Ghost Dansing Comments

The Torture Lawyers

2010-03-08T23:37:00.001Z

As I've pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com many many times, the Republican Party is the Party of America in decay; a proto-fascist influence on American politics with a political philosophy that upends the Constitution and delivers an obnoxious blend of Corporate Plutocracy and Theocracy to the National table. Nothing can be a better example of this decay than the brain-dead legal opinions the Dubya Bush and his cronies sought to justify their backward approach to America's security challenges.

When did America, the Home of the Brave, become a cowardly third-world kleptocracy run thuggishly by a despotic group of village idiots? Under George W. Bush, that's when. The crowning achievment of "Movement Conservatism".

The fact that Dubya's Torture Lawyers remain unsanctioned, and, for that matter, large portions of the Bush administration remain unjailed, is a testement to the damage already done, and the cultural decay caused by "Movement Conservatives" and the American Republican Party.

Here's what I mean:

Editorial
The Torture Lawyers
New York Times, February 24, 2010

Is this really the state of ethics in the American legal profession? Government lawyers who abused their offices to give the president license to get away with torture did nothing that merits a review by the bar?

A five-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s ethics watchdogs recommended a disciplinary review for the two lawyers who produced the infamous torture memos for former President George W. Bush, but they were overruled by a more senior Justice Department official.

The original investigation found that the lawyers, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, had committed “professional misconduct” in a series of memos starting in August 2002. First, they defined torture so narrowly as to make it almost impossible to accuse a jailer of torturing a prisoner, and they finally concluded that President Bush was free to ignore any law on the conduct of war.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility said appropriate bar associations should be asked to look at the actions of Mr. Yoo, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mr. Bybee, who was rewarded for his political loyalty with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. It was a credible accounting, especially since some former officials, like Attorney General John Ashcroft, refused to cooperate and e-mails from Mr. Yoo were mysteriously missing.

But the more senior official, David Margolis, decided that Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee only had shown “poor judgment” and should not be disciplined. Mr. Margolis did not dispute that Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee mangled legal reasoning and produced work that ultimately was repudiated by the Bush administration itself. He criticized the professional responsibility office’s investigation on procedural grounds and excused Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee by noting that everyone was frightened after Sept. 11, 2001, and that they were in a hurry.

Americans were indeed frightened after Sept. 11, and the Bush administration was in a great rush to torture prisoners. Responsible lawyers would have responded with extra vigilance, especially if, like Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee, they worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. When that office renders an opinion, it has the force of law within the executive branch. Poor judgment is an absurdly dismissive way to describe giving the green light to policies that have badly soiled America’s reputation and made it less safe.

As the dealings outlined in the original report underscore, the lawyers did not offer what most people think of as “legal advice.” Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee were not acting as fair-minded analysts of the law but as facilitators of a scheme to evade it. The White House decision to brutalize detainees already had been made. Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee provided legal cover.

We were glad that the leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, Representative John Conyers Jr. and Senator Patrick Leahy, committed to holding hearings after the release of the Justice Department documents.

The attorney general, Eric Holder Jr., should expand the investigation into “rogue” interrogators he initiated last year to include officials responsible for facilitating torture. While he is at it, Mr. Holder should assign someone to look into the disappearance of Mr. Yoo’s e-mails.

The American Bar Association should decide whether its rules are adequate for deterring and punishing ethical failures by government lawyers.

The quest for real accountability must continue. The alternative is to leave torture open as a policy option for future administrations.

A Bishop’s Words

2009-12-08T01:56:00.003Z

As I've pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com many many times, it would appear the Roman Catholic Church has essentially abandoned all of its Social Teachings in order to become a politicized cheerleader for the Republican Party.

We know the Republicans use abortion as a political wedge issue; essentially a moral rubics cube with no absolute solution in the realm of Public Policy.

Republicans have no viable Public Policy solutions for abortion, and in reality, they know outright ban on abortion would cause more problems than it would solve.

In fact, the status quo for abortion; a regulated legal medical procedure with the locus of responsibility placed at the level of the individual involved, is probably the most enlightened and just public policy we can have.

The only thing that should be added are government social programs aimed at the conditions and environments that produce the most abortions in order to reduce the numbers. Ideas alien to modern Republican Political and Economic philosophy, which the Church now finds itself worshiping.

The key to this, of course, is keeping the procedures, controls and statistics visible so factors can be acted upon; not drive the world of abortions underground as it was before creating a black market in the criminal realm. Given that, draconian bans are in fact counterproductive, and, as I said, would not necessarily prevent a single abortion.

The Catholic Church should be morally against abortions. And, actually, the Catholic Church has every right to comment on Public Policy. But why does it think statutory bans on abortion are going to suppress the practice in any way?

Why does it not, instead, tap into its vast Social Teachings and preach enlightened governance that addresses the societal and economic factors making abortion appear to be a viable solution for the women seeking them?

The Church has the tools. The Church once had the wisdom. But what has happened?

The answer to the "why" is the Church itself is suffering the wages of its own sins against God's flock, and has been blinded to everything other than its own self preservation.

The Catholic Church has compromised its own principles and teachings in many ways, favoring the mindless bumper-sticker Christianity of politicized Evangelical Fundamentalists.... the "Televangelist" movement.

It sacrificed Wisdom for the quick and easy platitudes of modern day Pharisees; the religious political rightists associated with the Republican Party and movement conservatism. This it did for the expedience of popularity. Politically "conservative" converts were looking for "absolutes" in a God-given existence of ambiguity. The Church commercialized and joined the Evangelicals; cheapened the message.

However, the greatest sacrifice on the altar of institutional preservation was the blatant sacrifice of their own moral authority as they systematically sought to cover-up widespread child abuse and pedophilia within its Priesthood.

A good Editorial in the New York Times captures the attitude of the Catholic Leadership on the issue of pedophilia in its Priesthood, and suggests why the Catholic Church should return to its own Social Teachings, and redeem itself, allowing the return of Wisdom to its pronouncements on Public Policy.

The Roman Catholic Church currently has lost moral authority on matters of Public Policy.

Editorial
A Bishop’s Words
Published: New York Times, December 6, 2009

In the end it was not the power of repentance or compassion that compelled the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, Conn., to release more than 12,000 pages of documents relating to lawsuits alleging decades of sexual abuse of children by its priests.

It was a court order. The diocese had spent seven years fighting a lawsuit brought by The New York Times and three other newspapers to unseal the records in 23 lawsuits involving accusations against seven priests. The diocese, which settled those cases in 2002, was ready to battle all the way to the United States Supreme Court to keep the archive secret. It lost in October, when the justices declined to hear its appeal.

Much about those cases was known, and the documents do not greatly revise our knowledge about the scandal that engulfed the entire church after erupting in Boston in 2002. The accounts of priests preying on children, being moved among parishes and shielded by their bishops while their accusers were ignored or bullied into silence, are a familiar, awful story.

But still it is hard not to feel a chill reading the testimony from two depositions given in 1997 and 1999 by Edward Egan, who was then bishop of Bridgeport and later named a cardinal and archbishop of New York. As he skirmishes with lawyers, he betrays a distressing tendency to disbelieve accusers and to shuck off blame.

He responds to accounts of abuse not with shame but skepticism, and exhibits the keen instinct for fraternal self-protection that reliably put shepherds ahead of the traumatized flock.

Referring to the Rev. Raymond Pcolka, whom 12 former parishioners accused of abuses involving oral and anal sex and beatings, Bishop Egan said: “I am not aware of those things. I am aware of the claims of those things, the allegations of those things. I am aware that there are a number of people who know one another, some are related to one another, have the same lawyers and so forth.”

Absent in those pages is a sense of understanding of the true scope of the tragedy. Compare Bishop Egan’s words with those of the archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, who, after the release of a recent report detailing years of abuse and cover-ups in Ireland, said:

“The sexual abuse of a child is and always was a crime in civil law; it is and always was a crime in canon law; it is and always was grievously sinful. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the report is that while church leaders — bishops and religious superiors — failed, almost every parent who came to the diocese to report abuse clearly understood the awfulness of what was involved.”

Bishop Egan, with institutional pride, looks at the relatively low rate of proven abuse cases as a sort of perverse accomplishment.

“It’s marvelous,” he said, “when you think of the hundreds and hundreds of priests and how very few have even been accused, and how very few have even come close to having anyone prove anything.”

Paranoia Strikes Deep

2009-11-09T22:25:00.003Z

As I have pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com many many times, modern Republicanism has become essentially a rightist phenomenon in American politics. Rightist as in fascist that is.

Many Americans continue to believe the Republican Party is just a political Party like the Democratic Party. This, unfortunately, is no longer so. I would challenge anyone to simply go on You Tube and take a look at speeches by General Dwight D. Eisenhower and compare what that fine Republican was saying compared to the Republican rhetoric today. In fact, to find a closer parallel to modern Republicanism, one really has to look at videos and read the words of individuals like Strom Thurmond during the Civil Rights movement. Oh yes. "Conservatism" of the rightist brand is not new. Strom and the Dixiecrats are the roots of the modern Republican Party. Those who know history know they defected from the Democratic Party when it began to back civil rights for Black people in America.

I've pointed out in earlier posts my belief that modern Republicanism is (maybe was) centered on rich powerful people who didn't want to pay their taxes. These people are too few to win elections, so they focused on southern white males (the "southern strategy") who felt disenfranchised after civil rights gains in the 60's and 70's, and more importantly the Party exploited what are euphemistically called "social conservatives", who are essentially single-issue voters easily captured in a net of wedge issues that in themselves produce no effective public policy, but around which those who felt "left behind" by progress could rally and cast their votes.

Of course the so called "social issues" were throw-away..... they really didn't matter to the Party bosses. Who really thinks that a rich person is not going to get an abortion if she wants one just because there are laws against it? The single issue voters were essentially chumps including the Libertarians who thought Republicans would deliver "smaller government" however misguided that basic concept was to begin with..... a sad joke.

However an interesting thing may be transpiring in a kind of "wag-the-dog" sort of way. My favorite economist and political commentator Paul Krugman has written an article that highlights, in my opinion, the ironic answer to the question; "Who controls the Republican Party?", and more importantly just how dangerous the Republican Party has become to the health of this great Nation.

Paranoia Strikes Deep
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 9, 2009
New York Times

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership — in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.

True, Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, offered some mild criticism after the fact. But the operative word is “mild.” The signs were “inappropriate,” said his spokesman, and the use of Hitler comparisons by such people as Rush Limbaugh, said Mr. Cantor, “conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which reads as if it were based on today’s headlines: Americans on the far right, he wrote, feel that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” Sound familiar?

But while the paranoid style isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is.

When Hofstadter wrote, the right wing felt dispossessed because it was rejected by both major parties. That changed with the rise of Ronald Reagan: Republican politicians began to win elections in part by catering to the passions of the angry right.

Until recently, however, that catering mostly took the form of empty symbolism. Once elections were won, the issues that fired up the base almost always took a back seat to the economic concerns of the elite. Thus in 2004 George W. Bush ran on antiterrorism and “values,” only to announce, as soon as the election was behind him, that his first priority was changing Social Security.

But something snapped last year. Conservatives had long believed that history was on their side, so the G.O.P. establishment could, in effect, urge hard-right activists to wait just a little longer: once the party consolidated its hold on power, they’d get what they wanted. After the Democratic sweep, however, extremists could no longer be fobbed off with promises of future glory.

Furthermore, the loss of both Congress and the White House left a power vacuum in a party accustomed to top-down management. At this point Newt Gingrich is what passes for a sober, reasonable elder statesman of the G.O.P. And he has no authority: Republican voters ignored his call to support a relatively moderate, electable candidate in New York’s special Congressional election.

Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.

In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

Modern Republicanism: Bigotry and the Base

2009-09-13T18:37:00.004Z

I've pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com many many times. The so called "base" of the Republican Party is nothing more than some rich people that don't want to pay their taxes confederated with a group of malcontents that feel the Federal Government has "imposed" on them or somehow constricted their personal liberty. These grievances go back at least as far as the Civil War, but really even further. Many are rooted in racism, and the so called "issues" they represent as political grievance thinly veiled aversions to the notions of Liberalism involving civic tolerance and the embrace of diversity. They didn't want to give up their slaves. Then they didn't want to let women vote. Then they didn't want blacks sitting at their lunch counters or in the front of the bus or be integrated into their schools. The Federal Government was the "evil" champion of all these social changes, finally taking up the cause for what was truly "right and just" despite those who held the reigns of power in their little fiefdoms..... "State's Rights" was and is the battle cry. Anything involving the Federal Government is "evil". What I am saying is that the base of the Republican Party is cobbled together from ideologies steeped in greed and bigotry, and the ugly face of racism is never far from the surface. Maureen Dowd of the New York times did a nice article expressing this idea after the unfortunate outburst by a backward Republican politician from South Carolina. There are those that embrace his backwardness, and they truly are the modern "base" of the Republican Party.

Boy, Oh, Boy

By Maureen Dowd

Published: September 12, 2009 

New York Times
The normally nonchalant Barack Obama looked nonplussed, as Nancy Pelosi  glowered behind.
Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such  pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at  a president who didn’t.
But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!  
The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from  South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an  overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and  T-shirts.
The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans,  led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s  state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that  she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for  president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the  brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.
I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the  frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner,  socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old  people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.
I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents  typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father  Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers  against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.
But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no  Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in  Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and  will never accept it.
“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,”  said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation.  Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on  Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising  Wilson.
“In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very  seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength.  My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’ ”
Barry Obama of the post-’60s Hawaiian ’hood did not live through the major  racial struggles in American history. Maybe he had a problem relating to his  white basketball coach or catching a cab in New York, but he never got beaten up  for being black.
Now he’s at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his  ascension. Even if he and the coterie of white male advisers around him don’t  choose to openly acknowledge it, this president is the ultimate civil rights  figure — a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.  
For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In  Obama, they have both.
The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this:  Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending  his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that  escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford  tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson.
“A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we’re  part of the union,” said Don Fowler, the former Democratic Party chief who  teaches politics at the University of South Carolina. He observed that when  slavery was destroyed by outside forces and segregation was undone by civil  rights leaders and Congress, it bred xenophobia.
“We have a lot of people who really think that the world’s against us,”  Fowler said, “so when things don’t happen the way we like them to, we blame  outsiders.” He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to  nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree.  Shades of John C. Calhoun!
It may be President Obama’s very air of elegance and erudition that raises  hackles in some. “My father used to say to me, ‘Boy, don’t get above your  raising,’ ” Fowler said. “Some people are prejudiced anyway, and then they look  at his education and mannerisms and get more angry at him.”
Clyburn had a warning for Obama advisers who want to forgive Wilson, ignore  the ignorant outbursts and move on: “They’re going to have to develop ways in  this White House to deal with things and not let them fester out there.  Otherwise, they’ll see numbers moving in the wrong direction.

Is Government 'Us' or is It 'Them'?

2009-08-18T22:02:00.009+01:00

As I've mentioned to my friends at Lucianne.com, the Republican Party has become essentially a rightist phenomenon in American politics..... Rightist as in Fascist. There are many reasons for this which I have enumerated over and over again.... in fact the Republicans have become predictable and boring, because they no longer have any sense of pragmatism.... all arguments are ideologically rooted and as a minority, basically obstructionist. Health Care issues for example are ideologically rooted in the idea that if something isn't making a big fat profit for corporations, it shouldn't be happening. See also how quickly it was noted by the Republicans that if Health Care Reform were blocked it would be Obama's "Waterloo"..... that is what it's all about for them. Ideology and partisan obstructionism. Never mind that Americans are paying top dollar for a crazy quilt of coporate insurance "governments" that place profit-taking over all else and don't even provide an opportunity to cover all of America's citizens. Business is not about the common good, and if business doesn't provide, then it isn't needed. For the Republican, it is as simple as that. The great individualists, the great advocates of property rights and personal liberty have no sense of social responsiblity. And they just don't want to pay their taxes.

So where did all this Republican "fear of Government" come from? It really is quite simple. Republicans want nothing to stand in the way of profit making..... not environment..... not efficiency..... not morals, ethics or any other human consideration other than money-making. Government is a big threat.... because government for-and-by-the-people serves ALL the people and REGULATES the private sector.

However, there is an historical perspective to be taken on this issue as well, and Joseph J. Ellis does a nice job of discussing this historic perspective in The Capital Times of Madison Wisconson.

Here is the article:

Is government 'us' or is it 'them'?
Joseph J. Ellis
The Capital Times, Madison Wisconson

8/17/2009 7:21 am

From the very beginning of our national history, Americans have been arguing about the proper role of government. Put succinctly, the dispute is between those who regard government as "them" and those who see it as "us."

Our two founding documents embody the tension in its classical form. The Declaration of Independence locates sovereignty in the individual citizen, who possesses the rights of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," as Thomas Jefferson so lyrically put it, and the power of government is described as an alien force that must be put on the permanent defensive.

