This post is an expanded version of my latest print column. It all started when I saw a TV commercial that made my jaw drop...
The resilient myth that Saddam Hussein plotted 9/11 is proof that Mark Twain was right when he said, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
Even today, long after this 9/11 myth has been officially and repeatedly discredited, roughly 40 percent of Americans still insist that Hussein conspired with al-Qaeda to bring down the Twin Towers. And it's a fair bet that this myth will remain in mass circulation as long as proponents of the Iraq war persist in believing that it is savvy politics to prey on people's ignorance.
Consider, for instance, the current TV ads - sponsored by a White House front group known as Freedom's Watch - that seek to shore up waning support for the Iraq war by perpetuating the canard that 9/11 was a Hussein production. In their quest to stoke emotions in defiance of fact, the ad-makers aren't exactly subtle. First, some military vets are shown making the case for staying in Iraq. Then, in the key image, we're back on 9/11. The north tower is burning, the second tower is seconds away from igniting, and these words flash on the screen: They Attacked Us.
The ad doesn't state that "they" refers to the Iraqis, but clever advertising is all about connecting the dots. Denizens of the reality-based community - including many in Philadelphia, who have probably seen this ad aired locally - are likely shaking their heads at this effrontery. Wasn't this myth put to rest years ago? Let us count the ways:
1. As early as June 2003, one month after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a monitoring group appointed by the U.N. Security Council announced that it had found no evidence linking Hussein to al-Qaeda.
2. In 2004, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission concluded: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."
3. In 2005, a newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document concluded that a key terrorist informant had been "intentionally misleading" his American debriefers when he claimed that Hussein had been in cahoots with al-Qaeda. The document, written 13 months before the U.S. invasion, also stated that "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements."
4. In 2006, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence - which, at the time, was still run by the Republicans - concluded in a report: "Postwar information supports prewar intelligence-community assessments that there was no credible information that Iraq was complicit in, or had foreknowledge of, the Sept. 11 attacks or any other al-Qaeda strike."
5. In February of this year, the Pentagon's acting inspector general concluded in a report that President Bush's neoconservative war planners utilized "both reliable and unreliable" information to fashion a Hussein/al-Qaeda link "that was much stronger than that assessed by the [intelligence community], and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the administration."
6. In April of this year, At the Center of the Storm, a memoir by ex-CIA director George Tenet, was published, in which we read that "there was never any real serious evidence that Saddam Hussein was an ally of al-Qaeda."
7. Last, even some notable Bush administration officials have debunked the myth. Donald Rumsfeld did it in 2004: Referring to Hussein and al-Qaeda, he told the Council on Foreign Relations, "I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two." And the other debunker, way back on Sept. 17, 2003, was George W. Bush. In a news conference that day, the president said: "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the Sept. 11."
Yet despite all the empirical evidence, a pro-Bush group - financed primarily by some rich Republican donors, and some ex-Bush ambassadors - has nonetheless paid out $15 million to air ads that meet the dictionary definition of propaganda. The ads are airing in 60 districts where Republican congressmen are wavering in their support for the war; Pennsylvania, home to seven targeted GOP House members, is on the front lines of this PR war. (Indeed, one key Freedom's Watch supporter is a prominent Philadelphian: Edward Snider, chairman of Comcast Spectacor.)
Clearly, Freedom’s Watch and its ad makers are not shamed by the prospects of perpetuating a myth. Nor, apparently, do they see a downside in hiring, as their spokesman, the former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, whose track record of prognostications is far from stellar. This is the same guy who insisted, on the first day of the war, that “people will rejoice” in Iraq when the Americans take over, and “there is no question that…Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.” Two months later, he opined: “I don’t think there’s any chance of losing the peace.”
When Fleischer popped up recently on MSNBC to defend the ads, guest Hardball host Mike Barnacle asked him how many of the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqis. (Correct answer: Zero.) Fleischer replied: "Mike, you're stuck in the 2001-2002 timetable and debate. (The situation today) is so far beyond that debate."
Translation: We should simply ignore the historical record.
But these strategists at Freedom's Watch are politically smart. They know, at this point, that it's virtually impossible to buck up the war supporters by talking about the tensions among Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds; many Americans, who are not particularly wise in the ways of the world beyond their borders, can't distinguish one group from another. Hence, the strategists' need for an emotional short-cut: Tie Hussein to al-Qaeda, the amorphous enemy that everybody knows.
The administration has long been performing this sleight of hand. In a letter to Congress on the day after he launched the invasion of Iraq, Bush said it was important "to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001." He did not directly state that Hussein plotted 9/11, but the implication was clear. He repeated that formula for years thereafter.
Even after the evidence mounted that Saddam had not plotted, Bush kept the inference alive, by shifting his terms and claiming that Saddam and al Qaeda had enjoyed a “relationship.” (June 17, 2004: “The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda – because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.”) Today, the ’08 Republican presidential candidates blur the lines further by routinely linking the Iraq war to the broader war on terror.
The myth about a Hussein-9/11 link persists not just because politicians and spin artists keep repeating it, in order to stoke emotions for the war, but also because many people are hard-wired to believe it. Psychologists have determined in recent studies that false information, once lodged in the brain, often tends to remain embedded, to the point where it becomes impervious to empirical reality. This helps to explain why, in a CBS/New York Times poll taken Sept. 4-8, 33 percent of all Americans - including 27 percent of Democrats - still tied Hussein to 9/11. Some 2007 polls have even pegged the share of credulous Americans to be as high as 41 percent.
Hence, the Twain adage about the traveling lie and the sluggishness of truth. But perhaps Freedom's Watch, in its defense, would prefer to quote another sage commentator, the erudite Cary Grant. While playing a Madison Avenue executive in North by Northwest, Cary purred to his secretary, "Ah, Maggie, in the world of advertising, there is no such thing as a lie, there is only expedient exaggeration."
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Dante Zappala, the brother of slain Pennsyvania National Guardsman Sherwood Baker (KIA in Iraq, 4/26/04), emailed today to express his exasperation about the Freedom's Watch ad campaign: "As someone who lost his brother in Iraq, while he was looking for WMD, no less, it's all very disheartening. This is not the civil democracy my brother believed in." And his mother recently delivered a video response, here.
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In current political news, it is with great sadness that I note the return, to the GOP presidential arena, of Alan Keyes. The black conservative and master of the diatribe - who ran as a fringe candidate in 1996 and 2000, and who got waxed by Barack Obama in the 2004 Illinois Senate race, and whose prospects of winning even three percent in any Republican primary are roughly analagous to Britney Spears' odds of dancing on Broadway - filed his candidate papers last Friday. Then he showed up last night at a conservative "values" debate. Maybe he figures that he can be the GOP's Mike Gravel.
My fondest memory of Keyes dates back to the winter of 2000, in New Hampshire. After a Republican debate, he stormed into the press room, where I and my colleagues were attempting the usual miracle, trying to write 1000 words of clean copy on a 45-minute deadline. For 15 of those minutes, Keyes proceeded to inform everyone, at the top of his impressive decibel scale, that the press was against him...because he was black. Then he stormed out. We all made deadline.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Monday, September 17, 2007
Bush reaches out; folksy Fred gets lucky
News on several fronts:
Three weeks ago, in the wake of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' widely applauded resignation, I wrote this: "Bush may be politically constrained from nominating another White House errand boy. This time he faces a Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, and there's no way that Patrick Leahy and his crew are going to sign off on anybody who believes that Justice should function merely as a political arm of the Republican National Committee....Bush soon will be battling Congress over executive privilege and domestic surveillance. Gonzales, with his credibility in tatters, would have been the wrong salesman. There are plenty of respected, independent legal scholars who can make a case for strong executive authority...strictly on the merits. Now that Bush's circle of inept Texas cronies has shrunk to nothing, he may have no choice except to reach out."
And apparently he has done so. Bush has tapped Michael Mukasey, a retired federal judge and ex-federal prosecutor. The decision to go with Mukasey is a sign that Bush actually recognizes his current political weakness, and understands that if he goes to the mat for a controversial conservative nominee, he will surely lose. Clearly, somebody in the bunker is thinking clearly, at least on this matter.
Mukasey, by reputation, is a tough law-and-order judge who can indeed advocate for Bush's concerns strictly on the merits. He does not hail from the Bush inner circle; indeed, as an outsider from New York, he is hardly known within the Washington community of conservative activists. (He's an advisor in the Rudy Giuliani presidential campaign.) But this weekend the White House enlisted Bill Kristol to smooth ruffled feathers and make the conservative case for Mukasey.
The activists' favorite candidate for the AG job was Ted Olson, the current U.S. solicitor general, but Olson (fairly or not) would trigger the protracted battle with the Democratic Congress that Bush can ill afford. Olson reputedly has a fine legal mind, and some Democrats (notably, ex-Bill Clinton operative Lanny Davis) sing his praises. But he was a prominent player in some of the major partisan scraps of the past decade - joining the Bush legal team during the 2000 Florida recount battle, and representing the conservative American Spectator magazine during the '90s, when it was investigating Clinton's private life. The current Democratic Congress, which can't seem to do much of anything about Iraq, would have sought to satisfy its liberal base by devouring Olson.
Mukasey, at least, has won early praise from liberals such as New York Sen. Charles Schumer, and Nan Aron of the Alliance for Justice; even liberal attorney/blogger Glenn Greenwald likes Mukasey's rulings in the famous Jose Padilla terrorist case. For all these reasons, some conservatives are already suspicious of Mukasey, but perhaps that's a sign that we actually have the making of a bipartisan nominee. Considering the poisonous mood in Washington in the waning days of the Bush era, that alone would be an accomplishment.
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Speaking of terrorism, Fred Thompson, the GOP's annointed great conservative hope, got very lucky early last week. Another embarrassing story about his Washington lobbying career got largely buried, thanks to the heavy media focus on the General Petraeus hearings. Consider this one:
Thompson billed his lobbying firm for the work he performed in 1992 on behalf of two Libyan intelligence agents who had been criminally charged with the bombing of Pan Am 103.
You may remember that terrorist act. The plane blew up over Scotland a few days before Christmas in 1988, sending 270 innocents (most of them Americans) into the sky. Four years later, after two Libyans were indicted, a Libyan lawyer was trying to prevent his clients from being extradited to the West. Seeking legal advice, he finally turned to the Washington lobbying firm where Thompson was hanging his hat. Thompson helped out. As he explained earlier this month, "I believe it was a venue question...I gave them my opinion, and that was the long and the short of it. That's all I know about it."
He wasn't the main player in this episode, but he did bill the firm for 3.3 hours of work on the case. That doesn't sound like much time, but you can still dispense an awful lot of advice to terrorists, or contribute considerable research, in just 3.3 hours. As a lawyer for the Pan Am 103 victims' families put it, "a number (of the families) were offended and angered that American lawyers were willing to earn fees by doing anything to help this pariah nation or the two bombing suspects.”
Thompson got lucky last week that this story quickly died. He's also lucky that he is not a Democrat. Because if a Democratic candidate for president had ever billed 3.3 hours of lobbying work on behalf of terrorist suspects (one of whom was ultimately convicted in the bombing), you can easily imagine the GOP's attack ad:
"The Democrats want us to believe that they can keep this country safe. But when one of their own candidates, working as a Washington lobbyist insider, had the chance to take money from terrorists who killed hundreds of Americans, he took it, and he aided their cause. The families of the victims aboard Pan Am 103 deserved better, and America today deserves a strong president who will fight the terrorists, not embolden them..."
But even if Thompson managed to dodge this story, he can't escape his tepid performance on the stump. This guy might turn out to be the worst product rollout since the DeLorean car in 1981. Asked late last week, in Florida, to comment on the Terri Schiavo case - which galvanized the nation two years ago, and became a conservative cause celebre - Thompson replied thusly:
"I can't pass judgment on it. I know that good people were doing what they thought was best. That's going back in history. I don't remember the details of it."
Consider those last two sentences. We're talking about the national political battle over a brain-damaged woman in 2005, not the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Schiavo's fate, and the GOP Congress' decision to override state's rights and reinsert her feeding tube, was a top news staple for weeks. Either Thompson was so immersed in memorizing his TV scripts in 2005 that he was barely paying attention to real life, or he was feigning bad memory in order to avoid taking a stand on an issue that was crucial to the conservative base. (It appears to be the latter.)
Lobbying for terrorists, claiming amnesia on Schiavo...this is the touted heir to Ronald Reagan?
Three weeks ago, in the wake of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' widely applauded resignation, I wrote this: "Bush may be politically constrained from nominating another White House errand boy. This time he faces a Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, and there's no way that Patrick Leahy and his crew are going to sign off on anybody who believes that Justice should function merely as a political arm of the Republican National Committee....Bush soon will be battling Congress over executive privilege and domestic surveillance. Gonzales, with his credibility in tatters, would have been the wrong salesman. There are plenty of respected, independent legal scholars who can make a case for strong executive authority...strictly on the merits. Now that Bush's circle of inept Texas cronies has shrunk to nothing, he may have no choice except to reach out."
And apparently he has done so. Bush has tapped Michael Mukasey, a retired federal judge and ex-federal prosecutor. The decision to go with Mukasey is a sign that Bush actually recognizes his current political weakness, and understands that if he goes to the mat for a controversial conservative nominee, he will surely lose. Clearly, somebody in the bunker is thinking clearly, at least on this matter.
Mukasey, by reputation, is a tough law-and-order judge who can indeed advocate for Bush's concerns strictly on the merits. He does not hail from the Bush inner circle; indeed, as an outsider from New York, he is hardly known within the Washington community of conservative activists. (He's an advisor in the Rudy Giuliani presidential campaign.) But this weekend the White House enlisted Bill Kristol to smooth ruffled feathers and make the conservative case for Mukasey.
The activists' favorite candidate for the AG job was Ted Olson, the current U.S. solicitor general, but Olson (fairly or not) would trigger the protracted battle with the Democratic Congress that Bush can ill afford. Olson reputedly has a fine legal mind, and some Democrats (notably, ex-Bill Clinton operative Lanny Davis) sing his praises. But he was a prominent player in some of the major partisan scraps of the past decade - joining the Bush legal team during the 2000 Florida recount battle, and representing the conservative American Spectator magazine during the '90s, when it was investigating Clinton's private life. The current Democratic Congress, which can't seem to do much of anything about Iraq, would have sought to satisfy its liberal base by devouring Olson.
Mukasey, at least, has won early praise from liberals such as New York Sen. Charles Schumer, and Nan Aron of the Alliance for Justice; even liberal attorney/blogger Glenn Greenwald likes Mukasey's rulings in the famous Jose Padilla terrorist case. For all these reasons, some conservatives are already suspicious of Mukasey, but perhaps that's a sign that we actually have the making of a bipartisan nominee. Considering the poisonous mood in Washington in the waning days of the Bush era, that alone would be an accomplishment.
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Speaking of terrorism, Fred Thompson, the GOP's annointed great conservative hope, got very lucky early last week. Another embarrassing story about his Washington lobbying career got largely buried, thanks to the heavy media focus on the General Petraeus hearings. Consider this one:
Thompson billed his lobbying firm for the work he performed in 1992 on behalf of two Libyan intelligence agents who had been criminally charged with the bombing of Pan Am 103.
You may remember that terrorist act. The plane blew up over Scotland a few days before Christmas in 1988, sending 270 innocents (most of them Americans) into the sky. Four years later, after two Libyans were indicted, a Libyan lawyer was trying to prevent his clients from being extradited to the West. Seeking legal advice, he finally turned to the Washington lobbying firm where Thompson was hanging his hat. Thompson helped out. As he explained earlier this month, "I believe it was a venue question...I gave them my opinion, and that was the long and the short of it. That's all I know about it."
He wasn't the main player in this episode, but he did bill the firm for 3.3 hours of work on the case. That doesn't sound like much time, but you can still dispense an awful lot of advice to terrorists, or contribute considerable research, in just 3.3 hours. As a lawyer for the Pan Am 103 victims' families put it, "a number (of the families) were offended and angered that American lawyers were willing to earn fees by doing anything to help this pariah nation or the two bombing suspects.”
Thompson got lucky last week that this story quickly died. He's also lucky that he is not a Democrat. Because if a Democratic candidate for president had ever billed 3.3 hours of lobbying work on behalf of terrorist suspects (one of whom was ultimately convicted in the bombing), you can easily imagine the GOP's attack ad:
"The Democrats want us to believe that they can keep this country safe. But when one of their own candidates, working as a Washington lobbyist insider, had the chance to take money from terrorists who killed hundreds of Americans, he took it, and he aided their cause. The families of the victims aboard Pan Am 103 deserved better, and America today deserves a strong president who will fight the terrorists, not embolden them..."
But even if Thompson managed to dodge this story, he can't escape his tepid performance on the stump. This guy might turn out to be the worst product rollout since the DeLorean car in 1981. Asked late last week, in Florida, to comment on the Terri Schiavo case - which galvanized the nation two years ago, and became a conservative cause celebre - Thompson replied thusly:
"I can't pass judgment on it. I know that good people were doing what they thought was best. That's going back in history. I don't remember the details of it."
Consider those last two sentences. We're talking about the national political battle over a brain-damaged woman in 2005, not the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Schiavo's fate, and the GOP Congress' decision to override state's rights and reinsert her feeding tube, was a top news staple for weeks. Either Thompson was so immersed in memorizing his TV scripts in 2005 that he was barely paying attention to real life, or he was feigning bad memory in order to avoid taking a stand on an issue that was crucial to the conservative base. (It appears to be the latter.)
Lobbying for terrorists, claiming amnesia on Schiavo...this is the touted heir to Ronald Reagan?
Friday, September 14, 2007
War without end
It's not worth my while to offer a lengthy critique of President Bush's latest war address; trust me, you've heard most of his lines many times before.
He did say a few new things, however. He insisted, for instance, that Iraq is a war that our troops "can win," which is a tad bleaker than what he said in December 2005, when, in one of his Knute Rocknesque flights of fancy, he insisted that "'we are winning the war in Iraq."
