Wednesday, January 14, 2004
"No President has ever done more for human rights than I have."- Bush, New Yorker, current issue
The Bush Family.
I noted Kevin Phillips’ new book on the Family. [“This is not a family that has a particularly strong commitment to American democracy. Its sense of how to win elections comes out of a CIA manual, not out of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.”]
Now the Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley, in his review of the Phillips book, writes: "Other than accumulating a certain amount of money and achieving a measure of what passes for aristocratic social position in this country, the Bushes have achieved nothing of distinction and appear to believe in nothing except their own interests http://www.node707.com/archives/000284.html
Army War College Report:
Hopefully most have seen, are hearing about this report. It needs to become a fixture in the public consciousness.
A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat.
The report, by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is "near the breaking point." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8435-2004Jan11?language=printer
Space Idea: Minimal Interest.
An AP Poll finds “tepid” support for the Moon-Mars idea. As the report noted, (Will Lester) “You can't have a war, cut taxes, have the economy in a garbage pail and spend billions going into space," said Dallas Hodgins, a 76-year-old retired University of Michigan researcher from Flint, Mich. "How are they going to pay for all this? I don't see how it's morally justifiable. In Flint, there isn't a school roof that doesn't leak." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10334-2004Jan12?language=printer
O’Neill Charges:
He’s back-tracked to a degree on his charge that the Administration was planning the Iraq invasion early in 2001. [Rummy, Cheney and Wolfowitz had sketched out the idea long before, but deferred it till the Taliban were overthrown.] It’s ‘interesting’ to note that it took all of one day after O’Neill’s 60 Minutes interview for the Administration to announce that it was investigating whether he took classified documents with him. Yet it took 74 days after the Robert Novak column for there to be an investigation of the Valerie Plame outing.
And, this from Time's article (John Dickerson) on O'Neill ...
"The biggest difference between then and now," O'Neill tells Suskind about his two previous tours in Washington, "is that our group was mostly about evidence and analysis, and Karl (Rove), Dick (Cheney), Karen (Hughes) and the gang seemed to be mostly about politics. It's a huge distinction." http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040119-574809,00.html
Truthtelling: Those of us who see ourselves as truth-tellers have a “field day” now that fake events and fraudulent operations are so common. Our phony president with the faux accent, b.s. resume and the pretend ranch is but a symptom.
Naomi Klein has a time with it in the current Nation:
This was the year when fakeness ruled: fake rationales for war, a fake President dressed as a fake soldier declaring a fake end to combat and then holding up a fake turkey. An action movie star became governor and the government started making its own action movies, casting real soldiers like Jessica Lynch as fake combat heroes and dressing up embedded journalists as fake soldiers. Saddam Hussein even got a part in the big show: He played himself being captured by American troops. This is the fake of the year, if you believe the Sunday Herald in Scotland, as well as several other news agencies, which reported that he was actually captured by a Kurdish special forces unit. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040126&s=klein
Paul Krugman deals with this as well
The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean's assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn't made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a "detour" that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O'Neill's revelations?
So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O'Neill's character but haven't refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O'Neill's TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts.
Some will say that none of this matters because Saddam is in custody, and the economy is growing. Even in the short run, however, these successes may not be all they're cracked up to be. More Americans were killed and wounded in the four weeks after Saddam's capture than in the four weeks before. The drop in the unemployment rate since its peak last summer doesn't reflect a greater availability of jobs, but rather a decline in the share of the population that is even looking for work.
More important, having a few months of good news doesn't excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to deny. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/13/opinion/13KRUG.html?pagewanted=print&position=
9/11 Update: Administration Fears Report Release
Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff on the politics of 9/11.