The Constitution enshrines "the people" as the sovereign agent, with a Bill of Rights that defines a protected region where government cannot intrude, but otherwise identifies a collective interest best managed by a federal government empowered to make decisions for the society as a whole.

All of U.S. political history can be understood as a perpetual debate between these two competing perspectives, symbolized at the start in the clash between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

The Jeffersonian position, with its emphasis on a minimalist government, prevailed throughout the 19th century and imprinted itself on the DNA of American culture as a quasi-sacred political creed.

By the start of the 20th century, as the United States became a more densely populated, ethnically diverse society with an industrial economy dominated by large corporations, the Jeffersonian perspective grew increasingly anachronistic. It became abundantly clear that government power was necessary to regulate the swoonish swings of the marketplace, provide a safety net for poor and elderly citizens, and protect the environment. Thus the Federal Reserve Board, Social Security, Medicare and the Environmental Protection Agency.

But despite these projections of the Hamiltonian ethos, which presumes that there is a collective public interest that only government can serve, the Jeffersonian ethos remains a potent force and not just in the right wing of the Republican Party. It colors the conversation about all the major domestic problems facing the Obama administration in ways that stigmatize as socialistic what we might ironically describe as the self-evident solutions.

In the health care debate, for example, there is a national consensus that we have a broken and bloated system. But instead of replacing it with the kind of single-payer government-run system adopted by most of the developed countries on the planet, that option is ruled out of order at the start of the debate. As a result, the best we can hope for is modest reform of an inherently flawed and expensive system.

To take another example, in the ongoing banking crisis, the removal of government regulations permitted major banks to assume unconscionable amounts of debt, much of it in the form of toxic investments that still remain on the books. It has been obvious that the banks needed to be temporarily nationalized to force them to purge bad debts from their portfolios.

But fear that the stock market would interpret this course as creeping socialism has prevented such straightforward action. So we are still waiting for many of the same self-described financial wizards who created our fiscal mess to get us the rest of the way out of it.

Our response to global warming is likely to meet the same fate. If there was ever a problem that demanded a coherent public response by government in the "us" mode, the threat to life on Earth as we know it would seem to be it. But "cap-and-trade" legislation, designed to reduce carbon in the atmosphere through government-created emission "allowances" that can be traded for money, is currently on life support in Congress, another victim of the deep-seated aversion to Washington's intrusion in the marketplace.

For much of our history, the Jeffersonian hostility to an energetic federal government served us well. But with the end of the frontier and the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the expanding role of government in protecting and assuring our "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" has become utterly essential.

All the major problems now befuddling us -- the destructive excesses of finance capitalism, a profit-based health-care system, an increasingly contaminated atmosphere -- are only soluble if we regard government as the chosen representative of our collective interests as a people and a nation.

No less an American hero than George Washington put it rather defiantly in 1785: "We are either a united people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation. ... If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending it."

And even Jefferson acknowledged that his anti-government vision would become irrelevant once we ceased being an agricultural society and that future generations -- meaning us -- would at some point need to throw off what he called "the dead hand of the past."
Joseph Ellis is the author of "American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic." This column appeared first in the Los Angeles Times.

Reagan Did It

2009-06-18T00:54:00.004+01:00

As I've pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com many many times, Republican political and economic philosophy was a train wreck in slow motion. There are many facets to Republican errors. Their "culture war" was despicable tapping the least common denominator of our national population to leverage bigotry, backwardness and resentments dating back to before the Civil War.

But it is in their economic philosophy that we see the roots of America's current economic crisis. Paul Krugman at the New York Times tells you why:

Reagan Did It
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: May 31, 2009
New York Times

“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. ... All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.

He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.

Attacks on Reaganomics usually focus on rising inequality and fiscal irresponsibility. Indeed, Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence.

On the latter point: traditionally, the U.S. government ran significant budget deficits only in times of war or economic emergency. Federal debt as a percentage of G.D.P. fell steadily from the end of World War II until 1980. But indebtedness began rising under Reagan; it fell again in the Clinton years, but resumed its rise under the Bush administration, leaving us ill prepared for the emergency now upon us.

The increase in public debt was, however, dwarfed by the rise in private debt, made possible by financial deregulation. The change in America’s financial rules was Reagan’s biggest legacy. And it’s the gift that keeps on taking.

The immediate effect of Garn-St. Germain, as I said, was to turn the thrifts from a problem into a catastrophe. The S.& L. crisis has been written out of the Reagan hagiography, but the fact is that deregulation in effect gave the industry — whose deposits were federally insured — a license to gamble with taxpayers’ money, at best, or simply to loot it, at worst. By the time the government closed the books on the affair, taxpayers had lost $130 billion, back when that was a lot of money.

But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down.
These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped.

Together with looser lending standards for other kinds of consumer credit, this led to a radical change in American behavior.

We weren’t always a nation of big debts and low savings: in the 1970s Americans saved almost 10 percent of their income, slightly more than in the 1960s. It was only after the Reagan deregulation that thrift gradually disappeared from the American way of life, culminating in the near-zero savings rate that prevailed on the eve of the great crisis. Household debt was only 60 percent of income when Reagan took office, about the same as it was during the Kennedy administration. By 2007 it was up to 119 percent.

All this, we were assured, was a good thing: sure, Americans were piling up debt, and they weren’t putting aside any of their income, but their finances looked fine once you took into account the rising values of their houses and their stock portfolios. Oops.
Now, the proximate causes of today’s economic crisis lie in events that took place long after Reagan left office — in the global savings glut created by surpluses in China and elsewhere, and in the giant housing bubble that savings glut helped inflate.

But it was the explosion of debt over the previous quarter-century that made the U.S. economy so vulnerable. Overstretched borrowers were bound to start defaulting in large numbers once the housing bubble burst and unemployment began to rise.

These defaults in turn wreaked havoc with a financial system that — also mainly thanks to Reagan-era deregulation — took on too much risk with too little capital.
There’s plenty of blame to go around these days. But the prime villains behind the mess we’re in were Reagan and his circle of advisers — men who forgot the lessons of America’s last great financial crisis, and condemned the rest of us to repeat it.

How Bush's Torture Helped Al-Qaeda

2009-05-17T19:57:00.004Z

I have pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com the Republicans have a choice of themes when it comes to their 20 year legacy: incompetence or malevolence.

Judging from Dick Cheney's latest utterances; his spirited defense of torture on enemy prisoners, we may be narrowing the choices down. Mindless malevolence seems to be a good characterization of Republican behavior.

Anyway, Robert Parry at Consortium News has done a great job describing how much and in what ways the Republicans have helped al-Qaeda over the years.

As if Nancy Pelosi is really the issue here...... what a joke.

Published on Thursday, April 23, 2009 by Consortium News
How Bush's Torture Helped Al-Qaeda
by Robert Parry

Captured al-Qaeda operatives, facing the threat or reality of torture, appear to have fed the Bush administration's obsession about Iraq, buying Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders time to rebuild their organization inside nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Even now, as al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies expand their power ever closer to Pakistan's capital of Islamabad, ex-Bush administration officials continue to insist they protected U.S. security by repeatedly waterboarding the likes of 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and terrifying others, such as Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, with "extraordinary renditions" to foreign countries known to torture.

However, the emerging evidence, including recently released Justice Department memos, suggests that the "high-value detainees" may have helped divert U.S. focus away from their al-Qaeda colleagues by providing tantalizing misinformation about Saddam Hussein's Iraq and dropping tidbits about Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who operated inside Iraq.
The May 30, 2005, memo by Steven Bradbury, then acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, also appears to have exaggerated the value of intelligence extracted from detainee Abu Zubaydah through harsh interrogations - references that Bush administration defenders have cited as justification for abusive tactics, including the near-drowning of waterboarding.

The May 30 memo states: "Interrogations of Zubaydah - again, once enhanced techniques were employed - furnished detailed information regarding al Qaeda's ‘organizational structure, key operatives, and modus operandi' and identified KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. ...
"You [CIA officials] have informed us that Zubaydah also ‘provided significant information on two operatives, [including] Jose Padilla [,] who planned to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb' in Washington DC area."

However, that last claim conflicts with known evidence about Zubaydah's interrogations and with the time elements of Padilla's arrest. Zubaydah was captured on March 28, 2002, after a gunfight that left him wounded. Padilla, an American citizen who converted to Islam, was arrested on May 8, 2002.

Yet, Bush administration lawyers did not give clearance for the "enhanced interrogation techniques" until late July, verbally, and on Aug. 1, 2002, in writing.
In addition, Zubaydah's information about Padilla and KSM was provided to FBI interrogators who had employed rapport-building techniques with Zubaydah, not the harsh tactics that CIA interrogators insisted upon later, according to published accounts.

FBI Successes

For instance, author Jane Mayer in her book The Dark Side writes that the two FBI agents, Ali Soufan and Steve Gaudin, "sent back early cables describing Zubayda as revealing inside details of the [9/11] attacks on New York and Washington, including the nickname of its central planner, ‘Mukhtar,' who was identified as Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. ...

"During this period, Zubayda also described an Al Qaeda associate whose physical description matched that of Jose Padilla. The information led to the arrest of the slow-witted American gang member in May 2002, at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. ...

"Abu Zubayda disclosed Padilla's role accidentally, apparently. While making small talk, he described an Al Qaeda associate he said had just visited the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. That scrap was enough for authorities to find and arrest Padilla.

"These early revelations were greeted with excitement by [CIA Director George] Tenet, until he was told they were extracted not by his officers but by the rival team at the FBI."
Soon, a CIA team arrived at the secret CIA detention center in Thailand where Zubaydah was being held and took command, adopting more aggressive interrogations tactics. However, the Bush administration did not approve the full battery of harsh tactics, including waterboarding, until mid-summer 2002.

Mayer's account was backed up Thursday by one of the FBI agents, Ali Soufan, who broke his long silence on the topic in an op-ed in the New York Times, citing Zubaydah's cooperation in providing information about Padilla and KSM before the CIA began the harsh tactics.
"It is inaccurate ... to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative," Soufan wrote. "Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence." [NYT, April 23, 2009]

Nevertheless, Bush administration defenders cite the information wrested from Zubaydah -- who was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002.-- as justification for the interrogation tactics that have been widely denounced as torture. For instance, former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen has credited the CIA's harsh interrogation techniques for the arrest of Padilla.
Thiessen also was given space in the Washington Post's neoconservative editorial section to cite a claim in the May 30 memo that "in particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques." (KSM was waterboarded 183 times after his capture in March 2003.)

Thiessen also said the harsh tactics extracted information from Zubaydah and KSM about Zarqawi's operation in Iraq that "helped our operations against al-Qaeda in that country."
However, the timetable again works against these assertions by the CIA and Bush apologists. Zubaydah was captured in March 2002 at a time when Zarqawi was an obscure terrorist holed up in a section of Iraq protected by the U.S.-British no-fly zone, which prevented Saddam Hussein's military from attacking Zarqawi's stronghold.

KSM was captured on March 1, 2003, 18 days before President Bush launched the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. It was not until after the invasion had given way to a U.S. occupation that Zarqawi tapped into a wellspring of anti-Americanism throughout the Middle East and began recruiting young jihadists from across the region to mount suicide and other attacks against U.S. forces.

Zarqawi also built alliances with disgruntled Sunnis as the insurgency grew.
Whatever information Zubaydah and KSM might have provided about Zarqawi would have been dated and - to the degree they built up his importance - could have played into President Bush's desire to view the Iraq War as "the central front in the war on terror."

False Intelligence

The problem of false intelligence had already been demonstrated by the handling of another al-Qaeda captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who had responded to threats of torture by claiming an operational link between Hussein's government and al-Qaeda. It was exactly the kind of information that the Bush administration had been seeking.

A June 2002 CIA report, which was dubbed the "Murky" paper, cited claims by al-Libi that Iraq had "provided" unspecified chemical and biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda operatives. Al-Libi's information also was inserted into a November 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.

In January 2003, another CIA paper expanded on al-Libi's claims of an Iraqi-al-Qaeda connection, saying that "Iraq - acting on the request of al-Qa'ida militant Abu Abdullah, who was Muhammad Atif's emissary - agreed to provide unspecified chemical or biological weapons training for two al-Qa'ida associates beginning in December 2000."

By Feb. 11, 2003, as the countdown to the U.S. invasion progressed, CIA Director Tenet began treating al-Libi's assertions as fact. At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Tenet said Iraq "has also provided training in poisons and gases to two al-Qa'ida associates. One of these associates characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful."
But the CIA's confidence about al-Libi's information went against the suspicions voiced by the Defense Intelligence Agency. "He lacks specific details" about the supposed training, the DIA observed. "It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers."

The DIA's doubts proved prescient. In January 2004, al-Libi recanted his statements and claimed that he had lied because of both actual and anticipated abuse, including threats that he would be sent to an intelligence service where he expected to be tortured.
Al-Libi said he fabricated "all information regarding al-Qa'ida's sending representatives to Iraq to try to obtain WMD assistance," according to a Feb. 4, 2004, CIA operational cable. "Once al-Libi started fabricating information, [he claimed] his treatment improved and he experienced no further physical pressures from the Americans."

Despite his cooperation, al-Libi said he was transferred to another country that subjected him to beatings and confinement in a "small box" for about 17 hours. He said he then made up another story about three al-Qaeda operatives going to Iraq "to learn about nuclear weapons." Afterwards, he said his treatment improved.

In September 2006, the Senate Intelligence Committee criticized the CIA for accepting al-Libi's claims as credible. "No postwar information has been found that indicates CBW training occurred and the detainee who provided the key prewar reporting about this training recanted his claims after the war," the committee report said.

The Senate Intelligence Committee skirted making a conclusion about how al-Libi's statements were extracted. But the al-Libi case demonstrated one of the practical risks of coercing a witness to talk. To avoid pain, people often make stuff up.

Buying Time

Though al-Libi's motivation appeared to be simply his desperation to avoid more pain, there is also the risk that al-Qaeda operatives intentionally "surrendered" intelligence that was designed to divert U.S. attentions away from the crucial terrorist base camps and safe houses along the Afghan-Pakistani border and toward Iraq.

In that sense, the interests of Bush's neocon foreign policy team and al-Qaeda were symbiotic. The Bush administration was determined to force regime change in Iraq while al-Qaeda was desperate for a respite from U.S. and NATO assaults in late 2001 and 2002. So, diverting U.S. military and intelligence resources toward Iraq bought al-Qaeda leaders valuable time.
As the U.S. military got bogged down in the Iraq War, al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies strengthened their safe havens inside Pakistan and began expanding their areas of control, threatening to destabilize the fragile government of Pakistan, the only Islamic country that has a nuclear bomb.

There has been other evidence that al-Qaeda's leaders understood the value of tying down the U.S. military in an open-ended war in Iraq, so they could reorganize and emerge as a more deadly threat in the future, especially if Pakistan's nuclear arsenal falls into their hands.
Osama bin Laden even intervened in Election 2004 by releasing a rare videotape on Oct. 29, 2004, railing against President Bush. Bush's supporters immediately dubbed the video tape "Osama's endorsement of John Kerry."

But inside the CIA, analysts concluded that the video was intended as a backdoor way to help Bush gain a second term, according to Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders.

According to Suskind's book, CIA analysts had spent years "parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. ...

"Their [the CIA's] assessments, at day's end, are a distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversations that the American public [was] not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis. Today's conclusion: bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection.

"At the five o'clock meeting, [Deputy CIA Director] John McLaughlin opened the issue with the consensus view: ‘Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President.'"

McLaughlin's comment drew nods from CIA officers at the table. The CIA analysts felt that bin Laden might have recognized how Bush's policies - including the Guantanamo prison camp, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the endless bloodshed in Iraq - were serving al-Qaeda's strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists.

"Certainly," CIA's deputy associate director for intelligence Jami Miscik said, "he would want Bush to keep doing what he's doing for a few more years," according to Suskind's account.
As their internal assessment sank in, the CIA analysts drifted into silence, troubled by the implications of their own conclusions. "An ocean of hard truths before them - such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin Laden would want Bush reelected - remained untouched," Suskind wrote.

One consequence of bin Laden breaking nearly a year of silence to issue the videotape the weekend before the U.S. presidential election was to give the Bush campaign a much needed boost. From a virtual dead heat, Bush opened up a six-point lead, according to one poll.
Bush himself said later he considered the bin Laden tape an important turning point in the election. [For details, see our book, Neck Deep.]

Prolonging the War

Al-Qaeda's strategic interest in bogging the United States down in Iraq also was disclosed in a late 2005 letter to Zarqawi from a top aide to bin Laden known as "Atiyah," who upbraided Zarqawi for his reckless, hasty actions inside Iraq.
The message from Atiyah, who is believed to be a Libyan named Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, emphasized the need for Zarqawi to operate more deliberately in order to build political strength and drag out the U.S. occupation. "Prolonging the war is in our interest," Atiyah told Zarqawi.
[To view this excerpt in a translation published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, click here. To read the entire letter, click here. ]

Besides the value that al-Qaeda saw in dragging out the Iraq War, the harsh interrogations also had severe consequences for American troops.

