Cheney Rules

The inimitable Charles Pierce, corresponding at Media Matters, reacts the the WaPo's staggering expose of the Cheney presidency. I was struck by John Yoo's apparent backpedal on the entire notion of the unitary executive, and his willingness to blame almost anything he could on David Addington, Cheney's legal eagle. Gonzales comes across as an astounding incompetent, probably not the man that you'd like to see as the highest ranking legal official in the country. But you knew that already, didn't you. And Bush, poor Bush. Every time that you think that he couldn't be portrayed or exposed more embarrassingly, you are surprised once more. Says Pierce:

The public careers of Cheney, Gonzales, David Addington, and anyone else involved in this perversion of democracy must be ended with all the brutality -- and more important, all the finality -- that the rule of law allows. They, and the philosophy they represent, must be crushed, utterly, so that it never rises again. In the future, executives must look at what happened to these people and be afraid of pulling this nonsense again. The WaPo series is a brief for impeachment, as clear a roadmap as we're likely to get, considering everything that must already have gone into the shredder. This is renegade authoritarianism at the very heart of the government and it must be stopped. This is no longer about politics. This is about what kind of country we are. If we allow this kind of unconstitutional brigandry to go on unchecked then we consent by our silence to the end of self-government. Period. If the Congress fails to check it, and if the Judiciary fails to recognize it for what it is, then they have consented to rule by the Executive. Period. Either Dick Cheney goes on trial, or we are found guilty of assisting in the suicide of our country. On this, there is no third way. Not any more.

We'll see.

Atrios thinks that the press ought to hang this story around Bush's neck and taunt him with it. It would be interesting to watch Little Lord Fauntleroy bristle under a constant stream of ridicule for playing second fiddle to Dick. I'd be wary of the unintended consequences, though. He might replace Cheney with someone worse, if that's possible. Maybe Fred Thompson?

Everybody is Al Queda Now

Professor Cole again plainly states the confusion and complication that we face in Iraq. Clearly, there are so many moving parts there, and each facet of the conflict is colored by it's own particular narrative within the larger history of Iraq. He notes:

So the Sunni Arabs in Baquba are done out. They have a Shiite government in their province that they don't want, and they have a Shiite/Kurdish government in Baghdad that sends Shiite troops of the Iraqi Army against them. The Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Baquba have thrown up local militias, and they have made alliances with Baathi and Salafi Jihadi cells.

What is all the more galling is that it has become evident over the last week that the administration has changed their rhetoric once again, and now refers to any and all Sunni insurgents as Al Queda. This is a shameful attempt to shore up support for the surge, and to tie the group responsible for 9/11 to the current chaos in Iraq. It is, of course, also a lie, as the president himself admitted when he said:

A clear strategy begins with a clear understanding of the enemy we face. The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists and terrorists. The rejectionists are by far the largest group. These are ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs, who miss the privileged status they had under the regime of Saddam Hussein -- and they reject an Iraq in which they are no longer the dominant group. . . .

The second group that makes up the enemy in Iraq is smaller, but more determined. It contains former regime loyalists who held positions of power under Saddam Hussein -- people who still harbor dreams of returning to power. These hard-core Saddamists are trying to foment anti-democratic sentiment amongst the larger Sunni community. . . .

The third group is the smallest, but the most lethal: the terrorists affiliated with or inspired by al Qaeda.

It's as if these guys stopped trying a long time ago.

Numb and Dumber

You really get a good sense of the pathetic yin and yang of the executive branch of our government today. In one corner is the idiot king, who introduces a black musician entertaining the White House barbeque with the following:

I want to thank our Chef, Paul Prudhomme, from New Orleans, Louisiana -- one of the great chefs in America. Thanks for coming, Paul. (Applause.) I thank Tony Snow and his bunch of, well, mediocre musicians -- (laughter) -- no, great musicians. Beats Workin, thanks for coming. (Applause.) Kermit, come up here. Kermit, we're proud to have you.

MR. RUFFINS: Well, thanks for having us.

THE PRESIDENT: Kermit Ruffins and the Barbeque Swingers, right out of New Orleans, Louisiana. (Applause.)

