August 2003

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Hillary porn

by Mark Gisleson

After yesterday's snafu, I wasn't eager to return to the subject of Wesley Clark, but this new post from Kos is pretty compelling:

Rumors are flying fast and furious that Hillary is contemplating a White House bid now that Bush looks "beatable."

A great deal of Clark's financial support would come from the Clinton money machine, and there's obviously no room for both candidates in the race.

As for a Hillary bid, all I have to say is, what is she thinking?

[more]

Kos also has the latest Iowa numbers, with Dean leading the pack with 25% to Gephardt's 21%. Clark's at 3%, but that's fairly moot, especially in the context of yesterday's link on that "no name" poll that used bio's to let poll respondents rank candidates. If you're looking to bone up on Clark, Tapped recommends this article he wrote for The Washington Monthly on multilateralism.

Steve (Perry — the guy whose name is up at the top of the page) thinks I'm a bit of an optimist, but there really does seem to be a sea change taking place in American politics. Granted, I've been saying things were on the verge of swinging back to our way of thinking ever since Reagan took office, but this time I'm really, really sure I'm right. [Note: Steve says I can't use emoticons, but in the upper Midwest this is known as dry, self-deprecating humor.]

Ashcroft's numbers are down, Alabaman evangelicals are questioning regressive tax policies, Madonna's in country, MediaWhoresOnline reports Al Franken's new book is about to go #1, and E.J. Dionne Jr. is leading off columns with lines like "Maybe we should just scrap Labor Day and rename it 'Capital Day.'" Not only is the tide turning, but sarcasm is replacing the Right's thirty-year-old Don Rickles put-down routine in providing our laffs du jour.

Not that the Democrats have their standup act entirely together. Romenesko has this link on Rep. Karen McCarthy whose no-shows in DC have cost the Dems big on numerous votes. Contrived storm clouds are gathering on Cruz Bustamante's horizon in the form of MECHA. Tom Daschle is still "leading" the Senate minority caucus, and the DLC still controls the DNC like Murdoch controls Fox.

The new Air Force Academy report will undoubtedly lead to aggressive Drudge and Fox-fueled exposes into Ivy League rape and sexual harassment coverups, although it's hard to see this being bad for the Dems over the long haul. People are starting to wake up to the fact that the Republicans have held or shared the reins for an awfully long time, and it will get progressively harder to for them to blame liberals for public morality being in decline when it's so obvious that the culture of big business has been far more culpable.

A good example would be last night's kisses between Brittney and Madonna and Christina at the Grammys. On the one hand they're "liberals" (whether they actually are or not is, of course, irrelevant), but on the other, it's big business that's holding the camera and encouraging the pose. Of course the Right is always quick to try to carve out Hollywood as not being part of Big Business, but that's pretty disingenuous since Big Business relies on Hollywood to sell their products.

Clearly, opportunity is knock-knock-knocking. Rick Geddes of the WaPost reports that e-mail is killing the Post Office, but more to the point, his numbers show the increasing access Americans have to the Internet, and alternative news sources. Those who choose to seek real news and not jingoistic propaganda can now do so, and barring a cybercoup that puts the 'net back in the hands of the oligarchs, this Iraq War may be our last manufactured conflict, barring an outright Bush coup.

But Clinton-Clark in '04? Boy, does that ever take the fun out of all the Wesley Clark speculation. And talk about your Orwellian Schwarzeneggerian Oedipal issues: how will all that fake Hillary porn* on the Internet play a role if the junior senator from New York runs? Those phototoons could prove to be the "cloak room joke that backfired" of the 2004 election cycle. The Mighty Wurlitzer's been running a cottage industry in pornographic satire for quite a while now, and will have to take responsibility for sexualizing Hillary in the eyes of many Americans. They have much to answer for, but I want to be in the peanut gallery for this day of testimony before the committee.

*This is the "cleanest" image in my collection, and is generally captioned so as to blame Hillary for the recent electrical blackout.

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Sorry about the domestic agenda two days running. I know a lot of Steve's fans come here for the foreign news and Iraq. Do check out Cursor for a weekend's worth of reading on that score.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at August 29, 2003 11:41 AM

 

Triangulating Bill's affections

by Mark Gisleson

Recently Josh Marshall posted a link to this New York Metro article by Michael Wolff on the Aspen Institute conference for policy makers. The article's most obvious money shot was the one used by Marshall:

When Clinton took questions, a young man from a technology company who identified himself as chairman of Bush-Cheney 2004 in California said he was offended by Clinton’s partisanship. To which Clinton, without hesitation, and with some kind of predatory gleam in his eye, said, “Good!” From there, Clinton went on, with emotion and anger, at a level seemingly foreign to most everyone here, to rip to shreds the motives, values, and legitimacy of the Republicans.

Big Dog, as James Carville and some of his supporters like to call him, is a master politician. His instincts tell him now is the time to attack, and to do so with some real ferocity. Clinton's political insights are legendary, although virtually everything this charming karmic chameleon says about 2004 needs to be examined in light of how it impacts Hillary in 2008. That's why I found this part of the article to be even more interesting:

[Clinton] was interviewed on the second day by Isaacson, who began by telling a story about how when he was a Rhodes scholar he’d done a paper that his Oxford professor had said was not at all in the same league as a similar paper written by a certain Rhodes scholar from Arkansas a few years before. This was one of those overachievement-upon-overachievement stories that was bound to subdue anyone.

The other Rhodes scholar was, of course, Wesley Clark, the retired general and fomer Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, who may soon announce his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. Steve Perry, a seasoned political observer, and I disagree as to what this means. Steve thinks this is a giveaway that Bill thinks Clark is a loser in 2004, setting up Hillary for 2008. I can be that cynical on occasion, especially if the conversation turns to Microsoft products, but I can't quite agree with Steve on this one.

I think the politician in Clinton wants to win, and win constantly. I can't imagine Clinton doing anything that would undercut a shot at taking the White House or either house of Congress from the Republicans. I'm sure some readers are chuckling at my naivete by now, but my time in the trenches for the Democrats taught me to recognize passion, and Clinton has it. My suspicion is that Bill would rather be Clark's Secretary of State than Hillary's First Husband. This one should become more clear as it plays out.

[Note: see CORRECTION below!]

Oh, and this recent Fox article about Clark's polling numbers is, uh, interesting.

Grassroots organizations have encouraged the former NATO (search) commander to make a run. The DraftWesleyClark.com group commissioned a Zogby poll in which those surveyed were asked to select a candidate based on his bio without knowing the candidate's name.

The poll, released Monday, showed Clark with 49 percent support in the "Blind Bio" survey compared to 40 percent for President Bush.

Matched up against six of the nine Democratic candidates, Clark polled in first place. That number dropped to fifth place among likely Democratic primary voters, however, when the candidates were named.