And last night he also came up with a few lines that would be downright comical if not for the fact that our soldiers are fighting and dying over there. I am referring, of course, to his expression of gratitude to those allies who are fighting and dying with us ("We thank the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq") - a seemingly impressive roster, until one actually does a bit of fact-checking, and discovers that he is giving a shout-out to such powerful stalwarts as Bulgaria (currently, 155 soldiers ), Estonia (35), Macedonia (33), and Moldova (12). He also conveniently omitted the fact that 18 countries have pulled out their troops, and that Britain is in the process of drawing down. Worse yet, his claim that 36 nations "have troops on the ground" is contradicted by his own State Department, which, in its Aug. 30 report, puts the number at 25.
But this war has always been an America-centric operation (unlike the substantive coalition that Bush's father assembled in 1990), and, in the big news of the night, the younger Bush made that abundantly clear:
...Iraqi leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America. And we are ready to begin building that relationship...
There it is, the Bush legacy, his gift to his successor in 2009: Open-ended war, with scant guidance from Bush himself on how we should define success or failure.
Speaking of such definitions, there was one overriding question that Bush needed to address last night: How does he plan to capitalize on the troop surge's military gains, and ensure that Iraq's sectarian leaders use the opportunity to achieve political reconciliation? That goal, after all, is what our soldiers this year have been dying for. Bush himself said in January that he expected Iraq's leaders to get their act together, and that he intended to measure their progress along the way; as he put it at the time, "America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced."
But, in his speech last night, he essentially confessed that he has no sway over the sorry situation in Baghdad: "The government has not met its own legislative benchmarks - and in my meetings with Iraqi leaders, I have made it clear that they must."
Or else he'll do what? Pull out the U.S. troops?
No, that won't happen - because, as he announced moments later, we're poised to build "an enduring relationship." Nowhere in his speech does he warn that the Iraqi government would pay a price if it continues to fail. The bottom line is that he has nothing new to offer about how to mop up his own historic mess. That task will fall to his successor, and you can bet that if the new leader is a Democrat, and that Democrat decides to speed up U.S. troop withdrawals, Bush will be out on the lecture circuit passing the blame.
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And on that cheerful note, have a great weekend. Regarding the weather forecast, however, I would first advise checking to see what General Petraeus has to say.
He did say a few new things, however. He insisted, for instance, that Iraq is a war that our troops "can win," which is a tad bleaker than what he said in December 2005, when, in one of his Knute Rocknesque flights of fancy, he insisted that "'we are winning the war in Iraq."
And last night he also came up with a few lines that would be downright comical if not for the fact that our soldiers are fighting and dying over there. I am referring, of course, to his expression of gratitude to those allies who are fighting and dying with us ("We thank the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq") - a seemingly impressive roster, until one actually does a bit of fact-checking, and discovers that he is giving a shout-out to such powerful stalwarts as Bulgaria (currently, 155 soldiers ), Estonia (35), Macedonia (33), and Moldova (12). He also conveniently omitted the fact that 18 countries have pulled out their troops, and that Britain is in the process of drawing down. Worse yet, his claim that 36 nations "have troops on the ground" is contradicted by his own State Department, which, in its Aug. 30 report, puts the number at 25.
But this war has always been an America-centric operation (unlike the substantive coalition that Bush's father assembled in 1990), and, in the big news of the night, the younger Bush made that abundantly clear:
...Iraqi leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America. And we are ready to begin building that relationship...
There it is, the Bush legacy, his gift to his successor in 2009: Open-ended war, with scant guidance from Bush himself on how we should define success or failure.
Speaking of such definitions, there was one overriding question that Bush needed to address last night: How does he plan to capitalize on the troop surge's military gains, and ensure that Iraq's sectarian leaders use the opportunity to achieve political reconciliation? That goal, after all, is what our soldiers this year have been dying for. Bush himself said in January that he expected Iraq's leaders to get their act together, and that he intended to measure their progress along the way; as he put it at the time, "America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced."
But, in his speech last night, he essentially confessed that he has no sway over the sorry situation in Baghdad: "The government has not met its own legislative benchmarks - and in my meetings with Iraqi leaders, I have made it clear that they must."
Or else he'll do what? Pull out the U.S. troops?
No, that won't happen - because, as he announced moments later, we're poised to build "an enduring relationship." Nowhere in his speech does he warn that the Iraqi government would pay a price if it continues to fail. The bottom line is that he has nothing new to offer about how to mop up his own historic mess. That task will fall to his successor, and you can bet that if the new leader is a Democrat, and that Democrat decides to speed up U.S. troop withdrawals, Bush will be out on the lecture circuit passing the blame.
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And on that cheerful note, have a great weekend. Regarding the weather forecast, however, I would first advise checking to see what General Petraeus has to say.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Hillary and a boy named Hsu
In her quest for the presidency, Hillary Clinton must dampen the suspicion, shared by many, that she is just another establishment shill for the status quo. Clearly, her most devoted supporters don't see her that way; nor does she. The problem at the moment, however, is that the Norman Hsu scandal is threatening to become a metaphor for Clintonian politics as usual.
Addicted to the money race, virtually all the major presidential candidates have come to rely on "bundlers" - free-lance power players who hit up their hundreds of friends, employes, associates, and acquaintances for campaign donations, then bundle them for delivery to the grateful White House aspirant - and at times there have been bipartisan embarrassments.
Roughly a dozen of George W. Bush's bundlers were investigated for sleazy business dealings; one was Jack Abramoff, the GOP super-lobbyist who now lives in the slammer, and another was Thomas Noe, an Ohio player who pleaded guilty to embezzling state money and laundering his own campaign donations through his employes. Mitt Romney was embarrassed recently by a bundler who got indicted on fraud charges. A John Edwards 2004 bundler has been indicted on a laundering charge similar to Noe's. One of Barack Obama's bundler's was indicted last autumn on fraud charges.
But with regards to the Norman Hsu saga...well, this guy (now under arrest after trying to flee a new court appearance on an old fraud charge) is in a class by himself. He raised at least $850,000 for Hillary - an amount that dwarfs the known output of all other bundlers - and he seemed to have a suspicious talent for bundling campaign donations from people of quite modest means. Consider, for instance, the Paw family in California, which has somehow managed to donate roughly $300,000 to various candidates (including Hillary) over the past three years, even though the Paw head of household is a mail carrier with annual earnings of $49,000.
The FBI is conducting preliminary inquiries into Hsu's bundling activities and business dealings; the Manhattan DA is investigating whether Hsu bilked a private equity firm in a Ponzi scheme. But what interests me is how the Clinton campaign has reacted to all this:
With all the speed of a turtle trundling through molasses.
Its first response, last June, was total denial. When a California businessman reportedly emailed the campaign to warn that "there is a significant probability that a man using the name of Norman Hsu is running a Ponzi scheme," a campaign official emailed back to say, "I can tell you with 100 certainty that Norman Hsu is NOT involved in a ponzi scheme. He is COMPLETELY legit."
Its second response, also last June, was to search public records for information about Hsu, but aides turned up nothing. Apparently they didn't look very hard, because The Washington Post pointed out yesterday that "a commonly used public record search shows that Hsu had multiple business lawsuits filed against him dating back to 1985, filed for bankruptcy in 1990, and was a defendant in two Californis court matters listed as possible criminal cases."
The campaign's third response, when suspicions about Hsu surfaced in the press in late August, was to praise their bundler. A Clinton flak said: "Norman Hsu is a longtime and generous supporter of the Democratic party and its candidates, including Senator Clinton. During Mr. Hsu’s many years of active participation in the political process, there has been no question about his integrity or his commitment to playing by the rules, and we have absolutely no reason to call his contributions into question." The campaign also said that it would not return any of the Hsu-related campaign contributions.
The campaign's fourth response was to grudgingly give ground. After it became clear that Hsu was a fugitive from justice, and after other Democratic candidates made it clear that they intended to purge themselves of Hsu money, Clinton did the same, by donating to charity $23,000 that Hsu had personally donated. But the campaign made this announcement in the early evening, after most East Coast news deadlines...and made it clear that Clinton was refusing to give back the donations that Hsu had bundled from others.
The campaign's fifth response came this past Monday evening. After learning that the FBI was on Hsu's trail, and after learning that The Los Angeles Times had obtained those aforementioned emails (the heads-up from the California businessman, and the 100 percent denial from the campaign), Clinton decided to give back the donations that Hsu had bundled from others. That's the $850,000. But the campaign, to soften the blow, made this announcement in the early evening (sound familiar?), after most East Coast news deadlines, and after the network news shows had gone on the air in the East, mostly with the dominant coverage of the Petraus hearings on Iraq. And now the campaign is refusing to disclose the names of the 260 bundlees who are poised to get their money back.
Bottom line: If Hillary Clinton intends to stump for the presidency by associating herself with only the upside of her husband's presidency (economic prosperity, for instance), while skipping past the downside (the campaign finance scandals of 1996, for instance), she may well need to become more vigilant in her responses to the Hsu disclosures, and others that might come along. Otherwise, she might have a problem convincing independent swing voters that she, more than her rivals, best embodies the politics of change in Washington.
Addicted to the money race, virtually all the major presidential candidates have come to rely on "bundlers" - free-lance power players who hit up their hundreds of friends, employes, associates, and acquaintances for campaign donations, then bundle them for delivery to the grateful White House aspirant - and at times there have been bipartisan embarrassments.
Roughly a dozen of George W. Bush's bundlers were investigated for sleazy business dealings; one was Jack Abramoff, the GOP super-lobbyist who now lives in the slammer, and another was Thomas Noe, an Ohio player who pleaded guilty to embezzling state money and laundering his own campaign donations through his employes. Mitt Romney was embarrassed recently by a bundler who got indicted on fraud charges. A John Edwards 2004 bundler has been indicted on a laundering charge similar to Noe's. One of Barack Obama's bundler's was indicted last autumn on fraud charges.
But with regards to the Norman Hsu saga...well, this guy (now under arrest after trying to flee a new court appearance on an old fraud charge) is in a class by himself. He raised at least $850,000 for Hillary - an amount that dwarfs the known output of all other bundlers - and he seemed to have a suspicious talent for bundling campaign donations from people of quite modest means. Consider, for instance, the Paw family in California, which has somehow managed to donate roughly $300,000 to various candidates (including Hillary) over the past three years, even though the Paw head of household is a mail carrier with annual earnings of $49,000.
The FBI is conducting preliminary inquiries into Hsu's bundling activities and business dealings; the Manhattan DA is investigating whether Hsu bilked a private equity firm in a Ponzi scheme. But what interests me is how the Clinton campaign has reacted to all this:
With all the speed of a turtle trundling through molasses.
Its first response, last June, was total denial. When a California businessman reportedly emailed the campaign to warn that "there is a significant probability that a man using the name of Norman Hsu is running a Ponzi scheme," a campaign official emailed back to say, "I can tell you with 100 certainty that Norman Hsu is NOT involved in a ponzi scheme. He is COMPLETELY legit."
Its second response, also last June, was to search public records for information about Hsu, but aides turned up nothing. Apparently they didn't look very hard, because The Washington Post pointed out yesterday that "a commonly used public record search shows that Hsu had multiple business lawsuits filed against him dating back to 1985, filed for bankruptcy in 1990, and was a defendant in two Californis court matters listed as possible criminal cases."
The campaign's third response, when suspicions about Hsu surfaced in the press in late August, was to praise their bundler. A Clinton flak said: "Norman Hsu is a longtime and generous supporter of the Democratic party and its candidates, including Senator Clinton. During Mr. Hsu’s many years of active participation in the political process, there has been no question about his integrity or his commitment to playing by the rules, and we have absolutely no reason to call his contributions into question." The campaign also said that it would not return any of the Hsu-related campaign contributions.
The campaign's fourth response was to grudgingly give ground. After it became clear that Hsu was a fugitive from justice, and after other Democratic candidates made it clear that they intended to purge themselves of Hsu money, Clinton did the same, by donating to charity $23,000 that Hsu had personally donated. But the campaign made this announcement in the early evening, after most East Coast news deadlines...and made it clear that Clinton was refusing to give back the donations that Hsu had bundled from others.
The campaign's fifth response came this past Monday evening. After learning that the FBI was on Hsu's trail, and after learning that The Los Angeles Times had obtained those aforementioned emails (the heads-up from the California businessman, and the 100 percent denial from the campaign), Clinton decided to give back the donations that Hsu had bundled from others. That's the $850,000. But the campaign, to soften the blow, made this announcement in the early evening (sound familiar?), after most East Coast news deadlines, and after the network news shows had gone on the air in the East, mostly with the dominant coverage of the Petraus hearings on Iraq. And now the campaign is refusing to disclose the names of the 260 bundlees who are poised to get their money back.
Bottom line: If Hillary Clinton intends to stump for the presidency by associating herself with only the upside of her husband's presidency (economic prosperity, for instance), while skipping past the downside (the campaign finance scandals of 1996, for instance), she may well need to become more vigilant in her responses to the Hsu disclosures, and others that might come along. Otherwise, she might have a problem convincing independent swing voters that she, more than her rivals, best embodies the politics of change in Washington.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
"My level of confidence is under control"
With regards to the Bush adminstration's latest PR push for open-ended war in Iraq, it is significant that designated cheerleader Ryan Crocker has barely been able to muster even a smidgen of rah-rah enthusiasm.
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, much to his credit, doesn't seem to share the president's penchant for strolling through wreckage with rose-colored glasses. Indeed, Crocker's behavior this week during his Washington visit can probably be viewed as a reasonably accurate barometer of just how badly the war is going - and how Bush is basically at the mercy of ground-level events that are out of his control.
After two days on Capitol Hill, and a press conference this morning, Crocker (always appearing with General David Petraeus) is leaving behind a string of downbeat remarks that are worth recounting:
"I am frustrated every day I spend in Iraq....There is an enormous amount of dysfunctionality in Iraq, that is beyond question. The government, in many respects in dysfunctional...I frankly do not expect us to see rapid progress through these benchmarks...It's hard to do nation-building or reconciliation in the face of widesprread sectarian violence, which has been the situation over the last 18 months...It's no exaggeration to say that Iraq is, and will remain for some time to come, a traumatized sociey...The failures are there on the Iraqi side, it's frustrating to me...My level of confidence is under control..."
It was also striking that Crocker strayed so far from the latest Bush spin about how the war in Iraq is really about our need to defeat al Qaeda. Crocker barely mentioned al Qaeda all week; apparently, he thinks there are bigger problems in Iraq than the presence of fighters who identify themselves with al Qaeda. (Virtually every study of the conflict has concluded that al Qaeda fighters constitute a small minority.) As Crocker said this morning, the prime headache in Iraq is the ongoing civil strife between home-grown Shiites and Sunnis - in his words, "an ethno-sectarian competition for power and resources."
This morning, Crocker also sought to cheerlead to the extent that he felt comfortable. It was almost painful to watch his labors: "The trajectory is moving upwards, but the slope is not very great, because of what we're seeing at ground level...the slope is up, even if the gradient isn't very deep...a long hard grind...I think that grind is making progress."
But since he did manage at a few junctures to utter the word "progress," that should be enough for Bush, who is now slated to speak about Iraq in prime time tomorrow night. He'll second Petraeus' recommendation for a modest troop drawdown by next spring or summer (the troop reduction that was inevitable anyway), he'll praise Petraeus and Crocker for divining signs of encouragement (in Petraeus' words today, "a degree of hope"), and he'll call for more time and patience. And he probably won't offer any new thinking about how Iraq's political leaders can be coaxed to reconcile, post-surge, after refusing to do so during the surge. Given the extent to which most Americans have already tuned Bush out, it's safe to predict that millions will simply ignore him and surf to some other show.
Crocker hasn't been in Iraq for very long, but he already has the downbeat bearing of Robert McNamara in the last days of his Vietnam stewardship at the Pentagon. As a subordinate, he's in no position to recommend that Bush go on TV and announce a fundamental shift in strategy. For instance, he's in no position to write something like this:
"The public is waiting for leaders from both political parties to stand up to the president and say enough is enough. They would like this situation resolved - and soon - and there is no other solution acceptable to them other than bringing the troops home...It is my opinion that the best leaders are those who trust the will of the public, even if that means changing direction or admitting a mistake. This is true leadership and the kind of leadership our nation has always desired."
That's Matthew Dowd...Bush's pollster/strategist on the 2004 re-election campaign.
-------
Hillary Clinton oughta be thrilled that her latest fund-raising embarrassment has been overshadowed this week by the Petraeus-Crocker story. I'll explain why tomorrrow.
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, much to his credit, doesn't seem to share the president's penchant for strolling through wreckage with rose-colored glasses. Indeed, Crocker's behavior this week during his Washington visit can probably be viewed as a reasonably accurate barometer of just how badly the war is going - and how Bush is basically at the mercy of ground-level events that are out of his control.
After two days on Capitol Hill, and a press conference this morning, Crocker (always appearing with General David Petraeus) is leaving behind a string of downbeat remarks that are worth recounting:
"I am frustrated every day I spend in Iraq....There is an enormous amount of dysfunctionality in Iraq, that is beyond question. The government, in many respects in dysfunctional...I frankly do not expect us to see rapid progress through these benchmarks...It's hard to do nation-building or reconciliation in the face of widesprread sectarian violence, which has been the situation over the last 18 months...It's no exaggeration to say that Iraq is, and will remain for some time to come, a traumatized sociey...The failures are there on the Iraqi side, it's frustrating to me...My level of confidence is under control..."
It was also striking that Crocker strayed so far from the latest Bush spin about how the war in Iraq is really about our need to defeat al Qaeda. Crocker barely mentioned al Qaeda all week; apparently, he thinks there are bigger problems in Iraq than the presence of fighters who identify themselves with al Qaeda. (Virtually every study of the conflict has concluded that al Qaeda fighters constitute a small minority.) As Crocker said this morning, the prime headache in Iraq is the ongoing civil strife between home-grown Shiites and Sunnis - in his words, "an ethno-sectarian competition for power and resources."
