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Archive: POLITICS >please note: some links may no longer be active.
Politics, marketing, and branding One of the fascinating, and extremely important outgrowths of the development of the blogosphere is the combination of meaningful comments and discussions which regularly appear on the best sites. There is an excellent example of this taking place over at firedoglake, which ReddHedd has highlighted nicely. Here's as excerpt: Political parties are like brands in business. Nike has a brand, a "personality:" winning. It's also young and a little edgy in its self-conscious presentation. Of course this is absurd. A corporation is not a personality, though corporations and organizations do have cultures. There are ugly dark sides to Nike's culture, and I won't get into them here (it's a tangent). People buy brands as a way of buying an identity, or at least, buying into one and declaring it by way of the brand's label. Think of all those Apple people who rebel, as an identity, from Microsoft. Political parties are brands. The Republican brand as it has developed over the last 30 years is aggressive, masculine and "moral." They have built this branding image by promoting personalities and "policies" designed to be products that position the brand. These policies are not focused on governing but on brand placement, and as a way to wedge the competing brand. In a two party system, you can only force dominance of your brand by rebranding your opposition in the worst possible light. They've been doing that for 30 years two. So, essential to their attempt to brand themselves as strong, masculine, aggressive and "moral," they have done all they can to define Dems as wimps, charlatans, profligates and pansies. Add a heavy dose of racist code language, stir and repeat repeat repeat, and you have the history of the last 30 years. Read the full post here
The cartoon controversy I have chosen to stay out of the cartoon controversy discussion, but Chris at Crooked Timber makes a very important point relating to an apparent double standard in Europe. It's well worth a look
Hubris and recklessness: a case study Today's NY Times includes an article about the Bush administration's handling of internal objections to the developed policy of coercive interrogation of terror suspects. Sadly, few will be surprised to learn that one of the Pentagon's top lawyers objected strongly to the policy, yet was brushed aside, and ultimately bypassed when the final draft of a crucial report was prepared. Here are some excerpts: This case really is an outrageous, and chillingly accurate template for the Administration's Standard Operating Procedure when dealing with internal dissent. And when history is written, there is no doubt in my mind that such behavior will be seen as one of repeated, fundamental mistakes which contributed time and again to reckless decisions being made which subsequently proved to be disasterous. "Even if one wanted to authorize the U.S. military to conduct coercive interrogations, as was the case in Guantánamo, how could one do so without profoundly altering its core values and character?" Mr. Mora asked the Pentagon's chief lawyer, William J. Haynes II, according to the memorandum. (snip) "In my view, some of the authorized interrogation techniques could rise to the level of torture, although the intent surely had not been to do so," Mr. Mora wrote. After trying to rally other senior officials to his position, Mr. Mora met again with Mr. Haynes on Jan. 10, 2003. He argued his case even more forcefully, raising the possibility that senior officials could be prosecuted for authorizing abusive conduct, and asking: "Had we jettisoned our human rights policies?" Still, Mr. Mora wrote, it was only when he warned Mr. Haynes on Jan. 15 that he was planning to issue a formal memorandum on his opposition to the methods — delivering a draft to Mr. Haynes's office — that Mr. Rumsfeld suddenly retracted the techniques. Read the full article here (must be a registered Times user) Jane Mayer has a pertinent article in The New Yorker as well
Josh Marshall on Cheney Josh Marshall has understandably been busy in recent months, building out and improving his deservedly popular Talking Points Memo website. Unfortunately, though, the frequency and depth of his personal contributions have decreased somewhat as a result. Hopefully that will change in time, and his recent post about Dick Cheney is an example of just how good he is at efficiently stripping an issue to its essence. About physical courage I don't know the answer. But all available evidence suggests that the Mr. Cheney is a man of deep moral cowardice. Makes a mistake and shoots his friend; blames the friend. Only he won't do it directly. So he gets underlings to do it for him. Forced to speak out publicly, he appears before a ringer-journalist guaranteed not to press uncomfortable questions. It's all of a piece with the man's record. He's afraid of accountability. That's why he's such a fan of self-protecting secrecy. That's why he's big on smearing government whistle-blowers. It's really just two sides of the same coin. He's afraid of accountability. It's the same reason why he's such a notorious prevaricator -- lies to avoid accountability. These are all the hallmarks of a moral coward. Read the full post at TPM