As former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora told the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2008, "there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq - as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat - are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo."
Zarqawi was killed in June 2006, but only after a new team of military intelligence interrogators arrived in Iraq and rejected the brutal interrogation strategies that had survived the Abu Ghraib scandal two years earlier.

Instead, the team employed FBI-style "rapport-building" techniques and won the confidence of captured Sunni insurgents who gave up Zarqawi's location, which was destroyed by a U.S. aerial attack. [For details, see Washington Post, Nov. 30, 2008, or Consortiumnews.com's "Connecting CIA Torture to Abu Ghraib."]

So, the "enhanced interrogations techniques" may have had two deadly consequences: eliciting misinformation that helped lead the United States into the quicksand of Iraq (while al-Qaeda and its Islamic fundamentalist allies strengthened their position in nuclear-armed Pakistan) and contributing significantly to the deaths of more than 4,200 American soldiers in Iraq.

© 2009 Consortium News
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.

Pitchforks and Pistols

2009-04-06T23:00:00.010Z

I have pointed out many times to my friends at Lucianne.com that modern Republicanism and "movement conservativism" is a rightist (as in fascist) influence in American politics.

Of course, all Republican-voting citizens were not fascists. However, I would say that the moderates in the Party had been taken for granted as a voting block while the Party fashioned a core (aka their "base") at the far right..... characterized by combining the greediest of the rich, the most authoritarian and rigid Christian religious sectarians, Libertarians who have no clue what kind of government they would want, but know that they don't want to pay their taxes and do as they please, and a mish-mash of gun-toters, anti-abortion, anti-global warming and/or generally anti-government single-issue voters...... then throwing in a long-term racists "Southern Strategy" for good measure to keep white southern males voting as a "manhood" block.

In other words, the Liberal, moderate conservatives that just didn't like the 60's but were otherwise pretty much like average Democrats were bumped time and time again into narrow wins for Republicans by the right-wing fringe. But they (modersates) weren't in charge.

Slowly, the facade of the moderate, conservative Republican was eroded, with the last eight years of Dubya's gang, and the antics of the last election finally making it clear..... there is no moderation in the Republican Party...... as mentioned in the previous article, the Republican Party IS Rush Limbaugh, it IS ENRON, it IS the general failure in all things foreign and domestic that we perceive to be the truth of it all.

The Contitution of the United States and other supporting documents are testimonies to Liberalism. Judges make Liberal rulings based on the Constitution because it is a Liberal document.

America is Liberal....... the Republican Party was once a normal, Liberal American political party....... Dwight D. Eisenhower would say no different, as an educated and worldly man...... an American hero.

The Republican Party is, however, no longer Liberal..... it should be flushed down the toilet. But it won't go easy. There is that minority core; the "base" that is still out there....... never underestimate fascists.

Here is an interesting BLOG article from Charles M. Blow, an Op-Ed columnest for the New York Times (a national treasure).

Pitchforks and Pistols

By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: April 3, 2009

New York Times

Lately I’ve been consuming as much conservative media as possible (interspersed with shots of Pepto-Bismol) to get a better sense of the mind and mood of the right. My read: They’re apocalyptic. They feel isolated, angry, betrayed and besieged. And some of their “leaders” seem to be trying to mold them into militias.

At first, it was entertaining — just harmless, hotheaded expostulation. Of course, there were the garbled facts, twisted logic and veiled hate speech. But what did I expect, fair and balanced? It was like walking through an ideological house of mirrors. The distortions can be mildly amusing at first, but if I stay too long it makes me sick.

But, it’s not all just harmless talk. For some, their disaffection has hardened into something more dark and dangerous. They’re talking about a revolution.
Some simply lace their unscrupulous screeds with loaded language about the fall of the Republic. We have to “rise up” and “take back our country.” Others have been much more explicit.

For example, Chuck Norris, the preeminent black belt and prospective Red Shirt, wrote earlier this month on the conservative blog WorldNetDaily: “How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution?”

Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, imagining herself as some sort of Delacroixian Liberty from the Land of the Lakes, urged her fellow Minnesotans to be “armed and dangerous,” ready to bust caps over cap-and-trade, I presume.

And between his tears, Glenn Beck, the self-professed “rodeo clown,” keeps warning of an impending insurrection by saying that he believes that we are heading for “depression” and “revolution” and then gaming out that revolution on his show last month. “Think the unthinkable” he said. Indeed.

All this talk of revolution is revolting, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed.
As the comedian Bill Maher pointed out, strong language can poison weak minds, as it did in the case of Timothy McVeigh. (We sometimes forget that not all dangerous men are trained by Al Qaeda.)

At the same time, the unrelenting meme being pushed by the right that Obama will mount an assault on the Second Amendment has helped fuel the panic buying of firearms. According to the F.B.I., there have been 1.2 million more requests for background checks of potential gun buyers from November to February than there were in the same four months last year. That’s 5.5 million requests altogether over that period; more than the number of people living in Bachmann’s Minnesota.

Coincidence? Maybe. Just posturing? Hopefully. But it all gives me a really bad feeling. (Where’s that Pepto-Bismol?!)

Fears of a Clown

2009-03-05T21:42:00.006Z

I have pointed out many times over the years that Rush Limbaugh IS the Republican Party; the perfect metaphor for their political and economic philsophy, the perfect symbol of movement conservativism which the Party embraces.

Now it's official. Timothy Egan at Outposts, a New York Times BLOG, has written an excellent tribute to Rush.

Here is hoping that Rush Limbaugh finally gets the recognition he deserves, and the Republican Party continues to embrace him fully as their leader and mentor.

By By Timothy Egan
Published: March 4, 2009
Joy among Democrats as Rush Limbaugh emerges as the face of the Republican Party.

Fears of a Clown

Once upon a time, you could drive to the most remote reaches of the United States and escape Rush Limbaugh. But from the Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico to the Badlands of South Dakota, where only the delicious twang of a country tune or the high-pitched pleadings of a lone lunatic came over the AM dial, there is now the Mighty El Rushbo.

As someone who spends a lot of time on the road, I used to find Limbaugh to be an obnoxious but entertaining companion, his eruptions more reliable than Old Faithful. But now that Limbaugh has become something else — the face of the Republican Party, by a White House that has played him brilliantly — he has been transformed into car-wreck-quality spectacle, at once scary and sad.

Behold:
The sweaty, swollen man in the black, half-buttoned shirt who ranted for nearly 90 minutes Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. He reiterated his desire to see the president of his country fail. He misstated the Constitution’s intent while accusing President Obama of “bastardizing” the document. He made fun of one man’s service in Vietnam, to laughter.

David Letterman compared him to an Eastern European gangster. But he looked more like a bouncer at a strip club who spent all his tips on one bad outfit. And for the Republican Party, Limbaugh has become very much a vice.

Smarter Republicans know he is not good for them. As the conservative writer David Frum said recently, “If you’re a talk radio host and you have five million who listen and there are 50 million who hate you, you make a nice living. If you’re a Republican party, you’re marginalized.”

Polling has found Limbaugh, a self-described prescription-drug addict who sees America from a private jet, to be nearly as unpopular as Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who damned America in the way that Limbaugh has now damned the nation’s newly elected leader. But Republicans just can’t quit him. So even poor Michael Steele, the nominal head of the Republican Party who dared to criticize him, had to grovel and crawl back to the feet of Limbaugh.

Some expected more mettle from Steele. After all, this rare African-American Republican won his post after defeating a candidate who submitted the parody song from Limbaugh’s show: “Barack the Magic Negro.”

Race is an obsession with Limbaugh, one of the threads I noticed on those long drives on country roads.

When Colin Powell endorsed Obama during the campaign, Limbaugh said it was entirely because of race. After the election, Powell said the way for the party, which has been his home, to regain its footing was to say the Republican Party must stop “shouting at the world.”

In 2003, Limbaugh said quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated because the media wanted a black to succeed. Over the next six years, McNabb threw for nearly 150 touchdowns and went to a Super Bowl.

And Limbaugh launched the current battle when he said of Obama: “We are being told that … we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.”

Translation: submit sexually to a black man because “someone” is telling us all to. Who? Which leaders of the Democratic Party have made such a claim? Which opinion-makers? But therein lies the main tactic of Limbaugh, an old demagogue technique: create a straw man, then tear it down. The latest example was Saturday, when Limbaugh presented himself as the defender of capitalism, liberty and unfettered free markets. Obama, he has said since, is waging a “war on capitalism.”

There is a war, all right. We are witnessing the worst debacle of unfettered capitalism in our lifetime brought on by — you got it, capitalism at its worst. It cannibalized itself. Government, sad to say, had nothing to do with it — except for criminal neglect of oversight.

Now that government has been forced to the rescue, just who is insisting on taxpayer bailouts? Who is in line for handouts? Who is saying that only government can save capitalism? The very leaders of unregulated markets who injected this poison into the economy, the very plutocrats that Limbaugh celebrates.

And, of course, let us never forget that the bailouts of banks and insurance companies were initiated by the Republican president Limbaugh defended for eight years.
Of late, Limbaugh has wondered why he has trouble with women. His base is white, male, Republican — people the party has to stop pandering to if it hopes to govern soon.

It’s little wonder that the thrice-married Limbaugh, who uses “femi-Nazi,” “info-babe” and “PMSNBC” (Get it? The network is full of women suffering pre-menstrual cramps, ha-ha), among his monikers for women, can’t get a date with that demographic.

For Democrats, this is all going to plan. It was James Carville and associates who first cooked up associating Limbaugh with the opposition, as Politico reported. Then on Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Limbaugh was the “voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party.”

Limbaugh played his role, ever the fool. A brave Republican could have challenged him, could have had a “have you no shame” moment with him, giving the party some other identity, some spine. Instead, they caved — from Steele, to the leaders in the House, Eric Cantor and Mike Pence, to Gov. Bobby Jindal, who would be ridiculed by Limbaugh for his real first name, Piyush, were he a Democrat.

You could almost hear their teeth clattering in fear of the all-powerful talk radio wacko, the denier of global warming, the man who said Bill Clinton’s economic policies would fail just before an unprecedented run of prosperity.

But Limbaugh has a fear of his own. If people see him purely as an “entertainer,” as Steele suggested, he will be exposed for what he is: a clown with a very large audience.

After the War on Terror

2009-02-05T23:24:00.008Z

As all of my friends at Lucianne.com know by now, modern Republican political and economic philosophy, in ascendence for the last decade or so, has produced more problems than it has solved.

Republicans, who essentially do not believe in government, essentially placed the American government in the hands of the village idiots as a cynical political statement.

The results are now there to see by all. Yes, there are some 15-20 percent dead-enders that cling doggishly to backward anti-government platitudes from the Reagan era or the mouthings of Rush Limbaugh on his radio show. However this does not conceal the blatant incompetence and ineffectiveness of their reign in all matters foreign and domestic.

No, that great flushing sound was as much flushing the Republican Party down the toilet, as it was greeting the fine new political talent found in the person of Barack Obama.

The Republican Party will not be the same in 2012..... they are busy remaking themselves as we speak.

One of the areas that have been totally wrecked by Republican majority is the American Foreign Policy. It will take some doing for the Obama administration to undo the damage done by Dubya and his merry pranksters.

Roger Cohen has written a very nice OPED in the New York Times that discusses the first winds of change coming to American Foreign Policy....

It is indeed refreshing..... so refreshing not to have to listen to the village idiots anymore.....

After the War on Terror

By ROGER COHEN
Published: January 29, 2009
New York Times

In his first White House televised interview, with the Al Arabiya news network based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, President Obama buried the lead: The war on terror is over.

Yes, the with-us-or-against-us global struggle — the so-called Long War — in which a freedom-loving West confronts the undifferentiated forces of darkness comprising everything from Al Qaeda to elements of the Palestinian national struggle under the banner of “Islamofascism” has been terminated.

What’s left is what matters: defeating terrorist organizations. That’s not a war. It’s a strategic challenge.

The new president’s abandonment of post-9/11 Bush doctrine is a critical breakthrough. It resolves nothing but opens the way for a rapprochement with a Muslim world long cast into the “against-us” camp. Nothing good in Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan or Iran could happen with that Manichean chasm.

Obama said, “The language we use matters.” It does. He said he would be “very clear in distinguishing between organizations like Al Qaeda — that espouse violence, espouse terror and act on it — and people who may disagree with my administration and certain actions, or may have a particular viewpoint in terms of how their countries should develop. We can have legitimate disagreements but still be respectful.”

Bush liked to distinguish between terrorists and the moderate, freedom-loving Muslims of his imagination. Obama makes a much more important distinction here: between those bent on the violent destruction of America and those who merely dislike, differ from or have been disappointed by America.

These days the great majority of the world’s Muslims fall into the latter category. Obama is right to take his case to them through the Arabic-language Al Arabiya network.
His tone represented a startling departure. He was subtle, respectful, self-critical and balanced where the Bush administration had been blunt, offensive, bombastic and one-sided in its embrace of an Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy.

Speaking as his Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, began an eight-day visit to the region, Obama described the mission as one of listening “because all too often the United States starts by dictating.”

Obama went further. Citing Muslim members of his own family and his experience of life in a Muslim country (Indonesia), he repositioned the national interest and his own role.
He defined his task as convincing Muslims that “Americans are not your enemy” and persuading Americans that respect for a Muslim world is essential. His objective, he said, was to promote not only American interests but those of ordinary people — read Muslims — suffering from “poverty and a lack of opportunity.”

That’s a significant ideological leap for an American leader, from the post-cold-war doctrine of supremacy to a new doctrine of inclusiveness dictated by globalization — from “the decider” to something close to “mediator-in-chief.” I applaud this shift because it is based in realism; a changed world is susceptible to American persuasion, not to American diktat.

Still, words do not alter the fact that the post-Gaza challenge facing Obama is immense. Here in Iran, where anti-American rhetoric is too significant a pillar of the 30-year-old Islamic Revolution to be lightly sacrificed, the response to the president’s interview was cool. It came as the government, citing the Israeli assault on Gaza, approved a bill to investigate and prosecute alleged war crimes anywhere in the world.

President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad said change under Obama was good but would only be credible if America apologized to Iran for its role in the 1953 coup, among other things. The hard-line daily Kayhan said: “Obama follows Bush’s footsteps.”

In fact, Obama said he would pursue dialogue with Iran and praised the greatness of Persian civilization even as he deplored Iranian threats against Israel, its nuclear program and “support of terrorist organizations in the past.”

Any U.S.-Iranian dialogue will have to be rooted in a word Obama favors: respect. The United States has underestimated Iranian pride and the fierce attachment to its independence of a nation that has known its share of Western meddling.

Carrots and sticks will lead nowhere. Nor will an exclusive focus on the nuclear issue that fails to examine the whole range of American and Iranian interests, some shared, some hotly contested.
What is certain, with Iran as with the rest of the Middle East, is that there will be setbacks. Terrorists will attack. Obama will be denounced. But as Mitchell knows from his experience of bringing peace to Northern Ireland, the critical thing is perseverance.

Tony Blair, now also a Middle East envoy and Mitchell’s partner in Belfast, once put it to me this way: “The only reason we got the breakthrough in Northern Ireland was we did in the end focus on it with such intensity over such a period that every little thing that went wrong — and everything that could go wrong did at some point — was all the time being managed and rectified.” He described the approach as: “Any time we can’t solve it, we have to manage it, until we can start to solve it again.”

Bush had the ideological framework wrong. Obama has righted it by ending the war on terror. Now comes the hard Middle Eastern slog of solve-manage-solve. It will need the president’s unswerving focus.

Bigger Than Bush

2009-01-18T14:48:00.005Z

As I've pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com many times, the political and economic policies of the Republican Party, exploiting movement conservativism, were essentially a train wreck in slow motion. It may have taken decades for the policies to to bring all matters foreign and domestic to a crisis stage, however, it had nothing to do with luck or providence...... What we see today in America is the effects of a sustained undercurrent of proto-fascist foreign policy and corporatist laissez faire economics. Even the Republican "Southern Strategy" reflects their approach to do what ever was necessary to gain and hold the reins of power, even when the policies, pushed far to the right of the political spectrum, were only acceptable by a core 20-25 percent of the authoratarian-leaning part of the population; a coalition of the very very rich, christian rightists and an amalgram of bigots. All others.... especially those who called themselves "moderate" Republicans were essentially bamboozled..... taken along for the ride down the slippery slope we find ourselves on today. They voted Republican because it was their identity, not because they perceived the direction the Party was taking. Some have awaken to see that they now belonged and were taken for granted by a Party that had little concern for their point-of-view..... Colin Powell being an excellent example.

Once again Paul Krugman taps the history and underscores the salient points of that underlying strategy, policy and wrong-headedness that is modern Republicanism......

