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Bernard Weiner: Conservatives are jumping ship: Bush is going down'
March 08, 2006
by Bernard Weiner
The Crisis Papers

I'm more and more convinced that it will be Republicans, many of them of the true conservative and realist kind, who effectively will do in the Bush Administration.

In this, I am reminded of the behavior of Richard Nixon when he realized that he was fast losing his middle-class, bourgeois base: He called it quits on the Vietnam War, and likewise on his presidency after his crimes were exposed.

But unlike Nixon's crew, Bush&Co. seem willing to take the country down with them, so desperate are they to hold onto power, deplete the treasury, pay off their corporate friends, carry out their ideological revolution -- and keep themselves out of the federal slammer.

The crimes of the Bush Administration are so many and varied that none of us should be surprised by anything that might happen in the coming weeks and months: Bin Laden captured or reported killed, a U.S.-Israeli air assault on Iran's nuclear facilities, a major terrorist attack inside the U.S. to be followed by martial law, the announcement of a bird-flu outbreak with the military placed in charge. I'm pretty level-headed and don't usually think in these dire terms, but these guys have backed themselves into a tight political corner and are desperate -- and dangerous.



THE IMPLODING SCANDALS

Bush is at 34% approval rating (Cheney is at 18!), and their scandals are blowing up in their faces: Katrina lies and incompetence; Iraq lies and incompetence; the Dubai Ports deal and incompetence; GOP bribery and corruption; Libby under indictment and Rove apparently about to be; Bush claiming authority to authorize torture, spy on millions of American citizens and violate the law whenever he incants the magic words "national security"; Congress rebelling at being frozen out of decision-making, etc. etc. But in the face of all that, the Roveian M.O. is always to attack their foes and to hype the fright quotient.

The Administration didn't have to consider the most extreme options until recently, when the wheels started falling off the Bush bus. The attacks were no longer coming mostly from liberals and Democrats; more and more, they were coming from loyal conservative Republicans, who, cognizant of the sinking poll numbers, saw the handwriting on the wall: They realized they could well lose their majorities in the House and Senate -- in other words, severed from their jobs and access to the spoils of power -- and they started distancing themselves from the Administration.

So, rather than beating my usual drum here denouncing the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush Administration, I thought I'd just lay out the comments of those conservatives and let them speak for themselves. (My late friend Emile de Antonio, the documentary filmmaker, taught me a good lesson; it's always better, he pointed out, to quote what the Wall Street Journal is saying rather than quoting a hippie or left-activist making the same point. When your own posse smells the moral rot up top, the end is near.)

The quotes here are on Iraq and the neo-con ideologues who took this country to war, though currently the flak is also coming hot and heavy from the Right on both the domestic spying and Dubai ports scandals. (Even conservative Republican Senator Richard Shelby says Bush broke the law in the way he handled the Dubai ports contract, and neo-con leader Bill Kristol suggests the other "i" word ("incompetent") in describing how Bush&Co. stumble around trying to govern: "I think it's become in people's minds an emblem of the administration that just isn't as serious about the competent execution of the functions of government as it should be."

THE NEO-CONS BEHIND THE WAR

Let's begin with a reminder that the conservative establishment didn't agree from the very beginning with Bush's neo-con obsession to invade Iraq. President George H.W. Bush, who successfully organized a massive coalition to push Iraq's army out of Kuwait in the first Gulf War, warned his son privately and through his spokesmen of the dangerous consequences both of invading and occupying Iraq and of doing so without wide international support. As he said of Iraq in "A World Transformed" (written with Gen. Brent Scowcroft): "Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome."

Fast forward to the present, when so many Republican stalwarts are saying, in effect, that they backed the wrong horse. Their party was taken over by rightwing extremists, incompetent at that, whose reckless neo-con policies are doing great danger to the country and to the future of the once-great GOP. Here's Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, chair of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation, going even beyond the war into the deeper crimes being committed against Americans' freedoms:
"Most Americans do not yet realize that a war is being waged -- not against Iraq but against each of us. It is not the Republican Party that is charge in this administration but a small cadre who seized executive branch power and converted it to their own uses. Most Republicans are experiencing a deer-in-the-headlights moment right now. Their Party has been hijacked, their president has been hijacked, and they do not know what to do. I remain a registered Republican working for an effective coalition. The attack on us and on our rights has hardly begun. You don't go to the trouble of setting up this degree of control without having made plans to use it."
NEO-CON FUKUYAMA HAS SECOND THOUGHTS

Or try this out. Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the 1992 neo-con best-seller "The End of History," is exhibiting some serious recantation these days in interviews and in his new book, "America at the Crossroads."

He now says that neo-conservatism has "evolved into something I can no longer support," and should be tossed onto history's pile of discredited ideologies. The doctrine, which has demonstrated "the danger of good intentions carried to extremes...is now in shambles," and needs to be replaced by a more realistic foreign policy.

For example, though he once supported regime change in Iraq, he now believes the war there is the wrong sort of war, in the wrong place at the wrong time. "The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally...

"By definition, outsiders can't 'impose' democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective."

THE CHENEY-RUMSFELD CABAL

Then we go to a long-time Administration stalwart who couldn't take it any more: Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army colonel who was chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made," Wilkerson said in a well-publicized speech at the New America Foundation last October. "And you've got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either."

Wilkerson has also focused attacks on the Bush administration for condoning torture, setting lax and ambiguous policies on treatment of detainees that inevitably led to the scandal of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and elsewhere.

BUCKLEY BUCKLES TO REALITY

Onward to the intellectual godfather of the modern conservative movement, National Review founding editor William F. Buckley Jr., who concludes that what may have started as a decent move has evolved into disaster:
"One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. ... Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols. ... Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy. ... The kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat."
THE TROOPS WANT OUT, SOON

Speaking of the troops in Iraq, recent polling reveals that nearly 3 out of 4 of U.S troops in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the year, and more than one in four say the troops should leave immediately. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff admits also that the Iraqis want us to leave "as soon as possible."

Here are some pertinent comments by a U.S. soldier in Iraq, writing as "djtyg," about why the desire to leave that country:
"We need to get out because our military cannot take much more of this. We are stretched too thin and it's about to get worse. ... Soldiers are frustrated. Every soldier I have talked to says that they are getting out of the military when they get home. Every. One. Of. Them. Regardless of rank, experience, or time in, they all want out. There has not been a single Soldier I've talked to that says they want to stay in. This includes officers, NCOs, and rookies who are on their first tour of duty. We need to get out of Iraq because Iraq is the reason why the military is shrinking. We, like Cindy Sheehan, are curious as to what 'noble cause' we are fighting for. We can't seem to find one. This is weakening America. At the rate we are going, we are going to have a military that can't fight because it has old and broken down equipment, and no troops to fight a war with."
SEN. HAGEL LOWERS THE BOOM

Then there are key Republican senators who are willing to stick out their necks by talking truth to power about Iraq. For example, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, who said the U.S. is losing in Iraq and raised a parallel to an earlier conflict.

The Vietnam War, he said, "was a national tragedy partly because members of Congress failed their country, remained silent and lacked the courage to challenge the administrations in power until it was too late. To question your government is not unpatriotic -- to not question your government is unpatriotic," he said, arguing that 58,000 troops died in Vietnam because of silence by political leaders. "America owes its men and women in uniform a policy worthy of their sacrifices."

O'REILLY QUESTIONS STAYING IN IRAQ

So, let's see: Bush is losing old-money Republican conservatives, GOP senators, neo-con theorists outside the Cheney-Rumsfeld nexus, military insiders, troops under fire in Iraq -- who else can he lose? Would you believe the lunatic fringe, as symbolized by that raving Limbaugh wannabee Bill O'Reilly? The Fox News pundit, who usually is in lockstep with the Bush program and calls anybody who criticizes those policies idiots and worse, had this to say the other day about the need to get out of Iraq ASAP:

"[We need to] hand over everything to the Iraqis as fast as humanly possible [because] there are so many nuts in the country -- so many crazies -- that we can't control them."

GOP DISCONTENT ON NATIONAL SECURITY

Well, one could go on and on with the criticism coming from the Right -- conservative former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, former Reagan Administration official Paul Craig Roberts, Congressional Dem warhawk John Murtha, et al. The point is that the Republicans, formerly associated with a winning national-security message, are now regarded much differently by many GOP politicos and rank-and-file citizens.

Many Representatives and Senators also deeply resent the way the Congress has been frozen out of the power loop by the Bush Administration. "We simply want to participate and aren't going to be PR flacks when they need us," Florida's conservative GOP Congressman Mark Foley said. "We all have roles. We have oversight. When you can't answer your constituents when they have legitimate questions -- we can't simply do it on trust."

Scott Reed, who managed Robert Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, called the current low poll ratings for Bush and the GOP "pretty shattering," noting especially that Bush's support among Republicans fell from 83 percent to 72 percent. "The repetition of the news coming out of Iraq is wearing folks down," Reed said. "It started with women [voters] and it's spreading. It's just bad news after bad news after bad news, without any light at the end of the tunnel."

THE PRESIDENT AS DICTATOR

"Even if you're a Republican member of Congress, you don't buy the exaggerated view of the unified executive theory, in which the only part of the Constitution that matters is Article II," on presidential power, said James B. Steinberg, a dean at the University of Texas at Austin. "If you want them to be in on the landing, you have to have people there for the takeoff."

For example, two staunch conservative Southern Senators won't accept Bush's Unified Executive theory of governance. "I think the administration has looked at the legitimate power of the executive during a time of war and taken it to extremes," said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. "[It's] to the point that we'd lose constitutional balance. Under their theory, there would be almost no role for the Congress or the courts." Mississippi's Sen. Trent Lott was even more blunt: "Don't put your fist in my face."

EVEN WALL ST. IS TALKING IMPEACHMENT

All those defections from the Bush orbit are doing great damage to the once-unified Bush&Co. juggernaut, but I've left out one key one: Wall Street. The titans of finance are agitated, to the point of raising the awareness of the possibility of impeachment or even urging serious consideration of Bush's removal.

The Wall Street Journal, alone among mainstream daily newspapers, has deigned to mention that there is a growing impeachment movement and an active PAC (impeachpac.org). And here's some of what Barron's Editorial Page Editor Thomas G. Donlan wrote in that establishment financial journal:
...The administration is saying the president has unlimited authority to order wiretaps in the pursuit of foreign terrorists, and that the Congress has no power to overrule him...Perhaps they were researched in a Star Chamber? Putting the president above the Congress is an invitation to tyranny. The president has no powers except those specified in the Constitution and those enacted by law. President Bush is stretching the power of commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy by indicating that he can order the military and its agencies, such as the National Security Agency, to do whatever furthers the defense of the country from terrorists, regardless of whether actual force is involved.

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation...

It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law. ...
THREE MORE YEARS?

So, friends, when we're down in the dumps, depressed by the fact that Bush&Co. are still in power even in the face of all their lies and bumblings and policies that result in thousands of people getting killed and maimed and tortured, let us consider that even their once-loyal rats are deserting the sinking ship of state.

The thought of nearly three more years of Bush&Co. misrule is too horrible to contemplate. So let's ratchet up the pressure, incorporate distressed GOP moderates and conservatives into the impeachment momentum, and send the Bush Bunker crew packing and return the country to reasonable people dedicated to a restoration of Constitutional rule of law and a realistic foreign policy. It's the least we can do for our country.

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., has taught government & international relations at various universities, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently co-edits The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). To comment, write crisispapers@comcast.net.

Copyright 2006, by Bernard Weiner

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O'REILLY QUESTIONS STAYING IN IRAQ

So, let's see: Bush is losing old-money Republican conservatives, GOP senators, neo-con theorists outside the Cheney-Rumsfeld nexus, military insiders, troops under fire in Iraq -- who else can he lose? Would you believe the lunatic fringe, as symbolized by that raving Limbaugh wannabee Bill O'Reilly? The Fox News pundit, who usually is in lockstep with the Bush program and calls anybody who criticizes those policies idiots and worse, had this to say the other day about the need to get out of Iraq ASAP:

"[We need to] hand over everything to the Iraqis as fast as humanly possible [because] there are so many nuts in the country -- so many crazies -- that we can't control them."

quote:

THE PRESIDENT AS DICTATOR

"Even if you're a Republican member of Congress, you don't buy the exaggerated view of the unified executive theory, in which the only part of the Constitution that matters is Article II," on presidential power, said James B. Steinberg, a dean at the University of Texas at Austin. "If you want them to be in on the landing, you have to have people there for the takeoff."

For example, two staunch conservative Southern Senators won't accept Bush's Unified Executive theory of governance. "I think the administration has looked at the legitimate power of the executive during a time of war and taken it to extremes," said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. "[It's] to the point that we'd lose constitutional balance. Under their theory, there would be almost no role for the Congress or the courts." Mississippi's Sen. Trent Lott was even more blunt: "Don't put your fist in my face."

quote:

So, rather than beating my usual drum here denouncing the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush Administration, I thought I'd just lay out the comments of those conservatives and let them speak for themselves. (My late friend Emile de Antonio, the documentary filmmaker, taught me a good lesson; it's always better, he pointed out, to quote what the Wall Street Journal is saying rather than quoting a hippie or left-activist making the same point. When your own posse smells the moral rot up top, the end is near.)

quote:

Most Republicans are experiencing a deer-in-the-headlights moment right now. Their Party has been hijacked, their president has been hijacked, and they do not know what to do. I remain a registered Republican working for an effective coalition. The attack on us and on our rights has hardly begun. You don't go to the trouble of setting up this degree of control without having made plans to use it."
NEO-CON FUKUYAMA HAS SECOND THOUGHTS

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I say, keep the pedal to the medal, duck, and hopefully only the neocon deer will be the ones that come through the windshield.

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CONSERVATIVE CRACKUP
He's a right-wing ideologue, not a true conservative
By Jeffrey Hart, JEFFREY HART is a professor of English (emeritus) at Dartmouth College, a former speechwriter for presidents Reagan and Nixon and, most recently, the author of "The Making of the American Conservative
March 12, 2006
Latime.com

WILLIAM F. Buckley Jr. has defined conservatism as "the politics of reality." Ideology is the enemy of conservatism because it edits, omits or ignores reality. George W. Bush is an ideologue.

Iraq is commonly said to be the centerpiece of Bush's presidency. The United States invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. But nearly three years after the invasion, no such weapons have been found. And evidence is mounting that the intelligence used to bolster the claims for Iraq's WMD was cherry-picked, politically pressured and, to use intelligence expert Thomas Powers' word, "fabricated."

Perhaps the real reason for the Iraq invasion, sold to Congress along with WMD, was a Wilsonian goal of making the world — or at least the Middle East — "safe for democracy." Bush hinted as much in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington a month before the invasion. "Human cultures can be vastly different," he said. "Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth."

An astounding statement. Flatly untrue. Refuted by history and experience. Did Mohamed Atta desire the same good things as his hostage passengers when he piloted his hijacked jetliner into one of the World Trade Center towers? Do Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds desire the same things today in Iraq?

Iraq is not going to be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East but, assuming a civil war is avoided, probably a Shiite-dominated theocracy leaning toward Iran. For this, the bill will be half a trillion dollars and tens of thousands dead and wounded.