An interview with Norman Solomon Solomon was way ahead of most in his understanding of what was happening in the run-up to the Iraq war. He answers questions about Iran (among other issues) in this interview. Guernica: Do you think an attack on Iran is likely? Norman Solomon: I believe that a U.S. (or Israeli) air strike against Iran is quite likely in the next year, [which] would be counterproductive, strengthening the hold that extreme hardliners have over Iranian institutions and public life. There is still a political struggle underway in Iran, and although reformers suffered a serious setback in the presidential election last summer, the struggle continues. The more aggressive that the U.S. government gets, the worse it is for human-rights advocates inside Iran. Guernica: Tehran's WMD program is pretty well documented. The Iranian leader has made some pretty strong statements lately about wiping Israel off the map. Shouldn't our government be concerned? Norman Solomon: The U.S. can't bomb its way out of this problem. An attack is likely to backfire and make the situation much worse – and even more dangerous. Overall, "do as we say, not as we do" has never been very convincing. With U.S. support continuing for Israel and its nuclear arsenal estimated at 200 bombs, the fact is that Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has never submitted to international inspections. Read the full interview at Guernica
The Cheney interview nugget: declassification Forget about the hunting accident for a moment, even though it was the enitire reason for the Hume interview. Buried in the interview was the following, highly important exchange: Q Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify information? THE VICE PRESIDENT: There is an executive order to that effect. Q There is. THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes. Q Have you done it? THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order -- Q You ever done it unilaterally? THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President. This is a very, very big deal, and not only because of the specific implications for the Plame affair. Steve Clemons has a comprehensive breakdown here. Be sure to also read some of the comments below the post, particularly those left by KM and Pissed Off American.
Kurtz–Hume quinella What a sad state of affairs. If you've read the post below, then you'll appreciate the blinding contrast (at least in this case) between Will, and the two above-named "reporters". Hume is the Fox News talking head who, along with his colleagues, essentially shills for the Administration. So it came as no surprise when Cheney chose Hume to ask the tough questions in his first public appearance since the shooting. The Reading Howie Kurtz, however, one could hardly have come away from the interview without being impressed. First, perhaps accompanied by the theme from Mission Impossible playing in the background as he wrote it, comes this: Brit Hume was in his morning staff meeting at Fox News yesterday when his cell phone rang. It was Dick Cheney. The network's Washington managing editor had been pressing for the interview that every news organization was hotly pursuing, and now the vice president was saying that he would talk to Hume -- and only Hume -- about the hunting accident that has put him at the center of a fierce Beltway storm. Then, just in case you weren't yet convinced of the importance of the interview, Howie buttresses his case with this, from an Mary Matalin, a former Cheney aide and informal adviser who accompanied him to the interview in the vice president's ceremonial office, said the vice president likes Hume but that "our objective was to get the whole story out in a consecutive way. He wanted a long form. We had no desire for anything other than comprehensive and hard questions." Of course. That's why they chose Fox and Hume: to ask "hard questions". And Howie is good enough to provide examples of Humes tough questions: Hume asked whether anyone was drinking (Cheney said he had had a beer at lunch hours earlier) and asked whom Cheney first talked to at the White House (Chief of Staff Andrew Card). He even asked whether Cheney hit the bird (the vice president didn't know). Presumably, Hume thought to himself "Hmmm...the VP had a beer at lunch, and refused to see the sherrif for many hours...any need for a follow-up question? Nah." The full article can be found at the The Washington Post