The Republican Party should collapse completely, and re-emerge in a form that returns to their Liberal Constitutional roots.... Reaganism, Reaganonomics and movement conservativism has demonstrably failed..... they've had it all their way, and reaped only the decline of a great Nation.

Bigger Than Bush
By PAUL KRUGMAN

New York Times, 2 January 2009

As the new Democratic majority prepares to take power, Republicans have become, as Phil Gramm might put it, a party of whiners.
Some of the whining almost defies belief. Did Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, really say, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror”? Did Rush Limbaugh really suggest that the financial crisis was the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by that evil genius Chuck Schumer?

But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House.
The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”
Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.
Oh, and the racial element isn’t all that abstract, even now: Chip Saltsman, currently a candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, sent committee members a CD including a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” — and according to some reports, the controversy over his action has actually helped his chances.

So the reign of George W. Bush, the first true Southern Republican president since Reconstruction, was the culmination of a long process. And despite the claims of some on the right that Mr. Bush betrayed conservatism, the truth is that he faithfully carried out both his party’s divisive tactics — long before Sarah Palin, Mr. Bush declared that he visited his ranch to “stay in touch with real Americans” — and its governing philosophy.

That’s why the soon-to-be-gone administration’s failure is bigger than Mr. Bush himself: it represents the end of the line for a political strategy that dominated the scene for more than a generation.

The reality of this strategy’s collapse has not, I believe, fully sunk in with some observers. Thus, some commentators warning President-elect Barack Obama against bold action have held up Bill Clinton’s political failures in his first two years as a cautionary tale.

But America in 1993 was a very different country — not just a country that had yet to see what happens when conservatives control all three branches of government, but also a country in which Democratic control of Congress depended on the votes of Southern conservatives. Today, Republicans have taken away almost all those Southern votes — and lost the rest of the country. It was a grand ride for a while, but in the end the Southern strategy led the G.O.P. into a cul-de-sac.

Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to.

Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.

Jeri Suzanne Horne, Liquid Illuzion

2009-01-10T22:58:00.005Z

Liquid once wrote me an email and said she liked the music videos i left on her "music bar"..... i liked her too.

She was always nice to me......

here's another ghost for the offering....... a little video music for her music bar.... i know Suzanne would like it.

i might have another version of the same song playing on my playlist..... the playlist was an idea i stole from Liquid.

i also changed my playlist to lead with this song when when i found out Liquid was gone.

if you want to see the video, just pause the player and click the URL.

Raveonettes, Dead Sound

George W. Bush's Legacy

2009-01-06T23:39:00.005Z

I have pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com many many times; this Republican administration, in its death throws after two unfortunate terms, has been an abject failure in all matters foreign and domestic. Furthermore its failures are solidly rooted in the political and economic philosophies of movement conservativism dating back at least to the Reagan administration. In short, modern Republicanism has been a slow train wreck culminating in the failed administration of George W. Bush.

Now, interestingly, Dubya thinks that he and his administration will be vindicated byhistory. That is mainly because of his unfortunate overindulgences with alcohol and possibly other drugs in his youth..... obvious brain damage.

Here is a nice article to set the record straight...... the record that history, undoubtedly, will not ignore:

Published on Monday, January 5, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
George W. Bush's Legacy of Failure

The president's defenders are puffing his record in a positive light - but reality keeps getting in the way

by Cliff Schecter

With only days left until his term expires, it appears that the Bush legacy project, an attempt by the usual corps of serial sycophants to rehabilitate the lame-duck generalissimo's image, is falling upon the deaf ears and self-gouged eyes of an American public sickened by the last eight years.
Yes, the Bush cabal just couldn't clear out of town without trying to complete one last propaganda project for the Gipper, or the Decider, if you will. Karl Rove, the genius who predicted a permanent Republican majority right before destroying a temporary one, and Karen Hughes, who likes to create mutual understanding in the Middle East by explaining that God appears in the US constitution, have been unleashing a wave of their finest shock and awe talking points. To listen to them is to hear how black is white, up is down and Bush has been more Churchill than Ceausescu.

Condi Rice, the very Siren Song of Security who thought a 2001 presidential daily briefing entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" meant the al-Qaida leader was thinking of investing in beachfront property in the greater Fort Lauderdale metro area, has also added her prescient voice to the chorus.

Our fearless chief diplomat's latest missive, reminding us that "the war on terror has failed to eliminate al-Qaida and its leader Osama bin Laden, but the US-led coalition and Iraq are close to defeating the group's Iraq branch", would be pretty cool if it weren't for the tiny hiccup that there was no "Iraq branch" of al-Qaida until she and her superiors chose to idiotically invade that country, and then do everything just short of providing al-Qaida in Iraq with an infusion of venture capital.

But the biggest problem for defenders of Bush's vast array of "accomplishments" is not even the cast of nincompoops trying to portray him as the "misunderestimated" heir to President Harry Truman. Their biggest obstacle appears to be reality itself. The American people have a way of getting it right, if not always immediately, and Bush's handlers haven't quite been able to force us all into the Matrix. Yet.

Right on time, CNN has come out with a poll that proves we know more than Mr Permanent Majority after all.

When asked whether Bush was "tough enough for the job", 49% of Americans responded yes, and 51% said no (even though he cleared brush in a very forceful manner! And wore a really tight flight suit! And said "Bring 'em on!"). That, by the way, is the best he performed on any question.

Is the president a person you admire? Seventeen percent yes, 72% no, but perhaps Bush legacy project peddlers can win over that 1% still thinking about it. Does Bush inspire confidence? Twenty percent said yes, and 80% said no. Did he manage the government effectively? Only 25% think he did, while 75% said not so much. Finally, did Bush bring the kind of change the country needed? A whopping 13% answered in the affirmative.

This is the way the rest of the poll goes. Whether it is about "getting things done" or "uniting the country" - two of Bush's campaign pledges - he is lucky to approach a 33% positive score. Saying these numbers ain't pretty is in the same range of euphemistic happy-talk as claiming the economy has hit a rough patch or the Cubs haven't won a World Series recently.

So when their two-page document of talking points comes your way reminding you that "Bush kept us safe after 9/11" (except for the anthrax attack, the shoe-bomber plot foiled by alert airline passengers and the more than 4,000 American kids unnecessarily killed in Iraq) and "Bush lifted the economy with tax cuts after 2001" (try Googling in succession: "sub-prime mortgages", "Bernie Madoff" and "Enron" for Bushenomics in action), much like CNN poll respondents, you can take the antidote by just refusing to close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and scream "nah, nah, nah, nah nah" until no longer cognisant.

As for history exonerating Bush 43 (as Laura Bush claims will soon occur), Herbert Hoover somehow doesn't elicit evocations of ecstasy 80 years later, and LBJ is still remembered more for a very bad war than his landmark legislative accomplishments. Now try combining starting a stupid war with overseeing an economic meltdown.

See where this is going, Laura?

Just two months ago, I met with Julie Blust, communications director for the National Bush Legacy Bus Tour sponsored by Americans United for Change. Upon it's arrival in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, she took me aboard this 45-foot long, 28-ton monument to Dubya's impact on the country and planet, from Katrina to corrupt no-bid contractors, economic destruction to "enhanced interrogation techniques".

Upon seeing the real record, as it appeared in video, picture and chart form on the walls of the Bush bus, it would be impossible to draw any other conclusion than that this man was a one-man wrecking crew (well, two and a half if you include Cheney). And that he'll saunter up alongside James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Warren Harding as the very definition of Oval Office calamity.

There is really only one arguable legacy of Bush's White House tenure that is a step forward for the US and all mankind. It's called President Obama.

Cliff Schecter is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and the author of The Real McCain : Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him And Why Independents Shouldn't.

The GOP's Joe McCarthy Gene

2008-11-30T21:43:00.005Z

I have pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com many times that modern Republicanism sinks a deep taproot into an ugly part of the American psyche..... not that which makes us great...... not that to which we aspire, but the deepest darkest recesses of our collective unconcious from which slavery and segregation was accepted and tolerated, persecution of various beliefs and ultimately persecution of a an individual's genetic makeup that produces basic sexual orientation. Some Republicans think of movement conservativism as a Goldwater phenomenon. Some believe it was incarnated with Reagan, and some even believe the latest George Bush was the conservative messiah. Movement conservativism, however, that dark root which the Republican Party learned to exploit in order to win elections actually is best understood as a facet of an historical American phenomenon referred to as McCarthyism.

Neal Gabler writing in the Los Angeles Times does a fine psychosocial analysis:

Published on Sunday, November 30, 2008 by the Los Angeles Times
The GOP's Joe McCarthy Gene
by Neal Gabler

Ever since the election, partisans within the Republican Party and observers outside it have been speculating wildly about what direction the GOP will take to revive itself from its disaster. Or, more specifically, which wing of the party will prevail in setting the new Republican course -- whether it will be what conservative writer Kathleen Parker has called the "evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy" branch or the more pragmatic, intellectual, centrist branch. To determine the answer, it helps to understand exactly how Republicans arrived at this spot in the first place.
The creation myth of modern conservatism usually begins with Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who was the party's presidential standard-bearer in 1964 and who, even though he lost in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history, nevertheless wrested the party from its Eastern establishment wing. Then, Richard Nixon co-opted conservatism, talking like a conservative while governing like a moderate, and drawing the opprobrium of true believers. But Ronald Reagan embraced it wholeheartedly, becoming the patron saint of conservatism and making it the dominant ideology in the country. George W. Bush picked up Reagan's fallen standard and "conservatized" government even more thoroughly than Reagan had, cheering conservatives until his presidency came crashing down around him. That's how the story goes.

But there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn't likely to be expunged any time soon.

The basic problem with the Goldwater tale is that it focuses on ideology and movement building, which few voters have ever really cared about, while the McCarthy tale focuses on electoral strategy, which is where Republicans have excelled.

McCarthy, Wisconsin's junior senator, was the man who first energized conservatism and made it a force to reckon with. When he burst on the national scene in 1950 waving his list of alleged communists who had supposedly infiltrated Harry Truman's State Department, conservatism was as bland, temperate and feckless as its primary congressional proponent, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, known fondly as "Mister Conservative." Taft was no flamethrower. Though he was an isolationist and a vehement opponent of FDR, he supported America's involvement in the war after Pearl Harbor and had even grudgingly come to accept the basic institutions of the New Deal. He was also no winner. He had contested and lost the Republican presidential nomination to Wendell Willkie in 1940, Thomas Dewey in 1948 and Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, three men who were regarded as much more moderate than he.

McCarthy was another thing entirely. What he lacked in ideology -- and he was no ideologue at all -- he made up for in aggression. Establishment Republicans, even conservatives, were disdainful of his tactics, but when those same conservatives saw the support he elicited from the grass-roots and the press attention he got, many of them were impressed. Taft, no slouch himself when it came to Red-baiting, decided to encourage McCarthy, secretly, sealing a Faustian bargain that would change conservatism and the Republican Party. Henceforth, conservatism would be as much about electoral slash-and-burn as it would be about a policy agenda.

For the polite conservatives, McCarthy was useful. That's because he wasn't only attacking alleged communists and the Democrats whom he accused of shielding them. He was also attacking the entire centrist American establishment, the Eastern intellectuals and the power class, many of whom were Republicans themselves, albeit moderate ones. When he began his investigation of the Army, he even set himself against his own Republican president, who had once commanded that service. In the end, he was censured in 1954, not for his recklessness about alleged communists but for his recklessness toward his fellow senators. Moderate Republicans, not Democrats, led the fight against him. His intemperance disgusted them as much as it emboldened his fans, Goldwater among them.
But if McCarthy had been vanquished -- he died three years later of cirrhosis from drinking -- McCarthyism was only just beginning. McCarthyism is usually considered a virulent form of Red-baiting and character assassination. But it is much more than that. As historian Richard Hofstadter described it in his famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," McCarthyism is a way to build support by playing on the anxieties of Americans, actively convincing them of danger and conspiracy even where these don't exist.

McCarthy, a Catholic, was especially adept at nursing national resentments among the sorts of people that typically did not vote Republican. He stumbled onto the fact that many of these people in postwar America were frightened and looking for scapegoats. He provided them, and in doing so not only won millions of adherents but also bequeathed to his party a powerful electoral bludgeon that would eventually drive out the moderates from the GOP (posthumous payback) before it drove the Democrats from the White House.
In a way, Goldwater was less a fulfillment of McCarthy conservatism than a slight diversion from it. Goldwater was ideological -- an economic individualist. He hated government more than he loved winning, and though he was certainly not above using the McCarthy appeal to resentment or accusing his opponents of socialism, he lacked McCarthy's blood- lust. McCarthy's real heir was Nixon, who mainstreamed McCarthyism in 1968 by substituting liberals, youth and minorities for communists and intellectuals, and fueling resentments as McCarthy had. In his 1972 reelection, playing relentlessly on those resentments, Nixon effectively disassembled the old Roosevelt coalition, peeling off Catholics, evangelicals and working-class Democrats, and changed American politics far more than Goldwater ever would.

Today, these former liberals are known as Reagan Democrats, but they were Nixon voters before they were Reagan voters, and they were McCarthy supporters before they were either. A good deal of McCarthy's support came from Catholics and evangelical Protestants who, along with Southerners, would form the basis of the new conservative coalition. Nixon simply mastered what McCarthy had authored. You demonize the opposition and polarize the electorate to win.

Reagan's sunny disposition and his willingness to compromise masked the McCarthyite elements of his appeal, but Reaganism as an electoral device was unique to Reagan and essentially died with the end of his presidency. McCarthyism, on the other hand, which could be deployed by anyone, thrived. McCarthyism was how Republicans won. George H.W. Bush used it to get himself elected, terrifying voters with Willie Horton. And his son, under the tutelage of strategist Karl Rove, not only got himself reelected by convincing voters that John Kerry was a coward and a liar and would hand the nation over to terrorists, which was pure McCarthyism, he governed by rousing McCarthyite resentments among his base.

Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. That's why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama's relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.

And that is also why the Republican Party, despite the recent failure of McCarthyism, is likely to keep moving rightward, appeasing its more extreme elements and stoking their grievances for some time to come. There may be assorted intellectuals and ideologues in the party, maybe even a few centrists, but there is no longer an intellectual or even ideological wing. The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Palin. It's in the genes.

The Republican Rump

2008-11-04T00:49:00.005Z

I've mentioned to my friends at Lucianne.com many many times how I thought the Republican Party had become a totally rightist phenomenon in American politics. Now my favorite economist and poltical pundit Paul Krugman has given succinct articulation to what I believe is the very very core of modern Republicanism....... Its very character. He projects into the future in the following article with profound understanding of the Republican Party forseeing how it will further crystalize into:

The Republican Rump

By Paul Krugman

New York Times

Published: November 3, 2008

Maybe the polls are wrong, and John McCain is about to pull off the biggest election upset in American history. But right now the Democrats seem poised both to win the White House and to greatly expand their majorities in both houses of Congress.

Most of the post-election discussion will presumably be about what the Democrats should and will do with their mandate. But let me ask a different question that will also be important for the nation’s future: What will defeat do to the Republicans?

You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.

For example, Larry Sabato, the election forecaster, predicts that seven Senate seats currently held by Republicans will go Democratic on Tuesday. According to the liberal-conservative rankings of the political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, five of the soon-to-be-gone senators are more moderate than the median Republican senator — so the rump, the G.O.P. caucus that remains, will have shifted further to the right. The same thing seems set to happen in the House.

Also, the Republican base already seems to be gearing up to regard defeat not as a verdict on conservative policies, but as the result of an evil conspiracy. A recent Democracy Corps poll found that Republicans, by a margin of more than two to one, believe that Mr. McCain is losing “because the mainstream media is biased” rather than “because Americans are tired of George Bush.”

And Mr. McCain has laid the groundwork for feverish claims that the election was stolen, declaring that the community activist group Acorn — which, as Factcheck.org points out, has never “been found guilty of, or even charged with” causing fraudulent votes to be cast — “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” Needless to say, the potential voters Acorn tries to register are disproportionately “other folks,” as Mr. Chambliss might put it.

Anyway, the Republican base, egged on by the McCain-Palin campaign, thinks that elections should reflect the views of “real Americans” — and most of the people reading this column probably don’t qualify.

Thus, in the face of polls suggesting that Mr. Obama will win Virginia, a top McCain aide declared that the “real Virginia” — the southern part of the state, excluding the Washington, D.C., suburbs — favors Mr. McCain. A majority of Americans now live in big metropolitan areas, but while visiting a small town in North Carolina, Ms. Palin described it as “what I call the real America,” one of the “pro-America” parts of the nation. The real America, it seems, is small-town, mainly southern and, above all, white.

I’m not saying that the G.O.P. is about to become irrelevant. Republicans will still be in a position to block some Democratic initiatives, especially if the Democrats fail to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

And that blocking ability will ensure that the G.O.P. continues to receive plenty of corporate dollars: this year the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has poured money into the campaigns of Senate Republicans like Minnesota’s Norm Coleman, precisely in the hope of denying Democrats a majority large enough to pass pro-labor legislation.