A new political battle is brewing over the federal panel investigating the 9/11 terror attacks, NEWSWEEK has learned. Facing a May deadline that many members no longer think they can meet, the panel is weighing asking Congress for more time to prepare its report. Some members want a few extra months—which would push back its release into the summer. But the prospect of unleashing the report in the middle of the election season is creating anxiety inside the White House. Some aides fear that the document will contain fresh ammo for Democrats eager to prove Bush was inattentive to terrorism warnings prior to 9/11. As a result, Bush officials recently floated a surprise strategic switch: they might OK a delay, but only if the report were put off until December, thereby "taking it out of the election," said a commission source. Late last week, though, the White House told the commission it was sticking with its longstanding position of no give on the May deadline. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3926713/
Dean and the Media, Eric Boehler (Salon.com)
Six months later, an extended version of that campaign narrative, polished by Republican talking-points memos and echoed day after day by the mainstream media, remains a constant of the campaign trail: Dean is a sarcastic smart aleck with foot-in-the mouth disease, a political ticking time bomb. The former Vermont governor remains the front-runner among Democratic voters, but he's gotten increasingly caustic treatment from the media, which has dwelled on three big themes -- that Dean's angry, gaffe-prone and probably not electable -- while giving comparatively far less ink to the doctor's policy and political prescriptions that have catapulted him ahead of the Democratic field. Newsweek's critical Jan. 12 cover story, "All the Rage: Dean's Shoot-From-the-Hip Style and Shifting Views Might Doom Him in November," achieved a nifty trifecta that covered anger, gaffes and electability, all three of the main media raps against Dean. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/01/13/dean_media/index_np.html
Dean, II: The Daily Show on Dean’s Anger
Stephen Colbert: It’s one thing to believe that President Bush’s policies are leading his country to a bleak future of massive debt, increased terrorism and environmental catastrophe, but does Dean have to be so mad about it? …
Jon Stewart: Specifically how does he manifest this anger?
Colbert:…It’s well documented, Jon…The point is, Dean’s anger has been widely reported.
Stewart: But, what incidents have you yourself seen?
Colbert: Doesn’t matter what I’ve seen, Jon, it’s been widely reported. And that makes it fact-esque. http://www.comedycentral.com/mp/play.php?reposid=/multimedia/tds/colb/colbert_8077.html
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune on the War: Well-said!
That reality [Saddam being ousted, captured; (questionable) progress] is truly gratifying, and it leads some Americans to conclude that the invasion of Iraq has proven itself both justified and worth the price. That conclusion, however, requires a logical leap that is itself unjustified. The outcome of the invasion and the reasons for it have always been separable questions. They need to remain that way…
Over the past few months, we have been insistent on keeping that reality in front of our readers. Frequently, that has brought accusations that we're making these points only because of "liberal" or "Democratic" bias. Despite our thick skins, these accusations are worrying, for they go to the question of our credibility with readers. The accusations also are false; consider those who share our view on the war:
The Cato Institute, a conservative Washington think tank best known for pushing the privatization of Social Security, says the war in Iraq was "the wrong war" because "the enemy at the gates was, and continues to be, Al-Qaida. Not only was Iraq not a direct military threat to the United States (even if it possessed WMD, which was a fair assumption), but there is no good evidence to support the claim that Saddam Hussein was in league with Al-Qaida and would have given the group WMD to be used against the United States."
From the U.S. Army War College comes a new study warning that the U.S. war on terrorism is unfocused and may have set the nation "on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and non-state entities that pose no serious threat to the United States." The war in Iraq, the report says, was "an unnecessary preventative war" which "diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable Al-Qaida."
The most detailed critique comes from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Carnegie's scholars think deeply and well about the reasonable application of power to preserve peace. The war in Iraq was not one of those reasonable applications, they conclude. Findings from the study include:
• "There was and is no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam's government and Al-Qaida."
• "There was no evidence to support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD to Al-Qaida and much evidence to counter it."
• In 2002, a dramatic shift occurred in U.S. intelligence estimates of Iraq's WMD capabilities, suggesting "that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002."
• "Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programs . . . ."
• "Considering all the costs and benefits, there were at least two options clearly preferable to a war undertaken without international support: allowing the [U.N.] inspections to continue until obstructed or completed, or imposing a tougher program of 'coercive inspections' backed by a specially designed international force."
We thought of those costs and benefits a week ago, when news came of the death of Capt. Kimberly Hampton, the first woman pilot killed in Iraq.
A photo taken of the South Carolina native as she sat in the cockpit of her helicopter communicated a good-natured openness and self-assurance. Her father said she "enjoyed the fact she was making a difference over there trying to help the Iraqi people and protect our freedoms in this country. She was very much a patriot."
Hampton undoubtedly was a patriot, and she was making a difference for the Iraqi people. Americans should be very proud of her and all the troops in Iraq. No doubt she truly believed she was protecting "our freedoms in this country." She believed that and answered the call because that is what her commander in chief told her.
But the most sacred duty civilians have to their armed forces is to ensure they are never called to sacrifice their lives unless this nation faces a real threat. Bush must be held accountable for Hampton's death. Iraq was the wrong war -- for conservatives, for liberals, for all Americans. http://www.startribune.com/viewers/story.php?template=print_a&story=4315251
-R
The Bush Family.