Ideology.

As Buckley wrote in two recent columns, our Iraq policy "didn't work." The Bush centerpiece has been an astonishing flop.

A major triumph of American conservatism since World War II has been general acceptance of free-market economics in political discourse. This economic system works. It produces goods and services efficiently.

Yet free-market economics pushed to exclude other worthy goals becomes an ideology.

Consider conservation. Since Republican Theodore Roosevelt created our national parks, every president has worked to protect them. Free-market ideologue Bush neglects them except as a playground for more snowmobiles. He wants to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He talks about fuel-efficient cars but does nothing to encourage their production.

Bush is a privatization ideologue. Not surprisingly, his scheme to privatize Social Security sank like a stone. Who wanted to attach the social safety net to stock in such companies as Enron and WorldCom? And Bush's Medicare prescription drug plan, another privatization scheme, has been a disaster.

As for me, I'm in favor of treating disease and avoiding unnecessary death.

Stem cell research promises to do that. But not long after his inauguration in 2001, Bush greatly hampered stem cell research by severely limiting federal support for it. Why?

Ideology.

Bush puts it this way: "It's wrong to destroy life in order to save life."

That works only if you think a dozen cells is the equivalent of an infant diagnosed with diabetes or an adult with Parkinson's disease. If you believe that, you will believe anything. In actuality, the supposed "culture of life" is a culture of disease and death.

Bush would like to abolish abortion. No one likes abortion. But a demand for it exists today that did not exist in 1950, let alone in 1920, when U.S. women got the vote. Today, look at a university campus. Half women. They are represented in all professions. They demand the right to decide if and when to have children. Criminalizing abortion would be folly, a disaster — and would fail, like that other prohibition. That's the actuality.

Bush is not a conservative. He has bushwhacked the term. He is a right-wing ideologue

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Iraq: Next Steps for U.S. Policy
Keynote Address
by Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski
3/16/06
(Rush Transcript)
For highlights, and to comment on the speech, click Here.

thinkprogress.org

Thank you very much, John [Podesta]. I’m delighted to be back at the Center, though I’m sorry that we’re still addressing the same issue I addressed during the Center’s inaugural conference.

Three years ago, almost to a day, just as the war was beginning, I appeared on the Jim Lehrer show, and at the end of the show, Lehrer, as his last question asked me, “What do you think is riding on this war?” And my response was as follows: Ultimately, American global leadership is at stake in this war. It’s not Saddam who is the issue, it’s whether America can lead, lead constructively, and in a way that others respect. Three years later, I think it’s appropriate to ask: Where are we? Where are we headed? And what should we do?

First, where are we? The answers to this are easy, and on this I can be quick. The war has proven to be prohibitively costly. American leadership, in all of its dimensions, has been damaged. American morality has been stained – in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. American legitimacy has been undermined – by unilateral decisions. American credibility – particularly the case for the war, has been shattered. Leadership depends on morality, legitimacy, credibility. The economic costs of the war are escalating into hundreds of billions of dollars. More importantly, American casualties are in the thousands, with more than tens of thousands maimed. We are not even counting Iraqi casualties; we prefer not to know what they are.

But we know that the country is devastated, three years after, quote, “liberation,” end quote. Regional and global hostility to the United States is rising. I recently read a book that was quite revealing in an unintended fashion. It was Jerry Bremmer’s memoir of his stewardship as the governor general of Iraq. At the end of the book he says something that is very true. He says, “Ours is a failed occupation.” A failed occupation, that’s his definition of it, and I agree.

It is a failed occupation as a consequence of a decision-making process that compounds errors, that involves a very narrow group of true believers, and that evades responsibility and accountability – for errors and even crimes. No one responsible for wrong judgments has been fired. No one responsible for setting in motion a chain of events that produced extraordinarily embarrassing crimes has been put on trial. The [administration’s] resistance to the International Criminal Court is perhaps more understandable under these circumstances.

The book is also quite revealing, incidentally, on the decision-making process itself. The discussion of NSC [National Security Council] sessions, based apparently on actual minutes, is very revealing regarding the decision-making process. The commander in chief appears largely as a cheerleader, and tough issues are hardly discussed.

That brings me to a more difficult question: Where are we headed? We know where we are. At least I think I know where we are, and I’ve just told you where I think we are: we are in a mess. But where are we headed, that’s more difficult. That requires somewhat contingent judgments.

First of all, are we prevailing? There was recently a very incisive report published by the International Crisis Group, and I believe one of its participants spoke here this morning. Their report studied the insurgency and its conclusion was that the insurgency is both consolidating and more and more widespread; that it is at an advantage because it is engaged in a war of attrition. In a war of attrition a foreign occupier is always at a disadvantage.

In fact, I think one can argue that under the porous U.S. military umbrella which suffers from very poor intelligence because it is an external occupation army, there are two wars going on at the same time, but one feeds and stimulates the other. One war is the insurgency against the occupier, and that seems to be gaining more sympathy from the public as time passes, which is an ominous sign. More sympathy – not necessarily more engagement – but more sympathy, more vocal emotional support. And the other war that’s ongoing is of course a sectarian conflict between the Shiites and the Sunnis. And the U.S. umbrella, which in effect is designed to stifle these wars but is so poor that it perpetuates them, in a sense keeps these wars alive.

We could, I think, probably put an end to it – to both wars if we were to put in enough troops. Theoretically, if we were prepared to put in – and I’m pulling these figures literally out of a hat not as a result of any serious study – if we could put in 500,000 troops, we probably could crush the insurgency; we probably could stifle some of the sectarian conflict. But we can’t put in 500,000 troops. We’ve recently made a difficult decision to increase our force presence in Iraq. We are putting in 700 more troops, and that is not an accident.

We are not in a position to really increase the occupation force, unless we declare some state of national emergency and engage in actions which are simply politically not being seriously considered. So we are not able to crush these two conflicts, but our presence is perpetuating them and probably unintentionally actually intensifying them.

My judgment is that this is not yet a civil war. And in that respect I happen to agree with the administration. It is not yet a civil war in the sense it is not a comprehensive nationwide collision between the Shiites and the Sunnis. But I do think, as I have already stated, that we are stimulating it, unintentionally, by an occupation that is resented and, as Bremmer has said correctly, it is a failed occupation. It is ineffective.

There is of course a great deal of thought about creating, in the course of the next year or so, a national Iraqi Army which will relieve us of the undertakings that the occupation forces are pursuing. Let us think of what that – those two words – actually mean: “national army.” A national army in Iraq – first of all, Iraq is composed of Kurds and Arabs. The Kurds have an army, and a rather good one actually, and are not going to be part of any Iraqi “national army,” so that is already a pitfall.

But beyond that there is, alas, the reality of the increasing split between the Sunnis and the Shiites and their reliance on militias that are sectarian as well as tribally based. They are not going to be a part of a “national army” either. To speak of a national army as a serious political prospect is to engage in self denial.

There is not going to be a national army in a country in which there are armed forces that are anything but national in outlook, discipline, command and, above all, loyalty.

The British recently discovered in Basra what it means to have a loyal, local, police force – for when push came to shove, it turned out they were totally infiltrated by tribal and sectarian loyalties.

This is a war of attrition and it is a war that I do not see us as winning. The question is, are we losing? In the longer historical run, we probably are actually not improving but rather deteriorating. But it is admittedly a judgment that it is difficult to make. It is also a judgment that – unintentionally, but very revealingly – the president himself shares somewhat. More recently, he has not been talking so much about a “mission accomplished,” but about the choice being between victory or defeat. Victory or defeat. Something which seemed inconceivable two years ago, and certainly nearly three years ago when we occupied Baghdad and “mission accomplished” seemed to be a reality.

I know that one of the speakers who was supposed to be with you this morning but who could not come was George Packer. I think his book [The Assassins’ Gate] provides the best eyewitness account of the ongoing, ambiguous but disturbing Iraqi realities.

And that brings me to the third part of what I wish to say to you: What should we do? Admittedly we face difficult choices. I have been a policymaker and most policy decisions that are important are difficult to make. They always involve contingent judgments. There is rarely certainty about outcome. There are always risks.

But in a situation of this sort it, is important not to let ourselves become the prisoners of uncertainty. Prisoners of uncertainty in the sense that, because there is uncertainty, we become its prisoners by saying we cannot change course because the course we’re on is familiar, and what might follow – a change of course – is unfamiliar, and therefore even more perplexing than the reality we confront.

The judgments that we make will be based on uncertainty and derived from uncertainty. They will be contingent. But we must confront contingency. That is a task of leadership: uncertainty and confronting contingency.

We must also make certain that we are not prisoners of slogans. And it’s easy to succumb to slogans, especially in a decision-making setting that is self-reinforcing, composed of true believers, and then articulated to the public in a manner that accentuates the elements of fear and anxiety, and therefore makes the public more inclined to join the decision-makers in being prisoners of uncertainty.

In my judgment, quote end quote “victory” is unlikely. I think that’s a judgment that, if I were a decision-maker today, I feel I would have to reach. And I certainly realize that the consequences of the absence of what we would have liked to have happened, namely victory, are uncertain.

There could be problems, and grave problems. And thus we need to make a cold judgment, a really cold judgment, about whether prolonged staying of the course is likely to be more or less damaging to overall U.S. interests. In other words, if we were not to stay on course – and I’ll speak more fully of what that means – would a civil war between the Shiites and the Kurds on one side and the Sunnis on the other be more destructive than the consequences of staying on course. That’s a contingent judgment one needs to made.

I have already hinted to you that in my view this is not yet a civil war, in the sense that most of what we see as sectarian violence occurs in areas in which there is overlap between Shiites and Sunnis, particularly Baghdad and a few other places nearby. Most of the anti-American insurgency is in purely Sunni areas. There is less violence in Shiite areas.

It is not yet a civil war – and if that is correct, if the judgment that this is not yet a civil war, but rather incipient stages perhaps of a civil war – then how certain are we in the judgment that if we were to desist, the Shiites and the Kurds would not be capable of compelling an arrangement with the Sunnis. The Shiites and the Kurds together account for about 75 percent of the population and they have an overwhelming advantage. The Shiites then would be faced with a difficult decision and the Sunnis then would be faced with a difficult decision: whether to accommodate or to resist, to challenge. And I think a reasonable judgment is they will probably be divided.

Some will choose the path of accommodation and we know even some Sunni leaders who advocate that. And some will choose the path of resistance. But the outcome, I think, of such a confrontation is also predicable: namely, that the Kurds and the Shiites will prevail. Is that an outcome necessarily worse than staying on course if one makes the judgment that staying on course involves a more and more difficult war of attrition, not to speak of its international consequences, but focusing purely on the Iraqi context?

These are the kinds of questions that need to be addressed seriously by decision-makers, who then look carefully at actual options and timetables and steps to be taken if a particular choice is made that cannot be undertaken in a setting in which the decision-makers are the very same people who initiated the war itself and are responsible for some of the major tactical and strategic errors involved. They are not capable of making a cold judgment. They are not able to look at alternative options because of their stake in past misjudgments – and in some cases lies, and in some cases perhaps crimes. And thus there’s a real problem with the decision-making apparatus.

And yet if the president is serious in saying that our choices have become more difficult, I think it behooves him to widen the circle of decision-makers. It is in his own interest as well as in the country’s interest. This does not necessarily mean reaching out to the opposition, but even reaching out even to members of his own party who have, in different ways, some subtly, some more directly, expressed an uneasiness about the course on which we have embarked.

I think it is clear to you by know, I hope, that I favor a decision by the United States to leave Iraq. And the way I would go about it would be that I would ask the Iraqi leaders to ask us to leave.

I would not announce it arbitrarily, but I would talk to the Iraqi leaders about our decision, our inclination, and I would encourage them to ask us to leave. And I think there would be Iraqi leaders who would ask us to leave. Some of them are openly opposed to the occupation. And others may be more ambivalent now that their own political positions would be strengthened if they identified themselves with the hostility of the Iraqi people to the occupation. And some of course would not wish to ask us to leave. And they would be the ones who would leave when we leave, which tells us something about the depth of their capacity for leadership. I think we should ask them to ask us to leave and to treat them as adults, and not as colonial wards, which is what we are doing.

We are teaching them democracy while at the same time arresting them, bombing them, humiliating them – and also helping them. It’s an ambivalent course in democracy – and one not likely to foster it.

I think we should set a date for the termination of the occupation. I’ve recently written publicly in an op-ed piece that I think roughly at the end of this year should be the target date. I am not dogmatic about that particular date. It could be somewhat later, perhaps even somewhat sooner. I do not know. But I would think that within a year we should be able to complete an orderly disengagement and the process would be extremely useful in concentrating Iraqi minds on what will follow and encourage them to assume responsibility.

I do not believe for a minute the argument that setting a date somehow or other would help the insurgency, that somehow or other the insurgents would go into their hiding caves or wherever and wait until the moment we leave and then suddenly they will surface and pounce. It’s not the kind of an insurgency. It’s an insurgency that is much more dispersed, spontaneous, in the crevices of Iraqi society expressing itself, also sometimes on the basis of monetary opportunity.

The assumption of responsibility by Iraqi leaders who know that they are now going to be responsible for the future of the country is more likely to produce leaders that are prepared to lead and have the capacity to lead.

I would also encourage the Iraqi government – not have the U.S. do it – to call for a regional conference. I would have the Iraqi government call for a regional conference of Muslim states, some immediately adjoining Iraq, others more distant. By way of example, one might mention Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, perhaps also Turkey (although that is sensitive because of Kurdistan), Algeria, Tunisia, and maybe even Iran.

I noted in the news today the Iranian willingness to talk to us about more stability in Iraq, to deal with the issue of post-disengagement stabilization, something which is in their own interest, and so therefore it is not a plea, a desperate plea for help. It is not a plea to replace one occupier with another set of occupiers, but it is to ask them to be engaged with the Iraqis on an Iraqi initiative regarding stabilization after the United States has left.

Of course we could also separately on our own then ask the Europeans, the Japanese, and others, maybe even the Chinese, to become more directly involved in doing what can be helpful to consolidate the post-departure Iraqi conditions. But all of that has to take place in a setting in which we also face up to the increasing risk that our policy in Iraq is in many respects a symptom of the wider regional blindness and increasing global self-isolation.

I think we have to recognize – and this is why such a decision has wider strategic ramifications – that what is happening in Iraq is dangerously part of a wider, developing collision between America and the world of Islam, a collision which could, if it widens and becomes truly intense, be devastating to America’s global position. And America in a conflict with the world of Islam will be an America that will find it more difficult to ensure our national security and to promote our leading position in the world.

And that means that in addition to thinking about Iraq, regarding which we have some difficult choices to make – and I repeat, in contingent and uncertain conditions – we have to take a critical look at two other unresolved issues that interact with the consequences of our involvement in Iraq.

First, our policy towards Iran. Why is it so different from our policy towards North Korea? North Korea is perhaps doing more of what we don’t want the Iranians to be doing. Yet with North Korea we are engaged in direct multilateral negotiations with the North Koreans in which other parties participate – Chinese, Japanese, South Koreans, and Russians. We refuse to do that in the case of Iran. We refuse to negotiate with Iran. We are negotiating, yes, all the time with the British, the Germans, and the French – asking them to make certain decisions, to make certain demands. We are not negotiating with the Iranians. Why not? Because we have said that that will bestow legitimacy on the Iranian government. Are we deliberately legitimating the North Korean government?

