Fred Thompson, RIP

This post by Glenn Greenwald ought to be game set and match for Fred Thompson's nascent campaign. It perfectly highlights the craving of the right for a strong authoritarian executive, even if that authoritarianism stretches into Rudy's penchant for snappish petulance, or even to the Bush administrations radical theory of the unitary executive, a blatant misreading of both our Constitution as well as the history of executive power in our history.

Thompson is an actor and a fraud. He plays tough guys and dresses up in costumes like Bush does. To egomaniacs like Bush and Thompson, the play is the thing. We've been down that dangerous road for the past 6 years, and it has led us down a spider hole that may take us decades to escape. The right's penchant for this sort of faux toughness is summed up by Greenwald here:

This is what Thompson said last month when interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News:

WALLACE: What would you do now in Iraq?

THOMPSON: I would do essentially what the president's doing.

Outisde of the dwindling band of dead-ender neocons and other assorted Bush followers, the only people who mistake that sort of mindset -- " I would do essentially what the president's doing" -- with "toughness" are Beltway pundits who continue to promote the view that the more wars one urges, the more militarism one embraces, the "tougher" one is. Conversely, the more one wants to avert sending fellow citizens into war, the "weaker" or "softer" one is, or -- to use Fineman's post-debate formulation -- the less "masculine" one is.

[Greenwald also focuses on the improbability that Thompson fits into the type of social conservative profile that the Republican party holds so dear, but I'm uninterested in that farce. The Republican party will swallow hard and accept a twice divorced Rudy, a Hollywood skirt chaser like Thompson, or a twice divorced scandal plagued Gingrich in a moment, if they think that either Hillary or Barak are the alternative]


There is an incredible level of hubris that men like Cheney, Bush, Perle, and Limbaugh possess. They refused to serve, but feel comfortable sending soldiers off to die for a cause that they must know is already lost. Thompson has proved himself to be another of these.

UPDATE: Boy, if Greenwald's wasn't enough, here is Digby ripping Thompson for his shameless support of Libby, and by extension, the entire BushCo organization. This paragraph, while unflinchingly accurate, is depressing, considering that for the next eighteen months we'll see this over and over again.

I guess we should be grateful they didn't just hire Kiefer Sutherland to play Jack Bauer as president and get it over with. But it's just a matter of time. They can't win on the merits so they have to turn every election into a phony campaign pageant filled with special effects and costumes so hiring actors to play politicians really makes sense. Don't understimate their abilities --- they are master showmen. After all, they were able to convince an awful lot of people that Junior was a hero instead of the nasty little socialite in a cowboy suit he really is. If it takes hypocritically assassinating the characters of honest prosecutors while defending cheap political smear artists to do it, they have no problem with that. It's all part of the show.

When elephants collide

Jeffrey Goldberg on the Republican Implosion. Every member of the proud 28% should read this.

Not since Watergate, Gingrich said, has the Republican Party been in such desperate shape. “Let me be clear: twenty-eight-per-cent approval of the President, losing every closely contested Senate seat except one, every one that involved an incumbent—that’s a collapse. I mean, look at the Northeast. You can’t be a governing national party and write off entire regions.” For this disarray he blames not only Iraq and Hurricane Katrina but also Karl Rove’s “maniacally dumb” strategy in 2004, which left Bush with no political capital. “All he proved was that the anti-Kerry vote was bigger than the anti-Bush vote,” Gingrich said. He continued, “The Bush people deliberately could not bring themselves to wage a campaign of choice”—of ideology, of suggesting that Kerry was “to the left of Ted Kennedy”—and chose instead to attack Kerry’s war record.

Rudy the Warrior

I don't fear a Giuliani candidacy for a number of reasons, one being that he's walking a fine line when he builds his case for foreign policy expertise on the general impression that he "owns 9/11". If he continues to remain a front runner in some of the polls (a position he has already relinquished in Iowa), the scrutiny of his handling of the clean up and rebuilding of Ground Zero will increase, and the results may not be all that flattering.