This morning, Crocker also sought to cheerlead to the extent that he felt comfortable. It was almost painful to watch his labors: "The trajectory is moving upwards, but the slope is not very great, because of what we're seeing at ground level...the slope is up, even if the gradient isn't very deep...a long hard grind...I think that grind is making progress."
But since he did manage at a few junctures to utter the word "progress," that should be enough for Bush, who is now slated to speak about Iraq in prime time tomorrow night. He'll second Petraeus' recommendation for a modest troop drawdown by next spring or summer (the troop reduction that was inevitable anyway), he'll praise Petraeus and Crocker for divining signs of encouragement (in Petraeus' words today, "a degree of hope"), and he'll call for more time and patience. And he probably won't offer any new thinking about how Iraq's political leaders can be coaxed to reconcile, post-surge, after refusing to do so during the surge. Given the extent to which most Americans have already tuned Bush out, it's safe to predict that millions will simply ignore him and surf to some other show.
Crocker hasn't been in Iraq for very long, but he already has the downbeat bearing of Robert McNamara in the last days of his Vietnam stewardship at the Pentagon. As a subordinate, he's in no position to recommend that Bush go on TV and announce a fundamental shift in strategy. For instance, he's in no position to write something like this:
"The public is waiting for leaders from both political parties to stand up to the president and say enough is enough. They would like this situation resolved - and soon - and there is no other solution acceptable to them other than bringing the troops home...It is my opinion that the best leaders are those who trust the will of the public, even if that means changing direction or admitting a mistake. This is true leadership and the kind of leadership our nation has always desired."
That's Matthew Dowd...Bush's pollster/strategist on the 2004 re-election campaign.
-------
Hillary Clinton oughta be thrilled that her latest fund-raising embarrassment has been overshadowed this week by the Petraeus-Crocker story. I'll explain why tomorrrow.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Winning the war on Capitol Hill
Here's the bottom line on the Iraq debate: The guy with the most medals wins.
Or, more specifically, the president who hides behind the guy with the medals...he wins.
Fact and substance are apparently meaningless at this point. The troop surge is actually a failure - when measured against the original definition offered last winter by President Bush, and again last spring by General David Petraeus. Bush said the surge was supposed to create "breathing space" for the Shiites and Sunnis to effect political reconciliation in Baghdad; in May, Petraeus told the Associated Press' annual meeting that the goal of the surge "is the genuine demonstration of a willingness by all parties to reconcile with one another, to truly embrace what is enshrined in the Iraqi constitution -- one Iraq, minority rights, no safe haven for terrorists and a government that is representative of and responsive to all Iraqis, and all is underlined. I mean, that's, I think, where we're all sort of focusing like a laser beam."
Yet there has been virtually no political reconciliation, and little progress is foreseeable.
Moreover, for every "metric" of declining violence offered on Capitol Hill this week by Petraeus (who has been tasked by Bush with assessing his own work, and essentially defending the war in which he has long had a vested interest), there are a slew of countervailing "metrics" offered by far more independent analyists.
Moreover, his recommendation of a troop drawdown by next spring or summer is also virtually meaningless - it is perverse to even call it "news" - because (a) the troop surge was always supposed to be temporary (remember?), therefore a return to pre-surge troop levels during the summer of 2008 will leave us roughly where we were last winter, and (b) a reduction was always in the cards, given the severe strains on military readiness and the fact that roughly 30,000 soldiers would complete their 15-month tours of duty.
Moreover, his praise for the Iraqi government's buildup of security forces is also virtually meaningless. He stated Monday: "Currently, there are 445,000 individuals on the payrolls of Iraq's Interior and Defense Ministries. Based on recent decisions by Prime Minister Maliki, the number of Iraq's security forces will grow further by the end of this year, possibly by as much as 40,000" - but conveniently failed to mention that a new independent report helmed by retired General James Jones paints a grim picture of those same security forces. Jones says they are riddled with corruption and "rife with political and sectarian intrigues," which seems a lot more important than how many individuals are, in Patraeus' words, "on the payrolls."
Most Americans, of course, know full well that Bush's front man is merely putting a new spin on the old stay-the-course, plead-for-patience message - the one that Bush can no longer deliver on his own because his credibility is shredded (witness the latest New York Times-CBS poll, which found that only five percent of Americans put their primary trust in Bush to resolve the war). But most people are also cynical about Petraeus as well. According to the latest USA Today-Gallup poll, 53 percent do not believe that he is sufficiently independent or objective; in the latest AP-Ipsos poll, 58 percent said that the surge has failed (with only 36 percent saying otherwise); and in several polls, strong majorities said that Bush will keep doing what he wants anyway.
But, politically speaking, it really doesn't matter what the public thinks. The Petraeus road show (which continues today on the Senate side) has only two real purposes:
1. Mollifying congressional Republicans, who are unquestioningly loyal by instinct and have been desparately looking for a reason to remain supine.
2. Dividing the opposition, by sowing fresh discord between the characteristically timid congressional Democrats and the party's liberal antiwar base.
Bush's aim, of course, is to retain sufficient votes on Capitol Hill, in order to forestall any threat to his war policies as he enters his final year. And it looks like he is succeeding.
Keeping the congressional Republicans in line is crucial. Petraeus may well have offered enough "metrics," and enough sufficient teases about possible troop drawdowns, to satisfy enough of the wavering GOP members. Those Republicans (especially moderates facing tough '08 races) who, just a few months ago, were threatening to bolt from the president in September, may now convince themselves that they have been given enough political cover. Norm Coleman, the vulnerable GOP senator who is up for re-election in Minnesota, gushed his gratitude today, telling Petraeus, "I applaud the troop withdrawals...I applaud the fact that it will be at pre-surge levels next year."
So perhaps the new Republican battle cry will be "Let's wait to see what General Petraeus says next April." And if they hold firm, that will be enough to foil the Democrats, who are hampered by their thin majorities and thus can't do anything substantive to change the course of this war without scores of GOP defections.
The Petraeus talking points will probably also provide sufficient political cover to the '08 GOP presidential candidates. Bush has had them in mind for quite some time. In his interviews with biographer Robert Draper, he tipped his hand: "I'm playing for October-November, to get us in the position where the presidential candudates will be comfortable in sustaining a presence," referring to the U.S. military presence in Iraq.
As for the perpetually flummoxed Democrats, I was struck by this passage this morning in The New York Times: "...only a few Democrats on two House committees seemed inclined to dispute with much vigor the assessments provided by a commander with medals on his chest and four stars on his shoulder." (No surprise there. Didn't I already signal that satirically, last Friday?)
And just as the Democrats were struggling to challenge their decorated celebrity guest, they also had to deal with fallout from the tactically stupid moveon.org newspaper ad - the one that ran yesterday in The Times, which referred to Petraeus as "General Betray Us." This was truly a gift to the Republicans, who are happiest these days when they can obscure their Iraq failures by changing the subject. And when a group on the left suggests in an ad headline that a military general might be betraying his country...well, what a grand opportunity to change the subject.
It doesn't matter that the copy in the ad was far more reasonable - and accurate -than the headline (example: "We'll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won't hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.") What matters is that moveon.org handed the Republicans a weapon, and the Republicans used it to hammer the elected Democrats who are already petrified of being branded as anti-military, to put the Democrats back on their heels right at the moment when Democrats were hoping that Petraeus' flawed arguments would dominate the news cycle.
For instance, Chris Dodd, one of the most outspokenly antiwar presidential candidates, had to devote precious air time last night to a denunciation of the moveon.org ad. He told CNN, "This is not about the personality of General Petraeus. I have respect for him as a military individual here giving his best assessment. And even his assessments indicate this is not going to be easy at all, even under the best of scenarios they're describing here. So the debate ought not to be about the personalities. The debate is about the policy."
So when the Democrats are scuffling with their own base, that's another advantage for Bush.
All told, Bush appears closer than ever to achieving his goal: Kicking the can down the road; keeping at least 100,000 troops on the ground in Iraq through the end of his tenure (with all the additional casualties that will ensue), and fobbing off his signature disaster on whoever comes next.
This isn't nearly as ambitious as his grandiose goal of turning Iraq into a peaceful western democracy, but at least his current objective is achievable.
-------
Meanwhile, here's my favorite exchange, from Petraeus' Senate committee appearance this afternoon...
Republican Senator John Warner: Are you able to say at this time (that) if we continue what you have laid before the Congress here, this strategy, do you feel that that is making America safer?
General Petraeus: Sir, I believe this is indeed the best course of action to achieve our objectives in Iraq.
Senator Warner: Does that make America safer?
General Petraeus: Sir, I don't know, actually.
(Two hours later, Petraeus amended his response and said that he should have answered "yes.")
Or, more specifically, the president who hides behind the guy with the medals...he wins.
Fact and substance are apparently meaningless at this point. The troop surge is actually a failure - when measured against the original definition offered last winter by President Bush, and again last spring by General David Petraeus. Bush said the surge was supposed to create "breathing space" for the Shiites and Sunnis to effect political reconciliation in Baghdad; in May, Petraeus told the Associated Press' annual meeting that the goal of the surge "is the genuine demonstration of a willingness by all parties to reconcile with one another, to truly embrace what is enshrined in the Iraqi constitution -- one Iraq, minority rights, no safe haven for terrorists and a government that is representative of and responsive to all Iraqis, and all is underlined. I mean, that's, I think, where we're all sort of focusing like a laser beam."
Yet there has been virtually no political reconciliation, and little progress is foreseeable.
Moreover, for every "metric" of declining violence offered on Capitol Hill this week by Petraeus (who has been tasked by Bush with assessing his own work, and essentially defending the war in which he has long had a vested interest), there are a slew of countervailing "metrics" offered by far more independent analyists.
Moreover, his recommendation of a troop drawdown by next spring or summer is also virtually meaningless - it is perverse to even call it "news" - because (a) the troop surge was always supposed to be temporary (remember?), therefore a return to pre-surge troop levels during the summer of 2008 will leave us roughly where we were last winter, and (b) a reduction was always in the cards, given the severe strains on military readiness and the fact that roughly 30,000 soldiers would complete their 15-month tours of duty.
Moreover, his praise for the Iraqi government's buildup of security forces is also virtually meaningless. He stated Monday: "Currently, there are 445,000 individuals on the payrolls of Iraq's Interior and Defense Ministries. Based on recent decisions by Prime Minister Maliki, the number of Iraq's security forces will grow further by the end of this year, possibly by as much as 40,000" - but conveniently failed to mention that a new independent report helmed by retired General James Jones paints a grim picture of those same security forces. Jones says they are riddled with corruption and "rife with political and sectarian intrigues," which seems a lot more important than how many individuals are, in Patraeus' words, "on the payrolls."
Most Americans, of course, know full well that Bush's front man is merely putting a new spin on the old stay-the-course, plead-for-patience message - the one that Bush can no longer deliver on his own because his credibility is shredded (witness the latest New York Times-CBS poll, which found that only five percent of Americans put their primary trust in Bush to resolve the war). But most people are also cynical about Petraeus as well. According to the latest USA Today-Gallup poll, 53 percent do not believe that he is sufficiently independent or objective; in the latest AP-Ipsos poll, 58 percent said that the surge has failed (with only 36 percent saying otherwise); and in several polls, strong majorities said that Bush will keep doing what he wants anyway.
But, politically speaking, it really doesn't matter what the public thinks. The Petraeus road show (which continues today on the Senate side) has only two real purposes:
1. Mollifying congressional Republicans, who are unquestioningly loyal by instinct and have been desparately looking for a reason to remain supine.
2. Dividing the opposition, by sowing fresh discord between the characteristically timid congressional Democrats and the party's liberal antiwar base.
Bush's aim, of course, is to retain sufficient votes on Capitol Hill, in order to forestall any threat to his war policies as he enters his final year. And it looks like he is succeeding.
Keeping the congressional Republicans in line is crucial. Petraeus may well have offered enough "metrics," and enough sufficient teases about possible troop drawdowns, to satisfy enough of the wavering GOP members. Those Republicans (especially moderates facing tough '08 races) who, just a few months ago, were threatening to bolt from the president in September, may now convince themselves that they have been given enough political cover. Norm Coleman, the vulnerable GOP senator who is up for re-election in Minnesota, gushed his gratitude today, telling Petraeus, "I applaud the troop withdrawals...I applaud the fact that it will be at pre-surge levels next year."
So perhaps the new Republican battle cry will be "Let's wait to see what General Petraeus says next April." And if they hold firm, that will be enough to foil the Democrats, who are hampered by their thin majorities and thus can't do anything substantive to change the course of this war without scores of GOP defections.
The Petraeus talking points will probably also provide sufficient political cover to the '08 GOP presidential candidates. Bush has had them in mind for quite some time. In his interviews with biographer Robert Draper, he tipped his hand: "I'm playing for October-November, to get us in the position where the presidential candudates will be comfortable in sustaining a presence," referring to the U.S. military presence in Iraq.
As for the perpetually flummoxed Democrats, I was struck by this passage this morning in The New York Times: "...only a few Democrats on two House committees seemed inclined to dispute with much vigor the assessments provided by a commander with medals on his chest and four stars on his shoulder." (No surprise there. Didn't I already signal that satirically, last Friday?)
And just as the Democrats were struggling to challenge their decorated celebrity guest, they also had to deal with fallout from the tactically stupid moveon.org newspaper ad - the one that ran yesterday in The Times, which referred to Petraeus as "General Betray Us." This was truly a gift to the Republicans, who are happiest these days when they can obscure their Iraq failures by changing the subject. And when a group on the left suggests in an ad headline that a military general might be betraying his country...well, what a grand opportunity to change the subject.
It doesn't matter that the copy in the ad was far more reasonable - and accurate -than the headline (example: "We'll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won't hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.") What matters is that moveon.org handed the Republicans a weapon, and the Republicans used it to hammer the elected Democrats who are already petrified of being branded as anti-military, to put the Democrats back on their heels right at the moment when Democrats were hoping that Petraeus' flawed arguments would dominate the news cycle.
For instance, Chris Dodd, one of the most outspokenly antiwar presidential candidates, had to devote precious air time last night to a denunciation of the moveon.org ad. He told CNN, "This is not about the personality of General Petraeus. I have respect for him as a military individual here giving his best assessment. And even his assessments indicate this is not going to be easy at all, even under the best of scenarios they're describing here. So the debate ought not to be about the personalities. The debate is about the policy."
So when the Democrats are scuffling with their own base, that's another advantage for Bush.
All told, Bush appears closer than ever to achieving his goal: Kicking the can down the road; keeping at least 100,000 troops on the ground in Iraq through the end of his tenure (with all the additional casualties that will ensue), and fobbing off his signature disaster on whoever comes next.
This isn't nearly as ambitious as his grandiose goal of turning Iraq into a peaceful western democracy, but at least his current objective is achievable.
-------
Meanwhile, here's my favorite exchange, from Petraeus' Senate committee appearance this afternoon...
Republican Senator John Warner: Are you able to say at this time (that) if we continue what you have laid before the Congress here, this strategy, do you feel that that is making America safer?
General Petraeus: Sir, I believe this is indeed the best course of action to achieve our objectives in Iraq.
Senator Warner: Does that make America safer?
General Petraeus: Sir, I don't know, actually.
(Two hours later, Petraeus amended his response and said that he should have answered "yes.")
Monday, September 10, 2007
Hagel worsens his party's woes
Senator Chuck Hagel has long exasperated most of his fellow Republicans; his antiwar pronouncements about Iraq have been generally viewed as political blasphemy, particularly his declaration last winter that the Bush decision to launch a troop surge "represents the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam." But they may well come to mourn his absence on the 2008 Nebraska ballot. His expected retirement - formally announced today - will put that Senate seat in play, and further burden the national GOP as it labors to avoid slipping even further into the minority.
In presidential election years, most public attention is focused on the contestants for the top job, but the composition of the House and Senate will be critically important when the new president starts work in 2009. It's hard to imagine, for instance, that a Democrat in the White House would be able to score big achievements without strong party majorities in both chambers. Which is why the Senate is a crucial '08 battleground.
And Hagel, by leaving, will make it tougher for the GOP to hang on to its fragile 49-51 minority.
Nebraska is a deeply red state in presidential elections, and it's hard to imagine that any Democratic hopeful can win there next year. But Nebraska's Republicans are also ticket-splitters, which helps explain the presence of the other senator, Democrat Ben Nelson, and the past successes of Democrat Bob Kerrey, who served both as governor and as a senator. And that same Bob Kerry (who has serious money and celebrity cache) is now thinking seriously about running for senator again, in 2008, now that Hagel is taking a pass.
There are other potentially strong candidates as well, including Mike Johanns, a former GOP governor who's now serving Bush as the U.S. secretary of agriculture, but the key point here is that the national Republicans will have to expend considerably more time and effort and money, just to defend its Nebraska seat, than they had originally planned. And the timing could not be worse, because they were already at pains to defend 22 of the 34 seats up for re-election next year.
Worse yet, virtually all of the vulnerable '08 seats are now held (or being vacated) by Republicans. Hagel is the third Republican to announce his departure, following Wayne Allard in Colorado (which has been trending blue) and, most recently, John Warner in Virginia (another major Democratic opportunity).
In addition, Republican incumbents are thought to be highly vulnerable in Maine (Susan Collins), Minnesota (Norm Coleman), New Hampshire (John Sununu), and Oregon (Gordon Smith). Smith is the only Republican senator on the west coast, and he's trying to hang on in a blue state. Sununu won a squeaker in 2002, but New Hampshire has been trending blue ever since. Collins, who voted to authorize war in Iraq, will face a Democratic congressman who voted no, in a state that supported John Kerry in 2004. And Coleman, who stayed loyal to Bush on Iraq, also hails from a pro-Kerry state.
Then there are the wild cards. Alaska GOP incumbent Ted Stevens and his New Mexico counterpart, Pete Domenici, are up for re-election next year, but both guys have had ethics problems (Stevens is under investigation in a federal corruption probe, and Domenici played a key role in the political purging of a U.S. attorney), and it would not be a shock if at least one of them announced the sudden desire to spend more time with the family rather than face the voters.
