No takers

Josh Marshall has a great wrap up of the Sunday talk shows reaction to the Gonzales testimony here.

Defining Gonzo Down

My reaction to the storm surrounding Gonzales is that it is amazing how far we've 'defined deviancy down' at this point. Pundits are speculating that if it wasn't the wiretap program that Gonzales was referring to, he must be hiding an even more nefarious spying program. I don't know. To me, the telling point is that the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the country has shown time and again that he has no respect for the laws that pertain to him. The position that Gonzales has taken is so disdainful of the rule of law that we risk missing the entire point of the executive branch's audacity.

Gonzo says that there was no dissension with regard to the illegal wiretapping program. Further, that even though they knew it was illegal, they feel that the laws do not pertain to them in this instance. Granted, at the time that he was attempting to persuade the incapacitated Ashcroft that this illegal program should be extended, he was serving as Bush's Tom Hagen, but now, as the AG, he continues to see no problem with the concept of flaunting the law of the land in defense of Bush's warped sense of executive rule.

He refuses to answer direct questions from the Senate Judiciary committee, and gives no reason. He told Schumer last week that he was not going to answer a direct question regarding who sent him to Ashcroft's sick bed, and did not cite any privelege, or any reason. That is contempt of Congress, plain and simple. It beggars belief that the attorney general would take such a position, but we've defined his deviancy down to the ground. As Josh Marshall says today:

The most telling part of the Sunday Show reaction to Alberto Gonzales yesterday was that it was treated as a given by pretty much everyone that Gonzales should resign or be fired. The only point really being debated now is whether he's guilty of perjury, a pretty proud standard for the top law enforcement official in the country.

That's really the point. The damage that this administration is doing to our republic goes far beyond the details of the latest outrage. It can only be likened to the nefarious effects on broader society that these same right-wingers blame rap music and the rap culture for. They claim that by listening to rap music, a generation of black youth is being systematically degraded, and that society will never be the same. How is this different than this administration's effect on our republic? We concede that Gonzo is being intentionally evasive of the committee, we concede that he is hiding behind slick legalistic distinctions, and we allow that he has decided to simply ignore or claim amnesia when it comes to direct questions from Senators. And then we attempt to parse his obfuscation for evidence of perjury. Whether he perjured himself or not is not the issue, because a conviction for Libby or for Gonzo is a temporary salve, the wounds that they've caused our country will take much longer to heal.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald takes apart the NYT for their lead story on the "other" intelligence program here.

PA District 27 Champs

Like father, like son...

Splendid Splinters win again

The mighty Splints win their seventh Villanova Softball championship.

Gonzo Grilled

This is my favorite moment from the grilling that Gonzo took at the hands of the Senate Judiciary Committee today. I love Specter's tone when he asks, "do you expect us to believe that?".

This is an amazing moment in our constitutional history, and a depressing one. As opposed to a bold defense of the administration's disdain for the system of checks and balances that our republic was built upon, we get Gonzo's incredibly weak-kneed responses to very personal attacks by the likes of Schumer, Leahy and ultimately even Specter. The senior senator from Pennsylvania has been a disappointment over the past year, particularly in his unwillingness to go all the way and demand the resignation of demonstrably the worst attorney general, and perhaps one of the least competent public servants in the history of our federal government. But each cut adds up, and at some point, even Specter will have enough.

The fact is, all of this was clearly illegal. The FISA law spelled out exactly how the government could go about gathering information, and the executive branch chose to ignore it completely. Gonzales allowed that to happen.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald takes apart John Yoo and his WSJ editorial here.

Airman's Shooting in New Jersey

I'm not quite sure what the functional equivalent of this is on the left. I hesitate from generalizing on the insanity of the mouth breathing right, because I'm sure that the left has examples of extremist blogging that compare unfavorably to this sort of thinking.

Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs jumped all over this story from the moment it was reported, and I have to say that I suspected immediately that this was being used to validate their blind hatred of all things brown and Muslim. The truth, of course, had nothing to do with their spin, as the authorities now report:

Yesterday, Smith, the spokesman for the Burlington County Prosecutor's Office, described Marren's final words as "rambling. There was no mention of the military, the war in Iraq or the victim being a soldier.

" . . . This has taken on a life of its own."

LGF and Malkin had a bit to do with creating the "life of its own".

Blaming the Generals.

Bush took time in his latest presser to blame Tommy Franks for everything that has gone wrong in Iraq since 2003. He says:

Q Thank you, sir. You have spoken passionately about the consequences of failure in Iraq. Your critics say you failed to send enough troops there at the start, failed to keep al Qaeda from stepping into the void created by the collapse of Saddam's army, failed to put enough pressure on Iraq's government to make the political reconciliation necessary to keep the sectarian violence the country is suffering from now from occurring. So why should the American people feel you have the vision for victory in Iraq, sir?

