March, 2007 archive

So the best I can do right now is come up with a list of recommended reading:

Dan Froomkin on Abu Gonzales:

It’s no secret in Washington that Gonzales is not an autonomous player. His entire career has been as an enabler of George Bush. He does what he’s told.

When he was White House counsel, for instance, he was widely seen as being under the thrall of vice presidential counsel David S. Addington on such signature issues as torture and presidential power.

It’s not as obvious who has been his minder since he became attorney general two years ago. But presumably either he or, more to the point, the staffers who write his speeches and draw up his talking points still get their marching orders directly from the West Wing.

Andrew Cohen on the Gang that Couldn’t Fire Straight:

If there are ultimately going to be honest answers to tough questions they are much more likely to come instead from the extraordinary internal investigation now underway at the Justice Department spearheaded by two honest and experienced professionals who know how and where to look for things they aren’t mean to find. Glenn A. Fine at the Office of the Inspector General and H. Marshall Jarrett at the Office of Professional Responsibility are together going to try to get to the bottom of what happened to those U.S. Attorneys and why. And if either or both men find something beyond mere politics (or the sort of routine incompetence we have come to expect from this Justice Department) we even could see a special prosecutor.

William Arkin distills different views of the ersatz “War on Terror”:

Controversies surrounding the war in Iraq — the manipulation of intelligence, ideology feeding overconfidence, mismanagement and potential failure — have so stained the Bush administration there is a tendency on the part of many to reject all of the government’s endeavors when it comes to the so-called “war” against terrorism.

The Bush administration’s manufactured connection between the Iraq war and the bigger “war” against terrorism has been made so politically explosive (and the actual connection is so strained) many fall into the trap of seeing one pitted against the other. Get out of Iraq to “fight” the terror war, they argue. Get rid of the Bush administration to focus on Afghanistan and al Qaeda and the still unfinished Sept. 11 business.

Two pieces in The Washington Post should remind us that this is a false and even dangerous assumption. One is an opinion piece by Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor that questions what the war against terror has accomplished other than creating a culture of fear in America. Who would have thought that once hawk and consummate ex-Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski would become one of the best minds today puncturing the bipartisan embrace of “war”?

Charles Krauthammer doesn’t recognize the difference between “politics” and “making stuff up to win elections.”

(Man oh man, it’s amazing how he contorts himself to defend the indefensible.

And, in the meantime, he tries to revitalize the discredited talking point that Clinton’s firing all the US Attorneys at the beginning of his term, something the Current Federal Administrator also did, with firing sitting U. S Attorneys appointed by the Current Federal Administrator at the beginning of his own malfeasance term during mid-term (something that has happened extremely rarely) , because they “weren’t loyal Bushies.”

There are lots of pretzel factories in Lancaster County, Pa., who can use Mr. Krauthammer, should he retire from being a Bushie apologist columnist.)

It’s not a question of probity, but of competence. Gonzales has allowed a scandal to be created where there was none. That is quite an achievement. He had a two-foot putt, and he muffed it.

How could he allow his aides to go to Capitol Hill unprepared and misinformed, and therefore give inaccurate and misleading testimony? How could Gonzales permit his deputy to say that the prosecutors were fired for performance reasons when all he had to say was that U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and the president wanted them replaced?

And why did Gonzales have to claim that the firings were done with no coordination with the White House? That’s absurd. Why shouldn’t there be White House involvement? That is nothing to be defensive about. Does anyone imagine that Janet Reno fired all 93 U.S. attorneys in March 1993, giving them all of 10 days to clear out, without White House involvement?

Wonder what Mr. Krauthammer would have had to say if Clinton fired a bunch of political appointees, not in 1993, when his term began, but, say, in 1997?

You know, I started out just to list some interesting links from today’s late evening reading.

I end up in shock and awe at the sophistry and duplicity of the apologists for the Current Federal Administration.

When I was younger and the part of the world in which I grew up was still a truck-farming area, as opposed to a grain-farming area, the migrant stream that came through every year numbered in the tens of thousands. It tripled the population of the county during harvest time.

(Indeed, for three summers I worked with the “Migrant Clinic,” a state and federally-funded project that actually provided medical and dental services to the migrants. My buddy and I did the paperwork and dragged the clinic–which was housed in a house-trailer–from one site to another.)

Ratty, broken down labor camps littered the area, with no toilets other than privies, running water only at a faucet somewhere in the central area of the camp, and, with luck, screens on the windows.

The business model was simple. The farmer dealt with a “labor contractor” (crew leader). The crew leader provided the labor.

The farmer paid the crew leader.

The workers generally got paid, well, not much of anything. You see . . .

It was a mobile company town–everything the workers got they were charged for–food, transportation, whatever. At the end of the week, through some miracle of accounting, the workers owed the crew chief more than their wages. (The descendants of those accountants are now preparing the Current Federal Administrator’s next budget proposal, but that’s another story.)