On the flip side of the ledger, the Democrats at present seem vulnerable only in Louisiana (where incumbent Mary Landrieu could be hurt by the exodus of thousands of Democratic voters, thanks to Katrina), and possibly South Dakota, where incumbent Tim Johnson, newly recovered from a brain operation, has yet to state his '08 plans (and he was a narrow winner anyway, back in 2002).
Moreover, as a reflection of the current national mood, Democrats are financially well positioned to play offense, in Hagel's Nebraska and across the map. Traditionally, they tend to have a lot less money than their GOP counterparts - but, at the moment, the reverse is true. At the end of June, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington had $20.4 million in the bank; the National Republican Senatorial Committee, only $5.7 million. Barring a money surge, it won't be easy for the GOP to spread limited largesse across an expanded number of competitive states.
All told, Senate handicapper Stuart Rothenberg noted today, "a Democratic gain of five to seven seats (is) a serious possibility next year."
Some Hagel foes on the right are celebrating his retirement; as one blogger on redstate.com scoffed the other day, "The unctuous lightweight from Nebraska...has decided to pack his crap and get off the battlefield. Toodle-oo, Chuck." But the fact is that, despite Hagel's Iraq heresies, he generally voted with his party 90 percent of time - on everything from taxes to Supreme Court nominees. If the Democrats wind up winning that seat, and widening their margin of control in the Senate, the Hagel-haters may come to rue their own mockery.
-------
Speaking of mockery, Hagel once lambasted his own Senate colleagues for their discomfiture on Iraq. He famously told them, "If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes."
Well, proverbially speaking, now that Hagel has decided to go sell shoes - by freeing himself up to say and act as he pleases, without needing to worry about the '08 voters back home - is he more likely to work closely with Democrats on the war, in opposition to Bush, for the duration of his lame-duck Senate stint? The same question applies to John Warner.
In presidential election years, most public attention is focused on the contestants for the top job, but the composition of the House and Senate will be critically important when the new president starts work in 2009. It's hard to imagine, for instance, that a Democrat in the White House would be able to score big achievements without strong party majorities in both chambers. Which is why the Senate is a crucial '08 battleground.
And Hagel, by leaving, will make it tougher for the GOP to hang on to its fragile 49-51 minority.
Nebraska is a deeply red state in presidential elections, and it's hard to imagine that any Democratic hopeful can win there next year. But Nebraska's Republicans are also ticket-splitters, which helps explain the presence of the other senator, Democrat Ben Nelson, and the past successes of Democrat Bob Kerrey, who served both as governor and as a senator. And that same Bob Kerry (who has serious money and celebrity cache) is now thinking seriously about running for senator again, in 2008, now that Hagel is taking a pass.
There are other potentially strong candidates as well, including Mike Johanns, a former GOP governor who's now serving Bush as the U.S. secretary of agriculture, but the key point here is that the national Republicans will have to expend considerably more time and effort and money, just to defend its Nebraska seat, than they had originally planned. And the timing could not be worse, because they were already at pains to defend 22 of the 34 seats up for re-election next year.
Worse yet, virtually all of the vulnerable '08 seats are now held (or being vacated) by Republicans. Hagel is the third Republican to announce his departure, following Wayne Allard in Colorado (which has been trending blue) and, most recently, John Warner in Virginia (another major Democratic opportunity).
In addition, Republican incumbents are thought to be highly vulnerable in Maine (Susan Collins), Minnesota (Norm Coleman), New Hampshire (John Sununu), and Oregon (Gordon Smith). Smith is the only Republican senator on the west coast, and he's trying to hang on in a blue state. Sununu won a squeaker in 2002, but New Hampshire has been trending blue ever since. Collins, who voted to authorize war in Iraq, will face a Democratic congressman who voted no, in a state that supported John Kerry in 2004. And Coleman, who stayed loyal to Bush on Iraq, also hails from a pro-Kerry state.
Then there are the wild cards. Alaska GOP incumbent Ted Stevens and his New Mexico counterpart, Pete Domenici, are up for re-election next year, but both guys have had ethics problems (Stevens is under investigation in a federal corruption probe, and Domenici played a key role in the political purging of a U.S. attorney), and it would not be a shock if at least one of them announced the sudden desire to spend more time with the family rather than face the voters.
On the flip side of the ledger, the Democrats at present seem vulnerable only in Louisiana (where incumbent Mary Landrieu could be hurt by the exodus of thousands of Democratic voters, thanks to Katrina), and possibly South Dakota, where incumbent Tim Johnson, newly recovered from a brain operation, has yet to state his '08 plans (and he was a narrow winner anyway, back in 2002).
Moreover, as a reflection of the current national mood, Democrats are financially well positioned to play offense, in Hagel's Nebraska and across the map. Traditionally, they tend to have a lot less money than their GOP counterparts - but, at the moment, the reverse is true. At the end of June, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington had $20.4 million in the bank; the National Republican Senatorial Committee, only $5.7 million. Barring a money surge, it won't be easy for the GOP to spread limited largesse across an expanded number of competitive states.
All told, Senate handicapper Stuart Rothenberg noted today, "a Democratic gain of five to seven seats (is) a serious possibility next year."
Some Hagel foes on the right are celebrating his retirement; as one blogger on redstate.com scoffed the other day, "The unctuous lightweight from Nebraska...has decided to pack his crap and get off the battlefield. Toodle-oo, Chuck." But the fact is that, despite Hagel's Iraq heresies, he generally voted with his party 90 percent of time - on everything from taxes to Supreme Court nominees. If the Democrats wind up winning that seat, and widening their margin of control in the Senate, the Hagel-haters may come to rue their own mockery.
-------
Speaking of mockery, Hagel once lambasted his own Senate colleagues for their discomfiture on Iraq. He famously told them, "If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes."
Well, proverbially speaking, now that Hagel has decided to go sell shoes - by freeing himself up to say and act as he pleases, without needing to worry about the '08 voters back home - is he more likely to work closely with Democrats on the war, in opposition to Bush, for the duration of his lame-duck Senate stint? The same question applies to John Warner.
Friday, September 07, 2007
Exclusive! The Petraeus testimony in advance!
As we all know, General David Petraeus is slated early next week to deliver his long-awaited congressional testimony on Iraq. Don't expect any big surprises. In fact, I happen to have the advance transcript right here, complete with the senatorial exchanges that haven't even happened yet. Here's an exclusive excerpt.
PETRAEUS: "...And so, in conclusion, my assessment of the most feasibly relevent metrics has led me to determine that while we are indeed making measurable progress and success toward achieving our strategic goals, some difficult challenges still need to be assessed in order to cement our success and progress. Put another way, while we do face many significant challenges in the short, medium, and long terms, with respect to our optimal stability goals, we are indeed making progress on some metrically measurable fronts. And therefore it would be prudent to ask for more patience, and to continue current policies, with the goal of reassessing all our success and progress in perhaps another six months. I thank the committee for this opportunity, and I look forward to answering your questions."
DEMOCRATIC Q: "Thank you, General, and if you would permit me, I would like to offer a note of skepticism. But first, I do want to emphasize that I am impressed and gratified by the rows of medals and ribbons that adorn your uniform, all of which are testaments to your unimpeachable bravery and valor and honor, and that goes as well for a uniform that, at least from my humble vantage point, seems truly to have been pressed and ironed with such patriotic precision that, dare I say, the buttons on your sleeves are glinting in the sunlight that is flooding our committee room -- "
REPUBLICAN Q: "Excuse me, but at the risk of talking out of turn, may I say that I think it is only fair to point out that the general's sleeve buttons are glowing, not merely 'glinting,' and the suggestion of only a glint constitutes an unfair Democrat attack on our brave fighting men and women. On this anniversary week of 9/11, this is a time when we all must support our troops, and for a member of this chamber to even imply that one of their commanding officers is less than fastidious about his -- "
DEMOCRATIC Q: "Oh my yes, yes, sorry, sorry, I do apologize, truly I do, and, yes, on second thought, I do concur that those buttons are indeed glowing. And I want to also assure the general that I intend no disrespect whatsoever, with respect to any skepticism I may wish to express regarding his testimony. I do confess, though, that I am a bit confused about one or two points. You testified, for example, that, according to Pentagon figures, sectarian violence in Iraq has declined since the surge began. Yet there have been a number of independent reports that have concluded otherwise. And I have here a Washington Post report, from last week, in which intelligence analysts complain that the Pentagon has simply eliminated whole categories of death, such as car bombs, in order to make the overall numbers go down. With your permission, may I read one quote from that Post story? 'If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian. If it went through the front, it's criminal.' I would be grateful if you could comment on that."
PETRAEUS: "I have not read that report, which appeared in a newspaper that is not known to be a friend of the administration, which I loyally serve. And if we fail to count deaths from bullets in the back of the head, then we will be fighting them over here."
DEMOCRATIC Q: "I appreciate the opportunity to follow up, by noting, with all due respect and deference, that you wrote a guest column for that same newspaper, shortly before the 2004 election, in which you expressed optimistic views about Iraq. At the time, you were being entrusted by the Bush administration to build and arm the Iraqi forces. You wrote - and I have it right here - that we were making "tangible progress...in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load of their own security." Yet now we have a new report, from an independent commission headed by a retired Marine general which says that the Iraqi forces will need at least another 12 to 18 months to stand up on their own. May we perhaps conclude, general, that, as you assess the surge,you are not the most objective observer? And in no way whatsoever do I consider that question to be an attack on our brave fighting men and women, please don't -- "
PETRAEUS: "We have made tangible progress because of the surge, but there is more hard work to be done - as that commission indeed suggests. So if it is wise to stay the course over the next 12 to 18 months, I am sure that our brave fighting men and women are up to the task of preventing another 9/11, the sixth anniversary of which is this week."
REPUBLICAN Q: "Mr. Chairman, I must protest this persistent star-chamber treatment of our illustrious guest in whom our president has rightly placed his trust. And at the risk of breaching the decorum of this august body, I also wish to note something that our president said the other day on the far side of the world. He reportedly told the deputy prime minister of Australia, that, with respect to our troops in Iraq, 'We're kicking ass.' Setting aside my Democrat friend's unhelpful questions, may I say that 'kicking ass' in the global war on terror is one metric we can all understand."
DEMOCRATIC Q: "I applaud my Republican friend for pointing that out, and I do believe that all my questions have been satisfactorily answered. But now I will issue a challenge to all my esteemed Republican colleagues. I want them to join us in sponsoring new war legislation - we just finalized the language - which is designed to take the notion of a cautious, incremental troop withdrawal, and turn that notion into a concept, whereupon, if there is tangible progress on the surge in six months time, we will take that concept and turn it into an idea, with the future objective of turning that idea into a goal. General Petraeus? Sir? Would you be willing, in six months time, to return here, with your glowing sleeve buttons, and assist us further in our deliberations?"
PETRAEUS: "You forgot to mention my uniform."
PETRAEUS: "...And so, in conclusion, my assessment of the most feasibly relevent metrics has led me to determine that while we are indeed making measurable progress and success toward achieving our strategic goals, some difficult challenges still need to be assessed in order to cement our success and progress. Put another way, while we do face many significant challenges in the short, medium, and long terms, with respect to our optimal stability goals, we are indeed making progress on some metrically measurable fronts. And therefore it would be prudent to ask for more patience, and to continue current policies, with the goal of reassessing all our success and progress in perhaps another six months. I thank the committee for this opportunity, and I look forward to answering your questions."
DEMOCRATIC Q: "Thank you, General, and if you would permit me, I would like to offer a note of skepticism. But first, I do want to emphasize that I am impressed and gratified by the rows of medals and ribbons that adorn your uniform, all of which are testaments to your unimpeachable bravery and valor and honor, and that goes as well for a uniform that, at least from my humble vantage point, seems truly to have been pressed and ironed with such patriotic precision that, dare I say, the buttons on your sleeves are glinting in the sunlight that is flooding our committee room -- "
REPUBLICAN Q: "Excuse me, but at the risk of talking out of turn, may I say that I think it is only fair to point out that the general's sleeve buttons are glowing, not merely 'glinting,' and the suggestion of only a glint constitutes an unfair Democrat attack on our brave fighting men and women. On this anniversary week of 9/11, this is a time when we all must support our troops, and for a member of this chamber to even imply that one of their commanding officers is less than fastidious about his -- "
DEMOCRATIC Q: "Oh my yes, yes, sorry, sorry, I do apologize, truly I do, and, yes, on second thought, I do concur that those buttons are indeed glowing. And I want to also assure the general that I intend no disrespect whatsoever, with respect to any skepticism I may wish to express regarding his testimony. I do confess, though, that I am a bit confused about one or two points. You testified, for example, that, according to Pentagon figures, sectarian violence in Iraq has declined since the surge began. Yet there have been a number of independent reports that have concluded otherwise. And I have here a Washington Post report, from last week, in which intelligence analysts complain that the Pentagon has simply eliminated whole categories of death, such as car bombs, in order to make the overall numbers go down. With your permission, may I read one quote from that Post story? 'If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian. If it went through the front, it's criminal.' I would be grateful if you could comment on that."
PETRAEUS: "I have not read that report, which appeared in a newspaper that is not known to be a friend of the administration, which I loyally serve. And if we fail to count deaths from bullets in the back of the head, then we will be fighting them over here."
DEMOCRATIC Q: "I appreciate the opportunity to follow up, by noting, with all due respect and deference, that you wrote a guest column for that same newspaper, shortly before the 2004 election, in which you expressed optimistic views about Iraq. At the time, you were being entrusted by the Bush administration to build and arm the Iraqi forces. You wrote - and I have it right here - that we were making "tangible progress...in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load of their own security." Yet now we have a new report, from an independent commission headed by a retired Marine general which says that the Iraqi forces will need at least another 12 to 18 months to stand up on their own. May we perhaps conclude, general, that, as you assess the surge,you are not the most objective observer? And in no way whatsoever do I consider that question to be an attack on our brave fighting men and women, please don't -- "
PETRAEUS: "We have made tangible progress because of the surge, but there is more hard work to be done - as that commission indeed suggests. So if it is wise to stay the course over the next 12 to 18 months, I am sure that our brave fighting men and women are up to the task of preventing another 9/11, the sixth anniversary of which is this week."
REPUBLICAN Q: "Mr. Chairman, I must protest this persistent star-chamber treatment of our illustrious guest in whom our president has rightly placed his trust. And at the risk of breaching the decorum of this august body, I also wish to note something that our president said the other day on the far side of the world. He reportedly told the deputy prime minister of Australia, that, with respect to our troops in Iraq, 'We're kicking ass.' Setting aside my Democrat friend's unhelpful questions, may I say that 'kicking ass' in the global war on terror is one metric we can all understand."
DEMOCRATIC Q: "I applaud my Republican friend for pointing that out, and I do believe that all my questions have been satisfactorily answered. But now I will issue a challenge to all my esteemed Republican colleagues. I want them to join us in sponsoring new war legislation - we just finalized the language - which is designed to take the notion of a cautious, incremental troop withdrawal, and turn that notion into a concept, whereupon, if there is tangible progress on the surge in six months time, we will take that concept and turn it into an idea, with the future objective of turning that idea into a goal. General Petraeus? Sir? Would you be willing, in six months time, to return here, with your glowing sleeve buttons, and assist us further in our deliberations?"
PETRAEUS: "You forgot to mention my uniform."
Thursday, September 06, 2007
The Republican line of march
Iraq is just not a quagmire for the troops. It's also a quagmire for the '08 Republican presidential candidates.
This was readily apparent last night, during the latest GOP debate, sponsored this time by Fox News. Any undecided independent voter who tuned in hoping to hear some fresh ideas probably surfed away in total frustration. With the exception of the unelectable antiwar candidate Ron Paul, the white guys on stage (minus Fred Thompson, who opted to yuk it up on Jay Leno) seemed cognitively incapable of straying from the familiar George W. Bush template.
That's a savvy strategy as far as it goes, since, according to the latest CBS News poll, 62 percent of Republicans support Bush's handling of the war - and the GOP base is crucial to winning the nomination. The problem is that, in terms of the '08 general election, marching in lockstep with Bush is political suicide; as evidenced in the CBS poll, only 21 percent of independent voters still back Bush on the war.
Mitt Romney embodied the GOP dilemma last night. When asked to explain his current stance on the war, and the possibility of a U.S. troop drawdown, he said this:
"...(T)he surge is apparently working. We're going to get a full report on that from General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker very soon. But the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Brookings have come back with positive reports. If the surge is working, then we're going to be able to start bringing back our troops levels slowly but surely, and play more of a support role over time. Ultimately, down the road, I would anticipate that we're not going to have a permanent presence in Iraq, and we'll be in a standby mode in surrounding nations. But, of course, when we consider moving to a support role and bringing, at some stage, our troop levels back, we're going to be doing that from a position of strength because the surge has worked."
That sure sounded familiar. In fact, we heard all that on Monday, from Bush himself. During his photo-op in Iraq, Bush suggested that a working surge might lead to eventual and unspecified troop withdrawals, but that first we must hear from Petraeus and Crocker, and, besides, on the drawdown issue, he doesn't have any time frame in mind. Now we have Romney suggesting that a working surge might lead to eventual troop withdrawals, but first we must hear from Petraeus and Crocker, and, besides, on the drawdown issue, "I don't have a time frame that I've announced."
Not surprisingly, a citizen questioner, whose son is serving in Iraq, complained shortly thereafter that he was dissatisfied with Romney's response, on the grounds that Romney had been vague on how he would end the war. (No wonder Romney was vague. He was echoing Bush.) The questioner, a deputy sheriff, said: "I didn't hear how you would end it. I didn't hear an end game plan from you, and I would like a response on that."
Whereupon Romney ignored the thrust of the question, and instead offered more rhetoric from the Bush playbook, basically about how "this battlefield of Iraq is a place where we have to be successful because the consequences of what will happen on this global battlefield are enormous."
