Nuclear Issues

There has been a lot of talk about Seymour Hersh’s article in this week’s New Yorker, which interviews a bunch of anonymous sources within the Bush Administration, the Pentagon, and political circles throughout Washington on the subject of Iran. There are a couple major points. The administration refuses to allow Iran to get nuclear weapons, regardless of what it has to do to stop them. The administration believes that a bombing campaign will endear us to the hearts and minds of Iranians and that 1.2 billion Muslims around the world will not be pissed about this. And (over the violent objections of the Pentagon) they are willing to use tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s nuclear-production facilities.

This. Is. Bad. Contained within the article is one source’s report that Bush wants to do what no Republican or Democratic president would have the courage to do in the future- effect full regime change in Iran. He supposedly wants this to be his legacy.

Before I go too far here, I should point out that it's a little shaky to base an enormous article full of groundbreaking foreign policy conclusions on a body of sources, of whom 75% insist on anonymity. I was always taught that with every anonymous source, the credibility of your articles goes down a little more. True, these folks probably need to protect their jobs, but if no one is willing to go on the record with their concerns, apparently, no one is too worked up yet.

Obviously the Bush administration came out with guns blazing (in a figurative sense) insisting diplomacy was their chosen track and the crisis could be resolved peacefully. It all rang a bit hollow in the context of Hersh’s article, and it didn’t help that the president of Iran (whose name is totally impossible to pronounce and I feel hypocritical trying to type) had made an enormous speech earlier in the week claiming that his country had “joined the nuclear club,” which I mentioned yesterday.

(If you want a really funny bit of trivia, go back to CNN.com or the AP or wherever and look up some pictures of the Iranian president delivering his “nuclear club” speech. In what I find incredibly hilarious, he’s giving the “we’re a nuclear nation now” speech in front of a mural full of white doves and peace signs. Unbelievable.)

On an immediate level, I get nervous because of the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Whether or not U.S. Navy aircraft have actually been practicing nuclear dive-bombing in the Gulf, there’s something called “the nuclear taboo” in international politics. There’s an unspoken agreement that, since Nagasaki, nuclear weapons should never actually be used. They can be threatened, of course- but they should remain essentially a defensive technology, making the cost of invasion or attack on a nuclear state unacceptable high.

If we break the nuclear taboo, we shatter one of the fundamental tenets of world peace for the last 60 years and permanently undermine the international non-proliferation effort. It would be a case of “do as I say, not as I do” that ended in a mushroom cloud, and America would cement its place on the world stage as an untrustworthy evil empire.

But here’s what spooks me even more than the use of nuclear weapons, on a broader level. There seem to be credible portions of Hersh’s article pointing to a Bush-administration assumption that the Iranians are going to rise up and welcome us as liberators. Never mind that the Shiite majority in Iraq is going to start a civil war (okay, more of a civil war) if we go after Iran. The Bush administration has learned absolutely nothing from their experience in Iraq. Muslim fundamentalists are going to fight us until the entire country is a graveyard and they’ll be thrilled to do it, too.

Most Democrats agree that, even though we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, we’re going to have to clean up the mess that this administration made. And that’s smart. But I can see a major fight brewing, especially if Congress’s Republican majority gets shaved thinner or even eliminated this fall, when the Bush rhetoric starts to escalate towards action. We cannot afford to go to war with Iran. The rest of the world will go from distrusting us to actively balancing their forces against our military. The international leadership we have accumulated since World War II will crumble before our eyes, and the economy, school systems, and homeland security (which we’ll desperately need) will be under-funded to a laughable extent.

The only chance we have of preventing this from happening (and, at this rate, it will probably happen) is a Congress, either Democratic or moderately Republican, which is willing to stand up to the President and tell him and his advisors that the country is not going to support this. Iran having a nuclear weapon would be extremely, extremely bad. That is true. However, going to war with them to prevent that from happening would destroy the tattered remnants of our credibility in the wider world and strain our relationships with key allies like Britain and western Europe to the breaking point.

Positive Omens

The immigration debate right now has me very happy for one particular reason. The reason George Bush won the White House in 2004 was The Base. I’ve written about this before- it’s the evangelical roots of the Base, its ability to shut out economic problems and foreign policy disasters in favor of unity over comparatively pointless social lightning rods, along with its friendly laissez-faire business philosophy, that fuels the Republican Party.

So immigration reform is the perfect issue to rip the right’s little Coalition of the Willing apart. You’ve got big business and Republican moderates on one side, who want illegal immigrants in the country because they’re good for the economy. On the other side, you’ve got hard-right conservatives who want to make it a deportable felony to be an illegal immigrant and want to build an Israeli-style border fence through the desert.