I noted Kevin Phillips’ new book on the Family. [“This is not a family that has a particularly strong commitment to American democracy. Its sense of how to win elections comes out of a CIA manual, not out of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.”]
Now the Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley, in his review of the Phillips book, writes: "Other than accumulating a certain amount of money and achieving a measure of what passes for aristocratic social position in this country, the Bushes have achieved nothing of distinction and appear to believe in nothing except their own interests http://www.node707.com/archives/000284.html
Army War College Report:
Hopefully most have seen, are hearing about this report. It needs to become a fixture in the public consciousness.
A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat.
The report, by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is "near the breaking point." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8435-2004Jan11?language=printer
Space Idea: Minimal Interest.
An AP Poll finds “tepid” support for the Moon-Mars idea. As the report noted, (Will Lester) “You can't have a war, cut taxes, have the economy in a garbage pail and spend billions going into space," said Dallas Hodgins, a 76-year-old retired University of Michigan researcher from Flint, Mich. "How are they going to pay for all this? I don't see how it's morally justifiable. In Flint, there isn't a school roof that doesn't leak." http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10334-2004Jan12?language=printer
O’Neill Charges:
He’s back-tracked to a degree on his charge that the Administration was planning the Iraq invasion early in 2001. [Rummy, Cheney and Wolfowitz had sketched out the idea long before, but deferred it till the Taliban were overthrown.] It’s ‘interesting’ to note that it took all of one day after O’Neill’s 60 Minutes interview for the Administration to announce that it was investigating whether he took classified documents with him. Yet it took 74 days after the Robert Novak column for there to be an investigation of the Valerie Plame outing.
And, this from Time's article (John Dickerson) on O'Neill ...
"The biggest difference between then and now," O'Neill tells Suskind about his two previous tours in Washington, "is that our group was mostly about evidence and analysis, and Karl (Rove), Dick (Cheney), Karen (Hughes) and the gang seemed to be mostly about politics. It's a huge distinction." http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040119-574809,00.html
Truthtelling: Those of us who see ourselves as truth-tellers have a “field day” now that fake events and fraudulent operations are so common. Our phony president with the faux accent, b.s. resume and the pretend ranch is but a symptom.
Naomi Klein has a time with it in the current Nation:
This was the year when fakeness ruled: fake rationales for war, a fake President dressed as a fake soldier declaring a fake end to combat and then holding up a fake turkey. An action movie star became governor and the government started making its own action movies, casting real soldiers like Jessica Lynch as fake combat heroes and dressing up embedded journalists as fake soldiers. Saddam Hussein even got a part in the big show: He played himself being captured by American troops. This is the fake of the year, if you believe the Sunday Herald in Scotland, as well as several other news agencies, which reported that he was actually captured by a Kurdish special forces unit. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040126&s=klein
Paul Krugman deals with this as well
The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean's assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn't made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a "detour" that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O'Neill's revelations?
So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O'Neill's character but haven't refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O'Neill's TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts.
Some will say that none of this matters because Saddam is in custody, and the economy is growing. Even in the short run, however, these successes may not be all they're cracked up to be. More Americans were killed and wounded in the four weeks after Saddam's capture than in the four weeks before. The drop in the unemployment rate since its peak last summer doesn't reflect a greater availability of jobs, but rather a decline in the share of the population that is even looking for work.
More important, having a few months of good news doesn't excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to deny. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/13/opinion/13KRUG.html?pagewanted=print&position=
9/11 Update: Administration Fears Report Release
Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff on the politics of 9/11.