Interesting polling approach: blind bio's? It's hard to imagine an objective Bush biography that would get any polling support! [More on Clark.]

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File under the heading, Dead Horse, beating thereof, but Orcinus' David Niewert has posted one of his patented Daily Howler-style, USS Clueless-length analyses, this time of Clinton bashing. Gratifying reading if you're still seething over the Right's treatment of Bill, and even if not, it's interesting for the perspective on how the Right responds to attacks on Bush.

Which takes us to this new Washington Monthly feature rating our last four presidents on their overall mendacity. The winner? Bush the Younger most mendacious, Clinton the least. Regardless of what you think of Clinton, any list of four people being rated on honesty where Bill Clinton wins is, well, an interesting list, to say the least. [via CalPundit]

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CORRECTION: Alert reader Dan wrote in to point out that while I may have taken hermeneutics and comp lit in college, my interpretation of the second Wolff quote above is clearly in error, and upon closer study, I see that he's correct. Isaacson is telling the story, and is referring to Clinton as the other Rhodes scholar. Given the folks gathered at the Aspen Conference, I doubt these three gentlemen were the only Rhodes scholars present, and I should have been a little faster on the draw.

Fortunately, this error mars my illustration, but not my point. I tired to do a little googling to find some new support, but instead found this:

Wes Pruden with the Confederate POV: With nothing but time on his hands, Bill is conniving to do for the missus what Pa Ferguson did for Ma in Texas, what George Wallace did for Lurleen in Alabama. The notion that Ma Clinton can wait until 2008 is nuts....To make 2008 happen, the Clintons would first have to pretend, convincingly, to work for the Democratic nominee next year while employing every trick in the shadows to sabotage his chances. If (horrors!) the Democrat wins, anyway, that would put Hillary's race off until 2012, when she will be pulling down Social Security. The year 2012 is in that long run when a lot of us will be dead....[Clark's] from Arkansas (he would just as soon you not notice), and he speaks well, looks terrific, and brings just what Hillary needs to her candidacy, which certain Little Rock folk say is exactly what's in the works. They see Bill Clinton's hand, barely hidden, making Wesley Clark happen. [Clark as Hillary's VP? Score this one for Steve.]

Sadly, Google News also brought up this Frontpage screed that makes an unpleasant allegation connecting Clark to Waco, as well as offering up some Nixonian smears that are as creative as they are vile. I'll be looking into that Waco thing more closely (essentially, the Army troops involved were under Clark's command, with the insinuation that no one knows if Clark himself was present).

NewsMax also sees Clark and Clinton as joined at the hip, but I don't take much solace in the fact that in my frenzied googling anything resembling an argument to buttress my speculation invariably came from news organizations that give their employees Jefferson Davis's birthday off.

Like a lot of surfers, I'm now sitting here scratching my head trying to remember where I read about Clinton being fond of Clark. In any event, hopefully I won't have any more "Sully" moments to report in the future.

ADDENDUM: It took a couple of days, but finally, after I quit looking, I found the quote that set off my line of thinking on Clark and Clinton. It's from Amy Sullivan's outstanding Wesley Clark article in Washington Monthly, ironically, cited above.

Clark just might get the biggest endorsement of them all. In a June interview, former President Bill Clinton told the Associated Press that he has been impressed by every aspect of Clark's career and uttered these magic words: "I believe Wes, if he runs, would make a valuable contribution because he understands America's security challenges and domestic priorities. I believe he would make a good president." The statement has been judged by many political observers to be a non-endorsement endorsement, and a signal to Democratic donors and consultants to wait for Clark.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at August 28, 2003 12:59 PM

 

Rove to face the music on Plame?

by Mark Gisleson

A bit late, but Mark Kleiman had a great follow up on the Valerie Plame affair on Monday. Kleiman provides ample links if you're new to the story, but the money shot is the following Joseph Wilson quote:

At the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words.

Salon interviews Al Franken today (recommended!). Franken mentions the Valerie Plame story, as well as providing a great game plan for taking the Right apart.

I won't sink to that level, but what's great about it is when you expose them, it's jujitsu. You just use what they do against them. And when you do that, they get mad. They go, "How dare you read what I said on Nexis!" O'Reilly keeps saying I'm a smear artist, but all I do is just say what they said. They think somehow it's unfair that they're held accountable for what they said, I guess. I don't know. They're awful people. I'm not talking about conservatives, I'm talking about people who do this kind of distortion. There are a lot of conservatives I like, but they don't indulge in what the guys I write about do.

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Looking at my Bush Wars notes file, I noticed that there's been a lot of great links I didn't manage to use recently. Not all, but many I found via Cursor, Babelogue's indispensable online partner. This is barely one step above recycling old posts, but, for what it's worth, here's some good reading that you may or may not have seen already:

"Have We Forgotten Anger in the Eyes?" by James L. Larocca, in Newsday. Lessons from Vietnam that apply to Iraq.

Then you would see it. In the eyes. The clean, white fury of men who have been reduced to abject humiliation and powerlessness in front of their families. The hatred in their eyes would be as pure as any you would ever see. It would last forever. You would never forget it.

I saw those eyes again the other day on the evening news. A group of young American soldiers, sent by their government to go house to house in a sweltering Baghdad suburb, had kicked in a door and rousted a family. The children were terrified, crying. The mother was furious, screaming. The eyes of the GIs were filled with confusion and shame at what they were being made to do by their government.

"Bush's Crumbling Authority in Iraq," by Robert Fisk, in CounterPunch.

Unable to blame their daily cup of bitterness upon Saddam's former retinue, the Americans will have to conjure up foreign intervention. Saudi "terrorists", al-Qa'ida "terrorists", pro-Syrian "terrorists", pro-Iranian "terrorists"--any mysterious "terrorists" will do if their supposed existence covers up the painful reality: that our occupation has spawned a real home-grown Iraqi guerrilla army capable of humbling the greatest power on Earth.

"Inside the Resistance," by Paul McGeough, in the Sydney Morning Herald. A journalist rides with the enemy in Iraq.

Their approach is as effective as it is simple. Usually they explode a landmine to halt an US convoy and to disorient the soldiers. Then one group of resistance fighters opens fire from one side of the road, drawing the attention of the Americans, while the men with an RPG take aim from a position about 150 metres back from the other side of the road.

Many of the fighters draw on their experience in national service under Saddam and they have acquired bomb-making and other manuals from the disbanded Iraqi military. They have been having lethal success with remote-controlled devices, including one that was floated down a river on a palm log to explode under a bridge used by the US.

On the highway south of Tikrit later in the week, a US soldier explains to me how a series of four IEDs - improvised explosive devices - had been found on a track routinely used by his convoy. The explosives were spaced at precise 25-metre intervals, the distance that separates vehicles in the American convoys.

"Siding with the powerless: Ideas from 60 years in journalism," by Walter Cronkite, in The Salt Lake Tribune.