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier.

But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.

The Specter of Wall Street

2008-10-07T23:03:00.004Z

As I've pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com many many times, the economic philosophy of the modern Republican Party is disastrous. However, it is not new..... as it turns out there is a lesson we love to learn and re-learn in America. Here is a very interesting article that gives us a short history of our foibles, and reminds us of our need to shy away from the "sounds-too-good-to-be-true" utterances of Republicanism. Published on Thursday, October 2, 2008 by TomDispatch.com

The Specter of Wall Street

 Wall Street's Comeback as the Place Americans Love to  Hateby Steve Fraser  
Wall Street sits at the eye of a political hurricane. Its enemies converge  from every point on the compass. What a stunning turn of events. 
For well more than half a century Wall Street has enjoyed a remarkable  political immunity, but matters were not always like that. Now, with history  marching forward in seven league boots, we are about to revisit a time when the  Street functioned as the country's lightning rod, attracting its deepest  animosities and most passionate desires for economic justice and democracy. 
For the better part of a century, from the 1870s through the tumultuous years  of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the specter of Wall Street haunted the  popular political imagination. For Populists it was the "Great Satan," its  stranglehold over the country's credit system being held responsible for driving  the family farmer to the edge of extinction and beyond. 
For legions mobilized in the anti-monopoly movement, Wall Street was the  prime engine house of monopoly capitalism, leaving behind it a trail of  victimized businesses, consumers, captive municipalities, and crushed workers.  For Progressive reformers around the turn of the twentieth century, Wall  Street's "money trust" was the mother of all trusts, its tentacles -- and the  octopus was indeed a popular image of the time -- choking off economic  opportunity for all but a favored few. Its political power in Congress, in  presidential cabinets, in statehouses, in both major political parties was seen  as so overwhelming as to threaten to suffocate democracy itself. 
All the periodic panics and depressions -- 1873, 1884, 1893, 1907, and 1913  -- that, with numbing regularity, punctuated economic life until the Crash of  '29 and the Great Depression brought the house down seemed to begin on the  Street. And whether they actually began there or not, all the misery that  followed in their wake -- the homelessness, the armies of tramps and hobos, the  starvation, the bankruptcies, the broken families, the crushing sense of  dispossession -- was regularly laid at the feet of the Street. 
Despite the hot-tempered invective directed its way, the "Great Satan" didn't  face its comeuppance until the New Deal in the 1930s. Then, all its  transgressions -- its speculative greed, its felonious insider-dealing, its  cynical manipulation of popular credulity, its extravagant incompetence and  seemingly limitless capacity for self-delusion -- left Wall Street truly  vulnerable. Its reputation had struck bottom. 
Wall Street's Invisible Decades 
Just like our Wall Street heroes of the recent past, so, too, back in the  1920s the savants of the Street claimed credit for the rickety prosperity of the  Jazz Age. With the Crash they took the blame for the disaster, just as they had  taken the credit for the prosperity, and were despised for their hypocrisy as  well. Just as seems to be starting to happen today, Congressmen, some of whom  had spent their careers genuflecting before the titans of Wall Street, suddenly  hauled them before investigating committees, there to be defrocked, treated to a  withering storm of biblically-inspired injunctions and Shakespearean curses, and  indicted in the court of public opinion. Wall Street was, as it now seems about  to be again, excommunicated. 
Suddenly weak beyond compare, the Street was powerless to resist Franklin D.  Roosevelt's regulatory state. In rapid succession came the Glass-Steagall  banking act and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the two securities  acts of 1933 and 1934, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission  (SEC), the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and much more. When, in 1936, the  President summoned the people to battle against the "economic royalists"  everyone knew just who he was talking about. 
It's long been said that FDR's New Deal saved capitalism from itself. That is  true. One ironic consequence of that fateful turn of events was, politically  speaking, to cloak Wall Street in invisibility. After all the shouting was over,  after the installation of legislative reforms had further chastened an already  cowed Street and constrained its penchant for financial wilding, it ceased to  function as the magnetic north for all those troubled by the inequities,  injustices, and deformations of capitalism. 
During the long prosperity of the post-war years from 1945 to 1970, when the  income and wealth inequalities that had always been associated with Wall Street  narrowed dramatically -- economic historians know this as "the great  compression" -- news of the Street retreated to the business pages and remained  there. Except for an occasional act of street theater, even in the tumultuous  1960s, the Street remained largely exempt from sustained political criticism.  Once the bête noire of all those who found themselves in opposition to  the ravages of laissez-faire capitalism, Wall Street had been neutered. 
Just as remarkable is how long that immunity from criticism lasted. After  all, Wall Street's record over the past quarter century is nothing to boast  about -- unless, that is, you happened to have made your living on it or in its  environs. 
Beginning in the 1980s, the Street supervised and profited handsomely from  the de-industrialization of America. "Lean and mean" capitalism, the watchword  of the Reagan era, added up to the systematic dismantling of the core of  American industry. This was done in the interests of "shareholder value," as  well, of course, as the bounteous short-term returns offered by the merger,  acquisition, and junk-bond mania of those years. Did the rise of a speculative  economy of virtual wealth and the fall of an economy that had once employed  millions productively at decent wages disturb the political equanimity of  American public life? Barely. 
When the financial regulatory apparatus of the New Deal was weakened, piece  by piece, or simply eliminated by a triumphant conservatism, the economy began  to re-experience the cycles of bubble and bust so familiar to previous  generations of Americans. In 1987, the stock market briefly collapsed. Then,  during the late 1980s, a large-scale savings and loan bailout was accompanied by  the rescue of banks caught short holding shaky Latin American debt. Not long  after that came the savaging of the "Asian tiger" economies by Thomas Friedman's  "electronic herd" of speculators, and the government-arranged bailout of that  period's biggest hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management. 
Before the country could catch its breath, matters got really serious with  the popping of the dot.com bubble, Enronization, and finally, of course, our  current catastrophe. Through all of this -- until now -- the political fallout  was virtually nil. Sarbanes-Oxely, the act passed by Congress in 2002 in  response to an avalanche of Wall Street and corporate scandals that began with  Enron, was a remarkably tepid piece of reformist legislation, given the scale of  the debauch; yet, within moments of its passage, howls of protest could be heard  from our offended friends on the Street, grievous complaints treated with all  due seriousness by the media, somehow still infatuated with Wall Street's  rain-makers. 
The Return of the Repressed 
No longer. There is a new agenda in America and it calls for re-regulation,  recovery, and retribution. It is enough to make one gasp in disbelief, but  nowadays there is practically universal agreement that the financial sector must  be more or less rigorously reined in and regulated. (Hedge fund managers and  some other hold-outs demur, of course.) Yet mere weeks ago, "government  regulation" was still a phrase to be avoided like the plague, ranking right up  there with "liberal" in the vocabulary of political obloquy. 
It's hard not to be reminded of just how quickly the political chemistry of  the country changed at the end of the 1920s. The presiding figure who had loomed  over that decade was Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon -- then considered  the greatest Treasury secretary since Hamilton. In 1929, his insane faith in the  free market led him to suggest to President Herbert Hoover that the way out of  the Depression was to do nothing, except "liquidate stocks, liquidate labor,  liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate." That thought earned him the enmity  of a once admiring country. So, too, laissez-faire has suddenly become  much too French for Americans who, but moments ago, treated it like the Holy  Grail. We are all regulators today. 
Of course, the devil, as every politician on television now makes sure to  say, will lie in the details of just what re-regulation consists of. If all it  involves is transparency, that won't be nearly enough. After all, that is  precisely what Sarbanes-Oxley promised when it required financial institutions  to make full disclosure of their activities. When it comes to circumventing the  rules of information sharing so as to leave the insiders in the know and the  rest of us out in the cold, where there's a will, there will always be a way.  The new regulatory regime must have powers that extend beyond umpiring. New  rules need to be invented whose purpose is as much to assure economic recovery  and equity as it is to police the borders of illegality. 
Indeed, popular anger fueling the regulatory crusade now seems to be coupled  with a deep-running fear of a coming depression and an urge to reverse course.  This, too, is symptomatic of a shift in the axis of political debate, in the  zeitgeist, if you will. 
The meltdown of the financial system has called into question American  economic behavior over the last generation. Wall Street has come to stand for a  paper economy that produces nothing useful, nothing tangible the way it once  did. It has frittered away resources on embarrassingly grotesque forms of  conspicuous consumption and patently non-productive forms of investment. It has  left the real economy underdeveloped, its infrastructure rotting away in plain  sight, its wealth fractured by unprecedented inequalities, dependent on sweated  labor, and its industries, across a broad spectrum, technologically second-rate.  It has left the country lost in a sea of debt and headed for an abyss of  unemployment, bankruptcy, and evictions. Somehow regulation -- although not all  by itself -- must address this, or so, for the first time in a long while, large  numbers of Americans hope and desire. 
People are now looking to the government -- that ogre of the dying old order  -- as the only power resourceful and strong enough to direct the flow of capital  where it's needed rather than where the discredited overlords of the financial  system think may be most profitable. Conservatives, especially those who rightly  balk at the mega-bailout now in the works as unfair to the American taxpayer,  decry what they call financial socialism. But what then? 
The Meaning of Retribution 
As it did in 1929, the free market has failed beyond tolerance. Overwhelming  popular sentiment (which each new poll registers with added vehemence) may,  sooner or later, bring not only a full recognition of just how wrong-headed the  country has been for how long, but how much in need it is of fresh institutions.  New forms of public authority, closely overseen by the mechanisms of democracy  rather than turned over to some autocrat on leave from his day job as an  investment banker, might have a chance of doing what was once unthinkable:  de-sanctifying private property and compelling it to perform in the general  interest when its private misuse has placed us all in peril. The New Deal  ventured in that direction. We need to venture further. 
Here's a first principle: Refuse to reward those institutions that have done  us no service. If that entails their liquidation (to borrow a word from Andrew  Mellon), so be it. The world won't end, only the world as they have known it.  
Let's use what's left of their grossly inflated assets to re-start the  engines of real economic development. Compel investment in the  re-industrialization of the country along lines that reward labor not  parasitism, end the reign of the sweatshop, rescue the country from  environmental suicide, revise the division of wealth and income so we can all  live free of the indecencies of lavish piggery, and insist that social  responsibility takes precedence over the bottom line. 
Many will seek retribution as well, just as Americans used to do in the  decades before the Great Depression. How could they not? That's what happens  when simple rage turns into moral outrage, when people are finally called to  account for the damage they've done. The emotion fuels a chemical reaction even  now at work in our cultural innards. It may prove the catalyst for an  intellectual and emotional explosion that someday will add up to a genuine break  with the past. It did so back in 1929. 
However justifiable, cutting CEOs loose from the life-support systems they've  used to drain corporate treasuries for decades is small potatoes. Do it, but  let's hope the instinct for retribution will be turned to better purposes -- to,  in fact, reintroducing into our political life and our economic behavior an  ethos of social solidarity. Let's see where that might take us. We could do much  worse. 
Copyright 2008 Steve Fraser 
Steve Fraser is the co-director of the American Empire  Project at Metropolitan Books and the author, most recently, of Wall Street: America's Dream Palace (Yale University Press).

For Republicans, Anything Goes, Apparently.....

2008-09-13T22:47:00.014Z

As I've pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com many many times, the ideology of the Republican Party does not predispose it to be of value to any American actually seeking to elect public officials to effectively run the government.

If the Party believes, as it has from the days of Ronald Reagan, that government (you know, the government by-and-for-the-people established by the Liberal American Constitution) IS THE PROBLEM, why would any citizen actually vote for a Republican, who is almost assuredly going to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The government fails because they want it to fail in order to prove their point.....

Is their incompetence accidental? Or do they really believe that the only function of government is to act as a conduit to move public monies into the profit margins of large corporations.

I say it is the latter. The perception of incompetence stems directly from the fact that Republican ideology does not believe government should be the stewards of the American People, seeing to it that the laws of the land are obeyed, the environment is protected, the people are protected from predatory business practices and that the more intangible qualities associated with the common good, but not necessarily attainable by the profit motive are attended to.

There is plenty evidence of this over the last eight years...... here is merely another example recently editorialized in the New York Times.......

You will notice that the Repubican team of candidates in this Presidential election cycle seldom speak of George W. Bush or his performance in the course of his two terms in office.....

There is very good reason for that..... Think for yourself if you really want to vote for Republicans.

Here's the Article:

September 12, 2008
New York Times Editorial

Anything Goes, Apparently

It seemed inevitable that bad things would happen when President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney packed the top posts at the Department of the Interior with lobbyists who had spent their careers representing the very industries they were now being asked to regulate. But it was left to Earl Devaney, the department’s inspector general — and the busiest gumshoe inside the federal bureaucracy — to demonstrate just how bad things could be.

In three extraordinary reports delivered to Congress this week, Mr. Devaney found that officials at the Minerals Management Service — the division responsible for granting offshore oil leases and collecting royalties — accepted gifts, steered contracts to favored clients and engaged in drugs and sex with oil company employees as part of what he described as a broader “culture of substance abuse and promiscuity.”

At the center of the scandal is the royalty-in-kind program, under which the service takes delivery of oil and gas in lieu of cash payments from energy companies, then sells it to refiners. The program is vulnerable to manipulation at either end of the transaction, by overvaluing the oil and gas when it is received or undervaluing it when it is sold.

The program obviously needs a complete overhaul. It has already been the subject of multiple investigations — by Mr. Devaney; Dirk Kempthorne, the interior secretary; the Justice Department; and Congress — for mismanagement and conflicts of interest. In an earlier report in 2007, Mr. Devaney found that the agency had failed — through negligence and possible ethical lapses — to collect billions of dollars in royalties from oil companies for leases in the Gulf of Mexico.

His new reports add more shameful details, including allegations that agency employees accepted gratuities and other favors — meals, ski trips, sports tickets and golf outings with industry representatives — “with prodigious frequency.”

Mr. Kempthorne, who has already transferred some employees and almost certainly will fire more, can take some comfort from the fact that nearly all of the misbehavior occurred before he arrived in Washington in 2006 to replace Gale Norton as interior secretary.

The White House can take no comfort at all. The people it brought to Washington to run the department had no interest in policing the oil, mining and agricultural interests they were sworn to regulate and every interest in promoting industry’s (and their own) good fortune. The most notorious of these was J. Steven Griles, a mining industry lobbyist who really ran the agency for four years and who later pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in the Jack Abramoff scandal.

The fruit of these terrible appointments was aptly described by Mr. Devaney two years ago when he appeared before a House subcommittee. “Short of a crime,” he said, “anything goes at the Department of the Interior.”

It now appears that crime could be part of the mix.

Why Misgovernment Was No Accident in George W. Bush’s Washington

2008-08-07T01:15:00.006+01:00

I have pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com many times over the years that the failures of this current administration are in fact ideologically driven; deliberate based on an anti-government ideology that defaults to corporate plutocracy at every turn.

How it is that people, even people who want smaller government, vote for a political party that doesn't believe government even has a function, in fact will deliberately fail because they don't believe the government should even be providing any service like hurricane relief, social security or regulations on dangerous business practices.

If you vote for Republicans, you get the government you deserve...... corrupt and deliberately ineffective....... deliberately incompetent.

Here is a very good article on this theme:

Published on Tuesday, August 5, 2008 by TomDispatch.com
Follow This DimeWhy Misgovernment Was No Accident in George W. Bush’s Washington
by Thomas Frank

Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past, that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.

I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by the president’s friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.

How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of the president’s former domestic policy advisers or the habitual plagiarism of the president’s liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.

But the onrushing flow swamps all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrink-wrapped cash “misplaced” in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaska’s leading politicians are apparently on the take — our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and Pharisee that was Tom DeLay — or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed us into a pointless, catastrophic war.

Bad Apples All Around

So let us begin on the solid ground of these simple facts: this spectacular episode of misrule has coincided with both the political triumph of conservatism and with the rise of the Washington area to the richest rank of American metropolises. In the period I am describing, gentlemen of the right rolled through the capital like lords of creation. Every spigot was open, and every indulgence slopped out for their gleeful wallowing. All the clichés roared at full, unembarrassed volume: the wines gurgled, the T-bones roasted, the golf courses beckoned, the Learjets zoomed, the contractors’ glass buildings sprouted from the earth, and the lobbyists’ mansions grew like brick-colonial mushrooms on the hills of northern Virginia.

Democrats, for their part, have tried to explain the flood of misgovernment as part of a “culture of corruption,” a phrase at once obviously true and yet so amorphous as to be quite worthless. Republicans have an even simpler answer: government failed, they tell us, because it is the nature of government enterprises to fail. As for the great corruption cases of recent years, they cluck, each is merely a one-of-a-kind moral lapse unconnected to any particular ideology — an individual bad apple with no effect on the larger barrel.