Here’s a rare glimpse of me-as-hard-liner. I actually support the hard-right conservatives on this one. If people come into this country illegally, we really ought to make it illegal. When you fly in, we don’t just say, “We’d really prefer you come through immigration,” but let people walk through to the taxi stand anyway. We don’t put up a sign that says “Welcome to America” on the highway from Mexico and just wave people through. But if you’re an illegal and you’ve been here for more than a few years, we ought to give you a chance to become a citizen. I think that people who sneak through illegally shouldn’t run around with the claim that “we’re Americans, too.” Uh, no. Not yet. And it’s not racism or bias to expect that people who illegally entered the country to maybe make some amends for doing that.

But it doesn’t really matter what I think. The fact is, the Republican Base is split cleanly in two on this one. Republicans are walking a ridiculous tightrope to ensure they don’t upset too many of their core voters, but they don’t know how many of their core voters are on one side of the debate or the other! They know that all of them are anti-abortion, most are anti-gay marriage, and most are pro-gun, but immigration?

The real problem, to be honest, is that Republican money says illegals are good, and Republican voters say illegals are bad, and that’s not a winning combination.

Here’s the other interesting thing. Iran announced today that they were “joining the nuclear club,” purportedly by enriching uranium. But they chose their words carefully. The Nuclear Club means, in everybody’s mind, the club of countries with nuclear weapons. They’re going to have a bomb soon, and they’ve got weapons with the advanced delivery systems to have an offensive capability. This represents (alongside North Korea) one of the most fundamental failures of the Bush foreign policy. They got nukes while we screwed around in a country that wasn’t even trying to get them in the first place. Good job, George.

The point is, the Republican Party is getting pulled in too many directions. 63% of Americans want a Democratic Congress this fall, and if things keep going in the direction the Bush administration is busily pushing them, we’re going to get one.

The Politics of Life or Death

Democrat John Giannetti represents a number of Washington suburbs in the Maryland General Assembly. He’s a freshman state senator, and while he’s a Democrat, he has a thoroughly crappy record on gun control. He voted against a number of common-sense gun control measures, including a firearm accountability system and the assault weapons ban. Basically, the guy likes his weapons a little too much to be a good Dem.

What’s weird is that Giannetti represents, at least in part, Prince George’s County. For those of you who don’t listen to rap music or know the Mid-Atlantic very well, Prince George’s (better known as “PGC”) is one of the most violent municipalities in America, with a murder rate that’s starting to play in the same league as Baltimore. Last year, PGC (with a population of 850,000) went up to 173 murders, while Baltimore fell to 269 with 650,000 residents. PG is rapidly rivaling “The City That Bleeds” as one of the most dangerous places in America.

(If you’re interested in learning more about how dangerous these “suburbs” can actually be, Gory Prince George’s does a pretty good job of tracking violence in the county, in the same manner that Baltimore’s City Paper tracks them with “Murder Ink.”)

Here’s the point. PG Police Chief Melvin High repeatedly stressed the need to take guns off the street, even instituting the uncreatively-named “Take Away Guns,” or TAG program. Yet Giannetti seems to do an outstanding job of undercutting the safety of his own constituents by denying police officers the common-sense gun control laws that they desperately need.

So the Brady Campaign has targeted (forgive the expression) Giannetti in this primary, hoping to replace him with, in their words, “someone who will make sensible gun laws a priority.” It’s set to be an ugly race between him and Jim Rosapepe, a member of the University of Maryland Board of Regents who’s practically salivating at the chance to attack Giannetti’s gun control record.

So last Wednesday night, Rosapepe was at dinner in Annapolis when he started choking. A friend tried the Heimlich maneuver to remove the airway obstruction, but it didn’t work. Suddenly, someone waiting at the take-out counter ran over and performed it correctly. The food came loose and Rosapepe’s life was saved.

As you probably guessed, the guy at the take-out counter was none other than Giannetti. He didn’t recognize his opponent until afterwards. Maryland’s Senate President expressed his hope that the incident would lead to a much more “uplifting” campaign.

I just find it funny that Democrats who hate each other will jump in to save each other’s lives, while Republicans will shoot their campaign donors in the face.

Globalization and Other Minor Issues

So, I’ve decided to pick back up on this thing. Here goes nothing.

I just got back from a lecture by the NYT’s Tom Friedman in Baltimore. He’s still in the process of promoting his book The World Is Flat, which approaches the subject of globalization with wide-eyed, almost childish optimism through the lens of information technology. He’s a smart guy and by the end, I was pretty well on board with his basic thesis- that IT technologies developed in the last 15 years are going to reshape the world on the scale of electricity.

My personal gripe was that he never really addressed the problem of access, since information technology is still, fundamentally, a first-world luxury. Though terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan might use Outlook Express, very few of Africa’s 850 million people even have access to the Internet in the first place. And given the deplorable condition of education and human rights in the third world, a high-speed Internet connection doesn’t level the playing field for an illiterate subsistence farmer.

Regardless of the hole (or hole) in Friedman’s arguments, his talk got me thinking about what seems like a gaping double standard in American trade policy. The Bush administration is a loud proponent of globalization, and if you listen to Scott McClellan, you’d believe that we’re on the march across the planet to spread social and economic freedom. The people of Iraq might not believe it, but at least Bush does.