I believe that most of us reporters are liberal, but not because we consciously have chosen that particular color in the political spectrum. More likely it is because most of us served our journalistic apprenticeships as reporters covering the seamier side of our cities -- the crimes, the tenement fires, the homeless and the hungry, the underclothed and undereducated.

We reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all. So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful. If that is what makes us liberals so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism -- that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at August 27, 2003 9:27 AM

 

A little closer to home

by Mark Gisleson

New Paul Krugman up today on the venality of the administration, the seeds of an invasion of Lebanon planted at the World Tribune, and that $500 billion deficit projection is making the rounds, but the truth is I just can't get this USA Today editorial about cable TV out of my head.

Cable's forced diet of programming is giving viewers heartburn. The average bill now tops $40 a month, up 50% since 1996, or three times the inflation rate. Those high charges could be avoided if cable companies allowed consumers to choose only the channels they want from a menu and pay for them "a la carte."

But cable companies, which operate as monopolies, typically have resisted allowing customers to exercise viewing choice. Now, surging rates are sparking calls in Washington for legislation to force a change in pricing policies. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., head of a Senate committee that regulates cable, says the industry is guilty of price gouging. The General Accounting Office (news - web sites), an investigative arm of Congress, plans to report on cable fees in October.

Not quite as earthshaking as venality, invasions and deficits, but I've always thought that our cable TV system cut right to the core of everything that's wrong with lockstep capitalism. People, you just can't give someone a monopoly without riding herd on them. It's stupid to think otherwise, even in relatively clean industries, let alone the money grubbing world of cable TV.

[W]hen programming costs go up, the increases are easily passed on to viewers. In fact, cable firms own many programming companies. ESPN this spring raised prices 20%. Industrywide, programming prices have risen 15% a year since 1997.

The threat of federal regulation has had some success in cracking the industry's united opposition to a la carte pricing:

Cox Communications CEO James Robbins has bashed ESPN's price hikes and says he is exploring the idea of charging for sports channels separately. He estimates three-fourths of Cox subscribers would drop ESPN if it meant paying less for cable.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter. We may finally get some progressive change, but not thanks to Congress. If and when it comes, it will come from industry leaders who are fed up with the system. Not exactly my idea of a safety net.

Tying this all back into a more normal Bush Wars theme, I think that what's about to happen to the world of cable is a good precursor for our pending political battles. Bush won't be brought down by Democrats, he'll be brought down by fed-up Republicans. It's a game they know how to play all too well, and our side doesn't even own a copy of the rulebook.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at August 26, 2003 9:40 AM

 

New revelations from Ritter

by Mark Gisleson

A startling revelation from former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter in the New York Times today about the fate of the meticulously kept Iraqi WMD archives.

On April 8, they say, the buildings were occupied by soldiers from the Army's Third Infantry Division. For two weeks, the Iraqi scientists and administrators showed up for work but, according to several I have spoken to, no one from the coalition interviewed them or tried to take control of the archive.

Rather, these staff members have told me, after occupying the facility for two weeks, the American soldiers simply withdrew. Soon after, looters entered the facility and ransacked it. Overnight, every computer was stolen, disks and video records were destroyed, and the carefully organized documents were ripped from their binders and either burned or scattered about. According to the former brigadier general, who went back to the building after the mob had gone, some Iraqi scientists did their best to recover and reconstitute what they could, but for the vast majority of the archive the damage was irreversible.

Ritter has consistently been one of the administration's most intense critics on Iraq, but his brash manner has made him an easy target for spinmeister Karl Rove, who's bludgeoned Ritter's reputation with accurate but inflammatory quotes like this one:

“I want the president impeached because he lied to the Congress of the United States,” Ritter said. “He may well go out and tell another lie about weapons of mass destruction” being found amid the rubble in Iraq. But, Ritter said, any scheme to plant evidence would run afoul of professional soldiers like those he served with in Gulf War I. “I can tell you, my fellow officers won’t sustain that lie.”

And, of course, just to be sure Ritter's statements were downplayed, there was that "mysterious" story that surfaced about Ritter and child molestation* a while back. If Dante were alive today, he'd have to invent several new rings of Hell to accommodate all of the people who worked so hard to make this war possible. On second thought, most of the offending parties would probably fit in well on some of Dante's original levels:

The vestibule of Hell is a great dark plain where the souls of those who never really lived, even in life, who took no decisive course, who lived without blame and without praise, flee endlessly from hordes of angry hornets. A good place to put all those career diplomats and spooks who went along with the lies to avoid damaging their careers.

The third ring is set aside for the Gluttonous, who lie on the ground beneath a pelting storm of rain and hail. This level consists of those who lived in excesses. War rooters who'll end up here include Bill "Book of Virtues" Bennett, Andrew "Barebacking" Sullivan, Laura "crawling on the floor drunk" Ingraham, etc.

Arriving in the fourth level, the Avaricious and the Prodigal are divided into two camps and spend eternity rolling heavy weights against each other. This circle holds those who wasted, lived greedily and insatiably. Bush buddies Kenny Boy Lay and all the Halliburtonistas will spend eternity here.

This is the fifth ring wherein live the Wrathful and the Gloomy. They spend their time here either tearing at each other in anger or gurgling in the black mud below. This level contains all those who lived crude, vindictive lives. Not that there's anything wrong with having political opinions, but it's hard not to see this as the final resting place for so very many neocons, Zionists, Nader haters, McCarthyites, etc.

[T]he sixth ring, a wide plain dotted with burning tombs. And inside the burning tombs? Heretics, those who failed to believe in God and the afterlife. If God was who Bush thinks he is, this is where we'd find Senators Jim Jeffords, Chuck Grassley, Dick Lugar and other apostates who have challenged W. on Iraq and Homeland Security. For the purposes of argument, I'd lean more towards populating this ring of Hell with folks like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Lynne Cheney, all of whom prostitute their religious beliefs in the service of war and socio-cultural engineering.

For the eighth ring, home to Fraudulence and Malice, is known as the Malebolge. Shaped like an enormous amphitheatre, it descents for ten more levels. On each of these levels a different class of sinner is tortured. Horned demons whip the seducers and pimps, hypocrites struggle to walk in lead-lined cloaks, simonists are wedged into stone holes, the soles of their feet licked with fire. Barraters, those who bartered their public office for private gain, are ducked in boiling pitch by a particularly frolicsome band of demons known as the Malebranche (Evil Claws). Magicians, Diviners, Seducers, Fortune Tellers, and Panderers are here. Well, that's pretty much the whole administration in a nutshell. Any names you don't see elsewhere clearly belong here, and, in all probability, everyone mentioned above would probably be more at home on these levels with all their friends and colleagues.