What is the issue? There is an issue: namely, the apparent Iranian quest for nuclear weaponry. That is the issue. Not the issue of the legitimacy of the Iranian government, which incidentally has been elected to a far greater extent then is the case of the North Korean government. We are not only participating in multilateral negotiations – we are participating in bilateral negotiations with the North Koreans.

We will not touch the Iranians. Why not? Are we perhaps trying to prevent a compromise? Do we really want Iran to desist, or do we want to drive it into extremism? It surely cannot be our deliberate intention to fuse Iranian nationalism with Iranian fundamentalism. But that is precisely what we are doing.

As a general proposition, without going into any further detail on Iran, in international affairs, sometimes delaying something undesirable is far more effective than seeking directly to prevent it.

And I believe that in the long run, time is on our side with Iran, and therefore engaging in a process that encourages accommodation and has the effect of significantly delaying what is undesirable may be more effective than marching towards confrontation that certainly would affect the stability of the region.

Secondly, we also need to provide serious evidence that we are committed to a lasting and equitable Israeli-Palestinian peace. Not a one-sided imposed solution. Regardless of how much more conciliatory it may be as compared to previous formulas, a solution that would be viewed by one of the two parties to the conflict as imposed is therefore ultimately less legitimate.

An imposed solution, even if more fair than what was discussed in the past, will still be viewed by the weaker side – the Palestinians – as illegitimate and thus the conflict will fester. I think it is important – especially now when the prospects for the peace process moving forward have somewhat receded, for understandable reasons – to make clear what in our view, and in the view of our closest allies, represents an equitable ultimate solution.

At least we should outline its fundamental principles, by codifying the various individual statements on that subject made at the highest American level. Such as territorial swaps for changes in the 1967 lines. Such as some formula for sharing Jerusalem, regarding which more than 55 percent of Israelis are prepared to accept a compromise. That would certainly help at least give credence to the notion that we do have a long-term solution that is viewed as legitimate by both parties actively in mind. Because without it we will contribute to a situation in the Middle East that enhances the prospects of an American–Islamic collision on a much wider front.

And that brings me to my last and concluding points: ultimately at stake in all of this is how do we define, today, America’s relationship with the world.

The president in releasing this morning the new National Security Strategy started off by saying, “America is at war. This is a war time national security strategy.” Let me just say this to you: words have consequences. And the deliberate misuse of words can be very dangerous. Fanning a fearful, but fundamentally misleading definition of reality, contributes to the emergence of a fear-driven nation, a self-isolating nation.

The president experienced that in the last two weeks on the Dubai issue, when he himself reacted to excessive national fears. And yet just yesterday the International Relations Committee of the House voted 37-3 to impose punitive embargos on any country that invests in increased Iranian oil production. If that is not a self-defeating policy, then I don’t know what it is.

But it is a part of this atmosphere of Manichean polarization which is being bred by a phony definition of reality. Neither President Truman nor Eisenhower – Democrat and Republican – ever spoke of America being a “nation at war” during the Korean War. Neither President Johnson nor Nixon ever spoke of America being a “nation at war” during the Vietnam War. Yes we have a serious challenge from the potential threat of terrorism and we have to wage an unrelenting struggle against it. But to describe America repeatedly as a nation at war – implicitly of course with a commander and chief in charge – is to contribute to a view of the world by America that stimulates fear and isolates us from others. Other nations have suffered more from terrorism than America. None of them has embraced that definition of reality.

What troubles me the most is not that which that I have criticized, but that which hasn’t happened. That is to say: a serious and comprehensive Democratic challenge on this subject. Democratic leaders have been silent or evasive. They have not offered an alternative to the war in Iraq. It’s easy to criticize – that was the first part of my speech. That is easy to do, although some of us did it sooner than others.

But they haven’t offered an alternative. Also they have not seriously challenged the view of the world that is being propagated from the top. At a time of a deepening and widening crisis in Iraq, and a widening gap between America and the world, that to me is a form of political desertion.
END SPEECH

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"The lazy-minded evangelico-romanticism of George W. Bush, the bureaucratic will to power of Donald Rumsfeld, the avuncular condescension of Dick Cheney, and the reflexive military deference of Colin Powell combined to get us into a situation we never wanted to be in, a situation no self-respecting nation ought to be in, a situation we don't know how to get out of. It's not inconceivable that, with a run of sheer good luck, we might yet escape without too much egg on our faces, but it's not likely. The place we are at is surely not a place anyone in 2003 wanted us to be at – not even Vic Davis Hanson."

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Originally posted by Sawdust:
Much of what you copy pasted here is crap but I do like Derbyshire. It's true that many conservatives are deeply disappointed in this Republican government but not because they have come to your side. They are dissapointed because Republicans are governing like they are on your side. That doesn't mean that Republicans will suddenly rush to become Democrats. It means that in the primaries there will probably be a rush to nominate Republicans who are further right than the faux Republicans representing us now.

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It's true that many conservatives are deeply disappointed in this Republican government but not because they have come to your side. They are dissapointed because Republicans are governing like they are on your side.

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Hell, I like you and I don't agree with anything you write.

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Hell, I like you and I don't agree with anything you write.

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A friend will bail you out of jail, a best friend will be in jail with you and observe "Wow , wasn't that the most fun we've ever had ? "

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Buckley: Bush Not A True Conservative
CBS News Exclusive: Buckley Criticizes President For Interventionist Policies
Stamford, Conn., July 22, 2006
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In an interview in his Stamford, Conn., home, William F. Buckley explains why he thinks President Bush has strayed from the true path of conservatism. (CBS)

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"If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign."
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William F. Buckley

(CBS) President Bush ran for office as a "compassionate conservative." And he continues to nurture his conservative base — even issuing his first veto this week against embryonic stem cell research.

But lately his foreign policy has come under fire from some conservatives — including the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley.

CBS Evening News Saturday anchor Thalia Assuras sat down for an exclusive interview with Buckley about his disagreements with President Bush.

Buckley's Stamford, Conn., home is a tranquil place that allows Buckley to think, write and spend time with his canine companion, Sebastian.

"He's practically always with me," Buckley says.

Buckley finds himself parting ways with President Bush, whom he praises as a decisive leader but admonishes for having strayed from true conservative principles in his foreign policy.

In particular, Buckley views the three-and-a-half-year Iraq War as a failure.

"If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign," Buckley says.

Interview continues

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U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D- Mass., who was in town Sunday to help Gov. Jennifer Granholm campaign for her re-election bid, took time to take a jab at the Bush administration for its lack of leadership in the Israeli-Lebanon conflict.

"If I was president, this wouldn't have happened," said Kerry during a noon stop at Honest John's bar and grill in Detroit's Cass Corridor.....

....."The president has been so absent on diplomacy when it comes to issues affecting the Middle East," ....

.....
This is about American security and Bush has failed. He has made it so much worse because of his lack of reality in going into Iraq.…We have to destroy Hezbollah," he said.

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It means that in the primaries there will probably be a rush to nominate Republicans who are further right than the faux Republicans representing us now.

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Exclusive: Reagan conservative lashes out at 'hijackers of the conservative movement'
John Byrne
Rawstory.com
July 28, 2006

He didn’t support invading Iraq. He says national security decisions are too often made for political gain. And he maintains that Tom DeLay used “legal plunder” for the “immoral purpose of holding onto power.”

A Democrat? No – His name is Richard Viguerie, a conservative icon and key architect of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory. Known to many as the godfather of direct-mail campaign fundraising, his four-decade career has succored scores of conservative candidates and grassroots causes.

A balding grandfather with a wry Texan’s smile, Viguerie is a seasoned conservative who confidently brushes aside accusations that his criticism of Republicans is intended for personal gain. On Monday, he sat down with RAW STORY to talk about his new book, Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause.

Modeling himself after Barry Goldwater, a 1960s conservative iconoclast whose reactionary stances later positioned Ronald Reagan for victory in 1980, Viguerie says the worst day of his political life was when Lyndon Johnson defeated Goldwater for president in 1964. Viguerie, who aided Reagan’s election but later became critical of some of his policies, today sees a landscape where Republicans run using a mantle of traditional values but carry the banner of conservatism only as far as it takes them to get elected.

Viguerie begins his book with two quotes. “The first is from Ronald Reagan and it says something along the lines of: ‘I tell my people that when we begin to refer to the federal government as us, we’ve been here too long.’ And then I recount a story of [former House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay (R-TX), late one night after dinner, he wants to light up a cigar and the manager says I’m sorry, Mr. DeLay… it’s against the law to smoke in a federal building. And DeLay says, ‘I am the federal government.’”

Viguerie spares little in attacking DeLay.

“DeLay is singlehandedly the primary person responsible for the most expansion of the government since [Democratic President] Lyndon Johnson,” he remarks. Subsequent research by RAW STORY revealed that, according to the CATO Institute, President Bush has exceeded Johnson in terms of discretionary spending.

Citing the recent bribery conviction of Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA), Viguerie says the real threat to government isn’t illegal activity – which he believes will eventually be caught by the law – but legal “plunder.”

“What really affects our life is the legal stuff, the legal thefts, the legal plunder of people like Tom DeLay, for the sole, in my opinion immoral, purpose of holding onto power,” the Texas politico said. “They are engaged in this illegal theft, spending money that doesn’t belong to them to hold onto power. And that’s corrupt and immoral. And people who are engaged in that are in no way worthy of the label conservative.”

Viguerie says he blames DeLay for passing President Bush’s Medicare prescription drug benefit, which conservatives say adds $18 trillion to Medicare’s unfunded liabilities. He also breaks with Bush on Iraq, noting that Bush used his opposition to “nation building” as a means to win conservative support during the 2000 campaign.

“I opposed the Iraq war,” he says. “It’s just nation building, and it’s just, you know, conservatives, true conservatives oppose America going in there, and now that we’re in there I don’t know how to get out.”

Asked where conservatives draw the line between restraining spending and defense, Viguerie framed his response by saying conservatives place defense spending above all other government projects. The United States spends more than six times as much on its military as the next largest spender, I noted, but this didn’t faze the Texas Republican.

“The purpose of government is not to redistribute the wealth, not to promote diversity, not to promote this cause or that cause -- it’s national defense,” he says. “That’s the purpose of government.”

“People are free wherever they’re free not because of their defense budget, but because of America’s defense budget,” he adds.

He does, however, believe military spending is rife with abuse. “The decisions are made far too many times for political reasons and not for defense reasons. Homeland Security is just riddled with pork.”

article continues

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Curtains for Conservatism
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post
Truthout.org
04 August 2006

Is conservatism finished?
What might have seemed an absurd question less than two years ago is now one of the most important issues in American politics. The question is being asked - mostly quietly but occasionally publicly - by conservatives themselves as they survey the wreckage of their hopes, and as their champions in the Republican Party use any means necessary to survive this fall's elections.

Conservatism is an honorable disposition that, in its modern form, is inspired by the philosophy developed by Edmund Burke in the 18th century. But as a contemporary American movement, conservatism is rooted intellectually in the 1950s and the circles around William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review magazine. It rose politically with Barry Goldwater's campaign in 1964.

Conservatism was always a delicate balancing act between small- government economic libertarians and social traditionalists who revered family, faith and old values. The two wings were often held together by a common enemy, modern liberalism certainly, but even more so by communism until the early 1990s and now by what some conservatives call "Islamofascism."

President Bush, his defenders say, has pioneered a new philosophical approach, sometimes known as "big government conservatism." The most articulate defender of this position, the journalist Fred Barnes, argues that Bush's view is "Hamiltonian" as in Alexander, Thomas Jefferson's rival in the early republic. Bush's strategy, Barnes says, "is to use government as a means to achieve conservative ends."

Kudos to Barnes for trying bravely to make sense of what to so many others - including some in conservative ranks - seems an incoherent approach. But I would argue that this is the week in which conservatism, Hamiltonian or not, reached the point of collapse.

The most obvious, outrageous and unprincipled spasm occurred Thursday night when the Senate voted on a bill that would have simultaneously raised the minimum wage and slashed taxes on inherited wealth.

Rarely has our system produced a more naked exercise in opportunism. Most conservatives oppose the minimum wage on principle as a form of government meddling in the marketplace. But moderate Republicans in jeopardy this fall desperately wanted an increase in the minimum wage.

So the seemingly ingenious Republican leadership, which dearly wants deep cuts in the estate tax, proposed offering nickels and dimes to the working class to secure billions for the rich. Fortunately, though not surprisingly, the bill failed.

The episode was significant because it meant Republicans were acknowledging that they would not hold congressional power without the help of moderates. That is because there is nothing close to a conservative majority in the United States.

Yet their way of admitting this was to put on display the central goal of the currently dominant forces of politics: give away as much as possible to the truly wealthy. You wonder what those blue-collar conservatives once known as Reagan Democrats made of all this.

Thursday's shenanigans were merely a symptom. Consider other profound fissures within the right. There is an increasingly bitter debate over whether it made any sense to wage war in Iraq in the hopes of transforming that country into a democracy. Conservatives with excellent philosophical credentials, including my colleague George F. Will and Bill Buckley himself, see the enterprise as profoundly un-conservative.

On immigration, the big-business right and culturally optimistic conservatives square off against cultural pessimists and conservatives who see porous borders as a major security threat. On stem cell research, libertarians battle conservatives who have serious moral and religious doubts about the practice - and even some staunch opponents of abortion break with the right-to-life movement on the issue.

On spending ... well, on spending incoherence and big deficits are the order of the day. Writing last May in National Review, conservatives Kate O'Beirne and Rich Lowry had one word to describe the Republican Congress' approach to the matter: "Incontinence." In that important essay, O'Beirne and Lowry argued that the relevant question for conservatives may not be "Can this Congress be saved?" but, "Is it worth saving?"

Political movements lose power when they lose their self-confidence and sense of mission. Liberalism went into a long decline after 1968 when liberals clawed at each other more than they battled conservatives - and when they began to wonder whether their project was worth salvaging.

Between now and November, conservative leaders will dutifully try to rally the troops to stave off a Democratic victory. But their hearts won't be in the fight. The decline of conservatism leaves a vacuum in American politics. An unhappy electorate is waiting to see who will fill it.

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Veteran Policy-Makers Fear Disaster in U.S. Course
by Jim Lobe
August 11, 2006 by the Inter Press Service
Commondreams

Alarms are definitely on the rise here.

And it's not just because the British police arrested 21 people who were allegedly plotting to bomb up to 10 jetliners between London and the United States in mid-flight over the Atlantic Ocean. Although that probably didn't help.

It's more the sense that the growing number of crises in the "new Middle East", proudly midwifed by the administration of President George W. Bush, is rapidly spinning out of control with potentially catastrophic consequences for the entire region and beyond.

The ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah -- not to imminent expansion of Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon if it does not get a U.N. Security Council resolution to its liking -- has, by virtually all accounts, inflamed and radicalised the Islamic world and rendered a larger regional conflagration much more likely.