One exasperating facet of the Giuliani candidacy, though, is the pundit class' willingness to assign not only mythic status to his performance post 9/11, but to take that one step further, as John Harwood does here:

HARWOOD: Well look, Keith, I think those answers by both McCain and Giuliani help both men perhaps in the primary and in the general election for different reasons. McCain`s core message is toughness, and that I`m tough enough that I can go against my party on this issue. Why? Because I`ve been in combat. I`ve been tortured myself, as you mentioned.

Rudy Giuliani also has a bit of a claim to combat in a different way, because he was on the ground in 9/11.

That's just nuts on so many levels. An insult to those who have served, and a ridiculous appraisal of the events themselves.

Where we are.

This is a common symptom of the right's wrongheaded thinking on our current situation in Western Asia. It is the underlying theme of most of Hannity and Limbaugh's shows these days, and has become a default reaction to the pro war right's defensiveness about the disastrous course we've chosen:

President Bush today: "These people attacked us before we were even in Iraq!"

Can we have a little frankness, please?

The President of the United States is a racist. Or at the very least, an anti-Muslim bigot.

In Iraq, Shi'ites and Sunni are fighting each other to the death. Under what possible logic can they be joined by a common identity?

Add to this simplistic, racist, anti-intellectual and just dead wrong prejudice a foreign policy based upon this sort of "hit and hope" triple bank shot:

In an interview on CNN International's Your World Today, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh explains that the current violence in Lebanon is the result of an attempt by the Lebanese government to crack down on a militant Sunni group, Fatah al-Islam, that it formerly supported.

Last March, Hersh reported that American policy in the Middle East had shifted to opposing Iran, Syria, and their Shia allies at any cost, even if it meant backing hardline Sunni jihadists.

A key element of this policy shift was an agreement among Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy National Security Advisor Elliot Abrams, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national security adviser, whereby the Saudis would covertly fund the Sunni Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon as a counterweight to the Shia Hezbollah.

Just so we've all got it straight, we're playing the same game we played in the 80s, funding radical Sunni militants (at that time, the son of a prominent Saudi family named Osama Bin Laden) in order to offset the influence of radical Shiite militants (read, Iran), while at the same time stoking Muslim hatred of America at the highest levels by adopting the most infantile language available to describe the various warring sects throughout the region.

There were more than a few people who pointed out that a "straight talking Texan who don't do nuance" was another way of describing a mouth breathing idiot.

Update: A reader points out that Michael Young (Daily Star in Lebanon, Reason Magazine) has questions about Hersh's assertions regarding Lebanese/US funding of Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon. I find it hard to believe that a veteran reporter like Hersh sourced his story as flimsily as Young claims. Hopefully, the questions raised by Hersh as well as Young's counterpoint will rise to a level that the blogosphere will take note of, so that we can bring some clarity to this critically important issue. I'll not hold my breath that I'll get any resolution on this on the evening news. Either way, thanks to the reader for the lead.

Bob Kerry on Iraq

Bob Kerry, who has been wrong about just about everything since 2003 (see ThinkProgress, here), has a bizarre editorial in the WSJ today basically saying that we need to keep fighting away in Iraq or bad things will happen there.

The paragraph that really jumped out at me, though, was this one:

No matter how incompetent the Bush administration and no matter how poorly they chose their words to describe themselves and their political opponents, Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before. And no matter how much we might want to turn the clock back and either avoid the invasion itself or the blunders that followed, we cannot. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is over. What remains is a war to overthrow the government of Iraq.

First, the "Bush is incompetent, but set that aside for now" argument is now the standard disclaimer of the dead enders on the right who continue to justify our catastrophic invasion. Secondly, the idea that we are now in a war to overthrow a government that we've hand picked and backed is just fundamentally wrong. That is not what is going on in Iraq today, plain and simple. The problem is that there is no functioning government in Iraq today and that we've created a situation where a functioning government that respects the existence of competing Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish rights may be an impossibility.

Distilling it all

In one compact post, Digby refutes just about every argument that this administration can or would put forward to justify their foreign policy over the past 6 years. Money graf here:

Basing your decisions upon your stated enemy's threats and taunts and holding fast so they can't yell "psych!" is not a foreign policy --- it's a WWF advertising campaign. It isn't real and it doesn't address any real problem. The US is the most powerful country on earth and the Islamoboogeymen are not going to take over our government and make us all wear burkas and pray to mecca. Really. Sophisticated thinkers would find solutions to the real problems of islamic fundamentalism and energy dependence and Israel and all the rest rather than launch invasions as PR exercises, but this is what we are dealing with. Marketing is the only thing the Mayberry Machiavellis know.