George Will gets it While not my favorite pundit, at least Will (in contrast to many other "conservative" commentators) has the courage to be intellectually honest with respect to the Administration's most recent abuses. Administration supporters incoherently argue that the AUMF [the Authorization for Use of Military Force] also authorized the NSA surveillance -- and that if the administration had asked, Congress would have refused to authorize it. The first assertion is implausible: None of the 518 legislators who voted for the AUMF has said that he or she then thought it contained the permissiveness the administration discerns in it. Did the administration, until the program became known two months ago? Or was the AUMF then seized upon as a justification? Equally implausible is the idea that in the months after Sept. 11, Congress would have refused to revise the 1978 law in ways that would authorize, with some supervision, NSA surveillance that, even in today's more contentious climate, most serious people consider conducive to national security. Anyway, the argument that the AUMF contained a completely unexpressed congressional intent to empower the president to disregard the FISA regime is risible coming from this administration. It famously opposes those who discover unstated meanings in the Constitution's text and do not strictly construe the language of statutes. Read the full article at The Washington Post
Hmmm... I wonder what percentage was spent judiciously? "The Bush administration spent $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars on 137 contracts with advertising agencies over the past two-and-a-half years, according to a Government Accountability Office report released by House Democrats Monday." Read the full article at AdWeek (Thanks to Josh at TPM)
"Democracy in the Middle East" That, as you probably know, is a line that George Bush has used with increasing frequency since a need arose for a second (or was it a third?) rationale for the invasion of Iraq. Well, the following headline and lead sentence from a NY Times article tell you all you need to know about this Administration's respect for the most recently elected democratic goverment in the region. U.S. and Israelis Are Said to Talk of Hamas Ouster Not only does this show a disgraceful and hypocritical lack of respect for a democratically elected goverment, but, in a continuation of a disturbing pattern by the Bush Administration, it is a move which is certain to play into the hands of radical Islamic elements throughout the world. Read the full article here
Duty, according to George W. Bush and George Bernard Shaw See, we have a duty. The job of the President is to confront problems, not to pass them on to future Presidents and future generations. –GWB I have a duty to nominate well-qualified men and women to the federal judiciary. I have done just that, and I will continue to do so. –GWB We have a duty for future generations. We have a duty to leave this world more peaceful. We have a duty to reform the institutions that are old and tired. That's our duty. –GWB I have a duty as the president to define problems facing our nation and to call upon people to act. –GWB I have a duty to protect the Executive Branch from legislative encroachment. I mean, for example, when the GAO demands documents from us, we're not going to give them to them. –GWB When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty. –George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Not thoroughly disgusted yet? From Bill Theobald of Gannett News: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert engineered a backroom legislative maneuver to protect pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits, say witnesses to the pre-Christmas power play. The language was tucked into a Defense Department appropriations bill at the last minute without the approval of members of a House-Senate conference committee, say several witnesses, including a top Republican staff member. (snip) "It is a travesty of the legislative process," said Thomas Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "It vests enormous power in the hands of congressional leaders and private interests, minimizes transparency and denies legitimate opportunities for all interested parties, in Congress and outside, to weigh in on important policy questions." Read the full article here
Robert Scheer on Bush's outrageous budget proposal Shame on the L.A. Times for "letting go" of one of the best, and most honest mainstream journalists in the U.S. Where would the Bush administration be without terrorism? Like the Cold War before it, the “war on terror” is a conveniently sweeping rationale for all manner of irrational governance, such as the outrageous $2.77-trillion budget the president proposed to Congress on Monday. Without terrorism, how could Bush justify to fiscal conservatives the whopping budget deficits that he has ballooned via his tax cuts for the wealthy that he now seeks to make permanent? Without terrorism, how could he convince government corruption watchdogs that the huge increases in military and homeland security — 7% and 8%, respectively — aren’t simply payback to the defense contractors who so heavily support the Republicans every election cycle? Without terrorism, how could the president get away with blindly dumping $120 billion more into the war in Afghanistan and the bungled occupation of Iraq that the Bush administration had once promised would be financed by Iraqi oil sales? In order to pay for the money pit that is Iraq, the Bush budget demands draconian cuts in 141 domestic programs, led by a $36-billion cut in Medicare spending for the elderly over the next five years. This from a president reelected after promising to expand rather than curtail healthcare services to seniors. Many of the other proposed cuts are equally obscene, such as the termination of $1 billion in child-care funds over five years, and the complete elimination of the Commodity Supplemental Food Program that provides food assistance to low-income seniors, needy pregnant women and children. By all means, read the full post here