For all of its crappy implementation, globalization a la Bush is an admirable goal. I can’t deny that a world with fewer trade barriers and increased global communication would be more productive and (since it would be so interdependent) probably a little more peaceful. But the problem is, America in general (and Bush in particular) don’t quite get that it’s a two-way street.

America is great at doing things, but in the last 30 years, we’ve lost the competitive edge in making things. And we tend to be pretty crappy when it comes to admitting that other people do a better job. From Canadian lumber to Korean steel, the United States has been trying to prevent inexpensive foreign goods of comparable quality from making it into our markets, using a battery of legal (and illegal) measures.

Let’s start with the Korean steel. Up until the winter of 2003, the United States was putting heavy tariffs on foreign steel (especially East Asian products coming out of South Korea, Japan and China.) The American steel firms couldn’t effectively compete without the U.S. government’s help, and they had plenty of friends in that government. Eventually, however, this proved counterproductive- the WTO came pretty close to slapping sanctions on American exports and the Bush administration buckled and removed the tariffs. We didn’t even pretend they were legal.

On the other hand, with Canadian timber, we have a semi-legal method of recourse to supposed predatory trade practices known as “anti-dumping legislation.” Foreign goods sold significantly below the current market value of domestic goods can (under WTO rules) be subjected to tariffs. In theory, this prevents countries like China or India from flooding other markets with dirt-cheap goods and driving domestic manufacturers out of business. In practice, however, it’s usually used as a tool by the United States to keep foreign competitors from getting too competitive, as in the case of the Canadian lumber industry.

We’ve invoked anti-dumping protections against Canadian wood products because (according to Congress) their government owns 95% of the Canadian timberland and leases it to local mills for about half of market value. Granted, it sounds pretty bad. Our logging industry, it’s true, can’t really compete with subsidized Canadian timber. Isn’t Canada violating the founding principles of free trade? What about NAFTA?

Well, not really, if you consider the fact that every taxpayer spends around $500 a year to subsidize America’s farmers. American farm subsidies are bad for our economy, and bad for everyone else. The vast majority of the money goes to support large corporate farms that reap- quite literally- billions of dollars in tax breaks every year (think of what that money could be doing if we invested it in education, or maybe small-business loans.)

So, not only is tax time pretty much stress-free, but every American farmer gets a guaranteed minimum price at which to sell their crops. So when we’re done selling all this cheap produce at home, it gets shipped off to the rest of the world and- you guessed it- dumped on domestic markets, bankrupting local farmers.

It’s true that Canada is being pretty unfair with the softwood lumber issue, but the damage they’d be doing to our logging communities is positively laughable compared to the damage we’re doing to local farmers around the world, and all to subsidize a nearly-extinct conception of the “family farm” that has been replaced by massive corporate entities.

All of this makes me a little bit surprised to see George Bush stepping into the fray on (at least what I perceive to be) the right side of the globalization debate, in regards to this ridiculous controversy about port ownership. I guess, after six years of unmitigated disasters, he had to get one right. Monkeys on a typewriter, maybe.

In terms of security, it really, truly, does not matter who owns the company, who owns the company, who owns the companies, who own American ports. American port security was crappy before 9/11. It remains crappy after 9/11. And regardless of whether a company based in the United Arab Emirates buys the British firm that’s been controlling the ports of Miami, Baltimore, Newark, Philadelphia, New Orleans and New York.

The main, articulated fear is that a company based in the same country as two of the 9/11 hijackers would somehow be tainted by Islamic extremism. This could, in theory, compromise port security and allow terrorists and weapons into the country. This is crap. More specifically, this is pure, unadulterated xenophobia, allowing Congressional politicians to grandstand during an election year about a homeland security issue that is really quite pointless. Okay, some of the hijackers came from Dubai. Well, shoe-bomber Richard Reid and Timothy McVeigh came from Britain and New York State. How about we start preventing British people and New Yorkers from owning transportation assets?

I live in one of those cities. I am not worried about who owns the port. The Bush administration is spending billions of dollars on a pointless war in Iraq that could have been spent (among a zillion other things) on equipping those ports with more ICE inspectors, radiological detection devices, and X-ray systems. The likelihood of a nuclear bomb making into my city by sea, is not going to change based upon the nationality of who owns the port. What interest does any company, be it based in Dubai, Manhattan, or Outer Mongolia, have in allowing terrorists to blow up its assets?

If we really intend to promote freedom and free trade throughout the world, we’re going to have to suck it up and play by the rules that we want everyone else to play by. America is historically bad at this. Take national security. We don’t want to allow anyone else to have nuclear weapons, but we’re perfectly comfortable not only retaining them, but threatening to use them. We don’t want to allow cheap foreign products into our markets but we have no problem flooding others with our exports.

As David Brooks of the NYT mentioned, the people who own the ports in Dubai are some of the few Arab folks who still like us, and now we’re pissing them off. If we’re going to get behind globalization and the free flow of economy activity, we have to play by the rules, and that means we’re not always going to come out on top.