Really. That's it. It is time for the grown ups to take back our foreign policy. Certainly Wolfowitz is a scalp that helps, but the tricky part is that the Cheney/Perle/Neocon cabal has been surrounded by the radical philosophy of executive power put forward by John Yoo and force fed on a compliant Congress by AG Gonzales. All of these scandals are related, they surround the throne like puzzle pieces, each important to the whole. That's why they had to have Monica Goodling, an inexperienced bible thumping fundy in charge of the AG purge. That's why they needed Doug Feith, the "stupidest f*cking man on the planet" in charge of a shadow intelligence operation. All of this works together, but we'll see whether the removal of one or a few parts brings the whole thing down. If Gonzo goes this week or next, and then Waxman begins hearings on pre war intel, you may see some significant momentum, but it will take a long time to get to the bottom of the muck. Unfortunately, it will take a longer time for this country to recover our reputation.

Christmas in May

Heading off for an Indian Princess weekend in the Poconos. I'll leave you with the great Shane MacGowan and the Pogues (with Kirsty MacColl goodness)

John Ashcroft, paragon of virtue

There's no question that this post about the testimony by Deputy AG James Comey before the Senate Judiciary Committee today points to a wanton disregard of the DOJ by the administration. As Tristero says, how crooked does this administration have to be to make John Ashcroft pull away in horror?

The program was reauthorized without the signature of the attorney general. Because of that, Comey said, he prepared a letter of resignation. "I believed that I couldn't stay if the administration was going to engage in conduct that Justice Department said had no legal basis."

At this point, according to Comey, a number of senior Justice Department officials, including Ashcroft, were prepared to resign...

What it also shows, of course, is just how important Gonzales is to the administration. They needed to find someone so slavishly obedient, so grossly inept, and as intellectually incurious as the boy king himself to place at the head of Justice. Their disregard for the rule of law and utter contempt of the Constitution required that. When they discovered that an old right wing stalwart like Ashcroft even had limits on how far he would go in rubber stamping the White House's radical grab for power, they reached out to the ultimate toady, Gonzo. The resume item that recommended him was the memo justifying the use of torture. If you can go there, you can go anywhere with regard to human rights and the rule of law. A bit of warrantless wiretapping is penny ante compared to that, eh?

His survival is more important to the administration than we may ever know. And if he doesn't turn, we'll never know the promises that were made to keep him quiet.

Update: From a post at TPM today, it is of course absurd to believe that Ashcroft was the backbone in this affair:

Simply this. The warantless wiretap surveillance program stank. For two and a half years, Ashcroft signed off on the program every forty-five days without any real knowledge of what it entailed. In his defense, the advisors who were supposed to review such things on his behalf were denied access; to his everlasting shame, he did not press hard enough to have that corrected.

When Comey came on board, he insisted on being granted access, and had Goldsmith review the program. What they found was so repugnant to any notion of constitutional liberties that even Ashcroft, once briefed, was willing to resign rather than sign off again.

Help Wanted

There is a very interesting article in the WSJ on the administration's dwindling focus on Iraq. Counter intuitively, at the time that we need the most expertise focused on the hyper complicated Iraq quagmire, we find that there is very little talent left in this administration that is willing to put in any time working on Iraq. The inability of the Bush administration to find a willing "War Czar" is but one example of the dearth of willing experts.

Like a doomed project at a large corporation, failure is an orphan. Typically, though, when you peel back the layers of decisions that are made in failed projects, you find a very critical misjudgment, or more often than not, lack of judgment that undermined the project from the outset. A decision was made somewhere along the way that in hindsight was clearly in opposition to the best advice available, or the ultimate goal of the project from the beginning. Someone willfully ignored, or lazily plowed ahead in the face of clear evidence that more data, more testing, or a fresh perspective was required. Doug Feith's statement from 2003 is a shining example. In discussing the lack of planning that went into the administration's post war actions, he said:

"Sometimes that goes well," Feith says, "and sometimes that doesn't go well."

Hard to argue with that.