And God help the worker who tried to get away. If he got away from the camp, where was he? Stuck in the middle of a Jim Crow community with no money, no resources, no one to turn to, and, likely, no bath for a week. He was lucky to make it to the bus stop before he got caught. And, if he were Mexican, he probably didn’t speak enough English to ask for help.

Now, the farmers knew this was how it worked. Hell, I learned how it worked from the farmers. It was sort of common unspoken knowledge.

But they needed the labor. So they turned pretty much just decided not to know what they knew.

(And how often does that still go on, as we turn our backs on the evil around us?)

And the crew leaders knew the farmers knew, but the crew leaders realized that, as long as the crops got picked and no fuss was made, things would be okay and they could move on the the next stop.

And the workers, well, for many of them, it was the only life they knew. They had no way out.

Well, we don’t have many migrants any more. Mechanization has made obsolete the great migrant streams that used to flow up the US on the East Coast, in the Mississippi Valley, the western Midwest, and the West Coast.

But we still have H-2 Guestworkers.

And, guess what? Not much else has changed.

(Aside: not all the crew leaders were bad–there were a few who came through each year with pretty much the same crews and who treated them fairly–but they were rare. I do remember one fellow who deserted his crew to run away with a carnival. The next year he was back with the crew. He said of the carnival, “Man, every vehicle they had was stolen–that was no place for me!”)

Now here’s a tournament I can get interested in.

He asks, “Why shouldn’t the President be able to fire anyone?”

Democrats are making a big deal out of the firing of few prosecutors who are appointed by the President and “serve at the pleasure of the President” or lack thereof as the case may be. Critics say that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been trying to politicize the Justice Department, but blogger and Charleston (West Virginia) Daily Mail columnist Don Surber thinks the department should be politicized, and so should the rest of the government. “Of course these firings were political,” he writes. “Their hirings were political. It is all political. That is why we vote. We elected President Bush to be the chief executive of this government. He should be able to fire anyone.”

I commend it to your attention for the wonderful clarity of his reasoning.

Dick Polman:

The Bush administration has been caught telling yet another falsehood (domestic politics category, as opposed to the Iraq war category).

Thanks to the latest Friday night document dump, let’s just simply compare what attorney general Alberto Gonzales said on March 13, and what he did last Nov. 27.

On March 13, he felt compelled to address the burgeoning evidence that eight U.S. attorneys (all Republicans) had been fired in an unprecedented fashion for being insufficiently zealous about President Bush and the GOP cause. He denied that he had played any role in the firings. Here’s the money quote: “We never had a discussion about where things stood.”

Now it turns out, courtesy of an item on the Justice Department calendar, that Gonzales met with his top aides last Nov. 27, to have a discussion about where things stood. They met in a Justice conference room at 9 a.m., and the title of the meeting was “U.S. Attorney Appointments.” The firings were engineered on Dec. 7.

With any luck, the first of many firings. But one hopes the next round of firings will be justified.

It’s time to let truthfulness back in the front door of the White House.

But I fear it will not be welcomed by the current occupents of that address.

Who woulda thunk?

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales approved plans to fire several U.S. attorneys in a November meeting, according to documents released yesterday that contradict earlier assertions that he was not closely involved in the dismissals.

The Nov. 27 meeting, in which the attorney general and at least five top Justice Department officials participated, focused on a five-step plan for carrying out the firings of the prosecutors, Justice Department officials said late yesterday.

There, Gonzales signed off on the plan, which was crafted by his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson. Sampson resigned last week amid a political firestorm surrounding the firings.

I’ve done a bit of travelling in my time . . .

create your own visited states map

With a tip to Opie.

Dan Froomkin advances a theory: Briefly, to turn the Department of Justice into the political enforcer for the Current Federal Administration.

Rovian theory suggests the following: The eight U.S. attorneys were fired not only to purge the Justice Department of some prosecutors who were insufficiently willing to use the power of their offices to attack Democrats and protect Republicans — but also to install favored people who wouldn’t have such scruples. And, thanks to a provision snuck into law by a Bush administration henchman (who has since been granted a job as — you guessed it — a U.S. attorney) there would be none of those pesky safeguards to prevent those jobs going to unqualified hacks.

Or, as White House Watch reader Charles Posner wrote to me in an e-mail yesterday: “Dan – I think everyone is looking at the Justice Dept. scandal form the wrong end – it’s not the firing, but the hiring that’s the crux of the issue. Rove has a plan and a list. The plan is to install partisans in the prosecutors’ office in order to target Democratic congressmen. Of course, Rove can hand pick each prosecutor without Congress’s involvement as allowed by the secret provisions of the Patriot Act. Now, where’s his list?”

As I said, it’s a theory.

But one consistent with past behavior of smears, innuendoes, lies, and rumors.