MR. RUFFINS: Thank you. Thanks for having us. We're glad to be here.

THE PRESIDENT: Proud you're here. Thanks for coming. You all enjoy yourself. Make sure you pick up all the trash after it's over. (Laughter.)

God bless you, and may God bless America. Thanks for coming. (Applause.)

In the other corner is the Dark Prince, who simply ignores an executive order that he doesn't feel applies to him:

Vice President Cheney's office has refused to comply with an executive order governing the handling of classified information for the last four years and recently tried to abolish the office that sought to enforce those rules, according to documents released yesterday by a House committee.

Arrogance, hubris, and an almost inconceivable level of incompetence and buffoonery. A fairly toxic mix. Even if they hadn't invaded a country that posed no threat to our own, displaced millions of individuals, caused the slaughter of untold thousands in two countries, isolated America and exposed the inherent limitations of a military that was generally considered invincible, and caused grievous damage to our international reputation that will take a generation to repair, I think we'd be in serious trouble with these two.

Special Reading Assignment

Sy Hersh on Antonio Taguba. It'll make you proud to be a 'mericun.

Meanwhile, in the North

Juan Cole has two good items regarding the Turkish incursions into Iraqi Kurdistan and the overall Turkish attitude towards the Kurds harboring of PKK terrorists. What comes through, of course, is the inherent complexity of the issue of Iraqi Kurdistan and the potential for disaster should the needle swing too widely in either direction. In the first posting, Cole points out that things have changed for the better for Kurds in Turkey:

things have changed in the past 30 years, though the good Lord knows that much remains to be done in ensuring that Turkish Kurds are first class citizens (not a goal that will be reached by thuggish, murderous PKK tactics). First of all, Turkish Kurds have spread all over Turkey as guest workers. There are millions living in cities such as Istanbul and other industrial centers. Political scientists studying their voting patterns have found that they vote like other Turkish citizens living in the same place. That is, Kurds in Istanbul vote like the Turks in surrounding neighborhoods. There is no pan-Kurdish political identity in Turkey.

However, Turkish anger at the Iraqi Kurds should not be underestimated:

In other words, the Kurdistan Regional Government is playing the Taliban to the PKK's al-Qaeda, from the point of view of the Turkish government. It is harboring 5,000 PKK fighters. Turkey has a strong and impressive military tradition and does not take casualties in its security forces lightly. What is going on is clearly a casus belli.

and at the end of his second post, he concludes:

I continue to be just amazed that no one in authority in Iraq is taking any steps to try to avert such a crisis. I earlier suggested a partion of Kirkuk province before the referendum as a way of defusing the tensions. But it seems like that the referendum will be held in the whole province and that the whole of it will go to Kurdistan. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has said that this development would be a cause for war in and of itself.

The train wreck continues to unfold.

Now, Cole is a very polemic writer, and is prone to taking extreme positions with regard to his area of expertise. However, he is an expert, and has been on the ground in Turkey as recently as last month. As a weather man, he knows which way the wind is blowing, and I'd not be totally surprised if he is right that the Bush administration is asleep at the wheel once again.

Getting it wrong again.

This post at Whiskey Fire tears apart the spurious argument that "liberal hawks", whatever that means, are intellectually dishonest in their opposition to this administration's increasingly dangerous foreign policy towards Iran. It's important to counter the argument that the initial support for the war in Iraq exists as some immutable piece of one's DNA that therefore categorizes the individual to a mission of supporting this administration's foreign interventions to no end. I naively saw the invasion of Iraq as a parallel to Clinton's policies in Yugoslavia, and supported it at the time as an honest attempt to act on behalf of the oppressed Iraqi people, much in the same way that the UN led forces in Bosnia had. I was stupendously wrong, but smarter people than I were not. In responding to an essay making the case that individuals are either inherently pacifist or militarist, WhiskeyFire points out:

The essay is crazy. The guy thinks the primary debate about foreign policy is between "pacifists" and "militarists" -- as if the primary reason anyone opposed the war in Iraq was from a position of committed pacifism. Well, maybe a small minority did, and good for them. But most of us opposed the war in Iraq because it was obviously a stupid fucking idea. The administration was clearly spouting bullshit about why it was necessary and how much it would cost in money and lives.

