Thomas Nephew thinks out loud about the basis for impeachment. In light of the Bush team — with the Democratic Congress’s help — retroactively making some of its lawbreaking officially legal, what should the focus of impeachment proceedings be? Nephew concludes that it should be the fraudulent case for this war — and the next one.
I like this guy a lot. He does a good job of gathering the relevant facts together and presenting them in an easily digestible package.
I very much enjoyed this essay entitled The Power of (Right Wing) Myth, and its analogy between the episode of Star Trek involving a race of aliens that speak only in metaphor and the tendency of many (I won’t limit it to the right wing as the author does) to fall back to a defined set of references to 20th century history to explain, even justify, a lot of things our government has done more recently. You can see it in Bush’s bizarrely ironic comparison of the Iraq and Vietnam wars, and all the way down through the ranks of officials and commentators throwing Churchill and Imperial Japan and Hitler around, seemingly without considering them anything more than archetypes of “good” or “evil”.
I was one of the generation the author mentions, who grew up in a republican household, imprinted with the mythos of the triumphant Reagan throwing out the unmanly peanut farmer; I had a “Reagan ’84” bumper sticker next to pictures of the Transformers on my bedroom door in grade school. But why haven’t more people like me given up childish caricatures and tried to learn the real lessons of history? I mean I wouldn’t use an episode of Star Trek to justify a war…
I’ve been reading Glenn Greenwald’s A Tragic Legacy. It occasionally feels over the top, but when I take the time to go through the case Greenwald lays out (on the specific nature of Bush’s decision-making, how it was manipulated to make the Iraq war happen, and how it’s being manipulated now to make a military attack on Iran happen), it’s hard for me find any flaws in his reasoning. That makes stuff like this piece from Ray McGovern especially worrisome to me: George W. Bush: A CIA Analysis.
Among other things, it mentions speculation that the reason Rove has left the White House (and perhaps the reason Tony Snow is also leaving), is that neither one wants to stay and deal with the aftermath of the upcoming missile and bombing attacks by the US on Iranian training camps and nuclear facilities.
The more I think about it, the more I think this isn’t just paranoia on my (and the other Bush-haters’) part. I think it’s a rational reading of the evidence before us.
Let me be more specific: I believe it now is more likely than not that Cheney has won the internal White House debate over whether or not we should bomb Iran, and Bush has decided to go forward with such bombing, probably within the next six months. I also believe that doing so will be disastrous, for many of the same reasons that invading Iraq has proven to be disastrous.
So, there are a couple of tests before us: 1) Am I actually being rational in drawing this conclusion at this point? Are we at essentially the same point in the Iran-attack timeline that we were in the late summer of 2002 with respect to the Iraq invasion? And 2) Will the people in a position to oppose this horrible idea be any more effective this time around than they were in the run-up to the Iraq invasion? Will media outlets conspire to pass on the administration’s pro-war propaganda and manipulated intelligence? Will wiser heads in the foreign policy community be more vocal in their opposition, and will that opposition have any effect? Will the Democratic-controlled Congress be willing or able to restrain a president bent on launching an ill-considered war?
If you listened to the latest podcast, you know I’m in a Rovian mood right now. So I was intrigued by the following piece by Peter Wallsten in the LA Times. It makes the case that Rove’s latest attacks on Hillary might actually be intended to strengthen her with the Democratic base, in the same way that Rove advocated attacking John Kerry early in the 2004 campaign as a way of conferring front-runner status on him, as opposed to the guy they were really worried about: John Edwards. Anyway: Clinton may be a target of Rove’s reverse psychology.
In this case, Rove’s weeklong broadside against Clinton — which he is expected to repeat in multiple appearances on television talk shows today — looks suspiciously like an exercise in reverse psychology that his team employed three years ago when it was preparing for President Bush’s reelection bid.
The ploy was described by Rove lieutenant Matthew Dowd during a postmortem conference on the 2004 election at Harvard University the month after Bush defeated Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.
In the run-up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when it was not yet clear who Bush’s opponent would be that November, Rove and his aides had begun to fear that their most dangerous foe would be then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.
With his Southern base, charismatic style and populist message, Edwards, they believed, could be a real threat to Bush’s reelection.
But instead of attacking Edwards, Rove’s team opened fire at Kerry.
Their thinking went like this, Dowd explained: Democrats, in a knee-jerk reaction to GOP attacks, would rally around Kerry, whom Rove considered a comparatively weak opponent, and make him the party’s nominee. Thus Bush would be spared from confronting Edwards, the candidate Republican strategists actually feared most.
Unlike Kerry, who had been in public service for decades, Edwards was a political newcomer and lacked a long record that could be attacked. And, unlike former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who had been the front-runner but whose campaign was collapsing in Iowa, Edwards couldn’t easily be painted as “nutty.”
If that sounds implausibly convoluted, consider Dowd’s own words:
“Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters’ minds.
“So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards,” Dowd said. “And we knew that if we focused on John Kerry, Democratic primary voters would sort of coalesce” around Kerry.