So now the Journal reports that no one is willing to pitch in and "own" Iraq. Only one White House senior staffer focuses on Iraq full time. Senior State Department and Pentagon officials caste their gaze towards more promising endeavors, like Israel and Palestine. Stephen Hadley, Condi Rice's replacement at the NSA, is looking to "hand off" Iraq, according to the article, a strange response to an issue that lies at the heart of his responsibilities.

Like the Commander Codpiece in his jumpsuit, this was all a lot more fun when we thought we were winning.

This is going well

Little blurb in the LA Times last week on the rancorous ending to a Parliamentary debate in Iraq. It illustrates not only the tension and bitterness in that body, but also the extremely complicated situation, with rival Sunnis battling over a perceived slight to a Shiite legislator.

Josh Marshall picks up another thread in this discussion of Iraq's inability to come to agreement on the vaunted "oil law" which is supposed to provide an equitable distribution of oil revenues to the competing groups in the country. The bottom line is that we may not even be able to qualify and define what "progress" in Iraq is, let alone identify any.

The problems of the oil bill bode poorly for the other so-called benchmarks that the Bush administration has been pressuring Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's government to meet. Those include provincial elections, reversing a prohibition against former Baath Party members holding government and military positions and revision of Iraq's constitution.

23:30 ET

Not sure exactly what it says, but these days I find myself watching O'Reilly rather than Colbert. While I've never been a big Colbert guy, I used to not be able to even stomach O'Reilly. Now, it's almost a morbid fascination at BillO's contortions and struggles to stay relevant. He sounds more like Glen Beck each day. Tonight, Dick Morris breaks down just how serious the pizza guy terrorist really is. Just wow.

What took him so long?

Rush just blamed the Ft. Dix incident on the Clinton administration's decision to relocate Albanian refugees from Kosovo in the US in 1999.


Hmm. A taxi driver, a pizza delivery guy and four friends were going to storm a military base, eh? And they were captured because the brought a copy of a home movie into a quickie mart to get copied to DVD. A home movie that showed them firing automatic weapons and screaming about jihad?

I think we can win this war on terror.

Working for the MCA

As the Democrats begin to get their feet under them and look to challenge the suspension of habeas corpus written into the Military Commissions Act, it is instructive to look at the real life consequences of this horrible law. Consider the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, as told by Glenn Greenwald:

In December, 2001 he was detained as a "material witness" to suspected acts of terrorism and ultimately charged with various terrorism-related offenses, mostly relating to false statements the FBI claimed he made as part of its 9/11 investigation. Al-Marri vehemently denied the charges, and after lengthy pre-trial proceedings, his trial on those charges was scheduled to begin on July 21, 2003.

But his trial never took place, because in June, 2003 -- one month before the scheduled trial -- President Bush declared him to be an "enemy combatant." As a result, the Justice Department told the court it wanted to turn him over to the U.S. military, and thus asked the court to dismiss the criminal charges against him, and the court did so (the dismissal was "with prejudice," meaning he can't be tried ever again on those charges). Thus, right before his trial, the Bush administration simply removed Al-Marri from the jurisdiction of the judicial system -- based solely on the unilateral order of the President -- and thus prevented him from contesting the charges against him.

The fact that this particular outrage was not enacted unilaterally by the administration under the cover of some bizarre John Yoo interpretation of the unitary executive, but was enacted as law, passed by Congress, and of course signed by the President, this piece of legislation is may be the most egregious example of the failures of our combined leadership since 2000. The Democrats should unflinchingly reverse this affront to our Constitution.

Nah gonna happen...

I agree with Atrios, who speaks of the recurring Friedman Units here. There is a meme emerging which seems to be coming close to reaching conventional wisdom status that says that we'll reach some sort of conclusion on the effectiveness of the "surge" long about September, and at that point it will become abundantly clear that we are either:

winning....in which case we'll wrap this baby up toot sweet, or
losing....in which case we'll pack up and call it an honest day's work, leaving the brown folks to their (now definitively) inevitable chaos, carnage, civil war, etc.

Under this scenario, the surge will clear up the muddle that we face today, and General Petraeus, our latest deus ex machina, will let us know at that point how we did. The problem is that this magical and inherently ridiculous thinking has skipped out of the minds of the proud 28% that still supports the boy king, and has risen to the next level of experts that dominate the Sunday talk shows.