But more importantly, looking forward, the point he makes is this:

This is all my balls. Ezra Klein is perfectly right to judge people writing on foreign policy primarily on their stances towards real world issues. A discussion of "underlying beliefs or theories" in this context is absurd, given the horror of the Iraq debacle. If your "underlying beliefs or theories" made you stick your dick in the blender, even "reluctantly," and you haven't thoroughly reassessed these concepts, I frankly don't want to hear your advice about what to do with the weed whacker.

A little colorful, but the point is well taken. And if we step away, we can see that the even larger issue is that if you take such a black and white stance, the consequences are horrible. You have to dig deeper to get out of the hole, and with each and every tragic event, you double down your bets. You read this:

Kabul, 18 June (AKI) - At least seven children have been killed in a US-led coalition air raid in eastern Afghanistan. In a statement released on Monday, the multinational forces said that Sunday night's raid was against a suspected al-Qaeda hideout in Paktika province near Pakistan and that a number of militants died in the attack. The children who were killed in the raid are believed to have been students at a madrassa or Islamic school near a mosque at the targeted compound. The US military said that intelligence information showed that the madrassa was being used as a refuge for al-Qaeda militants.

The statement said that residents in the area, in the district of Zargun Shah of Paktika province, confirmed that al-Qaeda fighters were present in the area all day.

"This is another example of al-Qaeda using the protective status of a mosque, as well as innocent civilians, to shield themselves," said coalition spokesman Major Chris Belcher.
The mosque is said to have been slightly damaged in the air strike.

and you are forced to stiffen your lip and press on, because you are a committed hawk, and you see events through the prism of militarism and pacifism. Ideological cowards like Bill Kristol, who's blood drips from his teeth at Fox News are one thing, but for ostensibly sensible people who supported our invasion of Iraq to stick to their guns with regard to Iran, and ignore the tragic consequences of our actions in Iraq seems to me to be something even worse.

1979

Cooler than the other side of the pillow, here's Joan Armatrading doing a jam version of Cool Blue Stole My Heart from 1979. A master of her craft. Great band, too.

Pace, Iran and Gonzo trifecta

Will Bunch at Attytood has a frightening take on the replacement of Peter Pace as head of the Joint Chiefs on Friday. He wonders whether Pace's refusal to tow the neocon line on the Iranian government's meddling in Iraq may have led to his dismissal. Clearly, it doesn't seem to be any secret that Pace was unwilling to go along with the preemptive action against Tehran:

One intelligence source told me that Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. Peter Pace, has explored the possibility of resigning if Bush presses forward with air attacks against Iran, a war strategy that might be done in coordination with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

If this is the case, and if this is part of a coordinated effort to saber rattle on the Sunday talk shows at that same time (as Joe Lieberman was happy to do this weekend), then we really have entered a scary place. The Bush administration seems to be more determined to act radically and unilaterally the lower their approval rating goes. As one after another Bush insider leaps for safety (Dan Bartlett last week), the small group of dead enders that remain loyal to him dig in even deeper. You could see the blood dripping from Bill Kristol's fangs on Fox News yesterday as he reiterated his call for the invasion of Iran.

The Gonzales no confidence debate illustrates this nicely. First, it exposes the ridiculousness of the administration's line on Pace's firing. Namely, their excuse that Pace's continued service would lead to a nasty reconfirmation hearing is flatly contradicted by their willingness to go down to the mat with Gonzo. Secondly, Bush's response to the Gonzo debate is telling. He called the process "meaningless" and announced that

They can have their votes of no confidence, but it's not going to make the determination about who serves in my government,

The vote may have been symbolic, or non binding, or toothless, but one thing that it cannot be is meaningless. I'm not trying to be Bill Safire, but if the vote had anything, it had meaning. If a majority of the United States Senate including eight members of your own party tell you that they believe that the highest ranking law officer in the country is a dog with fleas, there is meaning in that vote. Only a man who could so casually dismiss the process as an infringement on "his government" could consider it thus.