Indeed, Romney was so locked into Bush mode that he even exhibited one of Bush's most enduring traits: the ability to utter statements that are contradicted by factual reality. Scroll back to that first quote, and note his remark about how the Center for Strategic and International Studies recently came back with a "positive" report about how the surge is going. That is not accurate.
Anthony Cordesman, the leading Iraq expert at the CSIS think tank, recently came back from his Iraq visit and authored a nuanced report that is laced with skepticism. Cordesman writes that some of the anti-American violence has ceased not because of the troop surge, but because Sunni fighters, out of self-interest, have chosen to cut deals to work with the Americans; indeed, "the same fighters who were killing Americans could be killing them again in a matter of weeks or months...(W)hile the surge strategy has had value in some areas, much of this progress was not the function of the surge strategy, U.S. planning, or the actions of the Maliki government. In fact, the 'new' strategy President Bush announced in January 2007 has failed in many aspects of its original plan."
All told, despite Romney's sunny that the CSIS report was "positive," Cordesman wrote this: "The political and economic dimensions of the surge strategy have also failed to materialize at anything like the rate planned in Washington...Iraq has not made anything like the political progress required, and the effort to expand and revitalize the U.S. aid effort to help the Iraqi central government improve its dismal standards of governance and economic recovery efforts have already slipped some six months, and are far too dependent on the U.S. military." (And this report was written nearly one month before the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office concluded that the Iraqis have flunked the benchmark test, surge notwithstanding.)
And yet, despite all of Romney's lockstep Bush rhetoric, and his sunny Bush-style defiance of fact, that still wasn't good enough for some of his GOP rivals last night. John McCain, in particular, took umbrage that Romney had not been sufficiently sunny. Exhibiting the behavior that has made him a joke among the independent voters who once revered him, McCain took issue with one crucial word in the Romney rap on Iraq.
In Romney's initial remarks, he had said that "the surge is apparently working." Well, McCain bridled at the italicized word, and demanded that Romney expunge all traces of skepticism from his mind. McCain lectured Romney: "Governor, the surge is working. The surge is working, sir. It is working. No, not 'apparently.' It's working...It's working, and we have to rally the American people."
Rudy Giuliani also marched in lockstep, echoing the Bush argument that we can't allow Iraq to become a "headquarters for Islamic terrorism" - which is reasonable as far as it goes, as long as one ignores the historical context, which is that Bush, by invading Iraq, converted the country into a headquarters for Islamic terrorism.
On occasion, a few candidates did try to tiptoe away, ever so tentatively, from the line of march. Sam Brownback actually dared to say that "we don't have a political solution of the ground that works in Iraq...we need to recognize that reality," but few Republicans consider him a viable candidate at this point - especially in crucial New Hampshire (site of this debate), where his religious conservatism is out of step with the voters.
But the award for creative tiptoeing surely went to Mike Huckabee, who is currently enjoying his post-Iowa straw poll boomlet, and who offered this rationale for staying the course in Iraq:
"We have to continue the surge, and let me explain why, Chris. When I was a little kid, if I went into a store with my mother, she had a simple rule for me: If I picked something off the shelf at the store and I broke it, I bought it. I learned I don't pick something off the shelf I can't afford to buy. Well, what we did in Iraq, we essentially broke it. It's our responsibility to do the best we can to try to fix it before we just turn away. Because something is a stake....whether or not we should have gone to Iraq is a discussion the historians can have, but we're there.
We bought it because we broke it."
Where have I heard that one before...Oh yes. That's what Colin Powell reportedly said to Bush, when the first-term Secretary of State tried to warn the president about the potential downside of invading Iraq: "You break it, you own it."
Which means that Huckabee was being quite daring, in a way. Last night he was essentially arguing that we should stay the course with the surge not because it is working, but because we have screwed things up so badly in Iraq that we have no choice except to make amends by persevering.
And that's basically what passes for dissent these days within the Republican presidential field.
-------
As best I can determine, here's the most up-to-date Larry Craig chronology:
He was against resignation (last week) before he was for it (last Saturday). But then he was against it again (Tuesday) after he was for it (last Saturday). And now he is apparently for resignation yet again (today), after having been against it (Tuesday) and for it (last Saturday) and against it (last week).
And Ted Stevens, the ethically-challened Republican senator whose house has been raided by the FBI, is probably thinking, "Keep owning that news cycle, Larry."
This was readily apparent last night, during the latest GOP debate, sponsored this time by Fox News. Any undecided independent voter who tuned in hoping to hear some fresh ideas probably surfed away in total frustration. With the exception of the unelectable antiwar candidate Ron Paul, the white guys on stage (minus Fred Thompson, who opted to yuk it up on Jay Leno) seemed cognitively incapable of straying from the familiar George W. Bush template.
That's a savvy strategy as far as it goes, since, according to the latest CBS News poll, 62 percent of Republicans support Bush's handling of the war - and the GOP base is crucial to winning the nomination. The problem is that, in terms of the '08 general election, marching in lockstep with Bush is political suicide; as evidenced in the CBS poll, only 21 percent of independent voters still back Bush on the war.
Mitt Romney embodied the GOP dilemma last night. When asked to explain his current stance on the war, and the possibility of a U.S. troop drawdown, he said this:
"...(T)he surge is apparently working. We're going to get a full report on that from General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker very soon. But the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Brookings have come back with positive reports. If the surge is working, then we're going to be able to start bringing back our troops levels slowly but surely, and play more of a support role over time. Ultimately, down the road, I would anticipate that we're not going to have a permanent presence in Iraq, and we'll be in a standby mode in surrounding nations. But, of course, when we consider moving to a support role and bringing, at some stage, our troop levels back, we're going to be doing that from a position of strength because the surge has worked."
That sure sounded familiar. In fact, we heard all that on Monday, from Bush himself. During his photo-op in Iraq, Bush suggested that a working surge might lead to eventual and unspecified troop withdrawals, but that first we must hear from Petraeus and Crocker, and, besides, on the drawdown issue, he doesn't have any time frame in mind. Now we have Romney suggesting that a working surge might lead to eventual troop withdrawals, but first we must hear from Petraeus and Crocker, and, besides, on the drawdown issue, "I don't have a time frame that I've announced."
Not surprisingly, a citizen questioner, whose son is serving in Iraq, complained shortly thereafter that he was dissatisfied with Romney's response, on the grounds that Romney had been vague on how he would end the war. (No wonder Romney was vague. He was echoing Bush.) The questioner, a deputy sheriff, said: "I didn't hear how you would end it. I didn't hear an end game plan from you, and I would like a response on that."
Whereupon Romney ignored the thrust of the question, and instead offered more rhetoric from the Bush playbook, basically about how "this battlefield of Iraq is a place where we have to be successful because the consequences of what will happen on this global battlefield are enormous."
Indeed, Romney was so locked into Bush mode that he even exhibited one of Bush's most enduring traits: the ability to utter statements that are contradicted by factual reality. Scroll back to that first quote, and note his remark about how the Center for Strategic and International Studies recently came back with a "positive" report about how the surge is going. That is not accurate.
Anthony Cordesman, the leading Iraq expert at the CSIS think tank, recently came back from his Iraq visit and authored a nuanced report that is laced with skepticism. Cordesman writes that some of the anti-American violence has ceased not because of the troop surge, but because Sunni fighters, out of self-interest, have chosen to cut deals to work with the Americans; indeed, "the same fighters who were killing Americans could be killing them again in a matter of weeks or months...(W)hile the surge strategy has had value in some areas, much of this progress was not the function of the surge strategy, U.S. planning, or the actions of the Maliki government. In fact, the 'new' strategy President Bush announced in January 2007 has failed in many aspects of its original plan."
All told, despite Romney's sunny that the CSIS report was "positive," Cordesman wrote this: "The political and economic dimensions of the surge strategy have also failed to materialize at anything like the rate planned in Washington...Iraq has not made anything like the political progress required, and the effort to expand and revitalize the U.S. aid effort to help the Iraqi central government improve its dismal standards of governance and economic recovery efforts have already slipped some six months, and are far too dependent on the U.S. military." (And this report was written nearly one month before the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office concluded that the Iraqis have flunked the benchmark test, surge notwithstanding.)
And yet, despite all of Romney's lockstep Bush rhetoric, and his sunny Bush-style defiance of fact, that still wasn't good enough for some of his GOP rivals last night. John McCain, in particular, took umbrage that Romney had not been sufficiently sunny. Exhibiting the behavior that has made him a joke among the independent voters who once revered him, McCain took issue with one crucial word in the Romney rap on Iraq.
In Romney's initial remarks, he had said that "the surge is apparently working." Well, McCain bridled at the italicized word, and demanded that Romney expunge all traces of skepticism from his mind. McCain lectured Romney: "Governor, the surge is working. The surge is working, sir. It is working. No, not 'apparently.' It's working...It's working, and we have to rally the American people."
Rudy Giuliani also marched in lockstep, echoing the Bush argument that we can't allow Iraq to become a "headquarters for Islamic terrorism" - which is reasonable as far as it goes, as long as one ignores the historical context, which is that Bush, by invading Iraq, converted the country into a headquarters for Islamic terrorism.
On occasion, a few candidates did try to tiptoe away, ever so tentatively, from the line of march. Sam Brownback actually dared to say that "we don't have a political solution of the ground that works in Iraq...we need to recognize that reality," but few Republicans consider him a viable candidate at this point - especially in crucial New Hampshire (site of this debate), where his religious conservatism is out of step with the voters.
But the award for creative tiptoeing surely went to Mike Huckabee, who is currently enjoying his post-Iowa straw poll boomlet, and who offered this rationale for staying the course in Iraq:
"We have to continue the surge, and let me explain why, Chris. When I was a little kid, if I went into a store with my mother, she had a simple rule for me: If I picked something off the shelf at the store and I broke it, I bought it. I learned I don't pick something off the shelf I can't afford to buy. Well, what we did in Iraq, we essentially broke it. It's our responsibility to do the best we can to try to fix it before we just turn away. Because something is a stake....whether or not we should have gone to Iraq is a discussion the historians can have, but we're there.
We bought it because we broke it."
Where have I heard that one before...Oh yes. That's what Colin Powell reportedly said to Bush, when the first-term Secretary of State tried to warn the president about the potential downside of invading Iraq: "You break it, you own it."
Which means that Huckabee was being quite daring, in a way. Last night he was essentially arguing that we should stay the course with the surge not because it is working, but because we have screwed things up so badly in Iraq that we have no choice except to make amends by persevering.
And that's basically what passes for dissent these days within the Republican presidential field.
-------
As best I can determine, here's the most up-to-date Larry Craig chronology:
He was against resignation (last week) before he was for it (last Saturday). But then he was against it again (Tuesday) after he was for it (last Saturday). And now he is apparently for resignation yet again (today), after having been against it (Tuesday) and for it (last Saturday) and against it (last week).
And Ted Stevens, the ethically-challened Republican senator whose house has been raided by the FBI, is probably thinking, "Keep owning that news cycle, Larry."
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
The thing that wouldn't leave
Christmas has come early this year for the Democrats...because America's favorite toe-tapper, Senator Larry Craig (R-Restroom), is now signaling that he may well un-resign (despite having said on Saturday that he intends to resign), and that he now plans to fight in Minnesota to get himself declared un-guilty (despite the fact that he has already pled guilty).
This is probably Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell's worst nightmare, made worse because it's happening during waking hours. The last thing he wants, at this point, is to burdened any further by a "family values" colleague who is now known, nationwide, for his practice of sliding his fingers along the underside of a neighbor's toilet stall.
Thirty years ago on Saturday Night Live, John Belushi played a character called "The Thing That Wouldn't Leave," an unwelcome houseguest who refused to hit the road despite his host's persistent entreaties. Craig apparently wants to do the sequel. McConnell, who is not particularly happy about this turn of events, said at a press conference this afternoon: "My view remains what I said last Saturday. I thought he made the correct decision -- the difficult but correct decision to resign. That would still be my view today."
Every day that Craig keeps himself in the news is another bad news day for his fellow Republican senators - who are already facing a tough electoral landscape in 2008, and the very real prospect of losing more seats. And every day that this guy stays in the news is a bad day for the '08 Republican presidential candidates - most of whom are slated to debate tonight on Fox News. (Perhaps the fair-and-balanced questioners will ask the obvious question: "Do you candidates believe that Larry Craig should keep his Senate seat as he explores his legal options, or should he resign for the good of the party?")
Craig seems to be juiced by the argument that he was unfairly railroaded by the cops and prosecutors after his arrest at the Minneapolis airport, an argument offered twice in recent days by Senator Arlen Specter, a former prosecutor and the ranking GOP member on the Judiciary Committee. Specter told the Associated Press yesterday that "the more people take a look at the situation, there may well be second thoughts," and contended that if Craig hadn't pled guilty to disorderly conduct and had instead insisted on going to trial, "I believe he would have been exonerated." (Conservative commentator Dean Barnett notes ruefully, "If you’re the kind of Republican who suspects Arlen Specter is at the root of all things evil, this is a story for you.")
I've heard this argument as well. An ex-colleague of mine emailed to say, "Am I alone in believing that had Craig not pled guilty, the case against him was probably unwinnable? Since when do you get convicted for foot and hand signals? Craig said nothing and offered no proposition before the cop busted him. And on the (police) tape, he denies everything. I think civil libertarians should be incensed. Even gay-bashing (expletives) have rights."
All told, Craig's press secretary insisted on some wiggle room yesterday: "We're still preparing as if Senator Craig will resign Sept. 30, but the outcome of the legal case in Minnesota and the (Senate) ethics investigation will have an impact on whether we're able to stay in the fight - and stay in the Senate."
But his task in Minneapolis - to cancel his guilty plea - won't be so easy. He could claim, for starters, that he was unfairly entrapped by the undercover cop, but many legal experts doubt whether that defense will work. The general rule of thumb is that the defense succeeds only when the defendant can show that he was strongly invited to behave in a manner that he would not otherwise have exhibited.
In this case, however, the arrest report details a lot of uninvited behavior; as legal scholar Jeffrey Toobin said the other day on CNN, "Craig did a heck of a lot more than just pick up a piece of paper in the stall. He rubbed his hand along the side of the stall, and he lingered outside and looked through the crack and rubbed his fingers together. I mean, there were a whole series of signals. And the jury might very well have believed the officer rather than Craig."
And as for the guilty plea itself, that might be tough to expunge. The Minnesota courts reportedly do permit the withdrawal of guilty pleas, but the hitch is that the guilty must show there was "manifest injustice." That might be a tough standard to meet in Craig's case, especially since he was warned ahead of time by the prosecutor that his guilty plea would appear on his criminal record, yet still agreed to the plea after more than two weeks of deliberation.
The senator from Idaho is surely entitled to pursue all remaining legal options, but, for our purposes, it's the political realm that matters most. One of his many lawyers, Stanley Brand, told NBC today that Craig should not be punished in the Senate for his "private conduct," but Dean Barnett, the conservative commentator, doesn't buy the idea that a guilty plea stemming from conduct in an airport john meets the definition of "private." As Barnett puts it, "The kind of behavior he engaged in wasn’t just illegal. It was also narcissistic and immoral. Once again, children use that restroom..."
Many GOP sympathizers recognize that the party will remain under an ethical cloud as long as Craig sticks around. In the words of conservative blogger John Hawkins, "The moment he pled guilty, his political career was over and even if he manages to 'lawyer' his way out of the guilty charges, the public isn't going to buy it at this point...Whether Craig likes it or not, it's game over for him and he might as well go quietly with as much dignity as can be mustered under these sorry circumstances."
Which is surely the opposite of what Democrats are whispering to themselves this morning. Something along the lines of, "Larry, you can stay as along as you like."
-------
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, we have "The Thing That Wouldn't Stay." That would be longtime fugitive Norman Hsu, the former Hillary Clinton fundraiser (or, in the campaign's parlance, "Hillraiser"), who today skipped a court date in California, after first promising that he would show up to answer for his '91 guilty plea to a grand-theft felony rap. The guy has disappeared. And now that he's on the lam again, a fresh warrant has been issued for his arrest.
History apparently repeats itself. As I recall, scores of shady Democratic donors fled the country in the wake of the 1996 Bill Clinton fund-raising scandal, rather than face questioning.
Actually, we don't know whether the "apparel executive" has fled the country. But if he's hiding out in Idaho, he might want to avoid the public restrooms.
This is probably Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell's worst nightmare, made worse because it's happening during waking hours. The last thing he wants, at this point, is to burdened any further by a "family values" colleague who is now known, nationwide, for his practice of sliding his fingers along the underside of a neighbor's toilet stall.
Thirty years ago on Saturday Night Live, John Belushi played a character called "The Thing That Wouldn't Leave," an unwelcome houseguest who refused to hit the road despite his host's persistent entreaties. Craig apparently wants to do the sequel. McConnell, who is not particularly happy about this turn of events, said at a press conference this afternoon: "My view remains what I said last Saturday. I thought he made the correct decision -- the difficult but correct decision to resign. That would still be my view today."
Every day that Craig keeps himself in the news is another bad news day for his fellow Republican senators - who are already facing a tough electoral landscape in 2008, and the very real prospect of losing more seats. And every day that this guy stays in the news is a bad day for the '08 Republican presidential candidates - most of whom are slated to debate tonight on Fox News. (Perhaps the fair-and-balanced questioners will ask the obvious question: "Do you candidates believe that Larry Craig should keep his Senate seat as he explores his legal options, or should he resign for the good of the party?")
Craig seems to be juiced by the argument that he was unfairly railroaded by the cops and prosecutors after his arrest at the Minneapolis airport, an argument offered twice in recent days by Senator Arlen Specter, a former prosecutor and the ranking GOP member on the Judiciary Committee. Specter told the Associated Press yesterday that "the more people take a look at the situation, there may well be second thoughts," and contended that if Craig hadn't pled guilty to disorderly conduct and had instead insisted on going to trial, "I believe he would have been exonerated." (Conservative commentator Dean Barnett notes ruefully, "If you’re the kind of Republican who suspects Arlen Specter is at the root of all things evil, this is a story for you.")