[T]he ninth and final circle of Hell, Cocytus -- the frozen marsh where the Arch Traitor himself, is forever immersed up to his breastbone. Betrayers to those in which we should be forever faithful: God, Country, Family, are here....Satan's giant wings flap uselessly as he attempts to free himself, producing nothing more than cold winds that freeze the ice even harder. Satan has three faces: one black, one red, one yellow, with mouths gushing bloody foam and six eyes weeping. While he weeps, he relentlessly chews the bodies of three traitors -- Judas, Brutus, and Cassius -- whose terrible crimes were still less heinous than his own -- for Lucifer betrayed the greatest Lord of all. So now he suffers here, in the cold and dark at the farthest possible removal from the source of all light and warmth. I'll leave it to you to decide who belongs on the bottom-most ring of Hell. IMHO it really boils down to just who you think is the real POTUS, 'cause it obviously ain't George W. Top candidates include Karl Rove, Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, but feel free to suggest your own favorites.

Italicized copy courtesy of The Hannibal Library.

A silly exercise perhaps, but as we're unlikely to ever see any real justice in this matter in our own lifetimes, we might as well indulge in some fantasy. Feel free to send in your nominations for some new rings of Hell designed especially for this administration. It beats the heck out of reading about the mess in Iraq.

*Courtesy of Dan Kennedy, here's a better link to that story, which I had trouble finding via Google News this morning.

Posted by Steve Perry at August 25, 2003 9:49 AM

 

E coli Republicanism

by Mark Gisleson

Thanks to Jim Romenesko for slogging through the New York Post to find this gem about Michael Savage. The heir to Morton Downey, Joe Pyne and Fr. Coughlin appears to be spiraling down faster than George W.'s approval ratings. Jim's also doing his part to keep the national press corps up-to-date on the goings on at the Pioneer Press.

The right is going through some hard times in general. Scroll down to read Rush and Malloy's biting take on Ann Coulter's recent no-show. Apparently she was scheduled to appear with Joe Conason on Kudlow & Cramer. Joe's book seems to have the punditocracy terrified. The truth does have that effect on some folks, liars in particular.

Rounding out the gossip, hurry over to Page Six (link expires with the Saturday edition) to read how Hollywood's Left is turning out to make Arnold's campaign a memorable one.

I'd love to post nothing but right-bashing gossip today, but there are a few other links that require your attention.

Josh Marshall has part one of his interview with al-Qaeda expert Peter Bergen here.

Via Atrios, Sky News has a report that two U.S. troops may have been captured in Iraq.

A Marine is dead in Hilla.

Hamas supporters are demanding revenge in the Gaza Strip.

A new Forbes story is headlined, "Leading indicators are leading nowhere."

Janklow is toast.

Hiawatha Bray on the SoBig worm. Your Internet connection been funky lately? Just another side effect of zillions of 100MB attachments caroming about the 'net like heat seeking flying monkeys. (Is it just me, or does anyone else wonder why we never hear about the impact of these things on government computers?)

Life during the reign of George W.

Someday a grad student will wade through these posts looking for clues, but they're never going to figure it all out. Eventually I suspect they'll blame it all on some sort of fungus or smut, like the medieval conga lines that would spontaneously form after everyone ate some tainted food.

UPDATE: Missed this mini-trend of bloggers pulling up their old posts to verify that their pre-war criticism had in fact been right on target: easy war, impossible peace. Calpundit had it figured out. Hesiod had it doped too. Ron K at Daily Kos has some good stuff on what the experts had to say in Washington state the other night (unsurprisingly, the comments had to be shut down due to trolling — this is a story that must not be told...). DC's City Paper has a chart of which editorial pages most love to parrot W's henchmen's lines (this doubles handily as a list of the editorial pages that were most consistently wrong about every aspect of Iraq). For more about that, Jeff St. Clair's "War Pimps" traces the process by which the Bushies manufactured consensus. Not since Nixon was president has the left been so right, or the right so wrong.

UPDATE: OK, this is absolutely the last item. I just clicked on a link from that handy new Buzzflash wire on TCB's front page and found this fascinating story about four 9/11 widows who are putting more heat on the Bushies than all the Congressional and other independent investigators put together. I'm not much of a Gail Sheehy fan, but this piece is worth the read.

Posted by Steve Perry at August 22, 2003 10:29 AM

 

Conason & Lyons a Woodward & Bernstein for our times?

by Mark Gisleson

This week Salon is running five installments from Joe Conason's new book, Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How it Distorts the Truth. You'll have to watch the noxious Sprint commercial to read them, but it's worth it. Here are parts one, two, three and four. Here too are four great reasons to read all the installments and then run out and buy the book:

America in the 20th century was built on liberal policy, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the GI Bill, and the Great Society. The modern economy -- a private enterprise system that relies on government safeguards against depression and extreme poverty -- is the legacy of liberal leadership, from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. (And more recently Bill Clinton, who erased Republican deficits that were sending the economy into a spiral of recession and began to pay down the national debt.) Liberal policies made America the freest, wealthiest, most successful and most powerful nation in human history. Conservatism in power always threatens to undo that national progress, and is almost always frustrated by the innate decency and democratic instincts of the American people. [from part one]

George W. is the kind of "regular guy" who burns through millions of other people's dollars in failed businesses, drinks too much until early middle age, dodges an insider-trading scandal, picks up a major league baseball franchise, and eventually finds himself in the Oval Office as commander in chief of the world's only superpower, thanks to a justice appointed to the Supreme Court by his father. [From part two]

"Conservatives truly love America and support the armed forces, while liberals are unpatriotic draft dodgers." Of all the pernicious claptrap emitted by right-wing propagandists, none is more offensive than smearing liberals and Democrats as unpatriotic. The portrayal of a liberal elite that despises its own country has allowed conservatives to appropriate the flag, the national anthem, and other national symbols -- the heritage of every American -- as their movement's private property, and to misuse those symbols for narrow partisan purposes. To the extremists, anyone who doesn't pledge allegiance to the Republican platform is a "traitor."[From part three]

Never before had a municipal authority in Texas been given license to seize the property of a private citizen for the benefit of other private citizens. When a recalcitrant family refused to sell a 13-acre parcel near the stadium site for half its appraised value, their land was condemned and handed over to Bush and his partners. The ensuing lawsuit revealed that prior to passage of the enabling legislation, the Rangers management had planned to wield condemnation as a weapon to drive down the property's price. In a judgment against the city, an outraged jury awarded more than $4 million to the Arlington family whose land had been expropriated. [From part four]

Part five goes up at Salon on Thursday night about 11 pm (CDT). Put me down as one who thinks that Gene Lyons and Joe Conason will be known as the Woodward and Bernstein of the Reagan-Bush era. It's too bad they don't have someone like the Washington Post promoting their findings, but if you read the book, you'd know why that is.