Too depressing for a Friday. Need some tunes.

Digby has a depressing post up surrounding our national attention span and willingness to focus on the trivial rather than the tragic consequences of Bush administration's foreign policy. It is absolutely stunning to me that we as a nation feel that what is occurring in Iraq today does not warrant the attention that we feel we owe Nancy Grace's latest cause.

Atrios, though, I think adds a bit to this, in this post on Mitt Romney. He points out that while it may seem to you and I that Romney's astounding ignorance of the very current events that have led us to the current quagmire in Iraq is enough to ruin your entire weekend, perhaps something even more sinister is at hand. Maybe Romney's ignorance is a calculated attempt to tap into our culture and it's incredible propensity to ignore the larger world stage. Perhaps he is doing no more than repeating palpable falsehoods so that he can appeal to our basest nature. Certainly, that was the overriding theme of the debates this week. Giuliani, Romney and McCain, to say nothing of the lesser lights with which they shared the stage made Bush seem moderate. Their relentless fearmongering and promises to torture, surveil and deport anybody with a brown hue to their skin was a sickening display of the illogical conclusion of the current administration's legacy.

I'm tempted to say that is imperative that the Democrats rise above this sort of appeal, and stick with our better angels, but at the back of my mind, I have Nancy Grace and Glen Beck nagging about JonBenet....

Ahem

Tbogg gets all Steve Gilliard-like on Bill Kristol today. Good for the soul.

These are the consequences of the actions and chest-thumping policies of people like Scooter Libby, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Doug Feith, etc. They play a game where only other people lose, but never themselves. Then they just move on to think tanks and visiting professorships and book contracts where nobody ever points out to them that they fucked up. They fucked up really bad.

Steve Gilliard

Steve Gilliard is dead. I don't know these people, I don't pretend to.
But I am moved by his death, because he was such a passionate voice
railing against what is going so terribly wrong with this country right
now. Others will eulogize him much better than I, of course, but to me,
he was the ultimate manifestation of why this medium is so different,
and most remarkably so important. Venture capitalists and visionaries
who spot trends speak of community and viral networks, but at the end
of the day, we've got to keep in mind that the blogosphere , for all
it's faults, is not a business proposition or a social network. At the
beginning and at the end, it is a revolution in discourse. Those that
equate Kos and Atrios with Tom Paine are probably closest to the truth.

Gilliard, to me, represented the most pure manifestation of the revolution. Unapologetically profane, blunt, and willing to call bullshit on friend and foe when the time was right, he understood that blogging is not reporting, not
editorializing, and not "commentary". It is, of course, like nothing
else. Bloggers like Gilliard are expert at what they know, and unashamed
of it. He loved New York, he understood it like no one I've read. His
posts on Giuliani and Bloomberg, on Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima , and
remarkably, on the transit strike of December 2005 placed those events
into the larger responsibilities of our vocation as liberals. He
blogged on the Mets and the Yankees. He knew baseball and that matters, of course.

The other thing that Gilliard knew, as those of us who read him know, was military history. He understood that our pre-emptive invasion of Iraq was ill conceived and fraught with risk. He was a voracious reader who read every available tome on our nations military exploits that he could put his hands on, according to this remembrance by Jane Hamser.

As I posted months ago, he understood that our efforts in Sadr City are a
fool's errand, a death trap for our military, and he clearly understood
that Muqtada al Sadr is waiting us out, allowing us to do his dirty
work. Read James Wolcott. Perhaps his words, more than any other,
illustrate the confluence of old media with new. It beggars belief that
this man thought more deeply than Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz or Perle that what we undertook in Mesopotamia was unhistorical and suicidal. I shudder at the thought of Steve Gilliard and Bill Kristol in the same room.

Our last best hope is that everything that Steve Gilliard predicted will not come true. I'll not bet against him.

Jet Pilot

Ahh, the magic of the internets....youtube mashup of an anti bush screed and son volt. Two of my favorite indulgences.

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.