"THE PRESIDENT: Those are all legitimate questions that I'm sure historians will analyze. I mean, one of the questions is, should we have sent more in the beginning? Well, I asked that question, do you need more, to General Tommy Franks. In the first phase of this operation, General Franks was obviously in charge, and during our discussions in the run up to the decision to remove Saddam Hussein after he ignored the Security Council resolutions. My primary question to General Franks was, do you have what it takes to succeed? And do you have what it takes to succeed after you succeed in removing Saddam Hussein? And his answer was, yes.

"Now, history is going to look back to determine whether or not there might have been a different decision made. But at the time, the only thing I can tell you, Wendell, is that I relied upon our military commander to make the proper decision about troop strength.

That of course, would be the same Tommy Franks who was awarded the Medal of Freedom along with George Tenant and Paul Bremer. Bush has subsequently turned on each of them, blaming them for mistakes for which only he can be ultimately responsible.

Which brings us to Petraeus. I've had the sneaking suspicion all along that Bush is setting him up, which Dan Froomkin at the Post describes right here. He quotes Tom Ricks who says:

Yet Ricks continues: "Some of Petraeus's military comrades worry that the general is being set up by the Bush administration as a scapegoat if conditions in Iraq fail to improve," he writes. "'The danger is that Petraeus will now be painted as failing to live up to expectations and become the fall guy for the administration,' one retired four-star officer said. . . .

I think that often we ascribe higher level thinking to this administration than it really deserves. This is schoolyard crap, the kind of politics that you'd find in a low level office setting. Bush is creating the way out of his own decisions, in the probable case that they will fail. He's had a lifetime of failures from which to learn this tactic, but it is really no different that the manager of the mail room who is reluctant to take responsibility for his own screw up, choosing instead to push the clerk under the bus. Petraeus found his way to the top by painting a rosy picture of the Iraq situation in an op ed in the Post just before the 2004 election. Bush was happy to choose him, but Petraeus should have known that any failure would be his, while any success would be Bush's.

Bill Kristol's Ahistorical Crap

The thing that makes this video of Kristol so shocking is the obvious question that it leaves. He says:

“I think Gen. David Petraeus could go down in American history with an amazing performance. … This could be a Ulysses S. Grant situation where Bush finally found the right general.”

Think about that. Exactly what would winning look like in Iraq? There are 155,000 Turkish troops poised along the northern border in Iraq. Millions have fled the country, seeking asylum throughout western asia and Europe. We've even been nice enough to accept around 7,000 in the past year. (Read this heartbreaking post from Major Bob Batemen for that disgrace). Sunnis and Shia are no closer to reconciliation today then they were in the ninth century. Iran hovers. The Saudi empire wobbles.

In the Civil War, victory was easily defined as the cessation of hostilities and the surrender of the Confederate Army. Even the political "victory" was easily definable as the reconstitution of the broader union and the reconstruction of the South. In Iraq, there is no parallel to these clean definitions of victory, either militarily or politically. Kristol is a dangerous fool to suggest that.

Just making stuff up..

Man, these guys aren't even trying any more....from Josh Marshall:

Just out from the Times ...

The Bush administration will assert in the next few days that progress in carrying out the new American strategy in Iraq has been satisfactory on nearly half of the 18 benchmarks set by Congress, according to several administration officials.

But it will qualify some verdicts by saying that even when the political performance of the Iraqi government has been unsatisfactory, it is too early to make final judgments, the officials said.

The administration’s decision to qualify many of the political benchmarks will enable it to present a more optimistic assessment than if it had provided the pass-fail judgment sought by Congress when it approved funding for the war this spring.

Woops. An honest mistake.

From the Cunning Realist, the story of the latest high value Al Queda hit in Iraq:

Aired June 13, 2007

BLITZER: Finally, general, I understand there was a major hit against an Al Qaeda figure up in the north, in Mosul, earlier today.

I wonder if you could share some of the specific details with us.

BERGNER: Wolf, the coalition forces learned of a Kamal Jalil Bakr 'Uthman, who was referred to in some circles as the military emir of Mosul. He's the man who had -- who was involved in bringing some 100 foreign fighters in Iraq and involved in facilitating and conducting suicide attacks, both against the Iraqi people and the coalition.

Our forces went to detain him in Mosul. And as he resisted -- in fact, was going for a suicide vest, as our forces tried to capture him. And in the process they engaged him. And so an important action in Mosul, specifically, to reduce the Al Qaeda threat there, keep the pressure on these cells that are terrorizing the Iraqi people and conducting operations against the coalition.