If you're serious about understanding the chasm-like gulf between right and left in this country, time spent reading The Boston Globe's The Angry Season would be well spent (subtitled Outrage is back: Americans of the left and right alike are asking, 'Where are these guys leading us?'). On the left Jim Hightower, on the right Clyde Prestowitz:

HIGHTOWER: People are recognizing that our founding, fundamental values of fairness, justice, and opportunity for all—the very values that define our America—are being shoved aside to create an un-America of plutocracy and autocracy. In my travels, I find widespread dismay, frustration, resentment, and outright anger that no one in power is standing with them against this. The question I hear everywhere, is: ‘‘Where the hell are the Democrats?’’ Well, ask the pundits, if so many people oppose the Bush agenda, why did they vote to give Republicans a sweeping victory—indeed, a ‘‘mandate’’—in last year’s congressional elections? They didn’t. The majority of voters gagged on their choices and didn’t vote all—only 33 percent of those eligible cast a ballot in races for the House. The bottom line is that Bush’s GOP got only 17 percent of eligible voters. Some ‘mandate.’

PRESTOWITZ: Domestically, the administration’s new direction has been even more dramatic and, for traditional conservatives, alarming. Far from being reduced, the size of government has grown larger as spending has been significantly increased to support our imperialist strategy. Passage of the Patriot Act has imposed the greatest constraint on individual American freedoms since the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. In the face of budget projections now deep in the red, further tax cuts may cripple all but the most basic of government functions. Will traditional conservatives sit still for this?

* *

Long post today (er, well, long quotes anyway), but two recent columns by Bob Herbert and Ted Rall really stand out. Today's New York Times has Herbert on Iraq (readers of my screed yesterday will recognize the gist of where Herbert's coming from), and it's too quotable for me to try and pick a couple for cutting and pasting. A must read that you will agree with.

This week's Rall op-ed piece at Yahoo is a great example of the "good Ted Rall." The good Ted Rall uses his considerable knowledge of Central and Southwest Asia to provide incisive insights into the current situation. This one is on the cell phone situation and how cronyism is resulting in crippled telecommunications in Iraq. [The "bad" Ted Rall? If you read his cartoons, you know what I mean. If you don't, this one's a good example (as opposed to this "classic" Rall cartoon). Every now and then Ted throws out something straight from the pages of vintage Ramparts magazine. It doesn't mean he's wrong, but even this hard-nosed blue collar, socialist-leaning Democrat sometimes finds himself wishing Rall would tone it down a notch. On the other hand, he is wicked funny.]

 

Posted by Steve Perry at August 21, 2003 11:59 AM

 

Just go... now

by Mark Gisleson

I usually avoid Maureen Dowd's columns. Her Clinton-era cheapshots wore on me, exacerbating the simultaneous need I had to defend Clinton's sex life while despising him for his domestic and foreign policies. Even in her post-Willy weeniescence, she can write some mean lines:

The administration's optimism was exposed as a fantasy when the two efforts it holds most dear — the reconstruction and democratization of Iraq, and advancing the Palestinian-Israeli peace process — both went up in smoke yesterday, literally.

Before the Iraq war, the Bush team inflated the threats to America; since the war, the Bush team has deflated the threats to America.

Even the Bush people, who tend to look at excruciatingly difficult problems and say no prob, were shaken by yesterday's carnage, which delivered a terrible truth: just because we got Uday and Qusay, Iraqi militants are not going to stop blowing up Westerners. Even if we get Saddam, the resistance will no doubt keep at it, hoping the dictator will enjoy the carnage from paradise.

The democracy dominoes are not falling as easily as Paul Wolfowitz and other neocons had predicted.

The countries that could help us out with more troops won't do it unless Iraq is turned over to the U.N. And Rummy & Co., always doctrinaire, doesn't want turn Iraq over to those wimpy guys with blue helmets.

To be honest, I don't know what little ol' me can add to the reporting on yesterday's giant mess. Media Whores Online takes the low road, rubbing the vacationing Bushies' noses in the steaming pile formerly known as their foreign policy strategy. That's tempting, but at this point I'd give the sonuvabitch tens of millions of dollars and a Saudi palace if he would just resign and go away now. It took me fifty years to finally understand why the abused locals always let the head bastard abscond with the treasury, but now I get it. Whatever it takes to be rid of him for once and for all.

Steve Gilliard, as usual, sums it up best:

The Iraqis aren't going to work with us. They are not going to kill their relatives for the greater glory of Halliburton. George Bush is so fundamentally corrupt, and the Iraqis are so fundamentally angry at the occupiers, that people are willing to help anyone destroy anything. They blew up the pipeline for the water. How did they learn the spot to hit? Some civil engineer had to tell them. How did they know where de Mello's office was? Someone who worked in the building told them. The Iraqi resistance is sheltered and embraced by the Iraqi people. It could not exist otherwise.

Moja Vera, the soldier-blogger I love to quote has killed his comments section. I'm glad. His posts speak to the humanity of Iraq and the occupation, but the trolls who frequented his comments were more interested in fighting the war at home. TCB, of course, also lacks a comments feature. If you're that pissed or pleased, you have to write me or Steve, but we're not net nannies invested in hosting a tribal shoutout forum for the politically incompatible. We'd rather read the thoughts of people who have taken time to think about what they want to say. Like Moja, for example:

i do see the reasons that we are here...the good and the bad...i do hear the explosions...and i see the smoke billowing into the sky...the militants are blowing up all hope of peace with car bombs...we do it with B-2 bombers...there are 2 sides to everything...

At this point in time I don't think the Iraqis care if we take the oil with us when we leave. I think they just want us gone. Now.

Posted by Steve Perry at August 20, 2003 9:57 AM

 

Non-Regnery bestsellers

by Mark Gisleson

Bits of this and that today. Just biding our time waiting for the next big scandal to emerge, and one will, no doubt about it. Has any administration ever planted the seeds of so many scandals so quickly?

Osama bin Laden's about due to show up in the news cycle again. The Independent's John R. Bradley is reporting some interesting old news. Yosif Salih Fahd Alyaeeri, one of the nineteen May 12th Riyadh bombing perpetrators, apparently had a letter on his person from Osama. Meanwhile, The Mirror's Mark Ellis reports on the new audio tape from Abdel Rahman al-Najdi in which he claims that Osama's alive and urging Iraqis to fight back. Shocking stuff. Hard to believe such things could happen. Certainly no one could have predicted such things before we invaded Iraq. [Well, OK, maybe these folks: James Fallows, Zoltan Grossman, various think tanks, or DIY).

You'll be seeing this link everywhere over the next few days, but at some point do take the time to read the salaciously delicious story of All Arnold's Scandals. Thank god for the British press and their willingness to report all those political sex scandals that don't involve Bill Clinton's penis (oh, and happy birthday today to Bill, Tipper Gore, and Mary Matalin — a threesome Larry Flynt would love to stick a staple into).