“It wasn’t like we could tag [eliminate] somebody. Whomever we attacked was going to be helped,” he said.
I’ve been only half paying attention to the ongoing saga of the miners trapped in the Utah coal mine. Something about the “Little Boy” (or adult mine workers) “Trapped in a Well” (or a mine) storyline seems so clichéd, so tailor-made for shallow, breathless coverage by a growing crush of media, that I feel a personal duty to avoid the story, the same way I feel obligated to say “no” to any extended warranty while buying consumer electronics, just on general principle. Which is callous and insensitive, I realize; those miners and their families are going through a horrible ordeal, and any decent human, given half a chance, would (and should) feel powerful emotional sympathies. Which may just be another way of saying the same thing: in a context in which large corporations are mobilizing armies of bubbleheads and technicians and equipment to tap into my essential humanity for the purpose of selling soap (or whatever CNN is hawking during the commercial breaks from the mine coverage), cultivating my inner cynic becomes an act of justifiable (if regrettable) self defense.
I did have a moment when listening to NPR the other day when it occurred to me how the rescue effort has played out like a metaphorical version of the Iraq war: ill-equipped, ill-trained (if sincere) efforts in the early going (like the True Believer twenty-somethings who staffed the CPA in the early Iraq reconstruction effort); followed by people with some sense of what needed to be done, but without the required expertise to pull it off against a tight schedule (as when the initial rescue wells went astray and missed the miners’ presumed location); followed by repeated expensive-but-doomed efforts that amounted to too little, too late. And the whole time, we had the spectacle of those in power (generals and politicians in the case of Iraq, mine owner and Bush-appointed mining safety official in the case of the collapsed mine), posing for the cameras and apparently focused at least as much on maintaining a fiction that they bore no blame for the unfolding disaster as on actually living up to their obligations.
Sigh. And now the metaphor gets an extra layer, as we grapple with the sunk-cost fallacy: More are continuing to die as a result of the initial mistakes. Do we keep going as a tribute to the fallen? Or pull out and face the realization that they died in vain?
Anyway, I was interested by Arianna Huffington’s commentary on the media’s coverage of the affair: It Shouldn’t Have Taken the Deaths of Three Miners to Get the Media to Focus on Mine Safety.
So last night, suddenly, after the tragic second collapse at the Utah mine, there was a dramatic shift in the TV coverage of the story. All at once, faux folksy mining boss Bob Murray, who had been everywhere, was nowhere to be found (even sending in a junior executive to handle this morning’s press conference). In his place, at long last, were actual scientists, and experts on mine safety and the workings of the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Bush mine safety czar Richard “Recess Appointment” Stickler was also absent last night, and did not appear again until this morning’s press conference.
So many questions were finally being asked. Prompting one more: What took so long? Why did it take a tragic second collapse before the Murray and Strickler PR Show was finally replaced by actual journalism?
On the specific question she raises about the media, I think it’s just the latest in a long line of examples of how entertainment and business values are displacing journalistic ethics. Bloggers are gradually assuming the role of journalists. Which I realize is problematic in various ways, but it’s also just the reality of the situation.
I had fun with the last one, so I kept going. Lies.com podcast 22 follows the same approach, only moreso: Most of it is captured audio from YouTube (the new Napster), interspersed with shamelessly stolen music. I speak exactly 10 words in the whole thing.
If I’ve ever claimed that nobody in the Bush administration recognized how dangerous and destabilizing it would be to invade Iraq, I apologize.
I’m throwing these in here because all of them struck me as post-to-Lies.com-able, but I haven’t been able to tear myself away from boring crap like vacations and work and my family and local politics long enough to geek out and post them.
My apologies.
But anyway, here’s some links that I would be talking about if I were in obsessive mode:
Anyway, there you go: A concentrated dose of jbclinks. Kthnxbye!
If for no other reason, I have to post this for the title:
Josh Marshall posts the telling Ashcroft-hospital-visit-question video clip, and points out what’s really wrong with this picture. This isn’t a congressional witch-hunt, or political theater, it’s congress doing their job, and Gonzales demonstrating that he — the Attorney General of the United States — simply doesn’t give a damn about pesky checks and balances. I think the only reason he even shows up to these hearings is because refusal to appear would create enough drama for CNN to write a headline that might actually get the public’s attention.
Josh says:
It really requires stepping back in this case to take stock of this exchange. Testifying before Congress is like being called to testify in court. You have to answer every question. Every question. You can fudge and say you don’t remember something and see how far you get. Or you can invoke various privileges. And it’s up to the courts to decide if the invocations are valid. But it’s simply not permitted to refuse to answer a question. It is quite literally contempt of Congress
And what does the Constitution say that we do when the Executive Branch is in contempt of Congress, class?
Really, why would anyone ever read anything else but Glenn Greenwald? From his latest piece: Kit Bond and the credibility of war supporters.