At the same time, Wednesday's report that an unprecedented 1,815 bodies, 90 percent victims of violence, were brought to the Baghdad's morgue last month -- eclipsing the previous record established in June by some 250 corpses -- appeared to confirm the increasingly widespread view here that Iraq is moving headlong towards civil war, if it isn't already in one, as many regional experts have contended for some time.

"Two full-blown crises, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single emergency," noted Washington's former U.N. Ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, in an uncharacteristically alarming column in Thursday's Washington Post.

The column's title, "The Guns of August", was a reference to a book about the diplomatic follies and indecisive battles that launched Europe into a devastating world war in 1914.

"A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay," Holbrooke warned. "...The combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, history's only nuclear superpower confrontation."

Among other things, noted Holbrooke, a top candidate for secretary of state if Democrats had won the presidency in 2000 or 2004, Turkey is threatening to invade northern Iraq; the world's largest anti-Israel demonstrations are taking place in downtown Baghdad; Syria may yet be pulled into the Lebanon war; Afghanistan is under growing threat from a resurgent Taliban; and India is threatening about punitive action against Pakistan for its alleged involvement in the recent train bombings in Bombay.

Particularly alarming to Holbrooke, as to a steadily growing number of Republican realists and other members of the traditional U.S. foreign policy elite, is the apparent complacency of the Bush administration in the face of these events.

Indeed, since the outbreak of the Lebanon crisis four weeks ago, a succession of former top Republican policy-makers -- including Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to former presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush; the younger Bush's former deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage; and Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass -- has called publicly for a major reassessment of U.S. Middle East policy and its conduct of the "global war on terror."

Their common message is the necessity of pressing Israel for a quick ceasefire in Lebanon, engaging directly with Syria and Iran on both Lebanon and Iraq, and restarting a serious peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. It has been echoed by leading Democrats, including former President Jimmy Carter; his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski; and former secretaries of state Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, as well as by Holbrooke himself.

To these appeals, however -- as well as to the worsening of the twin crises themselves -- the administration has appeared largely deaf. "There is little public sign that the president and his top advisers recognise how close we are to a chain reaction, or that they have any larger strategy beyond tactical actions," Holbrooke noted.

The one, at least partial, exception has been Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice whose State Department, a bastion of realism, has been under almost constant attack since the outset of the Lebanon crisis by the same coalition of neo-conservatives, assertive nationalists, and Christian rightists led by Vice President Dick Cheney that led the drive to war in Iraq.

In the early stages of the latest war, Rice, who is also the only senior administration official who has been in constant communication with European and Arab leaders, was most outspoken about the importance of Israel exercising restraint and not attacking civilian infrastructure in Lebanon. She was reportedly infuriated when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert failed to follow through on a pledge to suspend aerial attacks for two days late last month.

Rice, a Scowcroft protégée, has supported talks with Syria on the crisis, and, according to an account published this week in Insight magazine, a publication of the right-wing Washington Times, has also argued in favour of engaging Iran.

Before the Lebanon crisis, Rice appeared to be successfully moving U.S. policy gradually, if fitfully, towards a more realist position, particularly with respect to Iran. But she has now run into a brick wall in Bush himself, according to Insight.

"For the last 18 months, Condi was given nearly carte blanche in setting foreign policy guidelines," it quoted one "senior government source" as saying. "All of a sudden, the president has a different opinion and he wants the last word."

Her problems, however, may not be confined to Bush, according to another report in Thursday's New York Times, which suggested that Cheney -- and his mainly neo-conservative advisers -- has become increasingly assertive in the latest crisis in support of Israel's efforts to crush Hezbollah. (In fact, some of his unofficial advisers, such as Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, have called for expanding the war to Syria and even Iran.)

In that respect, the current situation recalls the humiliation of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's who in early 2002 sought to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to halt Israel's military offensive in the Palestinian territories -- only to be undercut back home by Cheney and, ironically, by then-national security adviser Rice herself.

"She had as much to do with cutting his legs out from under him vis-à-vis the Middle East as anyone else -- either through outright agreement with Cheney, or, at the minimum, complicity with his views so as to draw even closer to Bush," according to ret. Col Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's former chief of staff at the State Department.

That experience, of course, confirmed the demise of realist influence in Bush's first term, at least with respect to the Middle East.

That Rice may now find herself in a similar position, having to contend with a resurgent Cheney-led coalition of hawks who are not so much complacent about the course of current events in the Middle East as convinced that their strategy of regional "transformation" by military means will be vindicated, is what is perhaps particularly alarming about the present moment.

"This whole business is nuts -- unless, of course, you believe what the rumor-mongers are beginning to pass around," wrote Wilkerson in reference to the Lebanon war in an email exchange with IPS. "(T)hat this entire affair was ginned up by Bush/Cheney and certain political leaders in Tel Aviv to give cover for the eventual attack by the U.S. on Iran. At first, I refused to believe what seemed to be such insanity. But I am not so certain any longer."
Copyright © 2006 IPS-Inter Press Service

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Defeatism and attacks on the Commander-in-Chief during a time of war
Glen Greenwald.com
Monday, August 14, 2006

We have a rule in our country that "attacking the Commander-in-Chief during a time of war" helps The Terrorists and emboldens our enemies. Joe Lieberman put it this way: "in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril."

President Bush said during the campaign that John Kerry's criticisms of Iraq "can embolden an enemy." And this year he warned us: "In a time of war, we have a responsibility to show that whatever our political differences at home, our nation is united and determined to prevail." And last week, Ken Mehlman gave a speech in Cleveland and attacked what he said is a growing "defeatism," and then oh-so-cleverly remarked: "Today's Democrat Party has become the Defeat-ocrat Party."

In the wake of the Bush administration's engineering of the Israel-Lebanon U.N. resolution, it looks like the Commander-in-Chief has a lot of new enemies and the The Terrorists have a lot of new allies:

National Review Editors

In addition to winning in Lebanon, Iran has the upper hand both in Iraq and in the contest over whether it will be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. If current trends continue, the Bush administration’s project in the Middle East will require the same sort of expedient we have just seen in the Israel–Lebanon conflict: a papering over of what is essentially a failure.


Dan Riehl

So, it turns out the lofty anti-terrorism rhetoric of Bush was little more than what some speech writer wrote to be read from a screen. . . . The man has looked over his head for much of his second term. Now, it's becoming more clear just how far. This will embolden the opposition in Iraq and could lead ultimately to the destruction of Israel.

Our war President has turned out to be a disgrace. At this point in world history, the Islamofascists look like they deserve to win. In fact, they might.

Paul Mirgenoff, Powerline Blog

Over at NRO's corner, John Podhoretz contends that this would mean the end of the Olmert government. I'm tempted to suggest that our government, having seemingly lost its will to oppose (or even to let others oppose) our deadliest enemies, deserves the same fate.


Michelle Malkin

Israel and the West surrender to Hizballah.

Terrorists and the U.N. win.

Peter Brookes, Senior Fellow, Heritage Foundation, NRO Symposium

If there is a clear winner in this war, it’s Iran.

Soshana Bryen, NRO Symposium

Thus far, the U.S. and Israel lose; Iran wins.

Anne Bayefsky, NRO Symposium

Kofi Annan’s wide grin, as he stood side-by-side with Secretary Rice on Friday, said it all. He won. But America and freedom’s cause lost.

Jeff Goldstein

Israel and the US have been defeated. Hizballah will grow emboldened. As will Iran.

Pamela "Atlas" Oshry, interviewer to John Bolton

Bush Administration Betrays Israel and America

Daily Pundit - in a post recommended by Instapundit: "Read the whole thing, especially if you work in the White House."

Bush's proud words of five years ago stand revealed as hollow and meaningless. What happened?

What happened was one of the biggest failures of leadership in Presidential history. Bush supporters will claim that Bush was done in by a liberal media and the ferocious hatred of liberals and leftwingers, but that is one of the things true leadership is all about: Managing and overcoming opposition in order to achieve the necessary goals - in this case, the destruction of world Islamist terrorism and the regimes that support it.

Bush turned out to be singularly ill-equipped for this task, both by skill and by temperament. His public relations management was curiously hesitant and badly timed, and, of course, his inabilty to speak effectively in public was a gigantic handicap. His temperament, it eventually became clear, was hesitant, overly calculating, timid, and "compassionate."

Compassion has its place, but not in warfighting. The Bush we know would not have pulled the trigger on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He abdicated the hard decisions in favor of political maneuvering and meaningless gestures.

As for me? I've moved on. The first administration of the first century of the American Third Millennium will, in my estimation, be remembered as one of the biggest failures of that century. Bush's great failure was, not invading Iraq, but not weathering the adversity that followed through acts of real leadership, and then pressing on with the necessary military destruction of the other regimes he, himself, named as most dangerous five years ago.

I'm hoping we can get through the next two years without any major disasters, and then I'm looking to elect a real war leader to the White House - somebody with a warrior's temperament and a leader's skills. George Bush has neither. He is a dangerous failure, and America will be well rid of him.

Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer both said this weekend on Fox that Hezbollah won and Iran has been strengthened. Attacks on the Commander-in-Chief and proclamations of American defeat are ubiquitous - among the same group that insisted for the last five years that such attacks are dangerous and wrong and that talk of American defeat helps the terrorists.

Aren't terrorists going to be so happy to see that Americans are divided in this way? Doesn't it make us less safe for all of these people to be branding the U.S. as weak losers and to be glorifying the strength and power of our enemies? Don't these people realize that we're in a war and that weakening the Commander-in-Chief with such criticisms and declaring American defeat endangers all of us?

quote:

Pundits Renounce The President
Among Conservative Voices, Discord
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
August 20, 2006

For 10 minutes, the talk show host grilled his guests about whether "George Bush's mental weakness is damaging America's credibility at home and abroad." For 10 minutes, the caption across the bottom of the television screen read, "IS BUSH AN 'IDIOT'?"

But the host was no liberal media elitist. It was Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman turned MSNBC political pundit. And his answer to the captioned question was hardly "no." While other presidents have been called stupid, Scarborough said: "I think George Bush is in a league by himself. I don't think he has the intellectual depth as these other people."

These have been tough days politically for President Bush, what with his popularity numbers mired in the 30s and Republican candidates distancing themselves as elections near. He can no longer even rely as much on once-friendly voices in the conservative media to stand by his side, as some columnists and television commentators lose faith in his leadership and lose heart in the war in Iraq.

While most conservative media figures have not abandoned Bush, influential opinion-makers increasingly have raised questions, expressed doubts or attacked the president outright, particularly on foreign policy, on which he has long enjoyed their strongest support. In some cases, they have complained that Bush has drifted away from their shared principles; in other cases, they think it is the implementation that has fallen short. In most instances, Iraq figures prominently.

"Conservatives for a long time were in protective mode, wanting to emphasize the progress in Iraq to contrast what they felt was an unfair attack on the war by the Democrats and media and other sources," Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, said in an interview. "But there's more of a sense now that things are on a downward trajectory, and more of a willingness to acknowledge it and pressure the administration to react to it."

Lowry's magazine offers a powerful example. "It is time to say it unequivocally: We are winning in Iraq," Lowry wrote in April 2005, chastising those who disagreed. This month, he published an editorial that concluded that "success in Iraq seems more out of reach than it has at any time since the initial invasion three years ago" and assailed "the administration's on-again-off-again approach to Iraq."

"It is time for the Bush administration to acknowledge that its approach of assuring people that progress is being made and operating on that optimistic basis in Iraq isn't working," the editorial said. Lowry followed up days later in his own column, suggesting that the United States is "losing, or at least not obviously winning, a major war" and asking whether Iraq is "Bush's Vietnam."

Quin Hillyer, executive editor of the American Spectator, cited Lowry's column in his own last week, writing that many are upset "because we seem not to be winning" and urging the White House to take on militia leaders such as Moqtada al-Sadr. Until it does, he said, "there will be no way for the administration to credibly claim that victory in Iraq is achievable, much less imminent."

Bush aides were bothered by a George F. Will column last week mocking neoconservative desires to transform the Middle East: "Foreign policy 'realists' considered Middle East stability the goal. The realists' critics, who regard realism as reprehensibly unambitious, considered stability the problem. That problem has been solved."

The White House responded with a 2,432-word rebuttal -- three times as long as the column -- e-mailed to supporters and journalists. "Mr. Will's kind of 'stability' and 'realism' -- a kind of world-weary belief that nothing can be done and so nothing should be tried -- would eventually lead to death and destruction on a scale that is almost unimaginable," wrote White House strategic initiatives director Peter H. Wehner.

Bush advisers said that they never counted Will or some others now voicing criticism as strong supporters but that the president's political weakness has encouraged soft supporters and quiet skeptics to speak out.

William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the National Review and an icon of the Ronald Reagan-era conservative movement, caused a stir earlier this year when he wrote that "our mission has failed" in Iraq -- just a few months after Bush hosted a White House tribute to Buckley's 80th birthday and the magazine's 50th anniversary.

Thomas L. Friedman, a New York Times columnist who is not a conservative but has strongly backed the Iraq war, reversed course this month, writing that " 'staying the course' is pointless, and it's time to start thinking about Plan B -- how we might disengage with the least damage possible."

White House spokesman Tony Snow said the second-guessing was predictable, given the difficulties in Iraq. "It's hardly unusual in times of war that people get anxious, and that would include people who have supported the president," he said. "The president understands that and is not fazed by it."

Snow said much of the frustration articulated by conservatives stems from a desire to accomplish Bush's ambitions. "The good thing is they all have the same goal: They all want to win the war on terror," he said. "You don't have people quibbling over the goals; they're quibbling over the means -- or 'quibbling' is the wrong word. 'Debating.' "

Snow, who hosted a Fox radio talk show before joining the White House this spring, has made an effort to reach out to conservative audiences by appearing on his former competitors' programs, including shows hosted by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. "We're certainly more engaged on that front," he said.

And some of the president's neoconservative supporters have fired back on his behalf. Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of Commentary magazine, wrote an 11,525-word essay this month rebutting not only Will, Buckley and other traditional conservatives but also fellow neoconservatives who "have now taken to composing obituary notices of their own." He noted that he had been a tough critic of Reagan for betraying conservative values, only to later conclude that Reagan's approach served "an overall strategy that in the end succeeded in attaining its great objective."

Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard and a reliable Bush supporter, said the disillusionment is not surprising. "People get weary, especially when they expected a war to be over very quickly," he said in an interview. "Supporters fall off over time. I've been disappointed by some of the people who have fallen off, like George Will, but that's what happens."

Few have struck a nerve more than Scarborough, who questioned the president's intelligence on his show, "Scarborough Country." He showed a montage of clips of Bush's famously inarticulate verbal miscues and then explored with guests John Fund and Lawrence O'Donnell Jr. whether Bush is smart enough to be president.

While the country does not want a leader wallowing in the weeds, Scarborough concluded on the segment, "we do need a president who, I think, is intellectually curious."

"And that is a big question," Scarborough said, "whether George W. Bush has the intellectual curiousness -- if that's a word -- to continue leading this country over the next couple of years."

