Friday afternoon Joe Strummer goodness

Dig the Clash from 1983.

Iran after the long weekend?

If you really want to get worried, read Professor Cole's post today on the Cheney administration's plan to roll out a PR offensive on an impending attack of Iran after the Labor Day weekend:

there has been some recent similar reporting. For instance, just on Tuesday Raw Story covered a paper by two British academics arguing that the US has the capability and perhaps the intention of launching an aerial assault on Iran's enrichment facilities.

Earlier, McClatchy reported on Aug. 9 that Cheney has been urging bombing of Iranian trails to Iraq. This position struck me as eerily reminiscent of Nixon-Kissinger's treatment of Cambodia (which is what really caused the Khmer Rouge horrors, not, as Bush said the other day, US withdrawal from Vietnam; we dropped enormous amounts of ordnance on that country and severely disrupted it).

You'd think this was all hyperbole, but clearly Bush has ratcheted up the rhetoric lately. Glen Greenwald has a post on the insane speech that Bush gave this week, in which he said:

Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. And that is why the United States is rallying friends and allies around the world to isolate the regime, to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late

...among other threats.

Obviously, the idea here is to attack from the air, as the idea of a groundwar is even to fantastic for these lunatics to dream about. Cheney, Podhoretz, Giuliani, Kristol, etc are hell bent on bombing Persia back into the middle ages. Imagine the consequences of that. Really, someone needs to get a hold on this white house, before it's too late. Or perhaps, as Greenwald points out, it already is:

The Iraq debate is over, at least from the perspective of actual results. It has been over for some time. The Congress is never going to force Bush to withdraw from Iraq. We are going to remain in Iraq in more or less the same posture through the end of the Bush presidency. That is just a fait accompli. The real issue of grave importance that remains unresolved is Iran, and it is hard to find causes for optimism there either.

The selective memory of the right

Tbogg has a great post on the relativism of the right, with particular regard to the Clinton blind spot. Undoubtedly, the nomination of Gonzales' replacement will be a very politically charged debate, but as so many have pointed out, this is no time for the Democrats to back down. The bald grab for power that the Bush white house has undertaken over the past seven years is a dangerous threat to the constitutional basis of our republic. They have shown time and time again that they cannot be trusted to act in any reasonable or accommodating fashion, and they simply should not be given any benefit of the doubt in this case.

We should not be surprised if Cheney gets his way and Laurence Silberman gets nominated. The resurrection of a partisan hack from the Nixon white house would fit perfectly for the remaining months of this catastrophic presidency.

UPDATE: From TPM, David Kurtz describes the inevitability of Bush's petulant reaction to the Gonzo resignation:

There is a persistent meme in press coverage that Bush--like Reagan--remains a figure aloof and removed not just from the partisan fray but from the words and deeds of his appointees and underlings. He stands apart, or so goes the thinking, undoubtedly encouraged by spin from the White House and Bushies.

Nearly seven years into his Presidency, don't we have a pretty good idea of the character and abilities of this man? There is a long track record now of truly unparalleled incompetence, corruption, and politicization. What more do we need to know? Bush's legacy is firmly entrenched, and barring any seismic historical events between now and January 2009, any changes to that sorry legacy will be at the margins.

Sunday Pogues

Up to me arse in soccer tournaments, Shane'll have to do for now..

Lots of Rudy material...

Two artilces, one about Rudy, and one by Rudy bring into high relief just how dangerous his candidacy can be. I'm actually shocked that he has remained as high as he has in the polls, because I assumed the fraud of his personal life and his long-standing opposition to many of the key planks of the modern conservative platform would have doomed him by now. It's early though.

Digby does a better job than I could ever do in pointing out the inherent dangerousness of Giuliani's simplistic thoughts in his Foreign Policy piece. Suffice it to say that anyone who even listens to Norman Podhoretz at this point, let alone appoints him as a senior foreign policy adviser to his campaign should be ignored and ostracized. Podhoretz is a war mongering octogenarian who lusts for Muslim blood and fantasizes about the mass murder of a nation of 70 million souls, one of the oldest civilizations on the planet, and one of the most modern and cosmopolitan republics in Western Asia.

Another telling flaw in Rudy's thinking is his reliance on the "competence" argument for his criticisms of the war in Iraq. This is a common theme that we'll hear more and more as the Republicans and Democrats who are vying for the presidency attempt to explain their support for the invasion of Iraq by qualifying the decision with the caveat that if only Bush had done a more competent job/sent enough troops/planned better, we'd be on easy street now. Matthew Yglesias wrote an excellent piece on that brand of thinking in the American Prospect back in October of 2005. He was criticizing this line of thinking among liberal hawks, but it is equally true of Rudy's argument, and will be heard by every candidate on the Republican side as they run as fast as they can away from the pariah in the white house.