Which leaves us to marvel helplessly at what appears to be a spectacular run of lousy luck. My, what a lot of bad apples they are growing these days!

Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system’s first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exists to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials. We Are the Government, insisted the title of a civics primer published in the earnest year of 1945. “The White House belongs to you,” its dust jacket told us. “So do all the other splendid buildings in Washington, D.C. For you are a citizen of the United States.” For you, young citizen, does the Post Office carry letters to every hamlet in the nation. For you does the Department of Agriculture research better plowing methods and the Bureau of Labor Statistics add up long columns of numbers.

The government and its vast workforce serve the people: The idea is so deep in the American grain that we can’t bring ourselves to question it, even in this disillusioned age. Republicans and Democrats may fight over how big government should be and exactly what it should do, but almost everyone shares those baseline good intentions, we believe, that devotion to the public interest.

We continue to believe this in even the most improbable circumstances. Take the worst apple of them all, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose astonishing career as a corruptionist has been unreeling in newspaper and congressional investigations since I came to Washington. Abramoff started out as a great political success story, a protégé and then a confidant of the leaders of the conservative faction of the Republican Party. But his career disintegrated on news of the inventive ways he ripped off his clients and the luxury meals and lavish trips with which he bribed legislators.

Journalistic coverage of the Abramoff affair has stuck closely to the “bad apple” thesis, always taking pains to separate the conservative movement from its onetime superstar. What Abramoff represented was “greed gone wild,” asserts the most authoritative account on the subject. He “went native,” say others. Above all, he was “sui generis,” a one-of-a-kind con man, “engaged in bizarre antics that your average Zegna-clad Washington lobbyist would never have dreamed of.”
In which case, we can all relax: Jack Abramoff’s in jail. The system worked; the bad apple has been plucked; the wild greed and the undreamed-of antics have ceased.

Misgovernment by Ideology

But the truth is almost exactly the opposite, whether we are discussing Abramoff or the wider tsunami of corruption. The truth is as obvious as a slab of sirloin and yet so obscured by decades of pettifoggery that we find it almost impossible to apprehend clearly. The truth slaps your face in every hotel lobby in town, but we still don’t get the message.

It is just this: Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington.

The correct diagnosis is the “bad apple” thesis turned upside down. There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the last few years. Hang around with grassroots conservative voters in Kansas, and in the main you will find them to be honest, hardworking people. Even our story’s worst villains can be personally virtuous. Jack Abramoff, for example, is known to his friends as a pious, polite, and generous fellow.

But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the “values” that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities — priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism. The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school.
Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.
Conservatism-in-power is a very different beast from the conservatism we meet on the streets of Wichita or the conservatism we overhear talking to itself on the pages of Free Republic. For one thing, what conservatism has done in its decades at the seat of power is fundamentally unpopular, and a large percentage of its leaders have been men of eccentric ideas. While they believe things that would get them laughed out of the American Sociological Association, that only makes them more typical of the movement. And for all their peculiarity, these people — Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Newt Gingrich, and the whole troupe of activists, lobbyists, and corpora-trons who got their start back in the Reagan years — have for the last three decades been among the most powerful individuals in America. This wave of misgovernment has been brought to you by ideology, not incompetence.

Yes, today’s conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish “golf weekend”; when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns — in short, when they treat government with contempt — they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.

And, yes, there has been greed involved in the effort — a great deal of greed. Every tax cut, every cleverly engineered regulatory snafu saves industry millions and perhaps even billions of dollars, and so naturally securing those tax cuts and engineering those snafus has become a booming business here in Washington. Conservative rule has made the capital region rich, a showplace of the new plutocratic order. But this greed cannot be dismissed as some personal failing of lobbyist or congressman, some badness-of-apple that can be easily contained. Conservatism, as we know it, is a movement that is about greed, about the “virtue of selfishness” when it acts in the marketplace. In rightwing Washington, you can be a man of principle and a boodler at the same time.

The Wrecking Crew in Full Swing

One of the instructive stories We Are the Government brought before generations of schoolkids was the tale of a smiling dime whose wanderings were meant to introduce us to the government and all that it does for us: the miner who digs the ore for the dime has his “health and safety” supervised by one branch of the government; the bank in which the dime is stored enjoys the protection of a different branch, which “sees that [banks] are safe places for people to keep their money”; the dime gets paid in tax on a gasoline sale; it then lands in the pocket of a Coast Guard lieutenant, who takes it overseas and spends it on a parrot, which is “quarantined for ninety days” when the lieutenant brings it home. All of which is related with the blithest innocence, as though taxes on gasoline and quarantines on parrots were so obviously beneficial that they required little further explanation.

Clearly, a more up-to-date version is required. So let us follow the dime as it wends its way through our present-day capital. Its story, we will find, is the reverse of what it was in 1945. That old dime was all about service, about the things government could do for us. But the new dime is about profit — about the superiority of private enterprise, about the huge sums that can be squeezed out of federal operations. Instead of symbolizing good government, the dime now shows us the wrecking crew in full swing.

Our modern dime first comes to Washington as part of some good citizen’s taxes, and it leaves the U.S. Treasury in a payment to a company that has been hired to do work on the nation’s ports. Back in 1945, the government would have done the work itself, but now it uses contractors for such things. This particular contractor knows how to win a bid, but it doesn’t know how to do the work, so it subcontracts the job to another outfit. The dime follows, and it eventually makes up a worker’s salary, who incorporates it into his monthly car payment. From there it travels into the coffers of an auto industry trade association, which happens to be very upset about a rule proposed by a federal agency that would require cars to notify drivers when their tire pressure is low.

So the trade association gives the dime to a Washington consultant who specializes in fighting federal agencies, and this man launches challenge after challenge to the studies that the agency is using in the tire-pressure matter. It takes many years for the agency to make its way through the flak thrown up by this clever fellow. Meanwhile, with his well-earned dime, he buys himself a big house with nice white columns in front.

But this is only the beginning of the story. As we make our rounds of conservative Washington, we glimpse something much greater than single acts of incompetence or obstruction. We see a vast machinery built for our protection reengineered into a device for our exploitation. We behold the majestic workings of the free market itself, boring ever deeper into the tissues of the state. Ultimately, we gaze upon one of the true marvels of history: democracy buried beneath an avalanche of money.

Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, is the founding editor of The Baffler, a contributing editor at Harper’s, and, most recently, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. His WSJ columns can be read at his website. He lives, of course, in Washington D.C. and this essay has been adapted from his new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (Metropolitan Books, 2008).

From the book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank, Copyright © 2008 by Thomas Frank. Reprinted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an Imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The Torturing Company We Keep

2008-07-26T23:09:00.007+01:00

I've often pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com that torture is both morally wrong and essentially ineffective except for satisfying primative instincts for revenge and obtaining false confessions for use in propaganda.

This Republican administration has been breathtakingly stupid in its policies on the use of torture, and anybody who comes after them in government is going to have to undo considerable damage to our reputation and sensibilities.

This is, of course, a direct result of the ideological inbreeding rampant in the modern Republican Party in general. We've managed to elect (did we really?) the intellectual least common denominator of American culture, and in return the world views us as knuckle dragging villains just as bad as the thugs who attacked us.

Congratulations to "movement conservatism" for delivering us this day..... I say this so-called version of conservatism should join other failed experiments in the dust bin of history, and America should be restored to its Liberal roots.

Here is a very nice article on the issue from The Consortium:

Published on Saturday, July 26, 2008 by Consortium News
The Torturing Company We Keep
by Michael Winship

At one point during the five and a half years John McCain spent as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, he was tortured and beaten so badly he tried to kill himself.

After four days of this brutality, he gave in and agreed to make a false confession, telling lies to end the unbearable pain.

Later, he would write, “I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.”

Similar techniques were utilized in the Asian war preceding Vietnam - Korea. The Communist Chinese used these techniques to interrogate U.S. POW’s and force them to confess to things they didn’t do, such as germ warfare.

A chart of the Chinese methods, compiled in 1957 by an American sociologist, lists the methods, among them, “Sleep Deprivation,” “Semi-Starvation,” “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” “Prolonged Constraint,” and “Exposure.”

The effects are listed, too: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns,” and others.

On July 2, The New York Times reported that the chart had made a surprise return appearance, this time at Guantanamo Bay, where in 2002 it was used in a course to teach our military interrogators “Coercive Management Techniques,” to be used when interrogating detainees held there as prisoners in the “war on terror.”

In other words, we had adopted the inhumane tactics of enemies past, tactics we once were quick to call torture. Tactics created not to get at the truth but to manufacture lies that we then characterize as credible.

How can we expect this to be an effective way to extract real information from terrorists?
Since 2005, Congress has banned the use of such methods by the military but we have no way of knowing whether the CIA continues to use them.

For example, The Associated Press reported Thursday that, “CIA Director Michael Hayden banned waterboarding in 2006, but government officials have said it remains a possibility if approved by the attorney general, the CIA chief and the president.”

Such is the secrecy and deliberate obfuscation that have characterized our nation’s descent into lawlessness and duplicity, depicted brilliantly in New Yorker magazine investigative reporter Jane Mayer’s new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.

Post 9/11, she reports, “For the first time in its history, the United States sanctioned government officials to physically and psychologically torment U.S.-held detainees, making torture the official law of the land in all but name.”

The late American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., she says, told her that “the Bush administration’s extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.”

Over lunch in 2006, the year before Schlesinger died, he said, “No position taken had done more damage to the American reputation in the world — ever.”

Read all of this in light of the series of hearings on Capitol Hill over the last weeks in which members of Congress have tried to find out how in the name of protecting us from further terrorist attacks, the Bush White House has twisted or abandoned the law to allow what most of the international community recognizes as torture.

The administration remains in denial.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft told the House Judiciary Committee, “I don’t know of any acts of torture that have been committed by individuals in developing information. …
“So I would not certainly make an assumption. I would attribute the absence of an attack [since 9/11] at least in part, because there have been specific attacks that have been disrupted, to the excellent work and the dedication and commitment of people whose lives are dedicated to defending the country. Interrogators have used enhanced interrogation techniques but they haven’t used torture.”

Grim hairsplitting. This week, as the result of a Freedom of Information Act suit, the ACLU received a heavily redacted copy of an infamous August 2, 2002, memo, signed by then-head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee and written with his subordinate, the equally infamous John Yoo.

“An individual must have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering,” it reads. “The absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture… We have further found that if a defendant acts with the good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering, he has not acted with specific intent.”

Jameel Jaffer, head of the ACLU’s national security project, told Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent, “Imagine that in an ordinary criminal prosecution a bank robber tortures a bank manager to get the combination to a vault. He argues that the torture was not to inflict pain, but to get the combination. Every torturer has a reason other than to cause pain. If you’re going to let people off the hook for an intention other than to cause pain, you’re not going to be able to prosecute anyone for torture.”

Deborah Pearlstein, a constitutional scholar and human rights lawyer who has spent time at Guantanamo monitoring conditions there, testified to Congress that, “As of 2006, there had been more than 330 cases in which U.S. military and civilian personnel have, incredibly, alleged to have abused or killed detainees. This figure is based almost entirely on the U.S. government’s own documentation.

“These cases involved more than 600 U.S. personnel and more than 460 detainees held at U.S. facilities throughout Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. They included some l00-plus detainees who died in U.S. custody, including 34 whose deaths the Defense Department reports as homicides. At least eight of these detainees were, by any definition of the term, tortured to death.”

Pearlstein cited a recent British study that discovered that our detainee policies had led to Britain’s withdrawal from joint, covert counterterrorism operations with the CIA “because the U.S. failed to offer adequate assurances against inhumane treatment.”

The House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs has issued a report stating the United States can’t be trusted to tell the truth about how it interrogates detainees.
“Given the clear differences in definition,” the report concludes, “the UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the Government does not rely on such assurances in the future.”

On Monday, the first American war crimes trial since World War II opened at Guantanamo, the United States presenting its case against Salim Ahmed Hamdan before a jury of U.S. military officers.

Hamdan, who at the time of 9/11 was Osama bin Laden’s driver, is charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism. Two surface-to-air missiles were found in a car he was driving - he says it was a borrowed vehicle and that he had no idea what was in the trunk.

The judge has thrown out confessions Hamdan made in Afghanistan after his capture.
“The interests of justice are not served by admitting these statements,” the judge said, “because of the highly coercive environments and conditions under which they were made.” Hamdan was bound for long periods of time, with a bag over his head.

You will know us by the company we keep. The burners of witches and the medieval masters of thumbscrews and Iron Maidens, the interrogators of the Spanish Inquisition, the North Vietnamese soldiers who beat John McCain and his fellow American prisoners of war into false confessions.

We have joined their ranks.

In the almost seven years since 9/11, we have countered terror not only with vigilance and war but fear, imprisonment without due process and yes, torture.
Torture is no more about learning the truth than rape is about sex. Both are about the violent abuse of power.

Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program, Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at http:www.pbs.org/moyers.

Secular Rule Benefits the Faithful, Too

2008-07-11T01:05:00.006+01:00

I've often pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com that in many ways secular values for governance is quite in tune with the teachings of Jesus Christ.

While the Mainstream Media, the Republican Party and the Nation has been under the delusion that being "Christian" somehow mandates Theocratic authoritarian governance, the truth is quite the opposite.

While there are many problems with the notion of Theocracy for a Liberal Democracy like America, our Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Dominionist Theocrats that form the extreme-right Republican "base" are in fact most un-Christian in indeological approach to government...... it is a manifest and insidious form of bigotry and intolerance they practice, and which they want to enshrine in law...... they want a particular type of christianity to prevail over all the other Christianities...... they want to succeed by law and governmental domination where they have failed in religious attraction.

These authoritarian Theocrats have dove-tailed well with the corporate authoritarians of the Republican Party to the degree that the modern Republican political ideology would culminate in a Corporate Plutocracy with heavy Theological overtones.

This is un-American and un-Christian...... the point is that the notion of Secular governance is a fruit of, rather than the anthithesis of Christianity.

Interestingly, most of the historic social advances in American society and government have been advocated by, and sometimes solely instigated by the "other" non-Republican forms of Christianity..... you know..... the real ones.

But think about it...... how one practice the Chritian value of tolerance and love for your neighbor....... all the varieties of Christianity, all the other religions and the non-religious, even atheistic citizens, unless the government itself establishes no laws regarding the impostion of a particular religion, or imposing on the individual's practice of religion? Why wouldn't secular government be accepted as a Christian-advocated value?

Here is an interesting article discussing that:

Secular Rule Benefits the Faithful, Too
by James Carroll

Published on Monday, July 7, 2008 by The Boston Globe

Last week, Barack Obama made front-page news by announcing he would expand so-called faith-based initiatives, channeling federal money into social services through religiously affiliated institutions. The move was seen as a wily appeal to conservative Christians. Liberals were skeptical. Under President Bush, “faith-based” is a fig-leaf for the naked removal of government from its role as social service provider. Bush has crassly exploited religion for partisan political purposes, even while drafting religion into the Republican war against “big government.” Was this Obama’s push-back?

A former community organizer, the Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate declared that struggles against poverty and disease require “all hands on deck,” as if acknowledging the limits of government. He may not be old enough to have enlisted in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, but he surely knows that religiously affiliated institutions were one of its fronts. As anyone who remembers, say, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, knows, “faith-based” can be code as much for progressive social change as for conservative reaction. Many of Obama’s predecessor community organizers were paid through congregations with grants from Johnson’s Great Society.

But the discussion of faith-based initiatives suggests that Obama’s religion problem goes deeper, even, than rumors about his being Muslim or the Jeremiah Wright controversy. The social liberalism that defines much of the Democratic Party, and, apparently, Obama, upholds an ideal of tolerance that transcends religious identity. It refuses to brand the irreligious, or even the antireligious, as somehow less human than those who worship God. Indeed, liberalism regards the openly secular character of the political realm to be an essential note of democracy — not a necessary evil, but a positive good. “Secular” is not a pejorative. Its tolerance tolerates even religious conservatives who are intolerant.

Such tolerance is a political virtue, but it can be a deeply religious virtue as well. Religion is mostly discussed, in the US political context, as if the main argument is between believers and nonbelievers. But the most important disagreement is between religious people who value the secular character of American politics and religious people who regard it as impious. The Republicans have benefited from this dispute because Democrats who are religious have failed to defend the liberal ideal of public religious neutrality as necessary not only for politics, but for authentic religion. It is not only atheists who need to be protected from the intrusions of a faith-defined government. So do the faithful.

The much-celebrated freedom that is the ground of the American consensus is, above all, freedom of mind and heart; freedom to think and believe as one chooses; freedom of conscience. Without that, there is no genuine democracy. But, more to our point, without that, there is no genuine religion. The only possible guarantor of such freedom, as the Founders understood, is a magistrate who acts with absolute religious neutrality. Religious people, that is, need the separation of church and state as much as atheists do. That separation, in fact, is why religion thrives in America.