In a later telephone interview, Scarborough said he aired the segment because he kept hearing even fellow Republicans questioning Bush's capacity and leadership, particularly in Iraq. Like others, he said, he supported the war but now thinks it is time to find a way to get out. "A lot of conservatives are saying, 'Enough's enough,' " he said. Asked about the reaction to his program, he said, "The White House is not happy about it."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

quote:

Originally posted by ProudCon:
When did this discussion group get so boring?

quote:

'Can't get no satisfaction'
by Ben Tripp:
August 23, 2006

We all know George W. Bush is a prick, and we know his people are the biggest bunch of peckerwoods since Nixon assembled his cabinet. We know furthermore that this cabal of venomous schweens have wrought more havoc in the world, and done more damage at home in America, than any single American administration since the South decided to secede. Even the commercial media is beginning to take note of these undisputable facts. Pundits are lining up to get on the earliest possible train out of Bushville, but that train left before the World Trade Center fell. Anybody with access to good information knew these people were planning to screw the world, long before they got out the brace & bit. Apparently the media didn't have that access to good information.

Or maybe the problem lies elsewhere. Maybe-- and you know this is a rhetorical device, you know 'maybe' doesn't enter into the thing-- just maybe the media didn't give a rat's rip about good information. Maybe they're in the bullshit business, same as most politicians. Back to my original point, because there's some convergence that needs to happen. We all know George W. Bush is a prick, and everyone around him are not only pricks, they're smarter pricks than he is, so they have no excuse. And we know the largely conservative, reactionary, sensationalist mainstream media has been lapping their ample bags for the last five years-- and throughout most of the Clinton years, as well. Why then, with the big rotten media finally starting to admit Bush is a Bad Thing For America And The World, am I not happier? It's because millions and millions of Americans don't give a rat's rip about good information, either.

See, it takes two to get fooled. You need a fooler, and you need a goddamn fool. There were enough fools in 200 and enough fools in 2004 to put this turdmincer in office and keep him there. Granted, not a sufficient number of fools so he could win an election square and fair, but plenty sufficient so it was close enough to steal, both times. I still see bumper stickers supporting the bastard, supporting the war on Iraq. Far fewer than I saw two years ago, but you have to ask yourself, what kind of human beings are these that can't accept the evidence all around them? If there were 2600 dead Americans on my lawn, people would ask questions. Anybody would. So why aren't a third of Americans asking these questions of the Bush administration?

So that's the first thing that robs me of satisfaction as I watch Bush and his minions lose their tiny minds in a morass of bad poll numbers and the impending bum-battering this election year promises to bring (the terror-alert card didn't work this time-- it's been pulled from the deck so many times it's gotten grubby, and even an idiot can spot it amongst the cards these days). America is rife with assholes, to put it bluntly. I used to merely dislike Right-Wingers for being flinthearted, war-loving sons of bitches. I forgave the ones I knew personally, assuming them to be essentially good people that didn't get enough love when they were children. Or something.

Now I hate them, and I fear them, and I don't want to live in the same country they do, even though it is patently obvious I'm the one that's going to have to shine up my passport and **** off out of it. They're not going anywhere. America won't be reunited in my lifetime, any more than it was reunited in the hundred years following the Civil War. I'm never going to forget what these ignorant, soulless fundamentalist woman-hating troglodytes did to my country, and several other countries, and the world at large. I'm not going to forgive, either. Half of Americans should put their beloved guns to their sanctimonious heads and blow their meager brains out for supporting war and death and destruction because they couldn't be bothered to seek out the facts beyond the cable news headlines, because they just like to kill dune coons, because they are mindless, superstitious, cowardly zombies sucking at the fartpipe of an authoritarian God that's the only sonofabitch meaner than this shitstain of a president. That's just the first thing that took all the fun out of watching the neoconservatives go down in flames.

The second thing is worse. Real people died because the government couldn't be bothered to follow up on an obvious plot to attack our country, on account of it was the president's vacation time again. Or, as so many now believe, because the government let it happen on purpose, or had a hand in it. And real people died again as we defeated an entire nation in pursuit of a single man. A man we then allowed to escape. A man we have since stopped looking for. Instead, real people died in Iraq-- and continue to die in numbers that the Black lague would envy-- to distract us from the abject failure of the hunt for Osama. And because what the hell, Iraq needed to die. It was in the playbook. Real people died in New Orleans, too, in an inexcusable act of willful negligence, as opposed to direct, bloody belligerence. They died just the same. I'll never forget that. How many died? Damn near as many as died on 9/11/01 in Manhattan. What have we done about it? The same thing we've done about the terrorists. Just about nothing.

The deaths of all these real human beings, that were born into the world, that suckled at their momma's titties, that learned how to talk one language or another, and found a god that suited them, or didn't, all these people that liked soccer or lamb chops or kissing or TV shows with David Hasselhoff, and a hundred thousand more that were too young to have learned anything much, but every single one of whom was born into this world just the same as George W. Bush, every cracker in Texas, Me, and Jesus Christ (in no particular order), all these deaths make it a sinful thing to even imagine taking satisfaction in the ruination of the Fourth Reich the neocons were attempting to erect.

I once thought I'd enjoy watching them go down. But it's no fun. We've lost the souls of half of our fellow Americans. They've become Nazis, monsters, Death-Eaters. We've lost countless civilians in distant lands, and miscounted tens of thousands of our own sons and daughters in the war. And we've lost too many freedoms. It is not too much to say that I have lost my country, and there are millions more that feel as I do.

Somewhere in a government-sponsored enemy-archive there is, I am told, a fat file stuffed with my writings, and probably the texts of my phone calls, and records of my financial transactions, too. They may also have all the documents pertaining to my divorce, and my kid's school report cards, and only the devil knows what else. I hope they will add this humble blog posting to that file, and I hope they will recognize that unlike them, I don't gloat over the destruction of my enemies. There's no satisfaction in it. The America I've lost is the same America they have lost, the only difference between me and the FBI agent in charge of filing my bumf being that I was kicking and screaming and he was collecting a paycheck.

So there's no satisfaction in watching the Right Wing implode. None at all. The price of admission was far too high. It is a bleak thing to admit, but if there is any satisfaction to be had, it is in knowing that the neocons --and the rotten-gutted millions that aided and abetted them-- must all live in the same world as the rest of us, forever washing their hands of blood that will not rinse away. And forever hosing off their patios, too, because when I figure out where they live, I intend to personally shit on their doorsteps if it takes me a thousand years. There may be some satisfaction in that.

quote:

Why Republicans Are Running from Bush At Election Time
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
October 27, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/43452/

So-called "principled" conservatives -- the faux libertarian voices of the Big Business elite that's always been the real base of the Republican Party -- are in full flight from the flaming wreck the Bush administration has become.

Former Bush I and Reagan official Bruce Bartlett lambasted the administration earlier this year with his book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," which was soon followed by longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie's "Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause." There are a dozen of them churning out columns and op-eds condemning Bush's profligate spending and pillorying his "compassionate," "Big Government" conservatism. Even former congressman Joe Scarborough -- MSNBC's cut-rate version of Bill O'Reilly -- got into the act, devoting a segment of his show to the fundamental question, "Is Bush an idiot?" and writing that he'd prefer "an assortment of Bourbon Street hookers running the Southern Baptist Convention to having this lot of Republicans controlling America's checkbook for the next two years."

And Christopher Buckley -- son of William F. and probably the funniest right-winger alive -- recently called Bush's governing philosophy "incontinent conservatism," and asked:

Who knew, in 2000, that "compassionate conservatism" meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief?

These "rebels" are enjoying a symbiotic relationship with the national media; writers love the intra-party feud -- usually the stuff of Democratic politics -- and the rogue conservatives get to brandish their "principles" and portray themselves as tip-toeing above the gutter of petty partisan politics in which the rest of us wallow.

But make no mistake: Underlying their dissent lies a massive deceit. Read between the lines, and you'll find that what really motivates them is a desperate attempt to save modern "conservatism" itself from going down with this administration. All of the libertarian rhetoric about limited government has always been a grand fraud; truly limited government is an anachronism. Perhaps it was appropriate in a time when small stakeholders toiled away in an agricultural economy, but it's simply impossible to govern a complex, modern, populous society like ours without a lot of staff.

Everybody knows it. The real question isn't about the size of government but whose interests it advances. Just consider that 42 of the 53 senators in the party of "limited government" voted for the bloated prescription drug bill that's now projected to cost $720 billion over the next ten years. It's a crappy, liberal-looking entitlement that was always just a giveaway to insurance companies and Big Pharma.

Judd Gregg, R-N.H., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, says on his website that he's proud to have promoted "responsible federal spending" during his tenure, but after voting to increase the country's debt ceiling to $9 trillion, he said sheepishly: "It's hard to understand what a trillion is. I don't know what it is."

Political scientists have known for a long time that while people respond positively to the idea of limited government in the abstract, when it comes to specifics people love big government and most, if not all of what it does. They want a government that will educate their children and put out forest fires and pay for their million-dollar cancer treatments and make sure that big chemical companies aren't poisoning their water and keep them from having to eat cat food after they've busted their asses working for 50 years. They expect cheap student loans and meat inspections and smooth highways, and even the lowest of "low information" voters know they're not going to get that stuff from the private sector.

Much more importantly, most people won't vote for politicians who honestly endorse a scorched earth, slash-and-burn libertarianism. Just ask Congress's loneliest (and most frustrated) man, Ron Paul, R-Texas, the Republican Party's only real libertarian.

And, contra the limited government types' spin, people aren't afraid of paying taxes to get government to do the things they expect it to. Take health care. The results of an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken during Bush's first term found results that are pretty typical: by a 2-1 margin Americans favored a universal health care system "modeled on Medicare." The nightmare for anti-tax activists was that eight in ten said it was "more important to provide health care coverage for all Americans, even if it means raising taxes, than to hold down taxes but leave some people uncovered."

For decades, Republicans have dealt with this reality with bullshit social issues, flag-waving demonstrations of patriotism that give even the worst of their economic victims a sense of self-respect and, most of all, by facing the American people squarely and just lying to their faces.

The Big Lie -- the deceit that's won them so many elections -- is that they can offer government that's just as big, but Americans won't ever have to pay for it. All the services you want and half the taxes! Eat ice-cream all day long and never put on a pound! Who wouldn't vote for such a utopian crock?

It's a series of boldfaced economic lies, actually, based on the carefully crafted separation of spending and taxes. The rebel conservatives' favorite statistic is that under Clinton, the government grew by 3.4 percent annually, and under Bush it's "exploded" -- a word that's ubiquitous to the genre -- to an average of over 10 percent each year (for some reason, they never mention that government spending increased by 9.75 percent annually under Saint Reagan).

But they never discuss his tax cuts. They've enriched a tiny uber-wealthy minority enormously, without doing anything to stimulate the economy. The cost, of course, is a tab the kids will have to pay -- massive deficits that legendary former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan called "unsustainable."

The idea that Americans can have their big government cake and eat their tax cuts too is nothing more than a scam on a huge scale that's been perpetrated for forty years. It's left voters dizzy. Public opinion about budgets and taxes at PollingReport.com is a tangled mess of contradictions. By 66-31 Americans think reducing the deficit is more important than getting tax breaks and by 2-1 they think the Bush tax cuts haven't done anything to help their own families, but by 58-30 they approve of the cuts anyway and by a margin of 50-35 they want them extended. It's psychotic.

But psychosis can be treated. And that's why so many "principled" paleoconservatives are running away from Bush like the Roadrunner from Wiley Coyote: His excesses threaten to expose the fact that the whole ideology's a sham -- that the wizard's dead and there's a little man behind that curtain.

Bush, a fake cowboy from a billion-dollar Connecticut family, has spent six years telling Americans that his voodoo economics will "unleash capital" and create a "torrent of new growth." Don't worry, he promises with his trademark smirk, we'll just "grow our way" out of the deficits. But his own comptroller, David Walker, told an audience earlier this year that "anyone who says we can grow our way out of the problem wouldn't pass Economics 101 or basic math." And the General Accounting Office says of Bushenomics: "Today's fiscal policy remains unsustainable" and adds, for clarity, "what is unsustainable will not be sustained."

Bush, the former frat boy, is a president whose excesses go across the board, and that's not the way it's supposed to be done. His father was Big Business's handmaiden, but he took governing seriously. This Bush's administration thinks government's a joke, and has elevated cronyism and corruption to an artform. Reagan was a hypernationalist, yes, but he fought proxy wars and picked off some easy meat in Grenada. When he found his Marines in the middle of a civil war in the Middle East, he cut-and-run with the best of them. Twenty years later Bush's adventure in Iraq threatens to give militarism a bad name. And while Saint Reagan was a homophobe who paid lip service to the religious right, Bush went to the mattresses for a brain-dead woman in Florida, even as his staff referred to his Christianist base as "insane," "ridiculous," "nuts." That threatens to expose the whole hypocritical game of footsie the GOP's played with the religious right for decades.

Make no mistake: Those "principled" conservatives don't hate Bush for his spending, they hate him because he is them -- the only kind of conservative who can win an election, a Republican peddling big government and low taxes without blinking. And if Americans get a clue that modern conservatism is nothing but a bunch of economic lies gilded with some bogus "family values" and softened with a bit of morphine for the terror junkies, he can bring the whole fetid house of cards down with him.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

quote:

Ideology Has Consequences
Bush rejects the politics of prudence.
by Jeffrey Hart
The American Conservative

November 20, 2006 Issue

Many Republicans must feel like that legendary man at the bar on the Titanic. Watching the iceberg slide by outside a porthole, he remarked, “I asked for ice. But this is too much.” Republicans voted for a Republican and got George W. Bush, but his Republican Party is unrecognizable as the party we have known.

Recall the Eisenhower Republican Party. Eisenhower, a thoroughgoing realist, was one of the most successful presidents of the 20th century. So was the prudential Reagan, wary of using military force. Nixon would have been a good secretary of state, but emotionally wounded and suspicious, he was not suited to the presidency. Yet he, too, with Henry Kissinger, was a realist. George W. Bush represents a huge swing away from such traditional conservative Republicanism.

But the conservative movement in America has followed him, evacuating prudence and realism for ideology and folly. Left behind has been the experienced realism of James Burnham. Also vacated, the Burkean realism of Willmoore Kendall, who aspired, as he told Leo Strauss, to be the “American Burke.” That Burkeanism entailed a sense of the complexity of society and the resistance of cultures to change. Gone, too, has been the individualism of Frank Meyer and the commonsense Western libertarianism of Barry Goldwater.

The post-2000 conservative movement has abandoned all that to back Bush and has followed him over the cliff into our calamity in Iraq. On top of all that, the Bush presidency has been fueled by the moral authoritarianism of the current third evangelical awakening.

Yes, aware Republicans are like that man on the Titanic who asked for ice, and this iceberg is too much.

The problem is that Bush campaigned in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative.” Today, the media calls him a conservative, yet there is nothing at all conservative about his policies, whether foreign or domestic. William F. Buckley once said that conservatism is the “politics of reality.” But Bush has not pursued reality-based policies. Will we have to find another word? It certainly looks that way.

Buckley has said that Bush has been “engulfed” by Iraq and that if he had been a European prime minister he would have resigned by now. Other commentators known as conservatives have agreed: Andrew Sullivan, George Will, Francis Fukuyama. It is worth considering a statement by Richard Cheney:

Once you get to Baghdad, it’s not clear what you do with it. It’s not clear what kind of government you put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime, a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that going to have if it’s set up by the American military there? How long does the United States military have to stay there to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens once we leave?

