an image better calculated to show a lack of engagement—a stratospheric indifference?  Now he could be viewing things from a couple of hundred feet—his handlers should never have let this image out of the privacy of their own little Air Force One world, and he never should have been merely flying past, by the standard of any cynical political manipulator.

In all the bullshit that has emanated from the Administration since this (latest) disaster, the most symptomatic text so far has been the one embedded in this Bumiller/Nagourney piece from the NY Times September 3rd:

In a sign of the mounting anxiety at the White House, Mr. Bush made a rare Saturday appearance in the Rose Garden before live television cameras to announce that he was dispatching additional active-duty troops to the Gulf Coast. He struck a more somber tone than he had at times on Friday during a daylong tour of the disaster region, when he had joked at the airport in New Orleans about the fun he had had in his younger days in Houston. His demeanor on Saturday was similar to that of his most somber speeches after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"The magnitude of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities," said Mr. Bush, slightly exaggerating the stricken land area. "The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable."

A rare Saturday appearance.  More somber than his jolly self on Friday while visiting the disaster region, when he joked around.  His geography, like everything else, is inaccurate.  But the phrase that for me captures the essence of this administration’s dysfunction is that "tremendous problems…have strained state and local capabilities".

The reason that the feds didn’t jump into furious action on this is simply that from the top, the view is that this sort of situation is a state and local problem.  The federal government exists to defend the republic from external aggression—no more, no less.  The fundamental New Deal view of federal government power and purview is so deeply ingrained (even on the right, where activist conservatives long for a far right majority on the Court) that few of us  can reflexively understand how fundamentally at odds with most of the rest of America this President really is.  Thus it is only in a disaster which has a major aspect of external aggression that the President is ready to mobilize federal power.  With much of the Homeland Security apparatus, not least FEMA itself, riddled with patronage and campaign rewarded appointees (how else would one take advantage of the newly created and massive cabinet department?), we can’t be surprised that they get the message beaming out from their Maximum Leader and his evil amplifier Mr Rove:  big government is when you use the power of federal authority to solve problems within the boundaries of the states.

There is no other explanation for an administration that leaves no child behind but spends nothing on education.  That kisses Veterans’ asses every VFW chance they get, and allows the VA health system to crash and burn.  That pretends to protect us from terrorist threats while ignoring the thousands of gaping security holes across the domestic landscape.  In fact, so basic is this view of domestic neglect that, far from ensuring a healthy national guard is available for action during the projected next domestic terror incident from hell, the Bushrovers have happily airlifted the National Guard over to Iraq, committing the fraud of extending their tours to encompass career-military deployments in order to continue the war without stirring up too much domestic political trouble, otherwise spelled D-R-A-F-T.

Now, in the wake of Katrina, Bush is not only suffering from the thousand cuts of summer, but from his own radical amputation of his lower political legs at the knees.  Bill Clinton, that king of smiley-faced snark, counseled us to wait a while before judgment. "It’s an appropriate thing to look into, but not at this time - they’re still finding bodies there."  But there is no fearsome alien enemy to face here, no way to accuse Bush’s accusors of lacking patriotism.  What is more patriotic than communal aid?  Perhaps now, with the aura finally dissolved in the  stench of those bloated domestic corpses (since the stink of foreign ones hasn’t apparently penetrated far enough inland) we can get down to cases.  Voter fraud, widespread influence peddling, war profiteer corruption, criminal military incompetance, the cover-up of human rights abuses, a far too well integrated relationship with large oil companies and their Saudi brothers, the illegal lobbying tactics of Rove’s close allies, the use itself of the first large-scale attack on domestic soil since Pearl Harbor as a way to misdirect our defensive reaction toward a wholly unrelated war on Iraq—why can we not reasonably hope for articles of impeachment?