But in recent years, as US politics was yoked to brands of conservative religion that wanted to blur the line between church and state, those religious believers for whom the secularity of liberal democracy is a value have been mute. In the public sphere, questions of religion have been treated as the province of the right wing, presided over by “values voters.” Thus “faith-based initiatives” have been put forward — and opposed — as if church basements have not been incubators of progressive social reform for generations. But religious liberals have feared that to make the argument for the expressly religious value of secularity in a democratic society is to offend nonreligious voters by even speaking of religion, and religious voters by affirming secularity. Lose, lose.

Obama seems ready to offend. He does not shy from the label “liberal.” He talks openly of religion’s meaning in his life. He has credentials as one who has long embraced faith-based social activism, even while affirming government’s central role as provider of services. Whether he will convincingly recast the shallow discussion of religion and politics that has defined the last American generation remains to be seen. But in this, as in much else, we can only wish him well.

Arte y pico

2008-07-02T19:38:00.008+01:00

i've never won a blog award before for anything...... thank you Utah Savage for awarding me this prestigious award, and congratulations to the other awardees.......this will give me practice in following instructions......

the rules:

1) pick five (5) blogs that you consider deserve this award for their creativity, design, interesting material, and also for contributing to the blogging community, no matter what language.
2) each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone.
3) each award winner has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her or him the award itself.
4) award-winner and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of “Arte y Pico” blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award which is here: Arte y Pico.

i bestow the award on the following blogs:

1) Dancing With Daisy (Daisy is very nice, posts nice things and very nice photographs)

2) texas oasis (Blueberry's Blog is oddly mesmerizing)

3) Saoirse Daily (Excellent Pictures...... always good pictures and she writes well too)

4) Zenography (Just Check It Out.... you'll see what i mean)

5) Blue Gal (Is my favorite Liberal Quaker..... big contributor on the political scene)

6) After the Bridge (Sherry does Poetry in Pittsburgh and has a very high quality blog......)

i have a lot of other favorites too deserving the award, however i deliberately stayed away from the Blogs that had already received one or more Arte y Pico's...... didn't want to get too incestuous...... maybe point out a new one or two that people didn't know about......

The Imperialist Right Threatens Obama on Iraq

2008-06-22T22:57:00.006+01:00

As I have pointed out many times to my friends at Lucianne.com, this Republican administration represents the zenith of "movement conservativism", which is essentially a rightist movement. They have been around for a long time, and actually are becoming quite predictable.

You can see from this article in the Huffington Post just how predictable they have become, as the author identifies exactly the tactic that Republicans will use against Barack Obama in the Fall.

I think Americans are getting to smart for this simple tactic...... plus, if they check their history, they will find it is essentially the same move made against Democrats after the bipartisan debacle of Vietnam...... which, like the Iraq War, was primarily a failure of strategic policy rather than a military failure.

Published on Friday, June 20, 2008 by The Huffington Post
The Imperialist Right Threatens Obama on Iraq
by Gareth Porter

Robert Kaplan is a throw-back to the late nineteenth century imperialists who believed in the inherent right of the United States to dominate the lesser breeds and believed that the manly art of war is good for civilization. In Imperial Grunts he talked without a trace of irony about the glory of U.S. soldiers taking up “the white man’s burden.”

Kaplan formed a one-man cheering section in late 2002 for the Bush project to take over Iraq and use its military bases to dominate the rest of the region. He confidently assured his readers that setting up a new government would be no big problem once the United States military was in control of the country. “Our goal in Iraq,” he wrote, “should be a transitional secular dictatorship that unites the merchant classes across sectarian lines and may in time, after the rebuilding of institutions and the economy, lead to a democratic alternative.”

That political insight ranks alongside Paul Wolfowitz’s belief that Iraqi Shiites wouldn’t mind foreign troops occupying Najaf and Karbala, because he didn’t think Iraq had any holy cities like Saudi Arabia.

Kaplan is also a political attack dog for the imperialist right on Iraq. In his latest column he admonishes Obama that must change his stance on troop withdrawal from Iraq or face serious political consequences this fall. He suggests that Obama will become Iran’s candidate if he does not accept the Bush administration position that the United States must maintain a major military presence in Iraq for the indefinite future.

Here is the full text of Kaplan’s rather heavy-handed warning to the Obama campaign:

“A precipitous withdrawal may be the last chance the Iranians will have to dominate Iraq to the degree that they had thought possible in 2006. If Obama heads into the fall campaign without visiting Iraq, without acknowledging progress there, and without altering his time-table for withdrawal, the Iranians may decide to help his electoral chances by initiating a new spate of bombings.”

The real point of Kaplan’s warning is not what the Iranians will do about Obama. It is what the imperialist right will do about him. They are quite desperate to implicate Obama in the coming debacle in Iraq. They would prefer to have him share the responsibility for the existing policy. If he refuses, however, they evidently feel the need to create a new narrative which says that Obama and the Democrats are enabling Iran to snatch victory from the jaws of the defeat.

Kaplan is clearly hinting that the imperial right, which now controls the White House but McCain’s campaign as well, will tag Obama as Iran’s candidate in the fall. The further implication of this threat, of course, is that he will also be blamed for having “lost” Iraq to Iran.

The idea of linking Obama’s troop withdrawal plan to the Iranian position in Iraq makes no sense objectively, but it is the logical political response by those who led the United States into a disastrous war. By doing so, they would hope to divert public attention from the Bush administration’s central problem — the fact that its invasion of Iraq put Iranian surrogates into power in Baghdad by removing Iran’s primary enemy, Saddam Hussein, thus clearing the way for a Shiite state.

Those U.S.-sponsored elections in 2005, which were so glorified by the Bush administration and the U.S. media, made the Iranian leaders salivate. They opened the door for the Shiite political parties and paramilitary groups created by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war to get state power. The Bush administration had no choice but to play ball with the pro-Iranian Shiites in 2004 and 2005, because it desperately needed the help of their paramilitary forces to help fight off the Sunni insurgents.

Ever since then, the Bush administration and its imperialist right-wing allies have had to deny the obvious reality that the Iraqi regime we were supposedly protecting from Iran was actually a joint U.S.-Iranian condominium.

Kaplan’s scenario of Iranian-orchestrated bombings before the election is, of course, utter nonsense. Rather than trying to stoke a war between Shiites and the Americans, Iran has simply convinced its Iraqi Shiite friends, whom Iran trained and put in its payroll in the 1980s, to ensure that the Bush administration’s proposal for long-term access to Iraqi military bases is rejected.

Dick Cheney lavished praise on Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the major pro-Iranian political party, for his cooperation when he went to Baghdad in March, but leading figures in that same party are now attacking the Bush administration’s proposal for a U.S.-Iraq “framework agreement” as legitimizing U.S. occupation. So is Prime Minister al-Maliki’s own Dawa party.

Now that the beneficiaries of the U.S. invasion and overthrow of Saddm are joining with Iran to reject the Bush administration’s military demands, those who led this country into war must know that they stand to be blamed for having sacrificed all those American lives for the political benefit of Iran.

The political ploy of shifting blame for the failure of an imperial venture to the other party is an old story in American politics. Remember Henry Kissinger’s masterful 1975 set-up of the stab in the back by the Democratic Congress, even as the old Saigon regime was already fleeing in panic? Kaplan is using the threat of yet another round of blame-shifting to blackmail Obama on Iraq.

This is only the first indication of just how ugly this campaign is likely to get on Iraq.

Dr. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005). He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.

Kucinich Introduces 35 Articles of Impeachment

2008-06-16T00:15:00.002+01:00

As I've related to my friends at Lucianne.com for many years, this Republican administration has proceeded in ways that are in fact quite worthy of impeachment.

I suppose it is only out of Democratic Party niceness that impeachment hearings are not in fact held now, in Dubya's last year in the Presidential Office.

Representative Dennis Kucinich has jotted down what articles of impeachment might look like if they were not "off the table" for the time being. I think it is worth a quick look.

There are only 35..... Here is a URL for the complete write-up on each of the 35 articles of impeachment.

Article I Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq.

Article II Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression.

Article III Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed eapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War.

Article IV Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States.

Article V Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression.

Article VI Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of HJRes114.

Article VII Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War.

Article VIII Invading Iraq, A Sovereign Nation, in Violation of the UN Charter.

Article IX Failing to Provide Troops With Body Armor and Vehicle Armor.

Article X Falsifying Accounts of US Troop Deaths and Injuries for Political Purposes.

Article XI Establishment of Permanent U.S. Military Bases in Iraq.

Article XII Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of That Nation's Natural Resources.

Article XIII Creating a Secret Task Force to Develop Energy and Military Policies With Respect to Iraq and Other Countries.

Article XIV Misprision of a Felony, Misuse and Exposure of Classified Information And Obstruction of Justice in the Matter of Valerie Plame Wilson, Clandestine Agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Article XV Providing Immunity from Prosecution for Criminal Contractors in Iraq.

Article XVI Reckless Misspending and Waste of U.S. Tax Dollars in Connection With Iraq and US Contractors.

Article XVII Illegal Detention: Detaining Indefinitely And Without Charge Persons Both U.S. Citizens and Foreign Captives.

Article XVIII Torture: Secretly Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official Policy.

Article XIX Rendition: Kidnapping People and Taking Them Against Their Will to "Black Sites" Located in Other Nations, Including Nations Known to Practice Torture.

Article XX Imprisoning Children.

Article XXI Misleading Congress and the American People About Threats from Iran, and Supporting Terrorist Organizations Within Iran, With the Goal of Overthrowing the Iranian Government.

Article XXII Creating Secret Laws.

Article XXIII Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

Article XXIV Spying on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment.

Article XXV Directing Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens.

Article XXVI Announcing the Intent to Violate Laws with Signing Statements.

Article XXVII Failing to Comply with Congressional Subpoenas and Instructing Former Employees Not to Comply.

Article XXVIII Tampering with Free and Fair Elections, Corruption of the Administration of Justice.

Article XXIX Conspiracy to Violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Article XXX Misleading Congress and the American People in an Attempt to Destroy Medicare.

Article XXXI Katrina: Failure to Plan for the Predicted Disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Failure to Respond to a Civil Emergency.

Article XXXII Misleading Congress and the American People, Systematically Undermining Efforts to Address Global Climate Change.

Article XXXIII Repeatedly Ignored and Failed to Respond to High Level Intelligence Warnings of Planned Terrorist Attacks in the US, Prior to 911.

Article XXXIV Obstruction of the Investigation into the Attacks of September 11, 2001.

Article XXXV Endangering the Health of 911 First Responders.

Bush Aide Scores White House War Propaganda

2008-05-30T00:13:00.009Z

As time unfolds, more and more of what I've been telling my friends at Lucianne.com has come true...... more and more evidence of deliberate deception and incompetence from this Republican administration.

Now it is in a new book by none other than Scott McClellan, a former Press Secretary in Dubya's administration. He is not the first Bush "insider" to come clean, however it is very very difficult to doubt his integrity...... though that is what this Republican adminstration attempted, quite reflexively, to do......

"Oh, that just doesn't sound like Scott!" they whined!

That is the core of modern Republicanism, however...... it is disloyalty, not dishonesty that is the ultimate sin.

Enough of that..... here's a very nice article about the book from The Nation:

Published on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 by The Nation
Bush Aide Scores White House War Propaganda
by John Nichols

The Bush administration employed propaganda techniques, political spin and deception to promote and then justify a war with Iraq that was unwise and unnecessary.

And a “too-deferential” national press corps allowed the president and his aides to get away with it.

Who makes this devastating, if not entirely new, charge?

The man responsible for spinning the story of the Bush presidency, former White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

In a memoir that will be published Monday, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, the veteran campaign and White House aide to George W. Bush portrays his former boss and those around him as permanent campaigners who frequently sacrificed the good of the country to achieve dubious political and policy goals.

McClellan is sharply critical of the Bush White House’s handling of definitional domestic policy challenges, particularly Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

But nowhere is the former press aide so devastating in his critique of his former boss as on the issue of how the United States was steered into the quagmire that is Iraq.

Bush, he writes, is guilty of a “failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and (of) rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”

Accusing the president of engaging in “self-deception” when it came to the facts from the Middle East, McClellan explains that Bush “and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war.”

“[I]n this regard, (Bush) was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security,” argues McClellan, who is blistering in his description of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, the president’s former national security adviser, as “too accommodating” and too concerned about protecting her own reputation to challenge strategies that she had to know were ill-advised and dangerous.

And what of the free press that is supposed to serve as a watchdog on executive excess and deceit?

“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq,” the former spokesman writes. “The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

McClellan, Bush’s traveling press secretary during the 2000 campaign and a former deputy press secretary to the president who served as White House spokesman from 2003 until 2006, is blunt and detailed in discussing administration efforts to destroy the reputation of a critic of the rush to war, former Ambassador Joe Wilson (and Wilson’s wide, outed-CIA agent Valerie Plame).

“I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood,” he writes of his defenses of key players in the scandal such as White House political czar Karl Rove and fellow White House advisers Elliot Abrams and I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby. “It would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the president effectively.”

While Bush, too, may have been deceived, McClellan explains that “the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

That lie, and the others related to the war, are the bitter legacy McClellan wrestles with in an agonizing account of the White House in which he served. That account will serve as an essential document of the Bush presidency, and of the current campaign to replace it.

Above all, however, McClellan’s book is a cautionary tale that reminds us that powerful men and the governments they guide must never be allowed to wage wars of whim.

“History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder,” he writes. “No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”

John Nichols’ new book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson hails it as a “nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the ‘heroic medicine’ that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to ‘reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.’”

Propaganda and the Media

2008-05-17T13:06:00.004Z

Propaganda. As as pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com many times, the rightist propaganda effort in America has been particularly insidious and effective.

Now we have a Republican administration that has epitomized "movement conservativism" and is nearly transparent in its efforts to systematically undermine our ability to get to the truth of almost any issue

Here is an interesting article from Joseph Galloway of the McClatchy Newspapers:

Published on Friday, May 16, 2008 by the McClatchy Newspapers
Propaganda and the Media
by Joseph L. Galloway

Once upon a time, it was widely believed that one of the greatest sins the U.S. government or its temporary political masters could commit was to turn a propaganda machine loose on the American people.

Congress viewed this so seriously that every appropriations bill passed since 1951 has contained language that says no public money “shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States” without the lawmakers’ prior approval.

The Bush administration has been caught violating the propaganda ban before, notably in 2005 in the case of radio host Armstrong Williams, who was paid to endorse President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law.

Particularly abhorrent to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which oversees compliance with the ban, is an agency’s use of “covert propaganda” or “covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties.”

This is why alarm bells should be ringing all over Washington about The New York Times’ disclosure that then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld encouraged a secret Pentagon program to care for and spoon-feed more than 50 retired senior military officers whom the administration deemed reliable friends who could be counted on “to carry our water” on the television and cable networks.
Feeding the military analysts “key and valuable information” in secret briefings by Pentagon and White House officials, the idea went, would make them the go-to guys for the networks and encourage the networks to “weed out the less reliably friendly analysts . . . .”

This 2005 memorandum, addressed to then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Larry DiRita, added: “This trusted core group will be more than willing to work closely with us because we are their bread and butter.”

Asked about the case of Col. Bill Cowan, who says he was fired as a military analyst for Fox News and cut off from the briefings for criticizing the war effort, DiRita told Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com: “I don’t know anything. I saw that in the story. I’ve heard other assertions to that effect. It was certainly not the intent.”

In a follow-up e-mail exchange between DiRita and Greenwald, Rumsfeld’s former mouthpiece - now Bank of America’s chief spokesman - elaborated on what he said he didn’t remember: “I simply don’t have any recollection of trying to restrict him (Cowan) or others from exposure to what was going on.”
DiRita added: “There are plenty of examples to the contrary - reaching out to people who specifically disagreed with us. One example I recall is Joe Galloway - a persistent critic and apparently popular with military readers. He came in and met Secretary Rumsfeld and we had other interactions.”
Now that’s a real knee-slapper: Me as a poster boy for how Rumsfeld and DiRita “reached out” to their harshest critics even as they stroked and promoted and schemed to embed the old reliables to wax enthusiastic about a war that was going from bad to worse.
Let the record show that Rumsfelds’ folks reached out to me on these few occasions:

* In early summer of 2003, half a dozen of us were invited to an off-the-record lunch with Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. The defense secretary seemed to have a poor grasp of the reality on the ground in Iraq and was still declaring that we’d do no nation-building there. He saw no insurgency, only a handful of “dead-enders”.

* In October 2005, DiRita called to invite me to travel with Rumsfeld to the Middle East and Australia. I declined because it conflicted with a long-booked graduation speech I was to give at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz. to a class of new Air Force F-16 fighter pilots that included my nephew. DiRita was stunned that I wouldn’t drop a bunch of fighter pilots to be schmoozed by his boss.