Smart man, that Cheney. The only problem is that he said that back in 1991 during the first Gulf War when he was secretary of defense in the administration of George H.W. Bush. At that time, Brent Scowcroft was national security adviser and James Baker was secretary of state. Recently, Scowcroft has said that though he has been friends with Cheney for more than 30 years, he no longer really knows him. What has happened to Cheney is anybody’s guess.

It can’t be 9/11. We know from many sources that Bush had decided to invade Iraq long before 9/11. In The Right Man, David Frum recounts being interviewed for a position by Michael Gerson, head Bush speechwriter and also policy adviser, not long after Bush became president. Gerson told Frum that Bush would topple Saddam. At that time nothing was being said about weapons of mass destruction.

National Review editor Rich Lowry sheds some light on the president’s motivation for invading Iraq in a column titled “The Revenge of Orthodoxy.” Following historian Walter Russell Mead, he notices that we are in the “Third Awakening” of Protestant evangelicalism and that the Bush presidency should be stamped “Brought to you by orthodox Christian believers.” He makes clear the implications of this for American foreign policy:

The reinvigorated Wilsonian foreign policy championed by Bush—and motivated less by Woodrow Wilson’s secular values (international law, etc.) and more by religious beliefs (the God-given rights of all people)—is a reflection of Bush’s Christian base.

Lowry, following Mead, is surely correct here. But just what is conservative about it? Historically, American evangelicalism has veered wildly from the crusading lyrics of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to the pacifism of William Jennings Bryan.

And has anyone ever claimed that Wilsonianism is conservative? To give Woodrow a bit of a break, his “Wilsonianism” was much more temperate than is sometimes thought: “It will now be our fortunate duty,” he said, “to assist by example, by sober, friendly counsel, and by material aid in the establishment of democracy through out the world.” That statement by Wilson reflects the original meaning of the torch the Statue of Liberty holds aloft: the United States is a beacon of liberty. Emma Lazarus’s famous lines about welcoming immigrants amounted to a misinterpretation. True enough, Lloyd George, when he returned to England from Versailles, remarked that he had not done badly considering that he had been sitting between Napoleon (Clemenceau) and Jesus Christ (Wilson). But just what did Wilson mean by “the world” when he spoke of “establishing democracy”? I hazard the thought that he focused on the West and was not thinking of Borneo or the Congo, nor, surely, of launching invasions and occupations of Mesopotamia. With Bush in mind, Woodrow’s “Wilsonianism,” though naïve and though certainly not conservative, can be declared Not Guilty.

To define what “conservative” in fact means, the place to turn is Edmund Burke, the founder of modern political philosophy, the first political thinker to base his thought on empirical fact and on history. Both Hobbes and Locke were empiricists, but in their political thought they reasoned from assumptions they posited about human nature.

Hobbes took a relatively dark view of human nature, seeing human life in a mythical pre-social state of nature as “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” Such creatures needed firm control. Locke, in contrast, was more optimistic, seeing man in a state of nature as governed by reason and thus requiring a much less intrusive government. The empiricism reflected by Locke, however, represented a new way of seeing the world and made political philosophy, beginning with Burke, possible. The opening pages of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1690) possess the promise of a new and innocent dawn as Locke brushes aside much of Western philosophy, judging metaphysics to be a distraction from his focus on the facts of this world, with a view to improving it. As a result, we have the facticity reflected in the birth of the novel (Defoe), history (Gibbon, Hume), biography (Boswell), and Burke. In Robinson Crusoe (1719) we have the thrill of Locke’s empiricism as it appears in the prose of our first novel, that is, in the first distinctively modern form of literature:

The sixth day of our being at sea we came into Yarmouth Roads; the wind having been contrary, and the Weather calm, we had made but little Way since the Storm. Here we were obliged to come to an Anchor, and here we lay, the Wind continuing contrary—viz. at South-west—for seven or eight Days, during which time a great many Ships from Newcastle came into the same Roads, as the common Harbour where the ships might wait for a wind from the river.

Never before in literature had man been placed so thoroughly in a physical (empirical) environment. Never before had biography come to us with the detail Boswell uses in his Life of Samuel Johnson.

Burke does not begin with hypothetical “states of nature” but with the facts of history and human behavior. His great breakthrough into new territory—he wrote that he had been “alarmed into reflection” by the completely unique events in France—came in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). To see his thought develop here in an exploratory way, then see him make further discoveries a year later, is to experience enormous intellectual excitement.

Once, while I was a graduate student at Columbia, I took a seminar in important thinkers with Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling. Barzun, in particular, liked to start by identifying the core of a great thinker’s thought. When it came to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution, I offered: “Burke knows that if you tried to tie your shoes in the morning by means of reason you would never get out of the house.” That is, you tie your shoes by habit. Barzun nodded approval but gave this a social dimension, saying, “Burke wanted his morning newspaper delivered on time.” That is, the writing, manufacture, and delivery of that newspaper require a great many actions that are accomplished by habit. Social institutions are the habits of society.

What Burke faced in the radical philosophes across the Channel was something new: an actual society in France being attacked by abstract “rights of man.” To this he opposed the historic liberties of England. He saw the abstraction-based attack on an actual society as something new in history—and inherently dangerous. Part of the excitement of the Reflections consists in Burke confronting this novelty, searching for a vocabulary to describe it: “abstract theory,” “metaphysical dogma.” Burke was seeking terms to describe a belief system impervious to fact or experience, and he brought to bear a permanently valid analysis of human behavior and the role of social institutions. Burke’s “abstract theory” and “metaphysical dogma” we would call ideology.

Burke’s thought, however, did not conclude with the Reflections. And it is exciting to watch him responding to events as they unfold. By 1791, in his “Thoughts on French Affairs,” he recognized that the social forces converging against the absolute monarchy had made revolution inevitable. Saying that the French Revolution had occupied him for two years, he now recognized that:

If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and they, who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.

Burke there moved from social structure in the Reflections to social process. In his great essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865) Matthew Arnold rightly described this as one of the great moments in modern thought.

In the free nations of the world at the present time, we have experienced changes that can be called revolutions, certainly the biomedical, also the women’s revolution, which has been one of the most far reaching in its implications. Not until 1912 was women’s suffrage on the agenda of a major American political party, Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive (“Bull Moose”) Party. And women’s suffrage implied women’s equality. The sources of women’s demand for equality surely went back before 1912. The result today can be seen in almost any college or university graduate school, indeed in the armed forces. I know the subject is fraught with emotion and contention, but I consider analytically that the demand for the availability of abortion is a derivative of women’s equality: that is, equality requires that women be able to shape their lives as freely as men do. Many will find that analytical conclusion disagreeable. No doubt Burke hated to see that the French Revolution had been inevitable. Yet he knew that those who “persist in opposing [the implications of] this mighty current in human affairs … will not be resolute and firm but perverse and obstinate.”

While it is not incorrect to call Burke a conservative, it is also correct to call him an analytical realist. And I suggest that they may be the same thing. Indeed there is a sense in which any successful government must be based upon such analytical realism. Today, many historians judge that Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were among the best presidents in the 20th century and rank them among the best in American history. I think Ronald Reagan will join them. All were realistic in handling the challenges they faced.

Bush has offered two justifications for his invasion of Iraq. First, that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. None were discovered, and Bush’s claims, upon examination, have been found suspect. He has also projected a democratic Iraq, some of his statements being so disconnected from actuality as to qualify as pure ideology.

For example, at the American Enterprise Institute on Feb. 26, 2003, Bush put forth the following theory of human behavior:

Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on earth. In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. For these fundamental reasons, freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror.

Yes, human beings do dislike “brutal and bullying oppression,” but everything else there is false. The people going to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11 did not want the same things as Mohammed Atta. Historically, holiness, power, glory, conquest, and empire have had greater appeal than freedom and democracy. But Bush’s belief in the convergence and even identity of goals apparently is unshakable.

Speaking in Whitehall later in 2003, Bush was at it again, claiming, “The establishment of a free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global expansion of democracy ... as the alternative to instability and hatred and terror.” Sure, “global expansion of democracy.” Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, a strategic thinker, wrote of Bush’s

fusion of breathtaking utopianism with barely disguised machtpolitik. It reads as if it were the product not of sober, ostensibly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely collaboration of Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von Moltke.

On April 24, Bush repeated his fantastic theory in a speech in Irvine, California:

I based a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things I think are true. One, I believe that there’s an Almighty, and secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody’s soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free. I believe liberty is universal. I believe people want to be free. And I know that democracies do not war with each other. And I know that the best way to defeat the enemy, the best way to defeat their ability to exploit hopelessness and despair is to give people a chance to live in a free society.

Well, it is certainly taking a long time for what the Almighty wants to make its appearance in the actual world. Most of the world today is far from democratic. Over the long span of human history, democracy is almost invisible. In the real world, many people want a society in which the rules laid down in the Koran govern all activities and take absolute precedence over liberty. In Iraq, the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has no interest in freedom, and al-Sadr is the power behind the present Prime Minister Maliki. What planet is Bush living on? He makes the “metaphysical dogma” of the radical philosophes seem sober by comparison.

Before long, students may be allowed to take entire history courses in the expanding library of books analyzing Bush’s Iraq calamity and other failures of his administration, which also derive from his tendency to privilege ideology over realism. Supply-side ideology led to large tax cuts and mountainous deficits. Privatization ideology led to an incomprehensible and unnecessarily expensive prescription-drug plan. No previous administration has produced such an outpouring.

Is Bush a conservative? Of course not. When all the evidence is in, I think historians will agree with Princeton’s Sean Wilentz, who wrote a carefully argued article judging Bush to have been the worst president in American history. The problem is that he is generally called a conservative, perhaps because he obviously is not a liberal. It may be that Bush, in the magnitude of his failure, defies conventional categories. But the word “conservative” deserves to be rescued. Against the misconception that Bush is a conservative, and appealing to Burke, all of our analytical energies must be brought to bear. I hope I have made a beginning here.
____________________________________________

Jeffrey Hart is a senior editor of National Review and author, most recently, of The Making of the American Conservative Mind.

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Ken Adelman: A Rat Abandons a Ship of Fools
November 20, 2006.
By Ken Silverstein.
Harpers.org

“Embittered Insiders Turn Against Bush,” was the headline of a front-page Washington Post story yesterday that detailed how former Iraq hawks have broken with the Bush Administration over the war. Exhibit A was Ken Adelman, a onetime Reagan Administration official and “onetime member of the Iraq war brain trust,” who has fallen out with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and who told the Post that “the President is ultimately responsible” for the “debacle” in Iraq.

Adelman's hypocrisy is stunning. In 2002 it was he who famously predicted that American forces would enjoy “a cakewalk” in Iraq, and during the run-up to the invasion he derided war critics for their stupidity and naiveté. “There's always the chicken littles, running around and saying 'oh my God, it's terrible,'” he said on Hardball, six days before the war began, when asked about the possibility that things might not go as smoothly as he and his fellow-hawks had predicted.

The following month, he was gloating to the New York Times that his “cakewalk” prediction had been remarkably prescient. Adelman, according to the story, “scorned recent complaints by retired generals and military analysts that the Pentagon had deployed too few troops” to Iraq. “I always thought that was ridiculous,” Adelman told the newspaper. “It turned out they were factually wrong. I never understood what having three times as many troops would have done.”

But what's most astonishing about Adelman's current criticism of the Bush Administration is that he argued for a “stay the course” approach long after it became clear that the war was a burgeoning disaster. He paid no mind to the idea that Iraqis were growing uneasy with the American presence, and said that although the administration was doing its best, more needed to be done in terms of generating employment and economic opportunities. “There were possibilities in the beginning, but they were all [floundering] for some reason or other,” he told MSNBC in June of 2003.

Here's a reason: Adelman and other war proponents were dead wrong when they envisioned a post-war scenario in which Iraqis greeted American troops with flowers and Iraq became a model democracy.

The following month, back on Hardball, Adelman—by now a regular on the talk show circuit—blandly stated that there was absolutely no need to put more U.S. troops on the ground, despite the complete failure of American forces to establish any type of order. “I would not go reinforce the troops,” he stated confidently. “I would accelerate the Iraqization of security.”

In September, during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Adelman once again went after war critics. “The war has been over, just, what is it, five months or something like that? And it takes a long time to rebuild a country,” he said. “The big problem has been not the war [in] Iraq, but the big problem has been twenty years of Saddam Hussein . . . They ran down everything about that country, so that we have to have time.” He derided the comments of another guest, Jessica Stern, of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who said that the war was creating anger in the Arab world and generating future jihadists. “We've heard the same thing before we went into Iraq . . . that the Arab street was going to rise up,” said Adelman. He went on to claim that the polls Stern cited were probably unreliable.

By April of 2004, it was no longer possible for Adelman to deny the unraveling situation in Iraq, but nothing, he argued, was fundamentally wrong with the Bush Administration's strategy. In an op-ed that month in USA Today (“Don't change course now”), he acknowledged a few minor problems with the hawks' prewar statements. “Those of us who championed Iraq's liberation were way too sanguine,” he wrote. “We were wrong about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. Wrong about Iraqis cooperating fully after Saddam Hussein was deposed. And probably wrong about close ties between Saddam's henchmen and Al Qaeda's fanatics.”

But they were right about everything else, he maintained, and he added that “panicky cries for a change of course must be rejected. . . . Calling for a new U.S. approach, for its own sake, risks undermining this battle.” Indeed, said Adelman, “Iraqis can't defeat us. Only USA Today editorials and similar worrywarts can defeat us.”

Now, after all this, Adelman would have us believe that he has absolutely no responsibility for the Iraq disaster? His breaking point on Iraq, he told the Post, was Bush's decision to award Medals of Freedom to Paul Bremer, General Tommy Franks, and George Tenet. “The three individuals who got the highest civilian medals the President can give were responsible for a lot of the debacle that was Iraq.” Adelman sounds jealous, not righteous. It's too bad there’s no medal for being a whining, war-promoting hypocrite.

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Lee Iacocca blasts Bush & Cheney as "clueless bozos"

Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course."

Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough. How about you?

I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have....

Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them—or at least some of us did. But I'll tell you what we didn't do. We didn't agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn't agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that's a dictatorship, not a democracy....

On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. Where was George Bush? He was reading a story about a pet goat to kids in Florida when he heard about the attacks. He kept sitting there for twenty minutes with a baffled look on his face. It's all on tape. You can see it for yourself. Then, instead of taking the quickest route back to Washington and immediately going on the air to reassure the panicked people of this country, he decided it wasn't safe to return to the White House. He basically went into hiding for the day—and he told Vice President Dick Cheney to stay put in his bunker. We were all frozen in front of our TVs, scared out of our wits, waiting for our leaders to tell us that we were going to be okay, and there was nobody home. It took Bush a couple of days to get his bearings and devise the right photo op at Ground Zero.

That was George Bush's moment of truth, and he was paralyzed. And what did he do when he'd regained his composure? He led us down the road to Iraq—a road his own father had considered disastrous when he was President. But Bush didn't listen to Daddy. He listened to a higher father. He prides himself on being faith based, not reality based. If that doesn't scare the crap out of you, I don't know what will....