The "Reverse Robin Hood" budget Howie Klein provides a scathing–and truly scary–overview of Bush's recently proposed 2007 budget. Some choice morsals: Medicaid patients will be forking over higher co-payments and deductibles. College loans will be more costly for students from working and middle class homes. Bye-bye federal aid for child support enforcement. And while you're at it, you ladies getting government assistance, you're just gonna have to work a little bit harder. And rich folks will share not at all in the sacrifice but will reap more benefits to make up for the taxes the wealthy had to pay going all the way back since FDR came along and saved capitalism from Bush-like excesses in the 1920's! As the fascist pig president prepares to send another $120 BILLION to the ratholes of Iraq and Afghanistan, I listened to a run down of some of the programs singled out for elimination, almost entirely programs for society's most needy, and it nearly broke my heart: food for low-income seniors, assistance for disadvantaged students seeking to finish high school and go to college, preventive healthcare for "under-served populations"... Bush seeks to cut $105 billion out of Medicare, gut the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and the National Institute of Health (particularly singling out programs dealing with cancer, blood diseases and heart and lung diseases for the Bush touch). His cuts to Federal education funding-- at every level-- are the biggest in the entire history of our country. Remember the first responders-- firefighters, policemen, emergency medical services? Cuts across the board for all, from over 50% to 80%. You live in an area with a meth problem? You're on your own, suckers; the programs are eliminated. (This is especially interesting since at least one recent study purports that counties with meth addiction problems are as strong a base for Bush politics as are the religionist fanatics!) But one of my favorite ironies is that he's also trying to cut the Army Corps of Engineers by over 11%-- you know, the men and women trying to fix the mess he made of New Orleans. Read the full post at the Down With Tyranny blog
Bush, Gonzalas, and the NSA wiretaps: an overview Glenn Greenwald, the point man in the blogosphere's effort to expose the dangers of the Administration's abuses of power, has written a comprehensive–and very important–overview of the NSA scandal. He also provides excellent suggestions for strategies to which we can all contribute. For those expecting the first day of the NSA hearings to be the culmination of this scandal or to produce made-for-TV smoking guns, Tuesday was anti-climactic. Alberto Gonzales diligently displayed his principal, defining attribute – a willingness to advocate each and every pro-Bush defense with a degree of blind loyalty that is staggering and, even for Washington, truly rare in its slavish purity. The Justice Department had previously issued multiple, lengthy documents setting forth the Administration’s legal defenses of Bush’s NSA program, and Gonzales did little more than monotonously recite those scripted points. In response to questions calling for him to deviate from the script, he either refused to answer or claimed he was unable to do so. Although lacking in grand drama, Gonzales’ testimony marks the beginning, not the end, of this scandal. How this scandal will be resolved is very much still to be determined, and its resolution depends exclusively on the course of action chosen by Bush opponents. Gonzales' defense of George Bush creates several potent opportunities to ensure that the Administration is held accountable for its repeated and deliberate acts of law-breaking. Read the full post here
The worst kind of deja vu And just when a sober, accurate assessment of Iran becomes crucial. State Department officials appointed by President Bush have sidelined key career weapons experts and replaced them with less experienced political operatives who share the White House and Pentagon's distrust of international negotiations and treaties. The reorganization of the department's arms control and international security bureaus was intended to help it better deal with 21st-century threats. Instead, it's thrown the agency into turmoil and produced an exodus of experts with decades of experience in nuclear arms, chemical weapons and related matters, according to 11 current and former officials and documents obtained by Knight Ridder. The reorganization was conducted largely in secret by a panel of four political appointees. A career expert was allowed to join the group only after most decisions had been made. Its work was overseen by Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer who was detailed to the State Department as senior adviser to former Undersecretary of State John Bolton, a critic of arms agreements and international organizations. Read the full article at Knight-Ridder