I've heard this argument as well. An ex-colleague of mine emailed to say, "Am I alone in believing that had Craig not pled guilty, the case against him was probably unwinnable? Since when do you get convicted for foot and hand signals? Craig said nothing and offered no proposition before the cop busted him. And on the (police) tape, he denies everything. I think civil libertarians should be incensed. Even gay-bashing (expletives) have rights."
All told, Craig's press secretary insisted on some wiggle room yesterday: "We're still preparing as if Senator Craig will resign Sept. 30, but the outcome of the legal case in Minnesota and the (Senate) ethics investigation will have an impact on whether we're able to stay in the fight - and stay in the Senate."
But his task in Minneapolis - to cancel his guilty plea - won't be so easy. He could claim, for starters, that he was unfairly entrapped by the undercover cop, but many legal experts doubt whether that defense will work. The general rule of thumb is that the defense succeeds only when the defendant can show that he was strongly invited to behave in a manner that he would not otherwise have exhibited.
In this case, however, the arrest report details a lot of uninvited behavior; as legal scholar Jeffrey Toobin said the other day on CNN, "Craig did a heck of a lot more than just pick up a piece of paper in the stall. He rubbed his hand along the side of the stall, and he lingered outside and looked through the crack and rubbed his fingers together. I mean, there were a whole series of signals. And the jury might very well have believed the officer rather than Craig."
And as for the guilty plea itself, that might be tough to expunge. The Minnesota courts reportedly do permit the withdrawal of guilty pleas, but the hitch is that the guilty must show there was "manifest injustice." That might be a tough standard to meet in Craig's case, especially since he was warned ahead of time by the prosecutor that his guilty plea would appear on his criminal record, yet still agreed to the plea after more than two weeks of deliberation.
The senator from Idaho is surely entitled to pursue all remaining legal options, but, for our purposes, it's the political realm that matters most. One of his many lawyers, Stanley Brand, told NBC today that Craig should not be punished in the Senate for his "private conduct," but Dean Barnett, the conservative commentator, doesn't buy the idea that a guilty plea stemming from conduct in an airport john meets the definition of "private." As Barnett puts it, "The kind of behavior he engaged in wasn’t just illegal. It was also narcissistic and immoral. Once again, children use that restroom..."
Many GOP sympathizers recognize that the party will remain under an ethical cloud as long as Craig sticks around. In the words of conservative blogger John Hawkins, "The moment he pled guilty, his political career was over and even if he manages to 'lawyer' his way out of the guilty charges, the public isn't going to buy it at this point...Whether Craig likes it or not, it's game over for him and he might as well go quietly with as much dignity as can be mustered under these sorry circumstances."
Which is surely the opposite of what Democrats are whispering to themselves this morning. Something along the lines of, "Larry, you can stay as along as you like."
-------
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, we have "The Thing That Wouldn't Stay." That would be longtime fugitive Norman Hsu, the former Hillary Clinton fundraiser (or, in the campaign's parlance, "Hillraiser"), who today skipped a court date in California, after first promising that he would show up to answer for his '91 guilty plea to a grand-theft felony rap. The guy has disappeared. And now that he's on the lam again, a fresh warrant has been issued for his arrest.
History apparently repeats itself. As I recall, scores of shady Democratic donors fled the country in the wake of the 1996 Bill Clinton fund-raising scandal, rather than face questioning.
Actually, we don't know whether the "apparel executive" has fled the country. But if he's hiding out in Idaho, he might want to avoid the public restrooms.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Refreshing the president's memory
Well, well. The plot thickens (or sickens).
As I wrote here yesterday, President Bush was asked recently by scholar Robert Draper to explain why and how his administration had made the disastrous decision, in May 2003, to disband the Iraqi army – and to thereby create a huge pool of unemployed and humiliated men, many of whom would soon join the nascent anti-American insurgency. In response, Bush said: “Yeah, I can’t remember,” and suggested that somehow the administration policy “to keep the army intact” had been countermanded without his knowledge. In Bush's recollection, he was flummoxed by the news that the army had been disbanded - and asked his aides, "what happened?"
Now we have a new development, and it’s yet another black mark on the administration’s rich record of incompetence.
L. Paul Bremer III, the presidential envoy who made the decision to disband the Iraqi army, read Bush’s comments, as reported yesterday in The New York Times. Apparently he was not pleased. He suspected that he was being hung out to dry, and that blaming him would be unfair – because he had proof, in writing, that Bush knew what was going on, in advance.
Bremer happened to have, in his possession, an exchange of letters with Bush, dated May 2003. His letter to Bush specifically pointed out that he intended to disband the Iraqi army (even though Bush had signed off on a plan, two months earlier, to keep the army intact and put it to work on postwar reconstruction). Bush responded in writing with fulsome praise for Bremer, and gave no indication whatsoever that he was concerned about Bremer’s intention to disband the army.
Perhaps in the hopes of refreshing Bush’s memory, Bremer yesterday provided these letters to The Times. In his communiqué to Bush, dated May 22, 2003, he wrote that, after taking a strong measure to purge Saddam Hussein’s party members from government, “I will parallel this step with an even more robust measure dissolving Saddam's military and intelligence structures to emphasize that we mean business.”
In effect, Bremer was telling Bush: I intend to contradict Bush administration policy. (Indeed, there was vociferous opposition, within the U.S. military, to the idea of disbanding the Iraqi army, for fear that such a move would give the insurgents a recruiting tool.)
But, in his May 23 response letter to Bremer, Bush merely replied: “Your leadership is apparent. You have quickly made a positive and significant impact. You have my full support and confidence. You also have the backing of our Administration that knows our work will take time.”
Bremer dissolved the army that same day. These letters help to explain why Bremer kept telling his skeptical colleagues, “I have my instructions.” But what’s not so easily explained is why Bush is now claiming “I don’t remember.” Here are some possibilities:
1. Bush clearly recognized what Bremer intended to do, but is now claiming amnesia, in order to distance himself from the catastrophic decision by pinning the blame on his former subordinate.
2. Bush did read the key passage in the letter, but somehow failed to recognize its significance – that Bremer was seeking permission to overturn Bush’s own policy.
3. Bush never read the letter; his inner circle simply signed off on Bremer’s plan without Bush’s input – and without informing Secretary of State Colin Powell or the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Powell and the joint chiefs have long stated that they were never asked for advice, or informed of the decision in advance.)
Apparently, the fog of war is not limited only to the battlefield. Chalk up this new tiff with Bremer as just another blow to the credibility-challenged president. It’s no wonder that the ’08 Republican presidential candidates so rarely rouse themselves to mention Bush by name. Let's see how often that happens in the next GOP debate, tomorrow evening. Clearly, Bush is trying to give the GOP candidates a little breathing room on Iraq, suggesting yesterday that he might endorse the vague possibility of future troop drawdowns.
-------
By the way, Slate has exclusive excerpts from the Draper book on Bush.
As I wrote here yesterday, President Bush was asked recently by scholar Robert Draper to explain why and how his administration had made the disastrous decision, in May 2003, to disband the Iraqi army – and to thereby create a huge pool of unemployed and humiliated men, many of whom would soon join the nascent anti-American insurgency. In response, Bush said: “Yeah, I can’t remember,” and suggested that somehow the administration policy “to keep the army intact” had been countermanded without his knowledge. In Bush's recollection, he was flummoxed by the news that the army had been disbanded - and asked his aides, "what happened?"
Now we have a new development, and it’s yet another black mark on the administration’s rich record of incompetence.
L. Paul Bremer III, the presidential envoy who made the decision to disband the Iraqi army, read Bush’s comments, as reported yesterday in The New York Times. Apparently he was not pleased. He suspected that he was being hung out to dry, and that blaming him would be unfair – because he had proof, in writing, that Bush knew what was going on, in advance.
Bremer happened to have, in his possession, an exchange of letters with Bush, dated May 2003. His letter to Bush specifically pointed out that he intended to disband the Iraqi army (even though Bush had signed off on a plan, two months earlier, to keep the army intact and put it to work on postwar reconstruction). Bush responded in writing with fulsome praise for Bremer, and gave no indication whatsoever that he was concerned about Bremer’s intention to disband the army.
Perhaps in the hopes of refreshing Bush’s memory, Bremer yesterday provided these letters to The Times. In his communiqué to Bush, dated May 22, 2003, he wrote that, after taking a strong measure to purge Saddam Hussein’s party members from government, “I will parallel this step with an even more robust measure dissolving Saddam's military and intelligence structures to emphasize that we mean business.”
In effect, Bremer was telling Bush: I intend to contradict Bush administration policy. (Indeed, there was vociferous opposition, within the U.S. military, to the idea of disbanding the Iraqi army, for fear that such a move would give the insurgents a recruiting tool.)
But, in his May 23 response letter to Bremer, Bush merely replied: “Your leadership is apparent. You have quickly made a positive and significant impact. You have my full support and confidence. You also have the backing of our Administration that knows our work will take time.”
Bremer dissolved the army that same day. These letters help to explain why Bremer kept telling his skeptical colleagues, “I have my instructions.” But what’s not so easily explained is why Bush is now claiming “I don’t remember.” Here are some possibilities:
1. Bush clearly recognized what Bremer intended to do, but is now claiming amnesia, in order to distance himself from the catastrophic decision by pinning the blame on his former subordinate.
2. Bush did read the key passage in the letter, but somehow failed to recognize its significance – that Bremer was seeking permission to overturn Bush’s own policy.
3. Bush never read the letter; his inner circle simply signed off on Bremer’s plan without Bush’s input – and without informing Secretary of State Colin Powell or the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Powell and the joint chiefs have long stated that they were never asked for advice, or informed of the decision in advance.)
Apparently, the fog of war is not limited only to the battlefield. Chalk up this new tiff with Bremer as just another blow to the credibility-challenged president. It’s no wonder that the ’08 Republican presidential candidates so rarely rouse themselves to mention Bush by name. Let's see how often that happens in the next GOP debate, tomorrow evening. Clearly, Bush is trying to give the GOP candidates a little breathing room on Iraq, suggesting yesterday that he might endorse the vague possibility of future troop drawdowns.
-------
By the way, Slate has exclusive excerpts from the Draper book on Bush.
Monday, September 03, 2007
"Yeah, I can't remember"
It often pays to read the entire front section of the newspaper, because you never know where you might find an item that belongs on page one.
Witness the Sunday story, in The New York Times, which detailed how Bush scholar/biographer Robert Draper scored a coup by persuading his fellow Texan, the commander-in-chief, to sit for a rare series of interviews. The Times story started on page one, and meandered along at great length about how President Bush is feeling "reflective" and "sorrowful" and "optimistic," about how he ate a low-fat hot dog and swatted at flies, about how he put his feet up on the table, about how the public won't give him a fair shake on Iraq ("every time I start painting a rosy picture, I get criticized," he laments), about how he says he has "God's shoulder" to cry on...
Then suddenly, on the jump page, way down near the bottom of the story, we discover this buried treasure:
Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.” But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” But, he added, “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff,” referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.
To fully appreciate Bush's key remark - "Yeah, I can't remember" - I'll provide some context:
On May 23, 2003, three weeks after Bush declared that major combat was over, his newly appointed Iraq administrator, Paul Bremer (who had no previous experience working in the region) signed an order that dissolved the Iraqi armed forces (thereby putting 385,000 people on the street). He also dissolved the existing police and domestic security forces (tens of thousands more). as well as the presidential security units that once worked for Saddam Hussein (50,000 more people).
With the stroke of his signature, Bremer created a vast pool of humiliated and newly politicized men, all of whom were familiar with warfare and weaponry. As Col. John Agoglia, deputy chief of planning at Central Command, later complained to Fiasco author Thomas Ricks, the Bremer decision was a disaster: "We snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and created an insurgency.” The decision erased one of the few unifying national institutions, and aggravated the simmering sectarian tensions.
More tellingly, the decision appeared to contradict Bush administration’s policy, as stated only two months earlier. Bremer's predecessor, Jay Garner, had told Pentagon reporters that “one of our goals is to take a good portion of the Iraqi regular army” and put them to work on reconstruction, because “the regular army has the skill sets to match the work that needs to be done.” Indeed, as author Ricks pointed out, Bush had signed off on keeping the army intact, during briefings on March 10 and 12.
The mystery deepens. Why did Bremer do the opposite? If he was contradicting Bush policy, why did he not suffer the consequences? Or had Bush policy somehow changed behind the scenes? Bremer, at the time, kept telling his worried subordinates, "I have my instructions," without saying who had issued those instructions.
So let us review: Robert Draper, the Bush scholar in The Times story, asks Bush to explain how his administration perpetrated one of the most disastrous miscalculations in contemporary U.S. foreign policy....and Bush says he “can’t remember” what happened. And can't explain what happened, even after the fact ("Hadley's got notes on all this stuff").
Is it accurate to call this guy The Decider, when he can't even remember how this fateful policy was decided, or whether he indeed had any role in deciding it?
Witness the Sunday story, in The New York Times, which detailed how Bush scholar/biographer Robert Draper scored a coup by persuading his fellow Texan, the commander-in-chief, to sit for a rare series of interviews. The Times story started on page one, and meandered along at great length about how President Bush is feeling "reflective" and "sorrowful" and "optimistic," about how he ate a low-fat hot dog and swatted at flies, about how he put his feet up on the table, about how the public won't give him a fair shake on Iraq ("every time I start painting a rosy picture, I get criticized," he laments), about how he says he has "God's shoulder" to cry on...
Then suddenly, on the jump page, way down near the bottom of the story, we discover this buried treasure:
Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.” But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” But, he added, “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff,” referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.
To fully appreciate Bush's key remark - "Yeah, I can't remember" - I'll provide some context:
On May 23, 2003, three weeks after Bush declared that major combat was over, his newly appointed Iraq administrator, Paul Bremer (who had no previous experience working in the region) signed an order that dissolved the Iraqi armed forces (thereby putting 385,000 people on the street). He also dissolved the existing police and domestic security forces (tens of thousands more). as well as the presidential security units that once worked for Saddam Hussein (50,000 more people).
With the stroke of his signature, Bremer created a vast pool of humiliated and newly politicized men, all of whom were familiar with warfare and weaponry. As Col. John Agoglia, deputy chief of planning at Central Command, later complained to Fiasco author Thomas Ricks, the Bremer decision was a disaster: "We snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and created an insurgency.” The decision erased one of the few unifying national institutions, and aggravated the simmering sectarian tensions.
More tellingly, the decision appeared to contradict Bush administration’s policy, as stated only two months earlier. Bremer's predecessor, Jay Garner, had told Pentagon reporters that “one of our goals is to take a good portion of the Iraqi regular army” and put them to work on reconstruction, because “the regular army has the skill sets to match the work that needs to be done.” Indeed, as author Ricks pointed out, Bush had signed off on keeping the army intact, during briefings on March 10 and 12.
The mystery deepens. Why did Bremer do the opposite? If he was contradicting Bush policy, why did he not suffer the consequences? Or had Bush policy somehow changed behind the scenes? Bremer, at the time, kept telling his worried subordinates, "I have my instructions," without saying who had issued those instructions.
So let us review: Robert Draper, the Bush scholar in The Times story, asks Bush to explain how his administration perpetrated one of the most disastrous miscalculations in contemporary U.S. foreign policy....and Bush says he “can’t remember” what happened. And can't explain what happened, even after the fact ("Hadley's got notes on all this stuff").
Is it accurate to call this guy The Decider, when he can't even remember how this fateful policy was decided, or whether he indeed had any role in deciding it?
Friday, August 31, 2007
Dave's show biz kisses, and more
A few pithy thoughts, then it's holiday time:
It's a tad unnerving to watch Hillary Clinton schmooze with David Letterman; she always seems to be working hard to party hearty, as if she had just mastered a spontaneity manual. But it's still a comfy environment for her, because, much the way that Sean Hannity kisses the rings of visiting Republicans, Letterman can be relied upon to ask questions that are little more than show biz kisses.
Last night, for instance, after welcoming Hillary to his stage for the seventh time, the Late Show host nailed her with a tough opening question: "When you were a little girl, did you go to camp?" A bit later, he did ask her to critique her weaknesses as a campaigner, but when she declined to do so, he dropped that line of inquiry and moved on.
And then, whether he knew it or not, he brought up a hot topic. Noting that Hillary has raised $60 million for her campaign, he asked, "Should it be that expensive?" Actually, if his research staffers had been on the ball (as John Stewart's staffers surely would have been), they might have fed him the same question in a more newsworthy form:
"What's up with this Norman Hsu character, anyway? He raised all this money for you, but now that it turns out he is a fugitive in a fraud case, you're suddenly giving all that money to charity - and, by the way, I see that you didn't decide to divest yourself until after other Democrats had acted first to dump their Hsu donations. So here's the problem: Because you and the other candidates are always so desperate to dash for cash, doesn't that mean you will keep relying on sleazeballs to vacuum the money for you? And that you risk being embarrassed by sleazeballs yet to be unmasked?"
OK, maybe that sounds more like a Chris Matthews filibuster, but you get my point. The incessant pressure to raise money - indeed, the pressure to finish first in the money sweepstakes in order to demonstrate viability - all but ensures that the candidates will be embarrassed on occasion by the shady operators who raise money in their name.
The Republicans have learned that lesson already, with Jack Abramoff (now in jail), and Ohio businessman Thomas Noe (now in hail). Barack Obama has already been compelled to dump all the money raised by an old Illinois associate, Antoin Rezko, who was indicted last year on a fraud rap. It's probably impossible for candidates to fully vet every single person who offers to raise money, but, fortunately for Hillary last night, she never had to tackle that issue at all. (Given the fact that Hsu, in his federal fund-raising filings, had listed a lot of phony addresses, what does that say about Hillary's vetting process?)