* In November 2005, DiRita invited me to a “one-on-one” lunch with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. This one I accepted. I arrived to find across the table Rumsfeld, the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace; Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Dick Cody; Joint Staff Director Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp and DiRita. We went at it hammer and tongs for an hour and a half over their conduct of the war and the errors that were costing the lives of American soldiers. As I left, I told Rumsfeld that I’d continue to point out those mistakes every week in my column.

* In April 2006, DiRita sent me an e-mail telling me that my most recent column was “silly”. That column had discussed an expensive war game the Pentagon conducted about a U.S. attack on a thinly disguised country that obviously was Iran.

A retired Marine general, Paul Van Riper, had been the commander of the “enemy” forces, and he used unconventional tactics to destroy the U.S. Navy flotilla in the Persian Gulf, leaving thousands of sailors and Marines dead. At that point, the commanders stopped the war game, reset everything and imposed new rules forbidding Van Riper from employing those tactics.

Van Riper walked out, furious, and requested an investigation. DiRita complained in his e-mail that I was silly to blame Rumsfeld for this and for covering up the investigators’ report. After all, he wrote, Rumsfeld couldn’t be expected to know retired generals several levels below him or to bear responsibility for such matters. His complaint sparked an escalating e-mail war that most reckon DiRita lost. The entire exchange was posted on the Internet and can still be found there.

So much for the Rumsfeld/DiRita outreach to their critics. They were much too busy hand-feeding horse manure to their TV generals, who in turn were feeding the same product to the American public by the cubic yard.

There’s little doubt that this program violated the laws against covert propaganda operations mounted against the American public by their own government. But in this administration, there’s no one left to enforce that law or any of the other laws the Bush operatives have been busy violating.

The real crime is that the scheme worked. The television network bosses swallowed the bait, the hook, the line and the sinker, and they have yet to answer for it.

Joseph L. Galloway, a military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers, is the co-author, with Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, of “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” a story of the first large-scale ground battle of the Vietnam War.

A New York Times report shines a light on how the military-industrial complex tries to shape broadcast news

2008-04-27T22:59:00.005Z

Many times I have pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com that Fascism is the political ideology toward which Americans should be most on guard..... it is insidious, and the modern Republican Party has already made decades of progress in moving the public psyche ever to the right..... to the degree that now we have experienced eight years of a Republican administration that is in essence the fruition of "movement conservativism" itself. Modern Republicans are FAR from being "conservatives". A true American conservative would be conservative about the Liberal tradtion and foundations of this great Nation!

If Americans wish to regain a sense of who they are, they need only return to the ideas found in foundational documents of this Nation.... America was founded on a bedrock of revolutionary concepts for Liberal governance.... the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights not only affirm the freedom and dignity of the individual, but also provides for a Liberal structure for governance that ensures that Freedom..... The current Republican administration has taken every opportunity to undermine America's Liberal Democracy and concentrate power in the Executive Branch to avoid checks and balances from the Congress and the Judiciary....... Liberalism is hated by Communists, Fascists, Theocrats and the Republican Party of the United States for that reason..... it is a revolutionary concept, yet one that does not accommodate extremist ideologues easily. Ladies and gentlemen, the political and economic ideology of the Republican Party in America is an extremist ideology that can no longer be considered part of the American tradition.

This Nation has moved to far to the right, and it is time to take it back..... make America America again.....

One of the things that has to change is the notion that the American Government can simply propagandize and manipulate the American People.

Here is an article concerning that very issue:

TV Military ‘Analysts’ Are Part of What Ike Warned Against

by Nancy Grape

Maine Sunday Telegram, Sunday, 27 April 2008

The faces dominating the front page of The New York Times last Sunday were male, strong-jawed and familiar. Indeed, that was the point.

They were the faces of nine retired military officers (there were more inside the paper) who appear regularly on network and cable television news to give viewers informed, independent assessments of the war in Iraq.

At least that was the idea.

What viewers have been getting, the Times revealed, is something quite different. The paper reported convincingly that some retired officers appearing as “military analysts” have been pushing Pentagon propaganda in return for continued access to top officials and financial benefit for themselves.

According to the Times report, “Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department.

“In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated,” the report said. “Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access. A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, an enthusiastic golfer in his presidential years, left behind more than spike marks on the White House floor. He stood at a convergence in American history. He knew it. And he gave voice to a solemn warning, delivered in 1961, three days before he left office.

Eisenhower, a renowned World War II general, declared, “Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.

“In the councils of government,” he warned, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” he declared. “We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

The Times’ report on the military analysts is a tale of propaganda, hidden loyalties and financial interests. It reveals a vulnerability that reaches all the way to the survival of the United States as a country governed by the informed opinion of its people.

The newspaper’s investigation shows that in case after case, the military analysts take their cues and their information from specially prepared Pentagon briefings and trips.

A number wear more than one hat. In addition to offering their “analysis” on television, they work for pay for defense-related industries. Employers range from military equipment manufacturers and contractors to lobbyists and consulting firms on the hunt for defense-related business.

The report is important for the glimpse it provides into how powerful forces help keep us enmeshed in Iraq.

The 17 military analysts pictured include such oft-seen faces as retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey on NBC News, retired Brig. Gen. James Marks on CNN and retired Lt. Gen. Tom McNerney on Fox. Even so, television news audiences haven’t heard much about the report. Up it popped on Sunday morning, and by Sunday night, it was smothered like a Philadelphia cheese steak in rehashed political news.

“This article would have come sooner, but it took us two years to wrestle 8,000 pages of documents out of the Defense Department that described its interactions with network military analysts,” reporter David Barstow explained on the Times’ Web site. “We pushed as hard as we could, but the Defense Department refused to produce many categories of documents in response to our requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act.”

Ultimately the Times went to court. Yet even then, Barstow said, “the Pentagon failed to meet several court-ordered deadlines.” Finally, the judge had enough. He threatened the Defense Department with sanctions if it continued to defy court deadlines. The stalling stopped.

The television networks and cable fiefdoms involved probably would prefer this story follow another military tradition and just fade away. Like it or not, however, the report on the Pentagon puppets leaves an indelible mark.

Eisenhower, president and general, would see it and heed it. So should we.

Nancy Grape comments on state and national issues for the Maine Sunday Telegram

Top Bush Aides Pushed for Guantanamo Torture

2008-04-21T10:04:00.008Z

As I've pointed out to my friends many times at Lucianne.com, this Republican administrations policies with respect to the use of torture is particularly indicative of the rightist influence the Republican Party has become in America.

U.S. Army Field Manual 34-52:
"The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind is prohibited by law and is neither authorized nor. condoned by the US Government. Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."

In the following article we see how political appointees of this Republican administration actually circumvented traditional and conventional thinking from military experts to establish the legal framework which violated the Constitution and International Law, embarrassed America in the eyes of the world, and undermined our sense of who we are as a Nation.

This should be an item of profound reflection. Not only did this Republican administration proceed with the matters at hand in an immoral, illegal and unethical way, it demonstrated its typical disregard for practical expertise in the matter of torture. The plain fact is despite the claims of TV programs like "24" and the like, torture never produces reliable information. Torture is a tool for dictatorships and authoritarian regimes (not to mention common criminals) to effect population control through violence, coercion and intimidation. Long a tool to extract false confessions and demonstrate regime or cult dominance over the weak, the use of torture for this Republican administration was all about demonstrating to the American People how "tough" they were on terrorists..... it is a tool of political propaganda. There is no other strategic or tactical utility.

Here's a very fine article on the mechanics of how this happened:

Published on Saturday, April 19, 2008 by The Guardian Top Bush Aides Pushed for Guantanamo Torture

Senior Officials Bypassed Army Chief to Introduce Interrogation Methods

By Richard Norton-Taylor

America’s most senior general was “hoodwinked” by top Bush administration officials determined to push through aggressive interrogation techniques of terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, leading to the US military abandoning its age-old ban on the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners, the Guardian reveals today....

In his new book, Torture Team, Philippe Sands QC, professor of law at University College London, reveals that: · Senior Bush administration figures pushed through previously outlawed measures with the aid of inexperienced military officials at Guantanamo.

· Myers believes he was a victim of “intrigue” by top lawyers at the department of justice, the office of vice-president Dick Cheney, and at Donald Feldspars defence department.

· The Guantanamo lawyers charged with devising interrogation techniques were inspired by the exploits of Jack Bauer in the American TV series 24.

· Myers wrongly believed interrogation techniques had been taken from the army’s field manual.

The lawyers, all political appointees, who pushed through the interrogation techniques were Alberto Gonzales, David Addington and William Haynes. Also involved were Doug Feith, Rumsfeld’s under-secretary for policy, and Jay Bybee and John Yoo, two assistant attorney generals.....

Myers mistakenly believed that new techniques recommended by Haynes and authorized by Rumsfeld in December 2002 for use by the military at Guantanamo had been taken from the US army field manual. They included hooding, sensory deprivation, and physical and mental abuse.

“As we worked through the list of techniques, Myers became increasingly hesitant and troubled,” writes Sands. “Haynes and Rumsfeld had been able to run rings around him.”

Myers and his closest advisers were cut out of the decision-making process. He did not know that Bush administration officials were changing the rules allowing interrogation techniques, including the use of dogs, amounting to torture.

“We never authorized torture, we just didn’t, not what we would do,” Myers said. Sands comments: “He really had taken his eye off the ball … he didn’t ask too many questions … and kept his distance from the decision-making process.”

Larry Wilkerson, a former army officer and chief of staff to Colin Powell, US secretary of state at the time, told the Guardian: “I do know that Rumsfeld had neutralized the chairman [Myers] in many significant ways.

“The secretary did this by cutting [Myers] out of important communications, meetings, deliberations and plans.

“At the end of the day, however, Dick Myers was not a very powerful chairman in the first place, one reason Rumsfeld recommended him for the job”.

He added: “Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and - at the apex - Addington, should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court.”

Talking about Creeping Fascism: Lessons From the Past

2008-04-19T01:37:00.005Z

As I've pointed out to my friends at Lucianne.com many times, the Republican Party has become a totally rightist phenomenon in American politics.
Here is a great article by Ray McGovern on the topic of fascism, and why Americans should be concerned about the rightist-drift in this Nation:
Quote
Creeping Fascism: Lessons From the Past
by Ray McGovern
Link
“There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater…Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later….”
These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as “Geschichte eines Deutschen” (The Story of a German). The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages-in English as “Defying Hitler.”
I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and emailed to ask me to “write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America…this is almost unbelievable.”
More about Haffner below. Let’s set the stage first by recapping some of what has been going on that may have resonance for readers familiar with the Nazi ascendancy, noting how “odd” it is that the frontal attack on our Constitutional rights is met with such “calm, superior indifference.”
Goebbels Would be Proud
It has been two years since top New York Times officials decided to let the rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. The Times had learned of this well before the election in 2004 and acquiesced to White House entreaties to suppress the damaging information.
In late fall 2005 when Times correspondent James Risen’s book, “State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” revealing the warrantless eavesdropping was being printed, Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer. It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen’s book on the street, with Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs’ trademark criterion: All The News That’s Fit To Print. (The Times ‘ own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, branded the newspaper’s explanation for the long delay in publishing this story “woefully inadequate.”)
When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with the president on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times. The truth would out; part of it, at least.
Glitches
There were some embarrassing glitches. For example, unfortunately for National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the White House neglected to tell him that the cat would soon be out of the bag. So on Dec. 6, Alexander spoke from the old talking points in assuring visiting House intelligence committee member Rush Holt ( D-N.J.) that the NSA did not eavesdrop on Americans without a court order.
Still possessed of the quaint notion that generals and other senior officials are not supposed to lie to congressional oversight committees, Holt wrote a blistering letter to Gen. Alexander after the Times, on Dec. 16, front-paged a feature by Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.” But House Intelligence Committee chair Pete Hoekstra (R-Michigan) apparently found Holt’s scruples benighted; Hoekstra did nothing to hold Alexander accountable for misleading Holt, his most experienced committee member, who had served as an intelligence analyst at the State Department.
What followed struck me as bizarre. The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature article, the president of the United States publicly admitted to a demonstrably impeachable offense. Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Committee on the Judiciary.
Bush Takes Frontal Approach
Far from expressing regret, the president bragged about having authorized the surveillance “more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks,” and said he would continue to do so. The president also said:
“Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it.”
On Dec. 19, 2005 then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-NSA Director Michael Hayden held a press conference to answer questions about the as yet unnamed surveillance program. Gonzales was asked why the White House decided to flout FISA rather than attempt to amend it, choosing instead a “backdoor approach.” He answered:
“We have had discussions with Congress…as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible.”
Hmm. Impossible? It strains credulity that a program of the limited scope described would be unable to win ready approval from a Congress that had just passed the “Patriot Act” in record time. James Risen has made the following quip about the prevailing mood: “In October 2001 you could have set up guillotines on the public streets of America.” It was not difficult to infer [[ http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/60/19945 ]] that the surveillance program must have been of such scope and intrusiveness that, even amid highly stoked fear, it didn’t have a prayer for passage.
It turns out we didn’t know the half of it.
What To Call These Activities
“Illegal Surveillance Program” didn’t seem quite right for White House purposes, and the PR machine was unusually slow off the blocks. It took six weeks to settle on “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” with FOX News leading the way followed by the president himself. This labeling would dovetail nicely with the president’s rhetoric on Dec. 17:
“In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al-Qaeda and related terrorist organizations…. The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September 11 helped address that problem…”[emphasis added]
And Gen. Michael Hayden, who headed NSA from 1999 to 2005, was of course on the same page, dissembling as convincingly as the president. At his May 2006 confirmation hearings to become CIA director, he told of his soul-searching when, as director of NSA, he was asked to eavesdrop on Americans without a court warrant. “I had to make this personal decision in early Oct. 2001,” said Hayden, “it was a personal decision…I could not not do this.”
Like so much else, it was all because of 9/11. But we now know…
It Started Seven Months Before 9/11
How many times have you heard it? The mantra “after 9/11 everything changed” has given absolution to all manner of sin.
We are understandably reluctant to believe the worst of our leaders, and this tends to make us negligent. After all, we learned from former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that drastic changes were made in U.S. foreign policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian issue and toward Iraq at the first National Security Council meeting on Jan. 30, 2001. Should we not have anticipated far-reaching changes at home, as well?
Reporting by the Rocky Mountain News and court documents and testimony in a case involving Qwest Communications strongly suggest that in February 2001 Hayden saluted smartly when the Bush administration instructed NSA to suborn AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest to spy illegally on you, me, and other Americans. Bear in mind that this would have had nothing to do with terrorism, which did not really appear on the new administration’s radar screen until a week before 9/11, despite the pleading of Clinton aides that the issue deserved extremely high priority.
So this until-recently-unknown pre-9/11 facet of the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was not related to Osama bin Laden or to whomever he and his associates might be speaking. It had to do with us. We know that the Democrats who were briefed on the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (the one with the longest tenure on the House Intelligence Committee), Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA) and former and current chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham (D-FL) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WVA). May one interpret their lack of public comment on the news that the snooping began well before 9/11 as a sign they were co-opted and then sworn to secrecy?
It is an important question. Were the appropriate leaders in Congress informed that within days of George W. Bush’s first inauguration the NSA electronic vacuum cleaner began to suck up information on you and me, despite the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment?
Are They All Complicit?
And are Democratic leaders about to cave in and grant retroactive immunity to those telecommunications corporations-AT&T and Verizon-who made millions by winking at the law and the Constitution? (Qwest, to it’s credit, heeded the advice of its general counsel who said that what NSA wanted done was clearly illegal.)
What’s going on here? Have congressional leaders no sense for what is at stake? Lately the adjective “spineless” has come into vogue in describing congressional Democrats-no offense to invertebrates.
Nazis and Those Who Enable Them
You don’t have to be a Nazi. You can just be, well, a sheep.
In his journal Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the “sheepish submissiveness” with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933. Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances “saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened, and one’s desk might be broken into.”
But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. Do you see any contemporary parallels here?
In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the “cowardly treachery” of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power. Haffner adds:
“It is in the final analysis only that betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight.”
The Social Democratic leaders betrayed their followers-”for the most part decent, unimportant individuals.” In May they sang the Nazi anthem; in June the Social Democratic party was dissolved.
The middle-class Catholic party Zentrum folded in less than a month, and in the end supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that “legalized” Hitler’s dictatorship.
As for the right-wing conservatives and German nationalists: “Oh God,” writes Haffner, “what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward…. They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews…. They were not even bothered when their own party was banned and their own members arrested.” In sum:
“There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion. In March 1933 millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders…At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown…. The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.”
This is what can happen when virtually all are intimidated.
Our Founding Fathers were not oblivious to this; thus, James Madison:
“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations…. The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”
We cannot say we weren’t warned.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. A former Army officer and CIA analyst, he worked in Germany for five years; he is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
This article appeared first on Consortiumnews.com.