Rainy Days

The last few months have been phenomenally bad for the Republican Party, and also for the entire country. Spurred by the Katrina and Rita disasters, Bush's approval rating has gone through the basement. His Supreme Court nominee is hitting a wall of resistance from the left and the right, and it looks like she won't be confirmed. The special prosecutor investigating the Valerie Plame leak is about to return inditements. And this bad news has somehow managed to relegate the other bad news about Iraq (it's not getting any better) to the back seat. In a day or two, we're going to pass the 2,000 dead mark.

A lot of people on the left side of the aisle are taking this as cause for celebration. Specifically, the country seems to be making the connection that it failed to make in 2004- that the president's reactions to everyday events are causing the problems we're seeing. Maybe the war in Iraq wasn't such a hot idea, everyday people are saying. Why are we still there again? How did this Katrina thing happen? What the heck is going on with the CIA and that investigation?

The Bush Administration and the Republican Party have suffered a steady diet of bloody noses in the last few months, and I would ordinarily be happy, especially with the 2006 elections coming onto the radar screen. The Democrats will probably do well in that election, and that is very, very important.

I'm not thrilled, however, that it took this constant barrage of bad things to force America to hold their president accountable. It's obvious to me that if it weren't for Bush's reactions (no, I don't blame him for 9/11 or the hurricane) to the bad events in the last five years, they wouldn't have been so bad. But it took a lot of really horrible things for the country to figure that out, and I had been hoping that America would be able to do that without such a high cost.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Bush's approval rating is tanking and Red America is looking a little less red, but unlike MoveOn and Howard Dean, I don't have the heart to capitalize on it. Despite what the right might tell you, it's not worth your country getting beat to shit to be proven right.

Dual Perspectives

I occasionally read Very Small Doses, which is a couple turns to my right and puts a lot more Jesus on my plate than I ordinarily prefer to stomach. However, it's well-written and intelligent, and its author recently brought up a point that I wanted to expand upon. He pointed out that political debate in America has polarized to such a degree that most people subscribe to one of two specific ideology (liberal or conservative) and each paints the other side as totally out of touch with reality.

I mentioned this in the "Two Truths" post, way back in the day. However, I feel like this is somewhat different. It's ceased to be a method of political discourse these days, and people actually buy into it with the zeal of religious fanatics (which, of course, a bunch of them are.) I basically get the same thing from my MoveOn.org e-mails and George Esseff's "What I Am" ad in the Washington Post. The orthodoxy of each side automatically portrays the other guy as misguided and uninformed- and that's using polite terminology.

The best example I've seen of this has been that poor woman protesting outside of Bush's ranch in Texas. As he continues his streak of being the hardest-vacationing president in history, Cindy Sheehan- whose son died in Iraq- arrived with an enormous media entourage to demand an audience with him and ask why her son died. In a move that shocked me, the Bush administration actually sent National Security Adviser Steven Hadley and Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin out to meet with her. (In a move that did not shock me, Bush stayed inside.)

Essentially, this woman demanded to know why her son had died, and wanted all the troops brought home so that the killing would stop. I mean, this woman has pretty much made up her mind about what we're doing in Iraq (it's not worth it) and what we course we should take (get the hell out of Dodge.)

Of course, Steve Hadley and Joe Hagin had made up their minds as well. According to Sheehan, they were "very respectful" but gave her the "party line" about Iraq. For those of you keeping score, the party line is that we are keeping America safe by building an Iraqi democracy (which I don't totally disagree with,) we have to defeat the terrorists (yes, and it would help if we admitted that they wouldn't be there if we weren't) and that Saddam had to go because he was a threat to the free world (which is crap.)

Let's try to break this down. I think Sheehan does a pretty good job of representing the liberal side of the issue, and Hagin & Hadley do a good job of representing the conservative. Forgive me if I add a little more geopolitical detail to this, but here's how the whole thing looks to me.

Liberal: A lot of American troops are getting killed in a war that should never have happened in the first place- we went after WMD that didn't exist and we basically did it alone, because the rest of the world (rightly) told us we were crazy. Keeping our guys there is an attempt to establish an American stronghold in the Middle East, with strategic airbases and access to oil. Our interests would be best served by withdrawing from Iraq, which would free up resources to secure our homeland from terrorists and stop the loss of American troops.

Conservative: American troops are defending freedom in Iraq. WMDs didn't matter. Saddam was a threat to the free world and we've liberated a country. Those who criticize the war are undermining our national unity, and dishonoring the memory of the men and women who have died to advance the cause of freedom. Leaving Iraq before the job is done would send a message to terrorists that, given enough bloodshed, the United States can be intimidated.

I had a hard time even writing that conservative bit, because I simply don't understand the logic of it. For example, a lot of conservatives tell me that while I disagree with the war, the soldiers are fighting to preserve my right to say it. That's garbage. They're fighting because Bush sent them there on false pretenses. Even if Saddam had chemical- no, biological- no, NUCLEAR weapons, and he had lobbed one of them into downtown Manhattan, he wouldn't be threatening my right to say exactly what I felt about it. If the troops were actually defending my right to free speech, I'd grab a helmet and an M-16 and join them.