In response to Letterman's general question about money, she simply replied that ideally campaigns should be be publicly financed, as a way to bring down the costs of politicking. That answer was good enough for Letterman who promptly shifted gears again, bringing up her husband ("does he ever forget sometimes that he's not running?"), which prompted her to observe that Bill probably would be running if he wasn't barred by the two-term limit, and that comment provoked another round of yuks...although I don't doubt for a moment that she was serious.
-------
Speaking of sleaze, let's pause to observe the two-year anniversary of Katrina by replaying this gem from the overstuffed Bush administration archives:
"We are extremely pleased with the response that every element of the federal government, all of our federal partners, have made to this terrible tragedy."
That "extremely pleased" official was Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary. Today, he is said to be on Bush's short list for a promotion - to the vacant job of attorney general.
Plus ca change...
-------
Republicans took another political hit this afternoon, when Virginia Senator John Warner announced that he will not run for re-election in 2008. His retirement will clear the way for a highly competitive Senate race in a once-solid Republican state that has been slowly trending blue.
Republicans were already dreading the task of trying to recapture the Senate at a time when they will be burdened by Iraq and the wreckage of the Bush presidency. Even if the venerable Warner had opted to run again in Virginia, the GOP would have been playing defense. Twenty-two of the 34 seats up for re-election in 2008 are currently held by Republicans, and at least five of those 22 - in Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Maine, and Oregon - have long been considered ripe for a potential Democratic takeover. (Only one Democratic seat, held by Mary Landrieu on Louisiana, is considered vulnerable.)
But with Warner gone, the GOP can definitely add Virginia's seat to its angst list.
(Indeed, even Warner would have faced a tough election, given the evidence that Virginians have grown increasingly weary of the war, and hostile toward national Republicans. Warner was an Iraq war enabler at the outset, and only lately has he taken measured steps to distance himself.)
Looking ahead, it would appear that Democrat Mark Warner (no relation), the popular ex-governor who recently flirted with a presidential bid, has the inside track - whereas the Republicans might well be forced to endure a bloody primary, potentially pitting a moderate (congressman Tom Davis) against a conservative (Jim Gilmore, whose '07 presidential bid lasted about 17 minutes).
In other words, the Republicans may have to raise and spend serious money just to hang onto a seat once thought to be inviolate. And a political party rarely scores big on the national map when it is forced to play defense.
It's a tad unnerving to watch Hillary Clinton schmooze with David Letterman; she always seems to be working hard to party hearty, as if she had just mastered a spontaneity manual. But it's still a comfy environment for her, because, much the way that Sean Hannity kisses the rings of visiting Republicans, Letterman can be relied upon to ask questions that are little more than show biz kisses.
Last night, for instance, after welcoming Hillary to his stage for the seventh time, the Late Show host nailed her with a tough opening question: "When you were a little girl, did you go to camp?" A bit later, he did ask her to critique her weaknesses as a campaigner, but when she declined to do so, he dropped that line of inquiry and moved on.
And then, whether he knew it or not, he brought up a hot topic. Noting that Hillary has raised $60 million for her campaign, he asked, "Should it be that expensive?" Actually, if his research staffers had been on the ball (as John Stewart's staffers surely would have been), they might have fed him the same question in a more newsworthy form:
"What's up with this Norman Hsu character, anyway? He raised all this money for you, but now that it turns out he is a fugitive in a fraud case, you're suddenly giving all that money to charity - and, by the way, I see that you didn't decide to divest yourself until after other Democrats had acted first to dump their Hsu donations. So here's the problem: Because you and the other candidates are always so desperate to dash for cash, doesn't that mean you will keep relying on sleazeballs to vacuum the money for you? And that you risk being embarrassed by sleazeballs yet to be unmasked?"
OK, maybe that sounds more like a Chris Matthews filibuster, but you get my point. The incessant pressure to raise money - indeed, the pressure to finish first in the money sweepstakes in order to demonstrate viability - all but ensures that the candidates will be embarrassed on occasion by the shady operators who raise money in their name.
The Republicans have learned that lesson already, with Jack Abramoff (now in jail), and Ohio businessman Thomas Noe (now in hail). Barack Obama has already been compelled to dump all the money raised by an old Illinois associate, Antoin Rezko, who was indicted last year on a fraud rap. It's probably impossible for candidates to fully vet every single person who offers to raise money, but, fortunately for Hillary last night, she never had to tackle that issue at all. (Given the fact that Hsu, in his federal fund-raising filings, had listed a lot of phony addresses, what does that say about Hillary's vetting process?)
In response to Letterman's general question about money, she simply replied that ideally campaigns should be be publicly financed, as a way to bring down the costs of politicking. That answer was good enough for Letterman who promptly shifted gears again, bringing up her husband ("does he ever forget sometimes that he's not running?"), which prompted her to observe that Bill probably would be running if he wasn't barred by the two-term limit, and that comment provoked another round of yuks...although I don't doubt for a moment that she was serious.
-------
Speaking of sleaze, let's pause to observe the two-year anniversary of Katrina by replaying this gem from the overstuffed Bush administration archives:
"We are extremely pleased with the response that every element of the federal government, all of our federal partners, have made to this terrible tragedy."
That "extremely pleased" official was Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary. Today, he is said to be on Bush's short list for a promotion - to the vacant job of attorney general.
Plus ca change...
-------
Republicans took another political hit this afternoon, when Virginia Senator John Warner announced that he will not run for re-election in 2008. His retirement will clear the way for a highly competitive Senate race in a once-solid Republican state that has been slowly trending blue.
Republicans were already dreading the task of trying to recapture the Senate at a time when they will be burdened by Iraq and the wreckage of the Bush presidency. Even if the venerable Warner had opted to run again in Virginia, the GOP would have been playing defense. Twenty-two of the 34 seats up for re-election in 2008 are currently held by Republicans, and at least five of those 22 - in Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Maine, and Oregon - have long been considered ripe for a potential Democratic takeover. (Only one Democratic seat, held by Mary Landrieu on Louisiana, is considered vulnerable.)
But with Warner gone, the GOP can definitely add Virginia's seat to its angst list.
(Indeed, even Warner would have faced a tough election, given the evidence that Virginians have grown increasingly weary of the war, and hostile toward national Republicans. Warner was an Iraq war enabler at the outset, and only lately has he taken measured steps to distance himself.)
Looking ahead, it would appear that Democrat Mark Warner (no relation), the popular ex-governor who recently flirted with a presidential bid, has the inside track - whereas the Republicans might well be forced to endure a bloody primary, potentially pitting a moderate (congressman Tom Davis) against a conservative (Jim Gilmore, whose '07 presidential bid lasted about 17 minutes).
In other words, the Republicans may have to raise and spend serious money just to hang onto a seat once thought to be inviolate. And a political party rarely scores big on the national map when it is forced to play defense.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
An outbreak of no-risk rectitude
Following up on yesterday's entry, regarding the fate of Senator Wide Stance (R-Idaho):
It's noteworthy that so many of his colleagues in the family values party are lining up to take him down. Yesterday, Michigan Congressman Peter Hoekstra, presidential long shot/Senator John McCain, and Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman (a vulnerable '08 re-election prospect) all called on rest room habitue Larry Craig to quit the Senate. And today we've heard the same sentiments from Florida Congresspeople Jeff Miller and Ginny Brown-Waite, Indiana Congressman Mark Souder, Louisiana Congressman Bobby Jindal, and Kentucky Congressman Ron Lewis. Plus, the GOP Senate leadership has stripped Craig of all his committee assignments and perks. Plus, they have sent his disorderly-conduct case to the Senate Ethics Committee.
The heat on Craig has become so intense that his spokesman today was forced to publicly deny that the senator is planning to quit. Which is what a spokesman generally tends to say right before the boss announces that he is planning to quit.
But this speedy show of moral umbrage is not as impressive as it seems, given the fact that the Republicans continue to give David Vitter a pass.
Not a single Republican has lined up to declare that the Louisiana senator - a self-described family-values paragon recently outed as a serial patron of prostitutes - should resign his seat forthwith. On the contrary, he was roundly applauded hy his colleagues at a recent closed-door meeting, and enjoys their support today.
One can certainly point out that patronizing hookers is an illegal activity, and that such behavior is not healthy for a marriage, and that the sanctity of marriage is supposed to be a fundamental GOP tenet, and that Vitter has long advertised himself to be a champion of that tenet, and that his hypocrisy is arguably a blow to the GOP's family-values image...but apparently none of that holds any sway among Vitter's colleagues.
So why the double standard? Two points:
1. Whereas Vitter engaged in illicit straight behavior, Craig was seeking to engage in gay behavior. And whereas the Republicans are demonstrably concerned about how gay behavior might impact traditional family values, they are clearly not so concerned about the impact of heterosexual adultery on traditional family values. As Pat Buchanan noted last night on MSNBC, grassroots Republicans, when assessing the severity of sex scandals, are "especially against homosexual activity." And as social conservative Ross Douthat explained yesterday, "it is easier to demonize gay people" than to talk about "heterosexual divorce rates."
2. And this is really the crux of the matter. It's fine for Republicans to display moral outrage against Larry Craig, and demand that he quit, because they know that the Republican governor of Idaho will merely tap another Republican as a replacement, and that therefore the Republican Senate tally will remain at 49. But if they were to bail out on David Vitter, and force him to quit, they would pay a political price. The Democratic governor of Louisiana would tap a Democrat as a replacement, and thus enhance the Democrats' slim Senate majority.
Which prompts a serious question: If Republican Larry Craig was representing a blue or purple state, with a Democratic governor at the helm, would his colleagues be waxing indignant and demanding his resignation?
Or is the current display of umbrage merely an exercise in no-risk rectitude?
It's noteworthy that so many of his colleagues in the family values party are lining up to take him down. Yesterday, Michigan Congressman Peter Hoekstra, presidential long shot/Senator John McCain, and Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman (a vulnerable '08 re-election prospect) all called on rest room habitue Larry Craig to quit the Senate. And today we've heard the same sentiments from Florida Congresspeople Jeff Miller and Ginny Brown-Waite, Indiana Congressman Mark Souder, Louisiana Congressman Bobby Jindal, and Kentucky Congressman Ron Lewis. Plus, the GOP Senate leadership has stripped Craig of all his committee assignments and perks. Plus, they have sent his disorderly-conduct case to the Senate Ethics Committee.
The heat on Craig has become so intense that his spokesman today was forced to publicly deny that the senator is planning to quit. Which is what a spokesman generally tends to say right before the boss announces that he is planning to quit.
But this speedy show of moral umbrage is not as impressive as it seems, given the fact that the Republicans continue to give David Vitter a pass.
Not a single Republican has lined up to declare that the Louisiana senator - a self-described family-values paragon recently outed as a serial patron of prostitutes - should resign his seat forthwith. On the contrary, he was roundly applauded hy his colleagues at a recent closed-door meeting, and enjoys their support today.
One can certainly point out that patronizing hookers is an illegal activity, and that such behavior is not healthy for a marriage, and that the sanctity of marriage is supposed to be a fundamental GOP tenet, and that Vitter has long advertised himself to be a champion of that tenet, and that his hypocrisy is arguably a blow to the GOP's family-values image...but apparently none of that holds any sway among Vitter's colleagues.
So why the double standard? Two points:
1. Whereas Vitter engaged in illicit straight behavior, Craig was seeking to engage in gay behavior. And whereas the Republicans are demonstrably concerned about how gay behavior might impact traditional family values, they are clearly not so concerned about the impact of heterosexual adultery on traditional family values. As Pat Buchanan noted last night on MSNBC, grassroots Republicans, when assessing the severity of sex scandals, are "especially against homosexual activity." And as social conservative Ross Douthat explained yesterday, "it is easier to demonize gay people" than to talk about "heterosexual divorce rates."
2. And this is really the crux of the matter. It's fine for Republicans to display moral outrage against Larry Craig, and demand that he quit, because they know that the Republican governor of Idaho will merely tap another Republican as a replacement, and that therefore the Republican Senate tally will remain at 49. But if they were to bail out on David Vitter, and force him to quit, they would pay a political price. The Democratic governor of Louisiana would tap a Democrat as a replacement, and thus enhance the Democrats' slim Senate majority.
Which prompts a serious question: If Republican Larry Craig was representing a blue or purple state, with a Democratic governor at the helm, would his colleagues be waxing indignant and demanding his resignation?
Or is the current display of umbrage merely an exercise in no-risk rectitude?
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
His own private Idaho
Why do errant “family values” Republicans seem to have so many problems with cops?
When these politicians are on the stump, they’re always lauding the police as our front-line protectors. Yet, apparently, when some of these same politicians go to a public bathroom, and allegedly engage in misdeeds that contradict the GOP’s family-values platform, and the police arrest them for those misdeeds…well, all of a sudden these moral paragons start insisting that the cops are all wrong.
First it was Bob Allen, a Florida Republican legislator and diehard opponent of gay rights, who was arrested a few months ago after he allegedly sought to solicit gay sex from an undercover cop in a Florida rest-stop bathroom; in his defense, Allen (who reportedly had tried to worm his way out of the arrest by telling the cop that he was a lawmaker) said that it had all been a big misunderstanding. On the cop’s part, of course.
And now, thanks to an arrest report unearthed by the Roll Call newspaper on Capitol Hill, we have Larry Craig, a Republican U.S. senator from Idaho and diehard opponent of gay rights, who was arrested at the Minneapolis airport on June 11 after he allegedly sought to solicit gay sex from a cop sitting in an adjoining toilet stall; in his defense, Craig (who reportedly tried to worm his way out of the arrest by flashing his Senate ID card and asking the cop, “what do you think about that?”) said that it had all been a big misunderstanding. On the cop’s part, of course.
And the way these guys described the purported misunderstandings…really, it’s priceless. Allen said he was just trying to talk his way out of a scary situation, owing to the fact that he is white and the cop was black and therefore he felt racially threatened. Craig’s explanation, however, is even more inspired. The family-values senator, a diehard opponent of gay marriage and other gay-friendly legislation, who pled guilty to disorderly conduct on Aug. 8, has introduced something brand new in American jurisprudence:
The Wide Stance Defense.
This is nonfiction bathroom humor at its best. The plainclothes police officer, Sgt. Dave Karsenia, had been tasked to investigate reports of lewd conduct in that airport bathroom. He entered a toilet stall and sat down. Soon thereafter, as he related in his arrest report, a well-dressed older gent appeared outside, and repeatedly sought to peer through the crack in the door. This gent, who turned out to be Craig, entered the adjoining stall. Then, “at 12:16 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd contact. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot…he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area.” Craig then swiped his hand under the stall divider, several times. He was arrested moments later.
And that’s when Craig came up with his novel defense. In the words of the arrest report, the senator explained “that he has a wide stance when going to the bathroom and that his foot may have touched mine” as a result.
If Craig is ultimately forced to resign his seat, he should hook up as a comedy writer for Bill Maher or Jon Stewart, because this is great stuff. I had always considered “wide stance” to be merely a baseball term, used to describe a batter who plants himself at the plate with his legs far apart. Ryan Howard of the Phillies? Wide stance. Moises Alou of the Mets? Wide stance. Baseball great Willie Mays? Wide stance.
But as a term for rest room visitation…well, I don’t want to get too personal about this, but, since a U.S. senator on the public payroll brought it up, I have to ask the question:
Is there anyone out there who regularly utilizes a “wide stance” in a public rest room, to the point where you play inadvertent footsies with your neighbor?
Or is this merely the kind of excuse that a hypocrite is likely to dream up on the spot, when cornered by his own behavior? This is the same guy, after all, who waxed morally indignant about President Clinton back in 1999, when he declared on NBC, “I’m going to speak out for the citizens of my state, who in the majority think that Bill Clinton is probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.” This is also the same guy who recently signed on as co-chair of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, because Romney “has very strong family values. That is something I grew up with and believe in.” (Craig is no longer co-chair of the Mitt Romney campaign.)
And the excuses continue. Craig’s introduced a new one at his press conference yesterday. It turns out that there have been scads of allegations that Craig over the years has engaged in furtive lewd acts with men in public bathrooms, and the Idaho Statesman newspaper had spent months examining the claims. It had published nothing all summer, but Craig insisted yesterday that his nervousness about the uncompleted press probe had somehow clouded his judgment and led him to plead guilty on Aug. 8 to the disorderly conduct charge. (The newspaper finally ran a piece on its investigation yesterday, signaling that several allegations might well be true.)
So, bottom line: Craig’s explanation is that he admitted guilt in a lewd-conduct criminal investigation only because he was stressed by a lewd-conduct newspaper investigation into allegations that he continues to deny. This guy needs a lawyer, pronto.
No doubt there will be some Republican partisans who will simply try to change the subject (“What about Democratic congressman William Jefferson, and the money that was found in his freezer?” or “What about Kristian Forland, that Nevada Democratic party official who’s currently wanted by the authorities for failing to appear in court on charges of writing bad checks?”). But the smartest conservatives know that Larry Craig, and Bob Allen, and Mark Foley, are blots on the party that claims to stand for moral rectitude, and that cases like these have a damaging impact on grassroots conservative morale.
As Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said in an interview yesterday, “There is an expectation that leaders who espouse family values will live by those values. And while the values voters don’t demand perfection, I do believe they want leaders with integrity.” And as for Craig’s wide-stance defense, not even Hugh Hewitt, the normally compliant conservative radio talk show host, can bring himself to stomach that one: “I don’t believe him. Read the statement by the arresting officer. (Craig) must think the people of Idaho are idiots.”
But if Craig continues to insist that the arresting cop misunderstood the whole incident, I can envision his final line of defense, his last-ditch rallying cry to his fellow conservatives:
“Ronald Reagan, in his shining city on a hill, sat with a wide stance!”
When these politicians are on the stump, they’re always lauding the police as our front-line protectors. Yet, apparently, when some of these same politicians go to a public bathroom, and allegedly engage in misdeeds that contradict the GOP’s family-values platform, and the police arrest them for those misdeeds…well, all of a sudden these moral paragons start insisting that the cops are all wrong.