A new political battle is brewing over the federal panel investigating the 9/11 terror attacks, NEWSWEEK has learned. Facing a May deadline that many members no longer think they can meet, the panel is weighing asking Congress for more time to prepare its report. Some members want a few extra months—which would push back its release into the summer. But the prospect of unleashing the report in the middle of the election season is creating anxiety inside the White House. Some aides fear that the document will contain fresh ammo for Democrats eager to prove Bush was inattentive to terrorism warnings prior to 9/11. As a result, Bush officials recently floated a surprise strategic switch: they might OK a delay, but only if the report were put off until December, thereby "taking it out of the election," said a commission source. Late last week, though, the White House told the commission it was sticking with its longstanding position of no give on the May deadline. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3926713/
Dean and the Media, Eric Boehler (Salon.com)
Six months later, an extended version of that campaign narrative, polished by Republican talking-points memos and echoed day after day by the mainstream media, remains a constant of the campaign trail: Dean is a sarcastic smart aleck with foot-in-the mouth disease, a political ticking time bomb. The former Vermont governor remains the front-runner among Democratic voters, but he's gotten increasingly caustic treatment from the media, which has dwelled on three big themes -- that Dean's angry, gaffe-prone and probably not electable -- while giving comparatively far less ink to the doctor's policy and political prescriptions that have catapulted him ahead of the Democratic field. Newsweek's critical Jan. 12 cover story, "All the Rage: Dean's Shoot-From-the-Hip Style and Shifting Views Might Doom Him in November," achieved a nifty trifecta that covered anger, gaffes and electability, all three of the main media raps against Dean. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/01/13/dean_media/index_np.html
Dean, II: The Daily Show on Dean’s Anger
Stephen Colbert: It’s one thing to believe that President Bush’s policies are leading his country to a bleak future of massive debt, increased terrorism and environmental catastrophe, but does Dean have to be so mad about it? …
Jon Stewart: Specifically how does he manifest this anger?
Colbert:…It’s well documented, Jon…The point is, Dean’s anger has been widely reported.
Stewart: But, what incidents have you yourself seen?
Colbert: Doesn’t matter what I’ve seen, Jon, it’s been widely reported. And that makes it fact-esque. http://www.comedycentral.com/mp/play.php?reposid=/multimedia/tds/colb/colbert_8077.html
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune on the War: Well-said!
That reality [Saddam being ousted, captured; (questionable) progress] is truly gratifying, and it leads some Americans to conclude that the invasion of Iraq has proven itself both justified and worth the price. That conclusion, however, requires a logical leap that is itself unjustified. The outcome of the invasion and the reasons for it have always been separable questions. They need to remain that way…
Over the past few months, we have been insistent on keeping that reality in front of our readers. Frequently, that has brought accusations that we're making these points only because of "liberal" or "Democratic" bias. Despite our thick skins, these accusations are worrying, for they go to the question of our credibility with readers. The accusations also are false; consider those who share our view on the war:
The Cato Institute, a conservative Washington think tank best known for pushing the privatization of Social Security, says the war in Iraq was "the wrong war" because "the enemy at the gates was, and continues to be, Al-Qaida. Not only was Iraq not a direct military threat to the United States (even if it possessed WMD, which was a fair assumption), but there is no good evidence to support the claim that Saddam Hussein was in league with Al-Qaida and would have given the group WMD to be used against the United States."
From the U.S. Army War College comes a new study warning that the U.S. war on terrorism is unfocused and may have set the nation "on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and non-state entities that pose no serious threat to the United States." The war in Iraq, the report says, was "an unnecessary preventative war" which "diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable Al-Qaida."
The most detailed critique comes from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Carnegie's scholars think deeply and well about the reasonable application of power to preserve peace. The war in Iraq was not one of those reasonable applications, they conclude. Findings from the study include:
• "There was and is no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam's government and Al-Qaida."
• "There was no evidence to support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD to Al-Qaida and much evidence to counter it."
• In 2002, a dramatic shift occurred in U.S. intelligence estimates of Iraq's WMD capabilities, suggesting "that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002."
• "Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programs . . . ."
• "Considering all the costs and benefits, there were at least two options clearly preferable to a war undertaken without international support: allowing the [U.N.] inspections to continue until obstructed or completed, or imposing a tougher program of 'coercive inspections' backed by a specially designed international force."
We thought of those costs and benefits a week ago, when news came of the death of Capt. Kimberly Hampton, the first woman pilot killed in Iraq.
A photo taken of the South Carolina native as she sat in the cockpit of her helicopter communicated a good-natured openness and self-assurance. Her father said she "enjoyed the fact she was making a difference over there trying to help the Iraqi people and protect our freedoms in this country. She was very much a patriot."
Hampton undoubtedly was a patriot, and she was making a difference for the Iraqi people. Americans should be very proud of her and all the troops in Iraq. No doubt she truly believed she was protecting "our freedoms in this country." She believed that and answered the call because that is what her commander in chief told her.
But the most sacred duty civilians have to their armed forces is to ensure they are never called to sacrifice their lives unless this nation faces a real threat. Bush must be held accountable for Hampton's death. Iraq was the wrong war -- for conservatives, for liberals, for all Americans. http://www.startribune.com/viewers/story.php?template=print_a&story=4315251
-R