This is basically turning into Vietnam, with one horrible twist. Middle- and upper-class kids aren't getting drafted, so there is no widespread protest, no swarm of outrage on college campuses. If 3,000 working-class kids die in Iraq, there aren't going to be mass protests to bring them home, because no one with a good job or educational opportunities is left with the military as their only option. The lives of the soldiers in Iraq are no more expendable than the lives of the Bush twins, who Cindy Sheehan recommended be sent to Iraq.

This has been a little disjointed. However, if you have any other point-counterpoints on liberal/conservative issues that simply talk past each other, please e-mail me and let me hear them. I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

Media Habits, or, Tom Daschle's Ghost in Space

All right, this might be a little lame, but I'll admit it. I signed up for BloginSpace, which allows you to broadcast your blog into space. Using RSS feeds (I don't know what they are either) they send the data from your site into deep space using a satellite dish. Or something. These guys could be totally making it up. However, it's entertaining. You can also send individual messages out into the Final Frontier, though they give you a solemn warning you not to send anything that could start an intergalactic war.

As you can probably tell, I occasionally get bored at my summer job, and find interesting ways of wasting time. In that vein, somebody recently asked me where I get my ideas for what to write about, and I figured that might make a decent (albeit short) post.

CNN.com. Oh, man, this website is my heroin. Without exaggeration, I can check this website 50 times in an hour. They're pretty fast with breaking news, if you can ignore the fact that the articles are written for fourth-graders. Also, CNN is excellent when it comes to sniffing out amusing, time-wasting "news" stories, such as the diplomatic spat between Denmark and Canada over a tiny island in the Arctic Circle. Other than that, CNN's website doesn't have much analysis, and has no qualms about posting unverified hearsay in the name of breaking the story first.

(I guess I did that, with the Secret Service arriving at Hopkins Hospital thing, last year. Guilty as charged.)

NYTimes.com. Not much needs to be said here. They know what they're doing. And the opinion pages have some of the most insightful analysis that's ever been thoroughly ignored by an administration. Except Maureen Dowd. I think many liberals would agree that Maureen Dowd is the crazy relative we'd rather not talk about. But I resist comparisons between her and Ann Coulter. Maureen Dowd is batty; Ann Coulter is criminally insane.

TheHill.com. I mentioned this newspaper in a previous post. It primarily circulates among people who either work on, or write about, Capitol Hill. Almost every story they publish could make a good report over the AP wire. But they assume you know the ins and outs of Congressional procedures, which involves a fairly steep learning curve every now and then. Like I mentioned earlier, I'd rather read Roll Call, but only The Hill gives you access to their articles for free. Also, they have some pretty awesome restaurant reviews.

WashingtonPost.com. Another fairly obvious one, that falls somewhere between The Hill and the New York Times. They occasionally fall prey to their inner policy wonk, but that doesn't bother me. Plus they do some of the best investigative reporting in the world, and they're good about getting policymakers to write editorials, even better (in some cases) than the New York Times. My yardstick for whether a paper is worth reading, is whether it's worth giving them my e-mail address. The Post and the Times both pass that test.

DailyKos.com These guys are even more left than I am, and occasionally I don't agree with them. (For example, I'm against the idea of a timetable for the Iraq pullout. I think that's a death sentence for the new Iraqi authorities.) However, if you're looking to take the overall pulse of young, progressive America, it wouldn't hurt to start there.

Virtual Pus. Kind of a goofy URL, but more power to them. It's a mix of the everyday blog and standard progressive musings, but the way the two are blended makes it good. Plus, the bloggers are Family Guy fans, so you know they're all right.

HomestarRunner.com This has absolutely nothing to do with politics, democracy, or social change. It has everything to do with being hilarious. If you haven't seen it, you should. If you have seen it, you know why.

As you can tell, my main sources of news come from the Internet. I only watch one TV show regularly, which I assume most of you watch as well. That's The Daily Show, which is amazing. It's the answer to conservative talk radio. Not only can liberals be smart and persuasive, we can also be funny. I challenge you to find a conservative TV show that is consistently hilarious. (And no, Hannity & Colmes does not count. I mean intentionally funny.)

So that's where I get most of my information. And Google. Oh, Google. Not only do you provide me with every piece of useless information I could possibly want, you have also provided me with the data I needed to write many useless term papers.

Why Kenyon?

So, Kenyon College in Gambier, OH marks the beginning of my Facebook PR campaign. It's not much of a campaign, since I don't have a lot of resources available for it cough poor college student cough. But Kenyon is close to my heart for a few reasons. First, I almost went there- spent an overnight there and loved it, but decided to stay on the East Coast for college. Also, a good friend of mine goes there, and she sometimes asks me why I didn't go. (I rarely have a good answer for her.) And a lot of my family's from Ohio.