The incompetence critique is, in short, a dodge -- a way for liberal hawks to acknowledge the obviously grim reality of the war without rethinking any of the premises that led them to support it in the first place. In part, the dodge helps protect its exponents from personal embarrassment. But it also serves a more important, and dangerous, function: Liberal hawks see themselves as defenders of the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention -- such as the Clinton-era military campaigns in Haiti and the Balkans -- and as advocates for the role of idealism and values in foreign policy. The dodgers believe that to reject the idea of the Iraq War is, necessarily, to embrace either isolationism or, even worse in their worldview, realism -- the notion, introduced to America by Hans Morgenthau and epitomized (not for the better) by the statecraft of Henry Kissinger, that U.S. foreign policy should concern itself exclusively with the national interest and exclude consideration of human rights and liberal values. Liberal hawk John Lloyd of the Financial Times has gone so far as to equate attacks on his support for the war with doing damage to “the idea, and ideal, of freedom itself.”

It sounds alluring. But it's backward: An honest reckoning with this war's failure does not threaten the future of liberal interventionism. Instead, it is liberal interventionism's only hope. By erecting a false dichotomy between support for the current bad war and a Kissingerian amoralism, the dodgers run the risk of merely driving ever-larger numbers of liberals into the realist camp. Left-of-center opinion neither will nor should follow a group of people who continue to insist that the march to Baghdad was, in principle, the height of moral policy thinking. If interventionism is to be saved, it must first be saved from the interventionists.

The entire thing is really worth reading.

At the end of the day, the two articles on Rudy illustrate the fundamental problem with his candidacy. Sure he is a hypocrite who has staunchly defended gay marriage, the right to choose and gun control. He'll turn against those positions and the expedient right will continue to support him if they think he can keep that she-devil out of the white house. Sure he's a twice married adulterer who's kids can't even stand him. The fundamentalists will see their way through that as well. But the one thing that worries me most isn't the hypocrisy or the pettiness, it's that he may just be the only man in America who could be elected president that may be as simple and clueless as the current one.

Yazidi Massacre

Count me as skeptical that the massacre of the ancient Yazidi sect West of Mosul was actually perpetrated by "Al qaeda in Iraq", as the administration is reporting. I think it far more likely that this is a regional manifestation of the civil war for the oilfields of Kirkuk, that will pit Sunni against Kurd in the violent endgame for control over the imperial construct known as Iraq. The Yazidi's are a Kurdish sect, and the lands they inhabit are squarely in the zone of contention between Kurdistan and Sunni Iraq. The notion that this was perpetrated under the auspices of some foreign influence seems far fetched. This is a territorial civil war.

Mouth Breathing Anger

In a post regarding Rudi's article in Foreign Affairs (a 6000 word essay that omits the word Pakistan, btw), Matt Yglesias points out a dilemma that candidates on the right are facing, namely a bifurcation between the slightly more moderate tone that the Bush administration has taken in the last 8 months and the ever increasing bloodlust of the "base", egged on by Rush, Sean Hannity and other minor haters like Glen Beck.

Indeed, the conservative base appears to be more committed to this vision at this point than is George W. Bush. After all, while I think the rise of moderate foreign policy in the Bush administration has often been overstated, there's no doubt that the President has softened the edges somewhat. Don Rumsfeld is gone. Rumsfeld's cookiest subordinates are gone. John Bolton is gone. Etc., etc. etc. But the Hugh Hewitt crowd, the Rush Limbaugh listeners, the Glenn Beck fans, and that whole lot still, in essence, want to see a bloody, bloody, bloody foreign policy.

I sense this strongly when I read LGF or listen to talk radio. These folks are angry. Their Captain Codpiece has turned out to be an idiot dilettante, they understand that everything Bush has done has made matters worse. They realize that they'll lose in 2008, and all of the fun that they had kicking around John Kerry and Al Gore doesn't seem to have amounted to much. Even their pet issues that they focused on once the war in Iraq wasn't fun to watch any more haven't yielded much fruit. The stock market is crashing, Rove is sneaking out the back door, and the real estate that they bought in Florida or by the beach is worth a hell of a lot less than when they bought it. For them, this is no time to go soft, no time to get tangled in diplomacy between Hamas and Fatah, no time to try to discern the various motives of minority or majority sects in Western Asia. The base wants dead brown folks, the more the better. Here's Newt:

Gingrich said that the "war here at home" against illegal immigrants is "even more deadly than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Outrage over the triple murder in Newark elides with irrational fear of the other, once it is revealed that one of the murderers was "an illegal". Albeit, an illegal that has been in this country since the age of eleven. To Hannity, immigration and terrorism are only one issue. And to the base, that means one thing. If all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Irrational fears

Glen Greenwald has an interesting point in his post today regarding the right's irrational fear of Islamic totalitarianism, or the gathering storm of Islamofacism, or whatever they are calling it these days. He highlights an essay by Roger Simon, in which the Pajamas Media editor professes his support for gay marriage, but then deftly requires all of those who are blessed by his open mind to support all out war against Muslims everywhere, because if we "lose" in Iraq, we'll be faced with societal Armageddon:

Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States -- the Pajamas Media/right-wing-blogosphere/Fox News/Michelle Malkin/Rush-Limbaugh-listener strain -- actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and "our women" will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an actual fear that they have -- not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview.