So the picture I'm painting for you is there's a great deal of pressure on these extremist cells around -- all across Iraq.

BLITZER: And when you say they engaged him, you mean they killed him?

BERGNER: They did kill him in the attempt to capture him when he went for his suicide vest.

Unfortunately for Wolf, and for Bergner, former Special Assistant to President Bush, the Cunning Realist has to point out:

Uthman was indeed a big kill, and the military featured his death last year in a report titled "Tearing Down al Qaeda."

When The Examiner pointed out that Uthman's death had been announced twice, a command spokesman said in an e-mail, "You are correct that we did previously announce that we killed him.

And you thought that this administration was awful for completely politicizing the DOJ.

Profile in Courage

A 25 year veteran of the Justice Department speaks in an Op-Ed in the Denver Post today.

The public trust has been flagrantly violated, and meaningful accountability is long overdue. Officials who have brought into disrepute both the Department of Justice and the administration of justice as a whole should finally have to answer for it - and the misdeeds at issue involve not merely garden-variety misconduct, but multiple "high crimes and misdemeanors," including war crimes and crimes against humanity.

I realize that this constitutionally protected statement subjects me to a substantial risk of unlawful reprisal from extremely ruthless people who have repeatedly taken such action in the past. But I am confident that I am speaking on behalf of countless thousands of honorable public servants, at Justice and elsewhere, who take their responsibilities seriously and share these views. And some things must be said, whatever the risk.

Sadly, I give him a week.

Liberal Media?

The administration's creeping use of "Al Queda" to designate just about any and all opposition to US forces in Iraq was noted this weekend by the Public Editor of the NY Times, a practice that was originally pointed to by a number of blogs, including this one. The right's need for one diabolical enemy to focus their energies on belies the incredible complexity of the war in Iraq, as well as the larger issues surrounding Western Asia in general. Glenn Greenwald has a post today illuminating just how scandalous the NYT's parroting of the administration's propaganda really is:

Three years after Judy Miller's departure from that paper, the newspapers's own Public Editor has scathingly pointed out what is glaringly obvious in plain sight -- the defining practices of Judy Miller (blind, uncritical trust in the government's and military's sources) continue to shape and dominate much of the paper's coverage about Iraq and issues related to Iran.

Eric Alterman wrote "What Liberal Media?" back in 2003,(here's a condensed version) but the dichotomy of reality and perception continues unabated. Even though the public editor of the NYT is calling out the news page for lazy coverage that carries water for an administration that has lied brazenly time and again, the conventional wisdom has it that the press is without exception, tilted towards unfounded criticism of this administration. Stranger than fiction.

Bush and History

David Halberstam's final piece for Vanity Fair picks up the fascinating and frustrating examination of Bush's belief that he is somehow an historical figure along the lines of Harry Truman. Even more, it looks at the history of post WW2 America and casts a cold eye on the triumphalism of Cheney, Rumsfeld and the entire Bush administration. Bush clearly sees himself as a student of history, a designation of which Halberstam is rightly suspect. I recently mentioned Bush's bizarre question to the visiting historian Andrew Roberts, when he asked "what can I learn from history"? And to Halberstam, the question is actually, "how can I cherry pick elementary historical interpretations to fit my black and white worldview"?

For example, Bush cites Yalta as a great sellout by FDR, just as the far right did in the 50s to bludgeon the left as commie symps, and Halberstam calls bullshit on their facts:

President Bush lives in a world where in effect it is always the summer of 1945, the Allies have just defeated the Axis, and a world filled with darkness for some six years has been rescued by a new and optimistic democracy, on its way to becoming a superpower. His is a world where other nations admire America or damned well ought to, and America is always right, always on the side of good, in a world of evil, and it's just a matter of getting the rest of the world to understand this. One of Bush's favorite conceits, used repeatedly in his speeches, is that democracies are peaceful and don't go to war against one another. Most citizens of the West tend to accept this view without question, but that is not how most of Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East, having felt the burden of the white man's colonial rule for much of the past two centuries, see it. The non-Western world does not think of the West as a citadel of pacifism and generosity, and many people in the U.S. State Department and the different intelligence agencies (and even the military) understand the resentments and suspicions of our intentions that exist in those regions. We are, you might say, fighting the forces of history in Iraq—religious, cultural, social, and inevitably political—created over centuries of conflict and oppressive rule.