First it was Bob Allen, a Florida Republican legislator and diehard opponent of gay rights, who was arrested a few months ago after he allegedly sought to solicit gay sex from an undercover cop in a Florida rest-stop bathroom; in his defense, Allen (who reportedly had tried to worm his way out of the arrest by telling the cop that he was a lawmaker) said that it had all been a big misunderstanding. On the cop’s part, of course.
And now, thanks to an arrest report unearthed by the Roll Call newspaper on Capitol Hill, we have Larry Craig, a Republican U.S. senator from Idaho and diehard opponent of gay rights, who was arrested at the Minneapolis airport on June 11 after he allegedly sought to solicit gay sex from a cop sitting in an adjoining toilet stall; in his defense, Craig (who reportedly tried to worm his way out of the arrest by flashing his Senate ID card and asking the cop, “what do you think about that?”) said that it had all been a big misunderstanding. On the cop’s part, of course.
And the way these guys described the purported misunderstandings…really, it’s priceless. Allen said he was just trying to talk his way out of a scary situation, owing to the fact that he is white and the cop was black and therefore he felt racially threatened. Craig’s explanation, however, is even more inspired. The family-values senator, a diehard opponent of gay marriage and other gay-friendly legislation, who pled guilty to disorderly conduct on Aug. 8, has introduced something brand new in American jurisprudence:
The Wide Stance Defense.
This is nonfiction bathroom humor at its best. The plainclothes police officer, Sgt. Dave Karsenia, had been tasked to investigate reports of lewd conduct in that airport bathroom. He entered a toilet stall and sat down. Soon thereafter, as he related in his arrest report, a well-dressed older gent appeared outside, and repeatedly sought to peer through the crack in the door. This gent, who turned out to be Craig, entered the adjoining stall. Then, “at 12:16 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd contact. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot…he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area.” Craig then swiped his hand under the stall divider, several times. He was arrested moments later.
And that’s when Craig came up with his novel defense. In the words of the arrest report, the senator explained “that he has a wide stance when going to the bathroom and that his foot may have touched mine” as a result.
If Craig is ultimately forced to resign his seat, he should hook up as a comedy writer for Bill Maher or Jon Stewart, because this is great stuff. I had always considered “wide stance” to be merely a baseball term, used to describe a batter who plants himself at the plate with his legs far apart. Ryan Howard of the Phillies? Wide stance. Moises Alou of the Mets? Wide stance. Baseball great Willie Mays? Wide stance.
But as a term for rest room visitation…well, I don’t want to get too personal about this, but, since a U.S. senator on the public payroll brought it up, I have to ask the question:
Is there anyone out there who regularly utilizes a “wide stance” in a public rest room, to the point where you play inadvertent footsies with your neighbor?
Or is this merely the kind of excuse that a hypocrite is likely to dream up on the spot, when cornered by his own behavior? This is the same guy, after all, who waxed morally indignant about President Clinton back in 1999, when he declared on NBC, “I’m going to speak out for the citizens of my state, who in the majority think that Bill Clinton is probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.” This is also the same guy who recently signed on as co-chair of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, because Romney “has very strong family values. That is something I grew up with and believe in.” (Craig is no longer co-chair of the Mitt Romney campaign.)
And the excuses continue. Craig’s introduced a new one at his press conference yesterday. It turns out that there have been scads of allegations that Craig over the years has engaged in furtive lewd acts with men in public bathrooms, and the Idaho Statesman newspaper had spent months examining the claims. It had published nothing all summer, but Craig insisted yesterday that his nervousness about the uncompleted press probe had somehow clouded his judgment and led him to plead guilty on Aug. 8 to the disorderly conduct charge. (The newspaper finally ran a piece on its investigation yesterday, signaling that several allegations might well be true.)
So, bottom line: Craig’s explanation is that he admitted guilt in a lewd-conduct criminal investigation only because he was stressed by a lewd-conduct newspaper investigation into allegations that he continues to deny. This guy needs a lawyer, pronto.
No doubt there will be some Republican partisans who will simply try to change the subject (“What about Democratic congressman William Jefferson, and the money that was found in his freezer?” or “What about Kristian Forland, that Nevada Democratic party official who’s currently wanted by the authorities for failing to appear in court on charges of writing bad checks?”). But the smartest conservatives know that Larry Craig, and Bob Allen, and Mark Foley, are blots on the party that claims to stand for moral rectitude, and that cases like these have a damaging impact on grassroots conservative morale.
As Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said in an interview yesterday, “There is an expectation that leaders who espouse family values will live by those values. And while the values voters don’t demand perfection, I do believe they want leaders with integrity.” And as for Craig’s wide-stance defense, not even Hugh Hewitt, the normally compliant conservative radio talk show host, can bring himself to stomach that one: “I don’t believe him. Read the statement by the arresting officer. (Craig) must think the people of Idaho are idiots.”
But if Craig continues to insist that the arresting cop misunderstood the whole incident, I can envision his final line of defense, his last-ditch rallying cry to his fellow conservatives:
“Ronald Reagan, in his shining city on a hill, sat with a wide stance!”
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Going beyond Gonzo
Now that Alberto Gonzales has decided to walk away from the smoking wreckage once known as the U.S. Justice Department, it will be instructive to see whether President Bush decides to hand the reins to another incompetent crony (assuming there are any left), or whether he takes the high road (a rare excursion) and actually nominates someone with the smarts and integrity to repair the beleaguered institution.
President Gerald Ford took the latter route in 1975, not long after he replaced the disgraced Richard Nixon and was tasked to clean up Justice. The department had been badly tainted by Watergate; as Ford later remarked, "it was essential that a new attorney general be appointed who would restore integrity and competence." He tapped Edward Levi, a University of Chicago legal scholar with strong leadership skills who earned plaudits from Democrats and Republicans alike; as Antonin Scalia would later write, "(Levi) brought two qualities to the job, a rare intellectuality and a level of integrity such as there could never be any doubt about his honesty, forthrightness, or truthfulness."
Will Bush opt for the Levi model, and pick an independent-minded outsider? I suspect that would not be his first impulse, given his habit of relying only on a small circle of diehard loyalists. Yesterday, he was still lauding the loyal Gonzo, complaining about how "it's sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person...is impeded from doing important work becauase his good name was dragged through the mud."
By attempting to pin the blame on the era we live in, Bush, of course, was ignoring the fact that Gonzales' record of ineptitude had alienated even those congressional Republicans who had long tried to give him the benefit of the doubt.
I'm not going to recap all the failings of an attorney general whose best defense, when asked to explain the unprecedented politicization of Justice (witness the prosecutor purge scandal), was that he simply didn't know what was going on. Suffice it to say that Gonzales presided over a department that has been decimated in the upper ranks. This year alone, we have witnessed the departure (via resignation) of the deputy attorney general, the acting associate attorney general, the attorney general's chief of staff, the deputy attorney general's chief of staff, the department's liaison to the White House, a high-ranking counsel at the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, and the assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division.
But Bush may be politically constrained from nominating another White House errand boy. This time he faces a Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, and there's no way that Patrick Leahy and his crew are going to sign off on anybody who believes that Justice should function merely as a political arm of the Republican National Committee. (Indeed, Democrats have leverage now. They might decree that confirmation for a new attorney general hinges on Bush's willingness to surrender internal documents, and staffer testimony, in the prosecutor purge scandal.) And no quality individual would even want the job, unless he or she can extract assurances from the White House that there will be no political interference.
And for pragmatic reasons alone, Bush needs to find a Levi. Bush soon will be battling Congress over executive privilege and domestic surveillance. Gonzales, with his credibility in tatters, would have been the wrong salesman. There are plenty of respected, independent legal scholars who can make a case for strong executive authority (just as Levi did, during the Ford administration), strictly on the merits.
Now that Bush's circle of inept Texas cronies has shrunk to nothing, he may have no choice except to reach out.
President Gerald Ford took the latter route in 1975, not long after he replaced the disgraced Richard Nixon and was tasked to clean up Justice. The department had been badly tainted by Watergate; as Ford later remarked, "it was essential that a new attorney general be appointed who would restore integrity and competence." He tapped Edward Levi, a University of Chicago legal scholar with strong leadership skills who earned plaudits from Democrats and Republicans alike; as Antonin Scalia would later write, "(Levi) brought two qualities to the job, a rare intellectuality and a level of integrity such as there could never be any doubt about his honesty, forthrightness, or truthfulness."
Will Bush opt for the Levi model, and pick an independent-minded outsider? I suspect that would not be his first impulse, given his habit of relying only on a small circle of diehard loyalists. Yesterday, he was still lauding the loyal Gonzo, complaining about how "it's sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person...is impeded from doing important work becauase his good name was dragged through the mud."
By attempting to pin the blame on the era we live in, Bush, of course, was ignoring the fact that Gonzales' record of ineptitude had alienated even those congressional Republicans who had long tried to give him the benefit of the doubt.
I'm not going to recap all the failings of an attorney general whose best defense, when asked to explain the unprecedented politicization of Justice (witness the prosecutor purge scandal), was that he simply didn't know what was going on. Suffice it to say that Gonzales presided over a department that has been decimated in the upper ranks. This year alone, we have witnessed the departure (via resignation) of the deputy attorney general, the acting associate attorney general, the attorney general's chief of staff, the deputy attorney general's chief of staff, the department's liaison to the White House, a high-ranking counsel at the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, and the assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division.
But Bush may be politically constrained from nominating another White House errand boy. This time he faces a Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, and there's no way that Patrick Leahy and his crew are going to sign off on anybody who believes that Justice should function merely as a political arm of the Republican National Committee. (Indeed, Democrats have leverage now. They might decree that confirmation for a new attorney general hinges on Bush's willingness to surrender internal documents, and staffer testimony, in the prosecutor purge scandal.) And no quality individual would even want the job, unless he or she can extract assurances from the White House that there will be no political interference.
And for pragmatic reasons alone, Bush needs to find a Levi. Bush soon will be battling Congress over executive privilege and domestic surveillance. Gonzales, with his credibility in tatters, would have been the wrong salesman. There are plenty of respected, independent legal scholars who can make a case for strong executive authority (just as Levi did, during the Ford administration), strictly on the merits.
Now that Bush's circle of inept Texas cronies has shrunk to nothing, he may have no choice except to reach out.
Monday, August 27, 2007
The goal is stability, not democracy
In a speech the other day, President Bush had this to say:
"Prime Minister Maliki is a good guy, a good man with a difficult job, and I support him. And it's not up to politicians in Washington, D.C. to say whether he will remain in his position -- that is up to the Iraqi people who now live in a democracy..."
Oh really?
Then why has a high-powered, Bush-connected Republican lobbying firm signed a $300,000 deal to destabilize "good guy" Nouri al-Maliki, and replace him with the firm's new client, Ayad Allawi – a former interim prime minister and neoconservative favorite who has longstanding ties to the CIA? Since when do the lobbyists in Washington, D.C., have a say in who runs Iraq?
The Barbour Griffith & Rogers lobbying contract to provide Allawi with what the firm calls "strategic counsel" is further proof that the Bush team's dream of a democratic Iraq is dead. The much-ballyhooed Iraqi elections have produced little more than sectarian civil war, with U.S. troops caught in the middle; therefore, perhaps the only administration option at this point (and military sources are saying it out loud) is to knock off the democracy rhetoric and find a way to impose, upon the “free” Iraqi people, a U.S.-friendly strongman who can maybe knock heads and curb the chaos.
Hence, Ayad Allawi, who said yesterday on CNN's Late Edition that he wants to "save the American mission in Iraq." (Is it any coincidence that he made himself available to CNN, at virtually the same time that he signed the U.S. lobbying contract and penned an op-ed in The Washington Post?)
His CIA ties date back to the early 1990s; the CIA helped bankroll his political operation, the Iraqi National Accord (INA), and continued to finance him for more than a decade. He also reportedly worked with the CIA on plans to set up an Iraqi intelligence agency. He served as prime minister until the duly elected government took over in 2005. In the view of many American hawks, he looks infinitely preferable to Maliki, a sectarian Shiite who's in cahoots with some of the warlords and thus has proved incapable of taming the bloodshed.
Who knows, maybe Allawi would do a better job on the security front. But it’s hard to imagine that this guy, a Shiite with a pro-American pedigree, would ever rise to the top in a free Iraqi election. So the fact that some Republican lobbyists are shilling for his ascension is stark evidence that the last-ditch GOP dream for Iraq is merely stability, not democracy.
As for that $300,000 lobbying contract, it’s not even Allawi’s money. In his CNN appearance yesterday, during which he shilled for himself, Allawi said that the money was provided “by an Iraqi person who was a supporter of us, of the INA, of myself, of our program, and he has supported this wholeheartedly.” He won’t name his money source, but it doesn’t take a PhD in foreign affairs to figure out that this well-heeled “Iraqi person” is allied with those in America who want to dicate who should run Iraq, notwithstanding Bush's pro forma democracy rhetoric.
And speaking of Bush, does he even run the show anymore? What explains the fact that, at the same time he was voicing support last week for “good guy” Maliki, a powerful Republican lobbying firm was ginning up support for a Maliki rival? (Indeed, the contract is being handled by Robert Blackwill, a former Bush envoy to Iraq.)
There are several possibilities, neither of which is very flattering to Bush:
1. Bush is deliberately deceiving us. He says publicly that he is for Maliki, and that Maliki’s fate hinges solely on the sentiments of the Iraq “democracy,” but he really doesn’t believe a word of it, because privately he’s winking approvingly at the Republican lobbyists’ campaign to undercut Maliki and install a U.S. puppet.
2. Bush is entirely sincere in his support for Maliki, but powerful backstage fixers in his own party don’t take him seriously anymore, and thus feel free to contradict him, and work against him in public – while earning a big paycheck besides.
Take your pick. And while you ponder, let us engage in a bit of nostalgia. For starters, yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of Dick Cheney’s declaration: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”
And let us conclude by harkening back to June 28, 2004. That was the day when Ayad Allawi was installed as interim Iraqi prime minister, in a private Green Zone ceremony lasting barely five minutes. Bush got the news from Condoleezza Rice, who passed him a note. Bush then scrawled a few celebratory words in response. Try not to choke as you scan this pearl of presidential wisdom:
“Let freedom reign!”
"Prime Minister Maliki is a good guy, a good man with a difficult job, and I support him. And it's not up to politicians in Washington, D.C. to say whether he will remain in his position -- that is up to the Iraqi people who now live in a democracy..."
Oh really?
Then why has a high-powered, Bush-connected Republican lobbying firm signed a $300,000 deal to destabilize "good guy" Nouri al-Maliki, and replace him with the firm's new client, Ayad Allawi – a former interim prime minister and neoconservative favorite who has longstanding ties to the CIA? Since when do the lobbyists in Washington, D.C., have a say in who runs Iraq?
The Barbour Griffith & Rogers lobbying contract to provide Allawi with what the firm calls "strategic counsel" is further proof that the Bush team's dream of a democratic Iraq is dead. The much-ballyhooed Iraqi elections have produced little more than sectarian civil war, with U.S. troops caught in the middle; therefore, perhaps the only administration option at this point (and military sources are saying it out loud) is to knock off the democracy rhetoric and find a way to impose, upon the “free” Iraqi people, a U.S.-friendly strongman who can maybe knock heads and curb the chaos.
Hence, Ayad Allawi, who said yesterday on CNN's Late Edition that he wants to "save the American mission in Iraq." (Is it any coincidence that he made himself available to CNN, at virtually the same time that he signed the U.S. lobbying contract and penned an op-ed in The Washington Post?)
His CIA ties date back to the early 1990s; the CIA helped bankroll his political operation, the Iraqi National Accord (INA), and continued to finance him for more than a decade. He also reportedly worked with the CIA on plans to set up an Iraqi intelligence agency. He served as prime minister until the duly elected government took over in 2005. In the view of many American hawks, he looks infinitely preferable to Maliki, a sectarian Shiite who's in cahoots with some of the warlords and thus has proved incapable of taming the bloodshed.
Who knows, maybe Allawi would do a better job on the security front. But it’s hard to imagine that this guy, a Shiite with a pro-American pedigree, would ever rise to the top in a free Iraqi election. So the fact that some Republican lobbyists are shilling for his ascension is stark evidence that the last-ditch GOP dream for Iraq is merely stability, not democracy.
As for that $300,000 lobbying contract, it’s not even Allawi’s money. In his CNN appearance yesterday, during which he shilled for himself, Allawi said that the money was provided “by an Iraqi person who was a supporter of us, of the INA, of myself, of our program, and he has supported this wholeheartedly.” He won’t name his money source, but it doesn’t take a PhD in foreign affairs to figure out that this well-heeled “Iraqi person” is allied with those in America who want to dicate who should run Iraq, notwithstanding Bush's pro forma democracy rhetoric.
And speaking of Bush, does he even run the show anymore? What explains the fact that, at the same time he was voicing support last week for “good guy” Maliki, a powerful Republican lobbying firm was ginning up support for a Maliki rival? (Indeed, the contract is being handled by Robert Blackwill, a former Bush envoy to Iraq.)
There are several possibilities, neither of which is very flattering to Bush:
1. Bush is deliberately deceiving us. He says publicly that he is for Maliki, and that Maliki’s fate hinges solely on the sentiments of the Iraq “democracy,” but he really doesn’t believe a word of it, because privately he’s winking approvingly at the Republican lobbyists’ campaign to undercut Maliki and install a U.S. puppet.
2. Bush is entirely sincere in his support for Maliki, but powerful backstage fixers in his own party don’t take him seriously anymore, and thus feel free to contradict him, and work against him in public – while earning a big paycheck besides.
Take your pick. And while you ponder, let us engage in a bit of nostalgia. For starters, yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of Dick Cheney’s declaration: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”
And let us conclude by harkening back to June 28, 2004. That was the day when Ayad Allawi was installed as interim Iraqi prime minister, in a private Green Zone ceremony lasting barely five minutes. Bush got the news from Condoleezza Rice, who passed him a note. Bush then scrawled a few celebratory words in response. Try not to choke as you scan this pearl of presidential wisdom:
“Let freedom reign!”
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