But another, different reason for starting this off with a Facebook announcement at Kenyon, was because of a Facebook group I saw there. "I Waited 5+ Hours To Vote Against That Redneck Jackass and All I Got Was This Lousy Facebook Group." I'll be honest, that's pretty awesome. A lot of us went through this election voting in solid blue (or, to be fair, solid red) states, and just felt helpless the whole time. The liberal population at Kenyon registered to help swing Ohio blue, and waited up to 11 hours to vote. Even though it was ultimately unsuccessful, they did a hell of a lot more for Kerry on Election Day than I did.

Anyway, that's why I bought an ad on the Kenyon Facebook. If this is your first visit, let me know what you think.

This Could Backfire

Okay, so I don't really mind this Roberts guy. (This is going to be a quick post.) NARAL instantly came out against him, because he'd argued a case against Roe v. Wade, but they ignored another quotation (11 years more recent than the first) saying that nothing in his personal beliefs would cause him to overturn Roe. I mean, that sounds pretty solid to me.

And he's smart. I respect smart conservatives the way I respect Yankee fans who know their baseball. Don't get me wrong, I hate you and everything you stand for. But as an enemy, I can respect you. And Roberts deserves some respect. Harvard College, Harvard Law (editing the law review) and clerking for a Supreme Court justice. This guy knows what he's doing.

Most advocacy groups on the left like MoveOn have prepared for this fight for so long that it would almost be seen as a disservice to do anything but fight, which gives me a little pause. They know it's not such a big deal, but to appear (pardon the phrase) "true blue," they're going to try to battle a Supreme Court nominee who is probably the least of all possible evils.

I think we ought to give Bush his nominee and be dignified about it, just like he asked. Grill him a little on his political leanings and do some digging into his background, sure. But his record was as white as snow in 2003 when he was appointed to the federal bench. This guy is Mr. Clean. Don't make a fight out of something that doesn't require a fight.

Here's what the Bush White House didn't expect. If the Senate Democrats gracefully confirm his nomination with a minimum of mud-slinging, what does the media attention shift right back to?

Oh, that's right.

Senors Rove and Libby.

Exactly where it should be.

Holding My Breath

It's 8:05pm EST and I'm pacing around my apartment, alone and more than a little bit worried about what Bush is going to say on TV in 55 minutes. It doesn't seem like an impending disaster; so far, the two names that have both been floated, Edith Clement and John Roberts, haven't left enough of a political footprint that anyone is setting off alarm bells on either side of aisle.

I haven't usually advocated "wait-and-see" policies on this blog, which is probably a little irresponsible on my part, but I've never claimed to publish more than opinion on here. But it looks like we don't have much choice on this one. DailyKos mentioned that some of the nominees were essentially a blank slate, and it's tough to figure out which way they're going to swing.

Personally, I think Roberts would be worse news. From what I've read, his stand on abortion has been predictably negative, although Bush would be crazy to appoint someone who wasn't a commited pro-lifer.

This couldn't come at a better time, of course. The news cycle is squarely focused around Rove, and if Bush announces his nominee early, the heat comes off the White House and onto the Democratic opposition to his nominee. Doesn't matter if he nominates Hilary Clinton, Alberto Gonzalez or the man in the moon. Suddenly, the Rove issue takes a backseat to the Confirmation Hearings.

Slick move. Now let's just see who he picks.

The Rick Santorum Post

I’m originally from Boston. It says so on the little profile to the right, and I’ve mentioned it a few times. I’m proud of that. I love the Red Sox, I love the culture, and I want to live there when I have a family. A friend of mine from school, also from Boston, just sent me an IM, saying I should write something about Rick Santorum and the comments he made about Boston. I hadn’t heard anything, so I checked Boston.com.

I did not believe what I was reading.

In comments he posted on a Catholic website- no, dammit, I’m not even going to paraphrase this shit. I’ll let him speak for himself. He was talking about innocent kids being sexually molested by priests.

“It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.”

That’s right, you actually just read that.

According to this man, priests in Boston molested, abused and traumatized innocent little boys because they were living in a city of liberals. The people of the state of Pennsylvania elected this man a United States Senator. The same guy, entrusted with the responsibility of confirming Supreme Court justices, who also compared homosexuality to “man on dog” sex.

He wrote this crap in 2002, to be fair, and bloggers only dug it up a few weeks ago. But it is, appropriately, causing a firestorm. The mayor of Boston openly groaned when a Globe columnist asked him about it, and even the Republican governor of Massachusetts (whose coreligionists, about 150 years ago, were calling polygamy a “new and everlasting covenant,”) said Santorum had proven he knew nothing about the culture in New England.

I’ve had an extremely difficult time writing this because I’m so angry, and I don’t do my best work when I want to wring someone’s neck. A friend works in Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, and has emphasized to me the importance of defeating Rick Santorum. I knew he was vulnerable to Bob Casey, and that he represents a gathering storm of religious extremism in the Senate. But until today, I didn’t know just how truly insane Santorum- and his constituents- could be.