It's hard to explain just how wrong this thought process is. We won't even have the troops that we committed to the surge fully deployed until June at the earliest. From a practical standpoint, it would be virtually impossible to determine whether any pacification of the current fighting would represent progress, or some variation of al Sadr's recent passive aggressive tactic of withdrawing from his stronghold to allow the Americans to do his dirty work in purging his Sunni adversaries. Take that as a criticism of the idea of timetables in general, but the reality is that it would be nearly impossible to make a definitive evaluation as soon as the fall.

But the real flaw in the thinking, as Atrios points out, is that it is pure fantasy to think that Bush would be at all swayed by a negative outcome to conclude that it was time to take his toys and go home. He's in this thing until January 2009, when he'll slink from Washington back to Crawford. Like a drunken gambler who has doubled down over and over again, in Bush's mind any change in his current policy equals defeat, and nobody ever forget that. Add to that the dynamics of an emerging presidential election, where Republican candidates will be falling over themselves to prove their allah bashing bona fides, and you can darn well be sure that September won't look any different than May does.

Update: Talk Left picks up the meme.


Update 2: That didn't take long.

U.S. commanders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that heightened troop levels, announced by President Bush in January, will need to last into the spring of 2008. The military has said it would assess in September how well its counterinsurgency strategy, intended to pacify Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, is working.

"The surge needs to go through the beginning of next year for sure," said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the day-to-day commander for U.S. military operations in Iraq. The new requirement of up to 15-month tours for active-duty soldiers will allow the troop increase to last until spring, said Odierno, who favors keeping experienced forces in place for now.

"What I am trying to do is to get until April so we can decide whether to keep it going or not," he said in an interview in Baghdad last week. "Are we making progress? If we're not making any progress, we need to change our strategy. If we're making progress, then we need to make a decision on whether we continue to surge."

In the Bunker

To pick up on the Digby post, it really beggars belief that this administration thought that "Old Europe" would agree with a preemptive war in western Asia that would destabilize an already tenuous region that lies much closer to them than it does to us. Obviously, destabilization and refugee issues impact that region (particularly France) and those concerns would have been paramount at the time Bush was attempting to browbeat the European allies into the Coalition of the Willing. Each of those nations have intelligence agencies who did review the available information and either found the Italian story on Niger, the aluminum tubes fiction, and the links between Saddam and Al Queda, or all three to be either seriously in question or outright lies.

But of course it goes further. Bush not only asked for European aide in his adventure, he demanded it. As Digby says:

I don't think enough attention has been given to that particular bit of Bushian hubris. He truly believed that he could force the rest of the world to come in and help pay for his misdaventure after the fact with troops and money. I don't know why any country would want to take on such a moral hazard, and they very obviously didn't, but Bush had so bought into his own hype that he believed he was not only the undisputed and sole leader of America, he thought he was Emperor of the world.


The American people must understand when I said that we need to be patient, that I meant it. And we're going to be there for a while. I don't know the exact moment when we leave, David, but it's not until the mission is complete. The world must know that this administration will not blink in the face of danger and will not tire when it comes to completing the missions that we said we would do. The world will learn that when the United States is harmed, we will follow through.

The world will see that when we put a coalition together that says "Join us," I mean it. And when I ask others to participate, I mean it

So no one should be surprised at this piece on a recent meeting between big shot Texas donors and the boy king which didn't go so well:

we're hearing that some big money players up from Texas recently paid a visit to their friend in the White House. The story goes that they got out exactly one question, and the rest of the meeting consisted of The President in an extended whine, a rant, actually, about no one understands him, the critics are all messed up, if only people would see what he's doing things would be OK...etc., etc.

Crikes, he's sounding more like Nixon each day....

Four years hence

There is quite alot of chatter all over the internets surrounding the fourth anniversary of Mission Accomplished. Greenwald has this. The Baltimore Sun has this. Digby highlights the contrast to European opinions of Bush here.

It is a shame and a disgrace. And an indictment of our press. But in the end, it is a tragedy: for our troops and for our country, and for the Iraqi people. Here's the piece that I found that moved me the most.