"conscience-shocking" That's how U.S. District Judge Deborah A. Batts characterized former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman's behavior for reassuring New Yorkers soon after the Sept. 11 attacks that it was safe to return to their homes and offices while toxic dust was polluting the neighborhood. I was on Long Island at the time of the attack, and I still remember my mother calling me to ask spefically about the potential risks of breathing the air. I brushed off her concerns, mainly because I was far enough away from Ground Zero. In retrospect, her instincts were dead-on, so to speak, and I feel very sorry for those who did accept the reassurances from a government body which is supposed to protect us from environmental dangers . More from Judge Batts: "No reasonable person would have thought that telling thousands of people that it was safe to return to lower Manhattan, while knowing that such return could pose long-term health risks and other dire consequences, was conduct sanctioned by our laws..." (snip) Quoting a ruling in an earlier case, the judge said a public official cannot be held personally liable for putting the public in harm's way unless the conduct was so egregious as "to shock the contemporary conscience." Given her role in protecting the health and environment for Americans, Whitman's reassurances after Sept. 11 were "without question conscience-shocking," Batts said. Read the full report at yahoo news
The theoretical foundations of liberalism Publius has written a brief, thought-provoking article on the important distinctions between the underpinnings of liberal and social conservative beliefs. The social conservative ascendancy is a rejection of not merely Democrats, but traditional liberalism itself (at least in some respects). And as their power increases, they will (as fundamentalists tend to do ) never be satisifed but keep reaching for more. Maybe, like with Schiavo, when evangelicals start overreaching, the country will revolt. But I don't think that secular and even religious progressives should wait for that day. Countering this movement requires rehabilitating liberalism and explaining why it is that "liberals" believe the things they do. And that task is more difficult than it might seem. Read the full post at the Law and Politics blog
Israel, Hamas, and fanaticism The following is excerpted from a recent Nation article by Jon Weiner. Amos Oz is Israel's leading novelist, a founder and the best-known voice of Peace Now. He is a bellwether for Israeli doves, for opponents of the occupation who favor Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and a negotiated two-state solution. In a recent conversation, he assessed the political and diplomatic implications of the Hamas electoral victory.
JW–The description of fanatics in your new book obviously refers to Israelis as well as Palestinians. What is your estimate of the state of fanaticism on the Israeli political scene today? AO–Israeli fanaticism and fundamentalism unfortunately are alive and kicking--on the far right, and in the ultra-religious segments of Israeli society. No society is immune to fanaticism and fundamentalism--not Israeli society, not American society and not Arab society. I have never gone for this simplistic dichotomy about a struggle between civilizations: east versus west, or Islam versus the rest of the world. I think the real struggle in the world arena, and probably for the rest of the twenty-first century, is the struggle between the fanatics and the rest of us. JW–Has the electoral victory of Hamas strengthened the fanatics inside Israel? AO–Fanatics always play into each other's hands. They always kindle the enthusiasm and zeal of their counterparts on the other side. Read the full interview here
Cindy Sheehan's arrest: a closer look I must confess that I didn't initially give much thought to the report of Sheehan's arrest and removal from the site of the SOTU address. And while it's tempting to atribute that oversight to outrage fatigue, that really wasn't the explanation. It's that I failed to think it through the way that Glenn Greenwald has, and having read his post, I agree that her arrest was, in fact, both outrageous, and a serious symptom of the diseased state of our country. This is nothing more than a naked attempt to stifle dissent and to create a criticism-free bubble around George Bush. Presidents routinely use all sorts of propagandistic imagery at the State of the Union to decorate their speeches with an aura of regal patriotism. We always see weeping widows and military heroes and symbolic guests of all sorts who are used as props and visuals to bolster the President's message both emotionally and psychologically. The State of the Union speech is hardly free of visual messages and propaganda of that sort; quite the contrary. But we apparently now have a country where the only ideas allowed to be expressed in our Nation's Capitol while the President is speaking are ones which glorify the Government and its Leader and where dissenting views are prohibited and will subject someone to arrest. Message cleansing of that sort belongs at a political rally in North Korea, not in Washington, DC. As is always the case these days, deep concerns about such issues are virtually non-existent in the mainstream media. Read the full post at Glenn's indispensable site