There is good news and bad news about this situation, and there is a whole pile of bad news compared to a puddle of good. The truly bad news is that Rick Santorum is not the only person who believes this. He did not proclaim this ignorant and evil garbage because he thought it would sound good against the walls of his private office, nor did he think he would be breaking new ground by claiming that liberalism bred pedophilia. No. Rick Santorum, and his conservative constituents from every religious stripe, believe that unwed priests raping little children are in the same moral category as monogamous gay couples who love each other.

If you want more evidence of conservative opinion leaders espousing learned and intelligent opinions on sexual deviance, look no further than radio commentator Michael Savage, host of “The Savage Nation.” Five days after the December 16th, 2004 tsunami, he got on the radio with some words to guide us through a global time of tragedy.

"If you are a God-believing, God-fearing person, I am sure at some point you ask yourself, wait a minute: the epicenter of [the tsunami] was adjacent to the sex-trade island of Phuket, Thailand... We shouldn't be spending a nickel on this, as far as I'm concerned."

You heard about it here. (Thank MediaMatters.org on that one, by the way. This was the same guy who said women’s hormones were “out of control” and they shouldn’t have the right to vote.) The reason the tsunami struck Thailand and Indonesia was because of the sex trade. Oh, I’m not defending the sex trade here. I’m just saying that if you believe the tsunami swamped Phuket because of little boys having sex with American tourists, it’s safe to say that you’d believe priests could be coerced into having sex with little boys because their neighbors voted Kerry.

That is the bad news. A lot of people have the same view of liberals as Rick Santorum, or worse. The good news is that this jackass has managed to polarize a lot of people. Rational religious voters have been forced into doing a double-take at the guy they elected, and his reactionary rhetoric has given the Pennsylvania Democratic establishment an exceptionally good cause to rally around. I’ve always thought that Democrats should be running for something, and not against someone, but Rick Santorum is a great reason to bend that rule.

And it would have been one thing if he’d taken a swipe at liberals in, say, Alabama. There would be about 10 people there who were getting real worked up. But when you go after one of the strongest bases of liberal power, and the school-year home of thousands upon thousands of college students just itching to volunteer for your opponent’s campaign, you have, pardon the term, drawn a bullseye upon your ass. I’d love to see the federal funding report for Bob Casey’s campaign PAC next week. There are going to be a lot of new zeroes there, most with a return address of Boston, MA.

A note to the approximately 1.2 conservatives who read this blog. The biggest complaint of the American right, the motivation behind much of the vitriol coming from Fox News, talk radio and the White House, is that liberals are sanctimonious and convinced of their own intellectual superiority. A common right-wing tactic has been to combat this by claiming a moral superiority, through either religion or patriotism. If you think that you can get away with claiming moral superiority and then attacking liberalism as promoting pedophilia, you are going to learn your lesson at the rapidly-approaching moment when the Congressional aisles turn a refreshing shade of blue.

My recommendation to the Republicans, which I hope (for our sake) they do not follow, is that they cut Rick Santorum off and leave him to the political wolves in November 2006. He’s already trailing 50-39% in early Pennsylvania polls. However, if they don’t, I look forward, along with the rest of blue America, to choking this guy with his own well-chosen words.

I hope we get the privilege of using Rick Santorum as a brick to tie to the Republican Party's submerging feet. And when he’s unemployed next fall, I hope he takes a vacation to Bay State, so we can show him a real Boston welcome.

The Endgame of Plamegate

I’m not jumping to any conclusions, but it’s Karl freaking Rove.

Karl Rove has become synonymous with the most amoral and ruthless political agenda since Joe McCarthy. Part of the reason that we all hate him is because he’s effective; Rove is remarkably good at stirring up “the base,” the hardcore, red-state, evangelical conservatives that put the gas in the neocon tank. Karl Rove’s strategy is appealing to “the base,” and assuming that the rest will take care of itself. So far, it’s worked- until the war in Iraq really started to go south, the Republican Party didn’t have to worry about being a “big tent” party in the first place. “The base” was enough.

(Today’s Arabic lesson: the word for “the base” in Arabic is…anybody? Oh yes, that’s right. It’s “al-Qaeda.”)

Even Rupert Murdoch, the poorly-regulated loudspeaker of the neocon movement, indirectly acknowledged Rove’s universally-poor reception among Americans in the animated show American Dad. The protagonist, a family man/CIA agent, hires Karl Rove to help him win his campaign for church deacon. Great moment: Karl Rove, face concealed beneath a red-and-black cloak, speaking in sepulchral tones, and accompanied by Satanic sound effects, is unable to pass through the doors of a church. Everybody knows the guy is evil.

Real-life Karl Rove story, which some people know and most don’t. The guy broke into Illinois Democrat Alan Dixon’s offices, stole a whole bunch of letterhead, and printed up an ad for a nonexistent campaign rally, which was to provide “free beer, free food, girls, and a good time for nothing.” He called it a “political prank” and laughs it off, which I would be okay with, if he didn’t falsely accuse his opponents of doing the same thing about 15 years later. (Just before a major debate, Rove went to the press with a claim that Democrats had bugged his consulting firm’s office. Turns out he did it himself.)