George W. Bush's resume was floating around the 'net for quite a while, but as a recently reformed long-time résumé writer, I wasn't very impressed (by the format, not the content, which was extremely unimpressive). Here's a new Bush resume site that does a much better job of conveying to Bush's employers (us/U.S.) just how underqualified he is for the Oval Office.

Bush is getting a lot more attention than just the kind Karl Rove seeks out for him. Here are some interesting selections from Amazon's bestseller list:

#6, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, by Al Franken

#8, Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth, by Joe Conason

#52, Living History, by Hillary Rodham Clinton

#68, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer

#69, The Prince of Providence: The True Story of Buddy Cianci, America's Most Notorious Mayor, Some Wiseguys, and the Feds, by Mike Stanton [audio link]

#73, Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America, by Molly Ivins

#87, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, by Sheldon Rampton and John C. Stauber

#98, Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History, by George Crile

Aside from the obvious liberal penchant for colons in book titles (as opposed to the conservative penchant for book titles written by assholes), the most telling thing about this list is the sudden rush to document recent history. Bush Wars readers won't be shocked to hear that the CIA is responsible for a great deal of the mess in the Middle East today, thanks to their strangling the region's first democracy in its infancy. But Charlie Wilson's story is less well known and no less important. Good books for diligent readers who have already gone through their stack of summer reading.

 

 

Posted by Steve Perry at August 19, 2003 9:52 AM

 

At home and abroad (we will manipulate our country's battles)

by Mark Gisleson

The U.S.

Steve Perry's on vacation this week from his editing duties at City Pages, so expect a lot of links to go with our otherwise always fair and balanced reporting.

The nature of the American class system has been on prominent display these last few days. Oh, no one saying anything along those exact lines, but take these Washington Posts op-ed pieces by Beth Shulman and Richard Morin and read them back to back and you'll see what I mean.

Shulman:

Fully 30 million Americans -- one in four US workers -- earn $8.70 an hour or less, a rate that works out to $18,100 a year, which is the current official poverty level in the United States for a family of four. These low-wage jobs usually lack health care, child care, pensions and vacation benefits. Their working conditions are often grueling, dangerous, even humiliating....

Morin:

"Directors who take action in the interest of stakeholders are ostracized to some degree, and that's closely related to what happens to whistle-blowers," Westphal said....Snubbed board members are significantly less likely to take subsequent actions to reduce the power of the executives they oversee -- as if they've learned their lesson.

Both Shulman and Morin jump start their pieces by cutting right to the chase. Shulman doesn't bother doing the math for minimum wage workers because everyone knows they're not making it, and Morin doesn't bother citing the case for CEOs being overpaid, because that goes without saying. Shulman goes on to address the four myths of the minimum wage:

Myth #1: Low-wage work is merely a temporary step on the ladder to a better job.

Myth #2: Training and new skills solve the problem.

Myth #3: Globalization stops us from doing anything about this problem.

Myth #4: Low-wage jobs are merely the result of an efficient market.

If you're unsure as to why any of these fall into the "lies" category Bush Wars readers have grown so familiar with, be sure to read Shulman's excellent and succinct debunkings of all four myths. Morin also deals with myths. He doesn't call them that, but still he does a good job of showing why CEO compensation is a rigged game just as much as the one played by Congress each time they keep the minimum wage pegged so far below the poverty level.

I'll resist the urge to fulminate about class war in Steve's space (I can always resurrect Career News if I want to do that), but I do feel obligated to point out that these articles are not typical of WaPo editorial fodder. For that, check out this someone-had-to-do-it anti-Bustamante, pro-Schwarzenegger essay from a Mexican-American.

* *

Iraq

The Chicago Tribune, one of the great old-time Republican newspapers has, by and large, not been terribly amused by this Bush's presidency. Gulf War II is not popular with them, and this Gary Marx article does a compelling job of showing the effects of the occupation on Iraqis and American troops.

Ezhar Mahmood Ridha and her sister-in-law were on their way to a wake when they met their deaths at the hands of US soldiers.

As their broken-down car stood stranded on a dusty overpass, a guerrilla fighter nearby detonated a huge explosive device at a passing US military convoy. As the soldiers turned and fired, the car carrying the assailant sped away, according to witnesses and US military officials.

The Americans hit the only object left on the overpass: Ridha's blue 1982 Mitsubishi sedan.

Bullets ripped through Ridha's body. She slumped over in the back seat, eyes frozen, as her 6-month-old baby slipped from her arms, witnesses said. Ridha's sister-in-law was hit in the stomach.

Aussie Vietnam War vet Brian Cloughley takes a much harder look at our troops in this must-read CounterPunch article.

"It happened at 9.30 at night . . . long before the start of curfew at 11 pm. The Americans had set up roadblocks in the Tunisia quarter of Baghdad, where the abd al-Kerim [family] lives. The family pulled up to the roadblock sensibly, slowly and carefully, so as not to alarm the Americans. But then pandemonium broke out. American soldiers were shooting in every direction. They just turned on the abd al-Kerims' car and sprayed it with bullets." It was reported that "They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop."

--

"Three soldiers surrounded me. I got down on my knees, hands in the air, holding my badge. One of them kicked me in the back and I fell to the ground. Another one kicked me twice in the face. They put their boots on my head and pressed it into the ground . . . I kept saying "police, police". I don't speak English but it's the same word in Arabic . . ." Sergeant Muhsen was not a combatant. One wonders if the soldiers who killed the two policemen and beat up Sergeant Muhsen had been issued, as required by the US Army's own manual, "a basic language translation card" indicating that "police" means "police". And did they give the police a chance to surrender before killing them?

Am I engaging in gross manipulation of this weblog's readers with these last couple sets of quotes? Of course I am. That's what I do: argue my point and try to advance my views. Steve's the journalist here — I'm strictly marketing. That's why I find these articles so fascinating. Journalists on the ground are starting to do some marketing of their own, and that's not good for the Bush neocons. It's easy to dismiss the rantings of a partisan like myself. It's harder but still fairly easy to dismiss the left wing press, people like Steve Perry and even Brian Cloughley (we'll take a look at how the Right works hard to keep sites like CounterPunch marginalized in some future post). It's much, much harder when the facts are coming from a mainstream reporter like Gary Marx. Expect Fox News to ignore this one, or make fun of Marx's name, but don't expect any kind of response from the "fair and balanced" folks.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at August 18, 2003 11:36 AM

 

Poll finds that Bill O'Reilly is an asshole

by Mark Gisleson

It's Fair and Balanced Friday on the 'net (much more on this at Twin Cities Babelogue's front page).

Not many voices have been raised in defense of Fox and O'Reilly, although Frontpage Magazine did do a half-hearted hatchet job on Franken, relying on faded memories of a couple of old SNL skits and throwing out some '70s era comments about drugs. Roger Ailes defended Fox News in a Baltimore Sun interview, but his best shot fell a little short.