I have news for the gang in Congress. We didn't elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bobblehead on Fox News will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don't you guys show some spine for a change?

Had Enough?

Hey, I'm not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I'm trying to light a fire. I'm speaking out because I have hope. I believe in America. In my lifetime I've had the privilege of living through some of America's greatest moments. I've also experienced some of our worst crises—the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the 1970s oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years culminating with 9/11. If I've learned one thing, it's this: You don't get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action. Whether it's building a better car or building a better future for our children, we all have a role to play. That's the challenge I'm raising in this book. It's a call to action for people who, like me, believe in America. It's not too late, but it's getting pretty close. So let's shake off the horseshit and go to work. Let's tell 'em all we've had enough.

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Impeach CheneyThe vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped.
By Bruce Fein
June 27, 2007

Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify.

Take the vice president's preposterous theory that his office is outside the executive branch because it also exercises a legislative function. The same can be said of the president, who also exercises a legislative function in signing or vetoing bills passed by Congress. Under Cheney's bizarre reasoning, President Bush is not part of his own administration: The executive branch becomes acephalous. Today Cheney Chief of Staff David Addington refused to renounce that reasoning, instead laughably trying to diminish the importance of the legal question at issue.

The nation's first vice president, John Adams, bemoaned: "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived; and as I can do neither good nor evil, I must be borne away by others and meet common fate." Vice President John Nance Garner, serving under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, lamented: "The vice presidency isn't worth a pitcher of warm piss." In modern times, vice presidents have generally been confined to attending state funerals or to distributing blankets after earthquakes.

Then President George W. Bush outsourced the lion's share of his presidency to Vice President Cheney, and Mr. Cheney has made the most of it. Since 9/11, he has proclaimed that all checks and balances and individual liberties are subservient to the president's commander in chief powers in confronting international terrorism. Let's review the record of his abuses and excesses:

The vice president asserted presidential power to create military commissions, which combine the functions of judge, jury, and prosecutor in the trial of war crimes. The Supreme Court rebuked Cheney in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Mr. Cheney claimed authority to detain American citizens as enemy combatants indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay on the president's say-so alone, a frightening power indistinguishable from King Louis XVI's execrated lettres de cachet that occasioned the storming of the Bastille. The Supreme Court repudiated Cheney in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.

The vice president initiated kidnappings, secret detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international terrorists. This lawlessness has been answered in Germany and Italy with criminal charges against CIA operatives or agents. The legal precedent set by Cheney would justify a decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to kidnap American tourists in Paris and to dispatch them to dungeons in Belarus if they were suspected of Chechen sympathies.

The vice president has maintained that the entire world is a battlefield. Accordingly, he contends that military power may be unleashed to kill or capture any American citizen on American soil if suspected of association or affiliation with al-Qaida. Thus, Mr. Cheney could have ordered the military to kill Jose Padilla with rockets, artillery, or otherwise when he landed at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, because of Padilla's then-suspected ties to international terrorism.

Mr. Cheney has championed a presidential power to torture in contravention of federal statutes and treaties.

He has advocated and authored signing statements that declare the president's intent to disregard provisions of bills he has signed into law that he proclaims are unconstitutional, for example, a requirement to obtain a judicial warrant before opening mail or a prohibition on employing military force to fight narco-terrorists in Colombia. The signing statements are tantamount to absolute line-item vetoes that the Supreme Court invalidated in the 1998 case Clinton v. New York.

The vice president engineered the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic surveillance program targeting American citizens on American soil in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. He concocted the alarming theory that the president may flout any law that inhibits the collection of foreign intelligence, including prohibitions on breaking and entering homes, torture, or assassinations. As a reflection of his power in this arena, today the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Cheney's office, as well as the White House, for documents that relate to the warrantless eavesdropping.

The vice president has orchestrated the invocation of executive privilege to conceal from Congress secret spying programs to gather foreign intelligence, and their legal justifications. He has summoned the privilege to refuse to disclose his consulting of business executives in conjunction with his Energy Task Force, and to frustrate the testimonies of Karl Rove and Harriet Miers regarding the firings of U.S. attorneys.

Cheney scorns freedom of speech and of the press. He urges application of the Espionage Act to prosecute journalists who expose national security abuses, for example, secret prisons in Eastern Europe or the NSA's warrantless surveillance program. He retaliated against Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, through Chief of Staff Scooter Libby, for questioning the administration's evidence of weapons of mass destruction as justification for invading Iraq. Mr. Cheney is defending himself from a pending suit brought by Wilson and Plame on the grounds that he is entitled to the absolute immunity of the president established in 1982 by Nixon v. Fitzgerald. (Although this defense contradicts Cheney's claim that he is not part of the executive branch.)

The Constitution does not expressly forbid the president from abandoning his chief powers to the vice president. But President Bush's tacit delegation to Cheney and Cheney's eager acceptance tortures the Constitution's provision for an acting president. The presidency and vice presidency are discrete constitutional offices. The 12th Amendment provides for their separate elections. The sole constitutionally enumerated function of the vice president is to serve as president of the Senate without a vote except to break ties.

In contrast, Article II enumerates the powers and responsibilities of the president, including the obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. A special presidential oath is prescribed. Section 3 of the 25th Amendment provides a method for the president to yield his office to the vice president, when "he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." There is no other constitutional provision for transferring presidential powers to the vice president.

Yet without making a written transmittal to Congress, President Bush has ceded vast domains of his powers to Vice President Cheney by mutual understanding that circumvents the 25th Amendment. This constitutional provision assures that the public and Congress know who is exercising the powers of the presidency and who should be held responsible for successes or failures. The Bush-Cheney dispensation blurs political accountability by continually hiding the real decision-maker under presidential skirts. The Washington Post has thoroughly documented the vice president's dominance in a four-part series running this week. It is quite a read.

In the end, President Bush regularly is unable to explain or defend the policies of his own administration, and that is because the heavy intellectual labor has been performed in the office of the vice president. Cheney is impeachable for his overweening power and his sneering contempt of the Constitution and the rule of law.

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Statement of Bruce Fein, Deputy Attorney General to Ronald Reagan
March 31, 2006

Statement of Bruce Fein Before the Senate Judiciary Committee Re: S.Res. 398 Relating to the Censure of George W. Bush

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee: I am grateful for the opportunity to express my support for Senate Resolution 398. It would censure President George W. Bush for seeking to cripple the Constitution’s checks and balances and political accountability by secretly authorizing the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens in the United States in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and misleading the public about the secret surveillance program.

Censure of the President for official misconduct is a species of congressional oversight of the Executive Branch including the exposure of mismanagement, corruption or other wrongdoing. Broad congressional oversight jurisdiction was endorsed by the United States Supreme Court in Watkins v. United States, 354 U.S. 178 (1957).

Congress regularly writes reports harshly critical of official actions at the conclusion of oversight hearings, for example, the Majority Report of the Iran-contra Joint Committee on Covert Arms Sales to Iran. Censure seems to me at least a first cousin—a collective judgment of Congress about the performance of the President regarding the discharge of official duties, including an obligation to faithfully execute the laws. With regard to S. Res. 398, it is also a statement to the Supreme Court that Congress disputes President Bush's interpretation of FISA and inherent Article II powers. If President Harry Truman could run against a “do nothing “ Congress, I see no reason why Congress cannot reciprocally run against a "doing wrong" president.

In conjunction with President William Jefferson Clinton’s impeachment, which I supported, I then held a different view regarding the propriety or legitimacy of censure. I worried that it would enable Congress to engage in character assassination by condemning a president without an opportunity to present exculpatory evidence, in contrast to the impeachment process. I am now persuaded that my worry was overbroad.

In this case, the President has been given a full opportunity to dispute the censure assertions and the Senate record is open to publish any presidential response, the danger of character assassination is much attenuated. Censure now seems to me a legitimate expression of Congress about the conduct of the President that contributes to enlightened public opinion and debate. With regard to my former unsound view, I can cite President Abraham Lincoln for the proposition that a man who does not grow wiser by the day is a fool, and Justice Robert H. Jackson who explained a similar recantation with the observation that he was astonished that a man of his intelligence had been guilty of such foolishness. See McGrath v. Kristensen, 340 U.S. 162 (1950)(concurring opinion).

Censure should not be employed over every legal disagreement between Congress and the Executive. A president should not be intimidated from good faith interpretations, especially where presidential prerogatives are at stake. But the warrantless surveillance program justifies censure because of the convergence of aggravating factors.

First, President Bush’s intent was to keep the program secret from Congress and to avoid political or legal accountability indefinitely. Secrecy of that sort makes checks and balances a farce. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Popular government without popular information is impossible. Neither Congress nor the American people can question or evaluate a program that is entirely unknown. Mr. Bush could have informed Congress that he was acting outside FISA without disclosing intelligence sources or methods or otherwise alerting terrorists to the need for evasive action.

Since 1978, FISA has informed the world that the United States spies on its enemies, and disclosing the fact of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program would not have added to the enemy’s knowledge on that score. That explains why the Bush administration continued the program after The New York Times’ publication. Second, President Bush’s refusal to disclose the number of Americans that have been targeted under the surveillance program and the success rate in gathering intelligence useful in thwarting terrorism from Americans targeted makes a congressional assessment of its constitutionality or wisdom impossible. Fourth Amendment reasonableness pivots in part on whether the government is on a fishing expedition hoping that something will turn up based on statistical probabilities, like breaking and entering every home in the United States because a handful of emails might be discovered showing a communication with an Al Qaeda member. Without knowing the general nature and success of the surveillance program, Congress is handicapped in fashioning new legislation or undertaking other appropriate responses.

Third, President Bush’s interpretation of the AUMF is preposterous, not simply wrong. FISA is clearly a constitutional exercise of congressional power both to protect the Bill of Rights and to regulate the power of the President to gather foreign intelligence through either electronic surveillance or physical searches during both war and peace. The necessary and proper clause in Article I authorizes Congress to legislate with regard to all powers of the United States, not simply those of the legislative branch. Congress was emphatic that FISA was intended as the exclusive method of gathering foreign intelligence through electronic surveillance or physical searches. And FISA was enacted when the United States confronted a greater danger to its existence from Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles than it does today from Al Qaeda. The argument that the AUMF was intended an exception to FISA is discredited by the following. Neither any Member of Congress not President Bush even hinted at such an interpretation in the course of its enactment, including a presidential signing statement. The interpretation would inescapably mean that the AUMF also was intended to authorize President Bush to break and enter homes, open mail, torture detainees, or even open internment camps for American citizens in violation of federal statutes in order to gather foreign intelligence. To think Congress would have intended to inflict such a gaping wound on the Bill of Rights by silence is thoroughly implausible. The AUMF argument was concocted years after its enactment. It does not represent a contemporaneous interpretation entitled to deference. Further, numerous provisions of THE PATRIOT ACT would have been superfluous if the AUMF means what President Bush now says it means. Finally, FISA is a specific statute prohibiting the gathering of foreign intelligence in both war and peace except within its terms, whereas the AUMF is silent on the issue of foreign intelligence. The specific customarily trumps the general as a matter of statutory interpretation. FISA is more definitive against the President than the failure of Congress to enact legislation in Youngstown because the former tells the Commander-in-Chief “you cannot act” whereas the latter simply said “we are not conferring this power to seize private businesses.” Fourth, President Bush has evaded judicial review of the legality of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program by refusing to use its fruits in seeking FISA warrants or in criminal prosecutions. Pending private suits are problematic because of difficult standing questions. The President’s evasion of the courts makes it proper for Congress to step into the breach to express its on view on the legality of the spying program. Fifth, President Bush’s theory of inherent prerogatives under Article II to justify warping a natural interpretation of the AUMF would reduce Congress to an ink blot in the permanent conflict with international terrorism. The President could pick and choose which statutes to obey in gathering foreign intelligence and employing battlefield tactics on the sidewalks of the United States, akin to exercising a line-item veto over FISA and its amendments.

Even if President Bush’s official misconduct regarding the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program would justify censure, the ultimate decision of whether to press forward is political—a type of prosecutorial discretion. The objective should be to restore the Constitution’s checks and balances that President Bush has begun to cripple. If President Bush had shown a serious inclination to collaborate with Congress over joint approaches to defeating international terrorism and gathering foreign intelligence, then censure would be counterproductive. But the President has been intransigent. Censure would not worsen the intransigence, but would facilitate a judgment by the American people during the next election as to whether they approve or disapprove of President Bush’s contempt for the rule of law and constitutional limitations. But an even superior response would be the exercise of the power of the purse to prohibit electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes outside of FISA, which I have previously advocated before this Committee.

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Bush is at 34% approval rating (Cheney is at 18!), and their scandals are blowing up in their faces:

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It's no surprise Bush has skipped visits to this heavily Democratic state. He is so disliked here that the popular and liberal Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee was voted out last year in favor of a Democrat who ran mostly on an anti-Bush platform.

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The Misunderestimated Mr. Cheney:The Vice President's Record of Willfully Violating the Law, And Wrongly Claiming Authority to Do So
By JOHN W. DEAN
----
Friday, Jun. 29, 2007

Vice President Dick Cheney has regularly claimed that he is above the law, but until recently he has not offered any explanation of why.

In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a law that Cheney believes does apply to him, whether that law be major or minor. For example, he has claimed that most of the laws passed in the aftermath of Watergate were unconstitutional, and thus implicitly inapplicable. His office oversees signing statements claiming countless new laws will not be honored except insofar as the President's extremely narrow interpretation allows. He does not believe the War Powers Act should be honored by the President. Nor, in his view, should the President be bothered with laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In fact, it appears Cheney has actively encouraged defiance of such laws by the Bush Administration.
Click here to find out more!

For Cheney, the Geneva Conventions - considered among the nation's most important treaties -- are but quaint relics that can be ignored. Thus, he publicly embraced their violation when, on an Idaho talk radio program, he said he was not troubled in the slightest by our forces using "waterboarding" -- the simulated drowning of detainees to force them to talk. There are serious questions as to whether Cheney himself has also conspired to violate the War Crimes Act, which can be a capital crime.

A man who can so easily disregard the War Powers Act, FISA, the Geneva Conventions, and the War Crimes Act is merely flicking fleas when it comes to complying with laws like the Presidential Records Act, which requires him to keep records. Yet as CNN and other news organizations have reported, Cheney ordered the destruction of the visitor logs to his residence. These, of course, are presidential records the law requires him to preserve and protect. (Indeed, neighbors of the Vice President were surprised when, in the past, a truck for a document shredding service would regularly visit the Vice President's residence at the Naval Observatory.)

Most recently, the Vice President has refused to comply with Executive Order 12958, as amended by his boss, George W. Bush. These orders were issued to implement the law adopted by Congress in 1995 to clarify the classification and protection of national security information.

Most interesting in Cheney's defiance is his absolutely absurd explanation of why the law is not applicable to him or his staff.

Cheney's Explanation(s) For Defying the National Security Classification Orders

Henry Waxman, who may be the nation's most diligent and vigilant member of Congress, recently reported that Vice President Cheney claims he is exempt from the presidential orders requiring government-wide procedures to safeguard classified national security information because he is not an "entity within the executive branch." According to information provided to Chairman Waxman's Oversight committee, Cheney further claimed he was not an "agency" as set forth in the Executive Orders.