Addendum, 3/23/2007:

Digby offers his thoughts here.

Glenn Greenwald on executive privilege. Crucial quotation:

Once a party demonstrates a propensity to issue false explanations and refuses to tell the truth voluntarily, no rational person would trust that party to make voluntary disclosures. One could trust (if at all) only on-the-record testimony, under oath, where there are criminal penalties for lying (if they have questions about that motivational dynamic, they can ask Lewis Libby).

Delaware Liberal takes a look at the latest argument that vampires don’t really exist.

Fully automated.

Self-Sinking.

Susie nails it.

Here.

The local rag has started carrying Michael Smerconish.

Sometimes amusing, but, mostly, a waste of newsprint.

Here.

Airplane.

On today’s Fresh Air:

Journalist George Packer’s article in the March 26 issue of The New Yorker magazine is called “Betrayed: The Iraqis Who Trusted America the Most.”

He reports that men employed by Americans as interpreters, construction workers, drivers and office workers are now being marked for death and hunted down as collaborators.

Read the article here.

I can’t find an exerpt which does justice to the whole. But I found this truly disturbing (from pages 14 and 15):

Richard Armitage, who was Deputy Secretary of State under Colin Powell during the first years of the Iraq war, served as a naval officer in Vietnam. In the last days of that war, he returned as a civilian, on a mission to destroy military assets before they fell into North Vietnamese hands. He arrived too late, and instead turned his energy to the evacuation of South Vietnamese sailors and their families. Armitage led a convoy of barely seaworthy boats, carrying twenty thousand people, a thousand miles across the South China Sea to Manila—the first stop on their journey to the United States.

When I met Armitage recently, at his office in Arlington, Virginia, he was not confident that Iraqis would be similarly resettled. “I guarantee you no one’s thinking about it now, because it’s so fatalistic and you’d be considered sort of a traitor to the President’s policy,” he said. “I don’t see us taking them in this time, because, notwithstanding what we may owe people, you’re not going to bring in large numbers of Arabs to the United States, given the fact that for the last six years the President has scared the pants off the American public with fears of Islamic terrorism.”

Even at this stage of the war, Armitage said, officials at the White House retain an “agnosticism about the size of the problem.” He added, “The President believes so firmly that he is President for just this mission—and there’s something religious about it—that it will succeed, and that kind of permeates. I just take him at his word these days. I think it’s very improbable that he’ll be successful.”

From Professor Cole.

But don’t answer letters from their parents.

Dick Polman:

Under the doctrine of “executive privilege,” internal White House business “is not subject to questioning by another branch of government….A president must be able to place absolute confidence in the advice and assistance offered by the members of his staff. And in the performance of their duties for the president, those staff members must not be inhibited by the possibility that their advice and assistance will ever become a matter of public debate.” If presidential aides were to testify in public on Capitol Hill, “the candor with which (their) advice is rendered, and the quality of such assistance, will be compromised and weakened.”

So spoke President Richard Nixon on March 12, 1973, as he sought to defy the congressional leaders who were seeking to subpoena Nixon aides and thus find out the truth about the Watergate scandal. But if those quoted words sound familiar, perhaps it’s because you heard echoes from President Bush late yesterday afternoon, as he sought to invoke executive privilege to defy congressional leaders who are seeking to subpoena Bush aides and thus find out the truth about the prosecutor purge scandal.

Ironically, the persons on Bush’s enemies list were all his appointees.

Addendum, 3/22/2007

Via Attytood: Exclusive photo: Bush aides preparing emails for delivery to Congress:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in Nashville that the personal lives of White House hopefuls shouldn’t become an issue in the 2008 campaign.

And this is the same womanizing (let me quote Mr. Nixon here) expletive deleted who tried to crucify Bill Clinton for his–let’s get this straight–personal life?

(Forget the stuff about lying under oath. That was trumped up sophistry. The American people understood: who wouldn’t try to cover up an affair? Then again, that might have some relationship to the Current Federal Administration’s reluctance to have its minions placed under oath. The “under oath” thing, that is.)

Honest to Pete, I’ve read a lot of novels and science fiction in my time, but nothing I’ve read takes leave of reality like these Republican party-ites.

Oh, yeah, let’s look at the fidelity issue amongst current Presidential hopefuls.

Hmmmmm. Looks like a few issues with the self-styled party of family values.

Pah!

Profanity fails me.

Nothing I can say can express the depth of my disgust at the depths of their hypocrisy.

They lie to themselves.

They lie to the American people.

They lie.

(A tip to HuffPost.)

I asked earlier, “What hath Bush wrought?”

Brendan has answered the question in a graphic photo essay.

Warning: It’s not for the squeamish. It shows how Bushie democracy has enlightened Iraq.

If you go look, remember, this war in Iraq was made up. Fabricated. Synthesized. Duplicitized.

And the blood is on all our hands, for we allowed it.