At its core, the history of the Iraq War has been authored by an indescribably deceitful and very intellectually limited political and media elite, perfectly symbolized by Kit Bond. These are people who spent four years hailing the Great Progress the Leader was making in Iraq, claiming we were “clearing and holding” neighborhoods of all the Terrorists, that Freedom was on the March, that anyone who questioned any of this was either brainwashed by the war-hating media or a Friend of The Terrorists.
And now, four years later, with the War plainly having been a failure, and their assurances all exposed as false, what are they doing? Hailing the Great Progress the Leader is making in Iraq, claiming we are “clearing and holding” neighborhoods of all the Terrorists, that Freedom is on the March, that anyone who questions any of this is either brainwashed by the war-hating media or a Friend of The Terrorists. Nothing ever changes. It just plods along with the same idiot slogans and the same people spouting them. And they do it with no shame, no acknowledgment of their own past behavior, and no loss of credibility.
Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!
Ahem. Greenwald spake thusly: Bush’s magical shield from criminal prosecution.
This latest assertion of power — to literally block U.S. Attorneys from prosecuting executive branch employees — is but another reflection of the lawlessness prevailing in our country, not a new revelation. We know the administration breaks laws with impunity and believes it can. That is no longer in question. The only real question is what, if anything, we are willing to do about that.
From the WaPo: Broader Privilege Claimed In Firings.
Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.
It’s really pretty remarkable, even for Bush. As Fein and Nichols would say, he’s asserting monarchical powers.
Impeachment has to go back on the table. Yes, I realize that the two-thirds majority of senators required to convict probably will not be findable. But Nancy Pelosi is wrong to view the process as a waste of time. It is her duty; as Patrick Leahy would say, her paramount duty. Nothing trumps preserving and defending the Constitution. If Bush and Cheney are not convicted, every senator voting to acquit who is up for re-election in 2008 will have to defend that vote.
If Lies.com Podcast 21 were a person, it would be old enough to buy alcohol.
This show is dedicated to my mom.
Thomas Nephew has written an excellent review of the even more excellent Tough talk on impeachment, from Bill Moyers.
This item from Think Progress does an excellent job of summarizing Bush’s evolving position on a key issue: The Ever Changing Definition of ‘Mission’ In Iraq.
I lost the site where I originally saw this map posted yesterday, but it makes for a nice contrast with all those “red and/or purple America” maps that were floating around after the 2004 presidential election:
Maybe Bush would consider playing president only in Utah for the next year and a half, with occasional trips to Idaho and Wyoming. Since those appear to be the only parts of the country that still want him.
Glenn Greenwald wrote an interesting item today that talks about Bush’s increasing use of the lie that the people we’re fighting in Iraq are the same people who attacked us on 9/11, and how the media is covering that lie: Little outbursts of journalism — what causes them?
I watched Bush’s press conference in the shiny new press briefing room today. I’m not going to bother going point by point through the inanity. Go watch the video and draw your own conclusions.
At this point, Congress has a duty to rescue our country from the further damage that Bush, unchecked, is clearly going to do over the next year and a half. He’s demonstrated that he’s perfectly willing to use things like commutations (and presumably pardons) to block Congress from uncovering the truth about his Administration’s lawbreaking. With the support of Republican filibusters in the Senate, he’s prepared to veto any measure that seeks to compel him to end the war in Iraq. So it actually becomes a pretty simple formula for Congress. They can muddle around and play the percentages and take money from lobbyists; business as usual. Or they can actually live up to their oaths of office, and their obligations to the people who elected them, and do the following:
As far as what to base the impeachments on, sweep it all up. Little things, like the obstruction of justice in the Plame outing investigation. Bigger things, like the warrantless wiretapping of US citizens. The cover-up of White House political involvement in the Justice Department firings. Signing statements. Denial of habeas corpus to Guantanamo captives. Black sites and extraordinary rendition. Violation of the Geneva Conventions. Torture. Knowingly making a false case for war, then pursuing that war with tragic ineptitude. The failure to live up to their oaths of office, in which they swore to preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Yes, Bush has made a career out of deflecting responsibility. Like any criminal, he will behave like a cornered animal, saying and doing whatever he can think of to beat you. And like all good prosecutors, it will be your job to cut through that with actual evidence, to follow the trail of breadcrumbs to the places he doesn’t want you to go.
Maybe you’ll fail, but at least you’ll have gone down swinging.
Get to work. You’re on the clock.
Update: The following made for fun reading: From back in March on The Next Hurrah: Dusting off “inherent contempt”. There’s also a comment from Kagro X at Daily Kos: Is inherent contempt pardonable? And finally from Thomas Nephew’s comment on a posting at Lawyers, Guns and Money: There’s already enough to begin impeachment…
Sigh. Of course, all this would be much more exciting if I lived in an alternate reality where the Democratic majorities in Congress were comprised of patriots, rather than fat cats.
Later update: Oh, and one more from Thomas Nephew: digby, what is the alternative to impeachment?
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