"Nobody's ever told, on our channel, left or right, what to say. [Democrat] Al Sharpton's been on our shows. He's not a right-winger. If you wake Mara Liasson up at 3 in the morning and say, 'What are you?' she'll say, 'Liberal!'"

Al Sharpton is, of course, Al Sharpton. But Mara Liasson, a liberal? Here's a quote from one of her Fox appearances:

"[Democratic Members of Congress Jim McDermott and David Bonior] are a disgrace...I mean, these guys ought to, I don't know, resign."

Franken, on the other hand, is one of the top comedic geniuses of our time. His response to Fox's lawsuit? "I normally prefer not to be out of the country on vacation when I'm sued. However, from everything I know about law regarding satire, I'm not worried."

Fox News is more than fair game. Besides distorting, bending, twisting and otherwise mutilating news items, they exercise remarkable control over what they choose to report. Here are some stories you won't be seeing on Fox News tonight:

Jim Lobe's "A Bigger, Badder Sequel to Iran-Contra." Clearly nothing to learn here, move along now, move along...

The New York Times just discovered that the Texas education miracle isn't quite so miraculous. Given the previous accolades Texas education has received from Fox, this practically constitutes a crime scene. We'll have to ask you to stand behind the yellow tape while we hide the evidence.

A lucid bit of commentary from Christopher Hitchens. No thanks. Fox would just as soon wait until a little later in the day when Chris will blend in better with their other potted plants.

Oh, and in the spirit of Fox News, I conducted a personal poll last night, calling up half a dozen friends and asking their opinion of Bill O'Reilly. The consensus? Five out of six said he was an asshole. The sixth was less complimentary.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at August 15, 2003 8:25 AM

 

Leveraging ignorance

by Mark Gisleson

Some days blogging feels more like teaching Civics and handing out reading assignments, but if this first graf from Bob Herbert's latest column doesn't get you to click on the link, you're probably reading the wrong weblog.

Talk about preaching to the choir. President Bush and his clueless team of economic advisers held a summit at the president's ranch in Crawford, Tex., yesterday. This is the ferociously irresponsible crowd that has turned its back on simple arithmetic and thinks the answer to every economic question is a gigantic tax cut for the rich.

[more]

I don't know if the big boys ever Google themselves, but on the off chance they'd ever happen to read this post I'd like to say how very much I value Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman's columns in the New York Times. (How much? Oh, about twice as much as I enjoy the rest of the New York Times put together — liberal newspaper my ass.)

Elaine Cassel will have more on this case later, but in the meantime, here's the ABC News report about that arms dealer bust that appears to be more sting than national security. No mention of him yet, but this operation just reeks of Ashcroft.

This last item came to me via a Cedar Rapids elementary school teacher. It's fairly deep stuff, but worth the read. It would be far too vast a conspiracy to ever orchestrate, still, it is remarkable how the success of big corporations and the Right in general has led to an incredible erosion in the quality of public school education. I'd argue that it's not so much a plan to dumb down America as it is the inevitable result of any process that seeks to enrich the few at the expense of the many. Leveraging is so much easier when you're using semi-literate dummies (i.e. Fox News viewers) as your fulcrum.

Oh yeah, we'll be "fair and balanced" tomorrow. See you then.

Posted by Steve Perry at August 14, 2003 9:35 AM

 

Mounting hypocrisy

by Mark Gisleson

I haven't heard a lot about this administration and the subject of petty venality. Sure, many have pointed fingers at Halliburton and other war profiteers, but that's garden variety Bush clan corruption at work. As I said yesterday, nothing new here, now move along.

Except that TBoggs just noticed an interesting article at WorldNetDaily. Paul Sperry has the details:

Thomas Rider, as acting director of Energy's intelligence office, overruled senior intelligence officers on his staff in voting for the position at a National Foreign Intelligence Board meeting at CIA headquarters last September.

His officers argued at a pre-briefing at Energy headquarters that there was no hard evidence to support the alarming Iraq nuclear charge, and asked to join State Department's dissenting opinion, Energy officials say.

Rider ordered them to "shut up and sit down," according to sources familiar with the meeting.

As a result, State was the intelligence community's lone dissenter in the key National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, something the Bush administration is quick to remind critics of its prewar intelligence. So far no banned weapons have been found in Iraq to confirm its charges.

The secret 90-page report, prepared Oct. 1, was rushed to sway members of Congress ahead of a key vote on granting the White House war-making authority. It also formed the underlying evidence for the White House's decision to go to war.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham gave Rider a $13,000 performance bonus after the NIE report was released and just before the war, department sources say. He had received an additional $7,500 before the report.
"That's a hell of a lot of money for an intelligence director who had no experience or background in intelligence, and who'd only been running the office for nine months," said one source who requested anonymity. "Something's fishy."

Now that's inspiring. For only $20,500 in bonuses, you too can get any kind of intelligence you want.

Of course none of us are surprised at the lack of Congressional investigations into such shenanigans, but it's a little dismaying that the big media boys are so coy about reporting on these things. Well, Susan Page at USA Today (of all places!) unloaded on the President and Congress yesterday. Worth reading in its entirety, the conclusions are especially eye-popping:

Florida Sen. Bob Graham, a presidential hopeful and former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he would love to convene hearings into the "misleading statements" by Bush and others about whether there was credible evidence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Niger that could be used in a nuclear weapon.

"Were they the result of intelligence agency failures? Or were the agencies acting appropriately but the information they provided was manipulated?" he asks. "I would want to hold a hearing on that."

Democrats also want to explore:

•  The administration's refusal to declassify a section of the congressional report on the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The 28 pages reportedly detail possible Saudi involvement.

•  The help that the Federal Aviation Administration gave in May to Texas Republicans who were trying to track down Democratic state legislators. The Democrats had flown to Oklahoma to avoid a special session on redistricting.

•  Allegations that the administration has distorted scientific findings to justify political decisions involving missile defense, environmental protection and other issues. Waxman last week issued a 40-page report on the subject. A White House spokesman dismissed it as partisan sniping.

"We still have our voices and our ability to speak out when we see things we don't like," says Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, another presidential contender and the senior Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
But he says "it would be a lot different" if Democrats could schedule hearings and call witnesses. "They'd be under a lot more pressure than they are today."

Stuart Roy, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, has no sympathy for the other side: "You have Democrats feeling irrelevant, and the only way they can make themselves feel more relevant is to engage in the politics of personal destruction."

[more]

Even the Washington Post's increasingly infamous op-ed page managed to take notice of the double standard:

One major politician called the administration's policies an "abject national embarrassment."

A former national security official said the president "has squandered American credibility and undermined our preeminence around the world." Another highly respected foreign policy expert said the administration "has not been able to distinguish between professorial concepts and foreign policy."

A key House leader insisted that "the president does not have the divine right of a king." He accused the administration of providing the public with "the spin, the whole spin, and nothing but the spin."