The entire piece is worth reading, because it brings into clear focus the fact that Bush's anti-intellectual persona is worrisome enough, but when he strays into actual historical analogy, his simplistic interpretation of historical events shows that he is only using history to support decisions that were made with no regard at all to actual events. As Halberstam cautions:

Those who know history best tend to be tempered by it. They rarely refer to it so sweepingly and with such complete confidence. They know that it is the most mischievous of mistresses and that it touts sure things about as regularly as the tip sheets at the local track. Its most important lessons sometimes come cloaked in bitter irony. By no means does it march in a straight line toward the desired result, and the good guys do not always win. Occasionally it is like a sport with upsets, in which the weak and small defeat the great and mighty—take, for instance, the American revolutionaries vanquishing the British Army, or the Vietnamese Communists, with their limited hardware, stalemating the mighty American Army.

Bush Alone

Perspective is funny sometimes. Atrios linked to this article on Bush, and assumed everyone would read it the way that I did, which is that Bush is a deranged child, in denial, alone and profoundly unpopular. In the Post's words:

The reality has been daunting by any account. No modern president has experienced such a sustained rejection by the American public. Bush's approval rating slipped below 50 percent in Washington Post-ABC News polls in January 2005 and has not topped that level in the 30 months since.

But I was just listening to Hannity, and the right takes the article much differently, actually as a balance piece to the merciless hatchet job that Cheney took in the same paper last week. Hannity sees the article as illustrative of the man's steely resolve in the face of enormous odds. He reads strength into the isolation and unpopularity. Another take comes from Tbogg, who thinks that the Post is lost again, affixing a wisdom to this idiot prince that belies the sorry truth:

I think it is quite adorable that, six years into his term, the White House is still trying to sell the American public on the idea that George W. Bush is a DEEP thinker.

For me, the most telling part of the story is from the British historian, Andrew Roberts, whom Bush invited to the White House after he read his "History of the English Speaking Peoples". Bush's question to Roberts:

"What can I learn from history?"

Think about that. What sentient adult would ask such a question of a history professor? Would you ask a math professor what you could learn from math? It boggles the mind. It's a question a fourth grader would ask, if he was trying to look smart.

And then there is Charlie Rangel's recollection of a recent plane trip with Bush:

When he flew to New York to visit a Harlem school and promote his education program, he brought along New York congressmen on Air Force One, including Democrat Charles B. Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. The White House was in the midst of tough negotiations with Rangel over trade pacts. But Bush did not try to cut a deal with Rangel, chatting instead about baseball. "He talked a lot about the Rangers," Rangel said. "I didn't know what the hell he was talking about."

That might just be an epitaph for the era.

Rhymin Simon

I caught some of the Paul Simon special the other night on PBS. He won the first Library of Congress Gershwin prize for popular song, which of course was well deserved. His canon is extraordinary, and as a popular songwriter, he is distinctive and unique. The most illuminating comment came from his longtime friend and neighbor, Lorne Michaels, who spoke about just how hard Simon works to create his songs.

I found the concert absolutely awful, though, and it wasn't just Marc Anthony, who looks more and more like Steve Buscemi in Trees Lounge. James Taylor hacked his songs to pieces, in particular "Slip Sliding Away", which for some reason became Slipping Sliding Away for James. Lyle Lovett and Buckwheat Zydeco did a spirited version of "That Was Your Mother". Allison Kraus was great, and Ladysmith hasn't gotten any less fun since I saw them on tour a decade ago. The rest of what I saw passed rather blandly.

Simon, alas, doesn't seem to have changed much at all either. He was at pains to give Art Garfunkel a smidgen of respect, and after a quick: "here's my partner in argument" introduction, they worked through "Bridge Over Troubled Water" as if they were in different studios. Simon was much warmer with Joseph Shabalala then he was with Art, and they marched off stage coldly. Can it really be that bad, after 40 years? Does Simon still feel that Art got credit that he was due, for some strange reason? He came across as a petulant brat, to me.

The most revealing moment, I thought, was when Stevie Wonder took the stage. Simon's deference to Stevie is well documented, of course. When he accepted the Record of the Year honor for One Trick Pony, Simon thanked Stevie for not releasing an album that year. And it was no different at the Gershwin. Simon was even smaller than usual, stood towards the back and kept his eyes on Stevie the whole time. And it probably goes back to Lorne Michael's point. For Stevie, with the perfect pitch, and no real controlling influences, the music comes easy. Stevie is a well known perfectionist, and his refusal to release his albums without innumerable revisions is legend, but I bet that his muse comes easily. He riffs in everything he does, and sings like a true jazz singer, improvising each and every note. For Simon, it seems more like hard work, and although he is a perfect choice for the Gershwin award, and a formidable popular song writer, none of it comes naturally, and that eats away at him, just like the long forgotten Garfunkel feud does.