The other strain of this, and one I've experienced first hand, is the notion that the threat we face today is somehow greater than anything we've faced in the past. This is the Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh view, that this war against Islamofacism is unprecedented, and that those on the left that do not support a pre-emptive and ill planned attack against a construct of the British empire that had nothing to do with 9/11 just "don't get it". The historical fact that we lived for 40 years with thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at our major cities, and that we were in varying degrees of hot and cold war with a superpower that rivaled ourselves is lost on these people. In their mind, box cutters and burkhas are scarier than ICBMs. This is the same mindset that allows veterans who fought in Southeast Asia to support a president who refused to fulfill his TANG service in Oklahoma, a Vice President who took five deferments, and a talk show host who avoided Vietnam because of a boil on his ass.

The Shame of the Democrats

Glen Greenwald at Salon highlights the double blow to reputation that the Dems take for rubber stamping an even more intrusive law that gives this administration basically unfettered access to email and international telephone communications. If they thought that they were in danger of looking weak for not endorsing the Bush plan, they failed. If they thought that they were within their power to defy Bush when they were in the minority, how could they possibly acquiesce now that they are in the majority?

While the premise of this behavior is that Democrats must avoid appearing "soft" and "weak," one article after the next describes their behavior as "surrendering," "capitulating," "bowing to pressure," "caving in" and "suffering defeat" -- all at the hands of a weakened, isolated and pervasively despised lame duck President whose political party is in shambles. The worst thing one can be in American politics and American culture generally is a loser, and Democrats perpetually turn themselves into losers and convince themselves when doing so that they are appearing "strong" and "tough."

Look, this administration has proven time and again that they are not to be trusted with the benefit of the doubt when it comes to respect for individual liberties or the rule of law. In fact, they have ignored or violated laws with impunity when they feel that those laws inconvenience their radical interpretation of executive power. Further, their motives for this impunity have far exceeded the narrow notion of anti-terror and bled consistently into the scope of anti-republicanism or anti-bushism. There is a convincing body of evidence that proves that these people should not be trusted. Further, a convincing majority of the American people feel that this administration is not only incompetent, but actually corrosive to our international standing, our constitutional legacy, and our historical mission. Why in the world the Democrats gave them this gift beggars my understanding.

UPDATE: Here's Glen Greenwald laying out the broad powers of the new act in very clear and disturbing detail.

An unhappy anniversary

Rush, Hannity, and Glen Beck can't get enough of the NYT op ed that surge supporters and long time war cheerleaders Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon wrote in last weeks paper. Leaving aside the fact that the authors are already backpedaling from the rosy assessment of what they saw in Iraq, and the fact that they completely ignored the fact that there basically is no legitimate government in Baghdad, the talking heads have anointed these two as exhibit number one of left wing crazies who have seen the error of their ways and come to the conclusion that the surge, the Petreaus magic and the Bush 'strategy' are destined for success. The claim that these two were in any way critics of this administration was eviscerated here.

Even through this year, they have remained loyal Bush supporters. They were not only advocates of the war, but cheerleaders for the Surge. They were, and continue to be, on the fringe of pro-war sentiment in this country. And yet all day yesterday, this country's media loudly hailed them as being exactly the opposite of what they really are. It was 24 hours of unadulterated, amazingly coordinated war propaganda that could not have been any further removed from the truth.

But the echo chamber is powerful, and the right wing talk radio gang knows that. So they repeat the deceit over and over, until it becomes conventional wisdom that these two administration "critics" have seen the light. It would be funny if kids weren't dying due to this deceit. They aren't reporting O'Hanlon's fairly serious caveat here:

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. O’Hanlon said the article was intended to point out that the security situation was currently far better than it was in 2006. What the American military cannot solve, he said, are problems caused by the inability of Iraqis to forge political solutions. “Ultimately, politics trumps all else,” Mr. O’Hanlon said. “If the political stalemate goes on, even if the military progress continued, I don’t see how I could write another Op-Ed saying the same thing.”

And right at the center of it is the President himself, who hosts the echo chamber in an exclusive chat in the oval office. Glen Beck, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt....

Beck took the bait, and swallowed the whole hook:

And Bush wasn't even being subtle:

Beck also added that Bush specifically mentioned the work of Brookings Institution analyst Michael O’Hanlon to support his policies.

This is pathetic in so many ways. Our President, wrapping himself in the cocoon of the blowhards who play to the 28% of our public who still support his foolishness. He refuses to face up to the fiasco he has created and the hypocrisy that he now embodies. For it was seven years ago today that he accepted the Republican nomination and said:

We will give our military the means to keep the peace, and we will give it one thing more: a commander-in-chief who respects our men and women in uniform and a commander-in-chief who earns their respect.

A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam: When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear, and the victory must be overwhelming....

I want to change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect....

And our nation's leaders are responsible to confront problems, not pass them onto others.

And to lead this nation to a responsibility era, that president himself must be responsible.

So when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear to not only uphold the laws of our land, I will swear to uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me God.