When Cheney was widely ridiculed by humorists, cartoonists, pundits, commentators and several members of Congress for his claim of not being an "entity within the executive branch," the Vice President's chief of staff and counsel David Addington responded by asserting that the Vice President is not subject to the order because he is not an "agency" as defined by the order. (Addington thus effectively dropped the claim that the Vice President is not an "entity.")

However, Addington does not cite any authority or language for his new claim that the Vice President is not an "agency." In fact, there is none. To the contrary, the order controlling national security classification states exactly the opposite of what Addington claims.

Executive Order 12958 states that the term "Agency" means any "Executive agency," as defined in the statutory language found at 5 U.S.C. 105, and it includes "any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information." An entity is any "body" or "unit" or "thing" within the executive branch, and to claim the Vice President's office is none of these is an insult to common sense. So is Addington's claim that the Office of Vice President is not an agency under the law.

Section 105 of Title 5 of the United States Code states that an "'Executive agency' means an … independent establishment" within the executive branch. Independent establishments are defined by Section 104 as "an establishment in the executive branch … which is not an Executive department [which are listed in Section 101, and include the Departments of State, Treasury, Justice, etc.], military department, Government corporation, or part thereof, or part of an independent establishment."

The Justice Department issued an opinion in 1994 that the Vice President was not an "agency" under the Freedom of Information Act. That opinion was largely based on the Supreme Court ruling, in Kissinger v. Reporters Comm. for Freedom of the Press, that "agency" does not cover "the President's immediate personal staff or units in the Executive Office whose sole function is to advise and assist the President."

However, the agency definition in E.O. 12985 is very different from that in the Freedom of Information Act. If, as Addington claims, E.O. 12985 was intended to exempt the Vice President's office, why did it not so state? Or, why did Bush not exempt the Vice President when he amended that order in July 2005?

Cheney's claim his office is neither an entity nor agency defies logic, but it is not surprising since he continues also to claim, with absolutely no evidence to support his claim, that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 and that terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi set up an al Qaeda operation in Iraq.

Needless to say, Cheney's claim - or Addington's claim, since Cheney appears to be backing away from his chief of staff and counsel on this issue - raises the question of what the vice president is. Legally, the vice president has only the most limited of powers and authority, unless the president empowers him.

The Limited Role the Constitution and a Federal Statute Envision for the Vice President

The Vice President's very limited but vital roles are set forth in the Constitution. He is the next in succession to become President, should there be a vacancy or should the president suffer from mental or physical inability to serve. And he is the president of the Senate, which means he can preside over the Senate but under the Senate Rules, he cannot take part in debate, and under the Constitution, he can only vote to break a tie.

In the event of a vacancy in the office of the president, under Article II and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the Vice President becomes the Acting President. Also under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the Vice President, when acting with a majority of the Cabinet, can also declare the president is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." If he so declares, then after so informing Congress, the Vice President becomes Acting President until the President notifies Congress that he is fine; if there is a dispute, the Congress resolves it.

The only other Constitutional duty of the Vice President is that set forth in Article I, Section 3, clause 4, which makes the Vice President the "President of the Senate, but [he/she] shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided." Not since the nation's second Vice President, Thomas Jefferson, decided it was a waste of time to preside over the Senate has any Vice President done so -- other than to break ties or for ceremonial events, such as the State of the Union or the tallying of electoral college votes.

Since 1947, the Vice President has been given a number of statutory duties, when President Truman recommended, and the Congress agreed, that the Vice President should be a member of the National Security Council. This, however, is the most significant of his statutory assignments.

Thus, beyond the limited constitutional responsibilities, and the few statutory tasks, the Vice President's role comes down to whatever the President assigns him. Vice Presidents can have no role greater than the assignments given by the president -- or in the case of Dick Cheney, whatever he has been able to convince the President he can appropriately handle for him.

The Source of Cheney's Power: Influence, Not a Formal Grant of Authority

Washington insiders have long understood that Cheney's power stems from his knowledge of the way the White House and the Office of the President operate. This is knowledge he acquired as President Ford's Chief of Staff. With Bush's consent, much of the paper flow of the White House which heads up the chain of command toward the President goes through Cheney's office. In addition, Cheney's staff reaches down into the executive bureaucracy to shape the debate before it reaches the White House.

Those with whom I have spoken have serious doubt that Bush and the White House staff really knows what Cheney is doing, why he is doing it, or how he is doing it. From the outset of this administration, Cheney has been instrumental in placing people loyal to him throughout the Executive Branch. This is not to say that Bush is not "the decider," for he is, but by shaping the debate and controlling the paper flow, Cheney decides what the decider will decide.

It has long been apparent that Cheney's genius is that he lets George W. Bush get out of bed every morning actually believing he is the President. In fact, his presidency is run by the President of the Senate, for Cheney is its true center of gravity. That fact has become more apparent with every passing year of this presidency, and anyone who thinks otherwise has truly "misunderestimated" our nominal president and his vice president.

quote:

Mount Broder erupts
Michael Tomasky
June 28, 2007 7:00 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/michael_tomasky/200...t_broder_erupts.html

The Washington Post's David Broder is, by some distance, the most important political columnist in Washington. The few thousand people who constitute the city's (and thus the country's) political elite - from elected officials to their staffs to powerful lobbyists to the city's other columnists and journalists - read Broder's columns in a way not so far removed from how one imagines Soviet factota once read editorials in Pravda, with the admittedly crucial distinction that Broder doesn't run a secret police force and thus lacks the power of fear. But when he speaks, official Washington listens, and to a great extent adopts his line.

His influence has often been frustrating to liberals, because, while Broder is no right-winger, he is also not a liberal and instead acts as a sort of arbiter of what defines the respectable middle. And because the definition of the "respectable middle" has shifted dramatically to the right in Washington in the last 25 years, Broder has, to some extent, followed. To liberal readers, he seemed far too quick to denounce Bill Clinton's sexual habits, frustratingly too slow to denounce George Bush's intelligence-cooking and war-making ones.

So when Broder writes, as he does today, that Dick Cheney is a dangerous man who has exerted a deeply malign influence on US politics, it's a big deal. Phone and DSL lines all over town are surely buzzing: Did you read Broder? What's he saying between the lines? Is Cheney at the beginning of the end?

What changed Broder's mind is a devastating four-part series in his paper this week detailing Cheney's actions as vice president: secrecy, end-runs around the secretary of state and others, phone calls to mid-level bureaucrats to pressure them to fix a decision the way the White House wants and so on.

In the broader sense all this was known. Not that the series didn't offer plenty of scoops, because it did - most eye-poppingly, the lengths to which Cheney went to ensure that torture became the policy of the United States.

Some other details have been previously reported in books and on Web sites and in opinion journals that Broder probably dismisses as partisan and doesn't read. But when something makes it to the front page of the Post - well, newspapers may be in decline, but they still have a special power in the political world that nothing else can touch.

So what does it mean that the dean of the Washington press corps has joined the anti-Cheney brigade? It might be too much to say as I did above that it could signal the beginning of the end for Cheney. But the tantalizing thing is that it might not be too much to say it.

Earlier this week, also on the Washington Post's op-ed page, another prominent conventional-wisdom maven, Sally Quinn, suggested a possible future. Quinn, the wife of former Post editor Ben Bradlee, doesn't publish very often, so when she does, official Washington listens.

Cheney is scheduled for surgery in the near future, to have the batteries replaced in his pacemaker. This, Quinn suggests, presents the perfect opportunity for Bush to pretend that Cheney needs to go for health reasons and to replace him with putative presidential nominee Fred Thompson.

This would hand Thompson the perch of quasi-incumbency from which to seek the presidency. Republicans would presumably coalesce around him. Bush could put him in charge of some nice-sounding commission on bipartisan apple pie and motherhood, the better to impress independent moderates.

Such scenarios have been discussed in Washington for a couple years now. But the Post's series, the Quinn column, and the eruption of Mount Broder lend them a new urgency.

Of course it would be fun to see Cheney sent packing to the disclosed location of Wyoming. But whether Democrats should cheer for such an outcome is another question. Thompson would be a more formidable candidate as the sitting vice president.

When a vice president is replaced in the middle of a term, both houses of Congress has to ratify the new choice. Would Democrats confirm a man who was installed expressly for the purpose of keeping the White House in GOP hands?

But that's all speculative. What's factually true is that the Cheney presidency is over. Whatever does or doesn't happen in the future, that's something to celebrate.

quote:

Gingrich says Bush's war on terror is "phony"
by John Aravosis (DC)
8/03/2007

Wow. When John Edwards said basically the same thing, he got fried. So does Gingrich think 3500 US troops gave their lives for a "phony" war, or just a phony president?

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday the Bush administration is waging a "phony war" on terrorism, warning that the country is losing ground against the kind of Islamic radicals who attacked the country on Sept. 11, 2001.

A more effective approach, said Gingrich, would begin with a national energy strategy aimed at weaning the country from its reliance on imported oil and some of the regimes that petro-dollars support.

"None of you should believe we are winning this war. There is no evidence that we are winning this war," the ex-Georgian told a group of about 300 students attending a conference for collegiate conservatives....

"We were in charge for six years," he said, referring to the period between 2001 and early 2007, when the GOP controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. "I don't think you can look and say that was a great success."

quote:

Originally posted by Seahawkfan:
While Bush has his issues, he still was by far the better choice.

quote:

U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D- Mass., who was in town Sunday to help Gov. Jennifer Granholm campaign for her re-election bid, took time to take a jab at the Bush administration for its lack of leadership in the Israeli-Lebanon conflict.

"If I was president, this wouldn't have happened," said Kerry during a noon stop at Honest John's bar and grill in Detroit's Cass Corridor.....

....."The president has been so absent on diplomacy when it comes to issues affecting the Middle East," ....

.....
This is about American security and Bush has failed. He has made it so much worse because of his lack of reality in going into Iraq.…We have to destroy Hezbollah," he said.

LINK

Kerry knows nothing about "leadership"

So which is it, use diplomacy or destroy Hezbollah?

Typical. Criticize at every opportunity but rarely offer a real alternative.

I certainly disagree with Bush at times, but he was the right choice.

quote:

Originally posted by ActivistJ:

quote:

Originally posted by ProudCon:
When did this discussion group get so boring?

When I'm distracted, I have a hard time educating myself too.

Ohio...That's where the neo fascists stole our country, isn't it?

In the old west, people were shot just for cheating at cards. Now they get away with ruining a country by cheating the voters. For now.

btw...Kerry would have listened to Richard Clark and thwarted 9/11, I'm sure. It was all there.

quote:

Hooked on War.The Secret Addiction of Thomas Friedman.
September 6, 2007
By NORMAN SOLOMON

Reading his "Letter From Baghdad" column in the New York Times on Wednesday, you'd never know that Thomas Friedman has a history of enthusiasm for war. Now he laments that Iraq is bad for the United States -- "everyone loves seeing us tied down here" -- stuck in the "madness that is Iraq." And he concludes that the good Americans who have been sent to Iraq will not be deserved by Iraqis "if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids."

The column, under a Baghdad dateline, is boilerplate Friedman: sprinkled with I-am-here anecdotes and breezy geopolitical nostrums. For years now, the man widely touted as America's most influential journalist has indicated that his patience with the war in Iraq might soon run out. But, like the media establishment he embodies, Friedman can't bring himself to renounce a war that he helped to launch and then blessed as the incarnation of virtue.

On the last day of November 2003 -- eight months after the invasion -- Friedman gushed that "this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan." He lauded the Iraq war as "one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad."

But the assumptions built into a Friedman column are murky outside the context of his worldview. "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist," Friedman wrote approvingly in one of his explaining-the-world bestsellers. "McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

Those words appeared in Friedman's book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," but the passage first surfaced (with a few tweaks of syntax) in the New York Times Magazine on March 28, 1999, near the end of a long piece adapted from the book. Filling almost the entire cover of the magazine was a red-white-and-blue fist, with the caption "What The World Needs Now" and a smaller-type explanation: "For globalism to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is."

The clenched graphic could be seen as the "hidden fist" that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without." While the cover story's patriotic fist was intended as a symbol of the globe's need for multifaceted American power, the military facet had been unleashed just as the magazine went to press. By the time the star-spangled cover reached Sunday breakfast tables, NATO air attacks on Yugoslavia were underway; the U.S.-led bombing campaign would last for 78 straight days.

Writing columns and appearing on broadcast networks to assess the war, Tom Friedman was close to gleeful. (The man was widely viewed as a liberal, whatever that meant, and "the liberal media" provided Friedman with many platforms that often seemed to double as pedestals.) Interviewers at ABC, PBS and NPR ranged from deferential to fawning as they solicited his wisdom on the latest from Yugoslavia.

Even when he lamented the political constraints on the military options of the 19-member NATO alliance, Friedman was upbeat. "While there are many obvious downsides to war-from-15,000-feet," he wrote after bombs had been falling for more than four weeks, "it does have one great strength -- its sustainability. NATO can carry on this sort of air war for a long, long time. The Serbs need to remember that."

So, Friedman explained, "if NATO's only strength is that it can bomb forever, then it has to get every ounce out of that. Let's at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are 'cleansing' Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted."

He added: "Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too...."

The convenience marbled through such punditry is so routine that eyebrows rarely go up. The chirpy line "Let's at least have a real air war," for instance, addressed American readers for whom, with rare exceptions, the "real air war" would be no more real than a media spectacle, with all the consequences falling on others very far away. As for rock concerts and merry-go-rounds, we could recall -- if memory were to venture into unauthorized zones -- that any number of such amusements went full throttle in the United States during the Vietnam War, and also for that matter during all subsequent U.S. wars including the one that Friedman was currently engaged in cheering on.

If the idea of civilians trying to continue with normal daily life while their government committed lethal crimes was "outrageous" enough to justify inflicting "a merciless air war" -- as Friedman urged later in the same column -- would someone have been justified in bombing the United States during its slaughter of countless innocents in Southeast Asia? Or during its active support for dictators and death squads in Latin America? For that matter, Friedman could hardly be unaware that for several weeks already American firepower had been maiming and killing Serb civilians, children included, with weaponry including cluster bombs. Today, Iraqi civilians keep dying from the U.S. war effort and other violence catalyzed by the occupation; meanwhile, of course, not a single concert or merry-go-round has stopped in the USA.

When righteousness moved Friedman to call for "lights out in Belgrade," he was urging a war crime. The urban power grids and water pipes he yearned to see destroyed were essential to infants, the elderly, the frail and infirm inside places like hospitals and nursing homes. Targeting such grids and pipes would seem like barbarism to Americans if the missiles were incoming. Any ambiguity of the matter would probably be dispelled by a vow to keep bombing the country until it was set back 50 years or, if necessary, six centuries. But Friedman's enthusiasm was similar to that of many other prominent American commentators who also greeted the bombing of Yugoslavia with something close to exhilaration.

The final paragraph of Thomas Friedman's column in the New York Times on April 23, 1999, began with a punchy sentence: "Give war a chance." It was a witticism that seemed to delight Friedman. He repeated it, in print and on national television, as the bombing of Yugoslavia continued. A tone of sadism could be discerned.

This article is adapted from Norman Solomon's new book "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State," which just came off the press. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com