An important senator called the president "a jerk," and a House member said: "He still looks like a small man in a big office and an illegitimate president."

Before you hurt yourself trying to think which Democrats said these things about Bush, you should probably know that E.J. Dionne is quoting Republicans on the subject of the Clinton presidency.

More slowly than I ever would have expected, this administration's hypocrisy is being outed. Once we had feeding frenzies focused on Clinton's sex life, Al Gore's lies, the Watergate break-in or even Iran-Contra, but now our six mega-media corporations seem astonishingly reluctant to pursue matters of even the gravest malfeasance.

The fate of Arnold Schwarzenegger may give us some clues as to the kind of media coverage we can expect in the months to come. Some reporters seem to be noticing that while Ahnold's campaign hands out position papers, the candidate himself seems to have very little to say. A past meeting with Ken Lay of Enron fame is being recalled [see #10], and various folks are digging into Schwarzenegger's Nazi issues. Even his "U.S. English" ties are being looked at. This could be a warm up for what life will be like for Bush in the near future. We can only hope so.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at August 13, 2003 11:49 AM

 

Grounding the cool kid and his friends

by Mark Gisleson

In what is beginning to look like a pattern that all news organizations will soon adopt, Newsweek follows up on blogger Josh Marshall's scoop on Mahdi Obeidi with an outstanding Michael Hirsh "web exclusive" on how the Bushies have stashed their whistle-blowing Iraqi scientist tightly away from nosy reporters.

The story's been making the rounds since late June when CNN showed Obeidi in his backyard where he had buried documents and notes on Iraq's enrichment program way back in 1991. The Bush administration crowed loudly, but then Obeidi disappeared from sight. Apparently, the neocons running the "occupation" didn't like "the rest of the story":

True, Obeidi said he’d buried the centrifuge equipment, as he’d been ordered to do in 1991 by Saddam’s son Qusay Hussein and son-in-law Hussein Kamel. But he also insisted to the CIA that, in effect, that was that: Saddam had never reconstituted his centrifuge program afterward, in large part because of the Iraqi tyrant’s fear of being discovered under the U.N. sanctions-and-inspections regime.... He also told the CIA that, as the International Atomic Energy Agency and many technical experts have said, the aluminum tubes were intended for rockets, not uranium enrichment or a nuclear-weapons program....

Soon, not only was Obeidi no longer a marquee name for the Bush team, he was incommunicado. Whisked off to a safe house in Kuwait, with no access to phones or the Internet, he waited in vain for what he thought had been offered to him: asylum in the United States and green cards granting permanent residency to him and his eight-member family.... As recently as Aug. 5, the last time [former UN inspector David] Albright spoke to him, Obeidi did not know when he would be allowed to leave for the United States, Albright said.

Asked about the Obeidi case, CIA spokesman William Harlow said Friday, “We don’t issue green cards … We never said he was coming here. We never made a promise.” (In fact, the agency does on occasion arrange asylum for useful informants)....

Albright and others suggest that, with the Obeidi case, the message being sent by the Bush administration to Iraqi scientists being interrogated in Iraq is a troublesome one: if you don’t tell us what we want to hear, you won’t be rewarded. In fact, things might even get a little unpleasant for you....

It took a while, but a major U.S. newspaper finally put out an editorial on the Valerie Plame affair. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer wisely points out that "[u]ntil Congress and the public know that there has been an unfettered inquiry into the handling of intelligence, the administration will face growing distrust." [Thanks to Buzzflash for this and the following link.]

Both of these items are related in the sense that this administration is facing a growing crisis, not so much over their actions, as for the lies used to shroud their actions in the cloak of patriotic self-defense. These lies are more than a little troubling, and Sam Dash, former Chief Counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, addresses them head on in Newsday's "Today We Face Another 'Watergate'."

[Watergate] was the culmination of a series of criminal acts authorized by Nixon and carried out by his in-house secret espionage team to maintain his power, smother dissent and punish his enemies....

It is the time of the anonymous informer and the chilling threat, reminiscent of Watergate, that dissent is unpatriotic and giving aid to the enemy. The logic of the government appears to be that the only way we can preserve our freedom and liberty from the efforts of terrorists to destroy them is to temporarily destroy them ourselves. But true security comes from our being a free society blessed with constitutional democracy and a Bill of Rights - rights that if lost cannot be easily recovered.

An alert Congress would check the administration's grab for greater power than the Constitution permits. It would hold hearings and inform the people of the dangers they faced. Unfortunately, Congress today is shirking its constitutional responsibilities. There are no Sam Ervins in the Senate now. Instead of offering leadership, our congressional representatives defer to the White House in an attempt to show they are as patriotic as the president.

Cover ups, calls for action from the press, and a Congress that shirks its Constitutional duty. Certainly, by the standards of the early 1970s, this is cause for alarm. But to the conservatives who always thought Nixon got railroaded by Brezhnev-loving liberals, we're currently experiencing business as usual at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Nothing to see here, now move along.

My only question is: if these are the things we do know about, what in the hell is going on that we don't know about? On those rare moments when I can summon up enough objectivity to look at this White House dispassionately, it's hard not to see a "cool kid" and his nerdy friends hiding out from the public in a fort made out of sofa cushions after egging the gardener. You can only fault the kids so much before wondering just when exactly their parents are going to step in and take some remedial action. I suspect the general public's going to have to act in loco parentis on this one as Frist and Hastert don't seem to be in any hurry to ground their wayward charge.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at August 12, 2003 9:45 AM

 

Reader mail, links

by Mark Gisleson

July was a record-breaking month at Twin Cities Babelogue. Led by Steve Perry's "All the President's Lies" articles, we had over 50,000 unique visitors stop by at Bush Wars and other TCB weblogs. Steve got a record-breaking number of letters as well, split right down the middle between pro- and anti-Bush writers. Not surprisingly, City Pages tends to attract liberal readers, so the even-steven response is a bit unexpected. Steve thinks Bush has strong reservoirs of support; I tend to think that Karl Rove's disinformation machine is operating at peak efficiency, and his droogies are firing off letters right and left to head off criticism of our Commander-in-Chief.

Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus examine some of the lies Steve wrote about in Sunday's Washington Post: "Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence." Countering this is Bob Novak predicting that David Kay will find the WMDs. As has been the case for decades now, the media will paint this as a "he said, she said" debate, and will report both sides regardless of how much evidence piles up revealing Bush's claims to be spurious.

There's a wild card in all of this, and ironically this Joker comes from Iraq, land of more decks of cards than Minnesota has lakes. The troops aren't happy. The Guardian explains:

Through emails and chatrooms a picture is emerging of day-to-day gripes, coupled with ferocious criticism of the way the war has been handled. They paint a vivid picture of US army life that is a world away from the sanitised official version.

In a message posted on a website last week, one soldier was brutally frank. 'Somewhere down the line, we became an occupation force in [Iraqi] e