Cheney, again Newsweek has a very important article out which provides a chilling look inside the Bush Administration, and reveals how some noble, high level officials questioned and pushed back at the unprecedented power-grab being made in the name of anti-terrorism. What is most scary, however, is that these true, conservative patriots were put under extreme pressure (and in some cases, forced out) by the hard-liners in the Administration. And who led the attack? Dick Cheney, of course. These Justice Department lawyers, backed by their intrepid boss Comey, had stood up to the hard-liners, centered in the office of the vice president, who wanted to give the president virtually unlimited powers in the war on terror. Demanding that the White House stop using what they saw as farfetched rationales for riding rough-shod over the law and the Constitution, Goldsmith and the others fought to bring government spying and interrogation methods within the law. They did so at their peril; ostracized, some were denied promotions, while others left for more comfortable climes in private law firms and academia. Some went so far as to line up private lawyers in 2004, anticipating that the president's eavesdropping program would draw scrutiny from Congress, if not prosecutors. These government attorneys did not always succeed, but their efforts went a long way toward vindicating the principle of a nation of laws and not men. By all means, read the full article on the MSNBC site
Dissent, for a change Three cheers for some Georgetown University law students who turned their backs on Attorney General Gonzales while he gave a speech at their school.
Here's what David Cole, a Georgetown law professor (and one of the panelists), had to say: "When you're a law student, they tell you if say that if you can't argue the law, argue the facts. They also tell you if you can't argue the facts, argue the law. If you can't argue either, apparently, the solution is to go on a public relations offensive and make it a political issue... to say over and over again "it's lawful", and to think that the American people will somehow come to believe this if we say it often enough. In light of this, I'm proud of the very civil civil disobedience that was shown here today." More pictures can be found here
Achcar on the Hamas victory Author Gilbert Achcar provides numerous insights and historical perspective in a superb editorial on Juan Cole's website. Here are a couple of excerpts: The sweeping electoral victory of Hamas is but one of the products of the intensive use made by the United States in the Muslim world, since the 1950's, of Islamic fundamentalism as an ideological weapon against both progressive nationalism and communism. This was done in close collaboration with the Saudi kingdom -- a de facto U.S. protectorate almost from its foundation in 1932. The promotion of the most reactionary interpretation of the Islamic religion, exploiting deeply-rooted popular religious beliefs, led to this ideology filling the vacuum left by the exhaustion by the 1970's of the two ideological currents it served to fight. The road was thus paved in the entire Muslim world for the transformation of Islamic fundamentalism into the dominant expression of mass national and social resentment, to the great dismay of the U.S. and its Saudi protectorate. (snip) The electoral victory of Hamas is a resounding slap in the face of the Bush administration. As the latest illustration of the sorcerer's apprenticeship that U.S. policy in the Middle East has so spectacularly displayed, it is the final nail in the coffin of its neocon-inspired, demagogic and deceitful rhetoric about bringing "democracy" to the "Greater Middle East." Read the full post here
The importance of real journalism As most you know, the current state of journalism in this country is dangerously poor. This problem, which poses serious threats to our country, is illustrated in crystal clear fashion by Glenn Greenwald in a recent post. And while it is true that Greenwald is a lawyer, and presumably has some advantages over the average reporter when commenting on matters of law, this particular example of top-class reporting could have been produced by any serious journalist. The post is a MUST READ
Classic Wolcott Quite a few bloggers have touched on the rather odd decision by Tim Russert to ask Barak Obama his opinion of Harry Belafonte's (rather negative) opinion of George Bush. Well, no one got (or, for that matter, could have gotten) to the heart of the matter more effectively or entertainingly than Wolcott. I share the stomach growls of my fellow bloggers over Tim Russert's asking Barack Obama his opinion of Harry Belafonte's lableling George Bush the evilest motherfucker on the planet. I too think this was an inappropriate line of inquiry from the Tim Man. Just because Obama has been known to surrender his hips to the sultry sway of the calypso beat is no reason to be quizzing him so oafishly on the subject. Thankfully, Wolcott has more on the topic here
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