However, he did manage to pull off a number of impressive successes. His trademark is attacking an opponent on their strongest issue. In fact, a few of his business associates consulted for a couple of guys you may have heard of- Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The perception of irony is clearly not present in Rove’s skill set, but winning elections is. He recently decided to attack MoveOn.org by claiming that liberals wanted to offer “therapy” to the 9/11 hijackers, while the conservatives were “prepar[ing] for war.” The group Families of September 11th asked him to please shut his mouth or apologize, and he promptly did neither.

I’m not saying Karl Rove doesn’t have a good reason for being a psychopath. During his parent’s divorce, he found out that his dad actually wasn’t his dad. Then his mom killed herself. I hate him, but I think I can guess why he snapped.

The fact is, Karl Rove has gotten so good at being evil that I assumed the goon who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity would be an underling whose orders from above were carefully obscured. Up until now, I had assumed that the guilty part was Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I.L. “Scooter” Libby. Presumably he was acting out of shame and rage that the world was going to either forget him, or remember him as “Scooter.” Also, he sounded a little like G. Gordon Liddy.

But as of Tuesday, July 12, this thing has been blown wide open and there isn’t even much of a media frenzy. The White House is clamming up, understandably, and Scott McClellan is backpedaling faster than a Lance Armstrong tape on rewind from his earlier comment that whoever leaked the information would be fired, and that it categorically was not Karl Rove.

Except there’s an e-mail in which Karl Rove told Matt Cooper that Joe Wilson’s trip to Iraq was authorized by his wife, who worked at the CIA on WMD issues.

(Rove’s lawyer is only contesting that Rove did not reveal Plame’s name, and that he did not identify her as an undercover agent. It’d be like telling a gang of drug dealers that the new recruit “worked for the FBI” but without saying whether he was an undercover agent or not. What the hell else would they be doing, mopping the floors?)

Matt Cooper is not brain-damaged. He would be able to figure out that Valerie Plame was Joe Wilson’s wife about as easily as you or I could. And he would also be able to figure out that since nobody knew Plame worked at the CIA, it was probably some kind of, um, you know, well, secret.

Karl Rove told Matt Cooper that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA on WMD. Nobody is contesting that. Karl Rove is the leak, and as Bush stated nearly two years ago, he needs to be fired. He also needs to go to jail.

Anybody on the left or the right who wants to argue that is welcome to try.

Something Worth Sharing

Apparently this little gem has been going around various progressive listservs. I myself spotted it on Virtual Pus and was fascinated. My summer job involves market research and polling, and I've always appreciated when numbers can paint an accurate picture of American society. Granted, statistics are malleable, but some of them can't be argued with.

I was most taken aback by the divorce number. That's one of the most important weapons in the conservative arsenal; the claim that red-state, moral-values voters are Pro-Family, dammit. Which is patently ridiculous, because they get divorced a hell of a lot more often than us effete, blue-state moral relativists. I understand that going after the Bible Belt divorce rate is a low blow, but if they're going to bash gays using The Family as a hammer, they deserve it.

The piece's author is anonymous, but I wish I could get his or her e-mail address to talk about where they got their facts. Not just for purposes of verification, but because it sounds like a gold mine of information that I'd like to dig into.

I made a few slight revisions (deleted a paragraph about Iraq that I didn't agree with) and added a few tidbits of information that I thought my particular audience would enjoy. Otherwise, it's pretty much verbatim as I found it.

Enough talk. I'll let you read it.



"Dear Red States,
We intend to form our own country, and we’re taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren’t aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and the Northeast.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma, the Southwest and all the slave states.
We get stem cell research and the best beaches.

We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay.
We get the Statue of Liberty. You get OpryLand.
We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.
We get Harvard. You get Ole Miss.

We get 85 percent of America’s venture capital and entrepreneurs.
You get Alabama.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition’s, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country’s fresh water, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Cal Tech and MIT.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, and the University of Georgia.

Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we’re discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent think Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals than we lefties.

Sincerely,
Author Unknown in Nueva California."

Supporting The Troops

I was taking a summer EMT course last year when I overheard an exchange between two of the students in the course. One was about as liberal as you could get. She was a tattooed art school graduate with profane, anti-Bush stickers plastered across her fuel-efficient car- she was almost cartoonish. The other one was an enlisted guy in the Air Force who'd overheard her talking about how she was against the war in Iraq.

He ambled over. "So you're one of the ones who spits on our guys when they get home from Iraq, huh?" he asked. He wasn't being sarcastic, either. He was legitimately curious.

She shook her head. "Oh, no, I don't have any problem with military personnel. I just don't support Bush or the war."

He nodded. "So you support the troops, though?"

"Yeah," she responded, "of course I do."

What does this mean? "Support the troops." The most common expression of this sentiment is to put one of those yellow ribbons on the back of your car, which don't exactly seem designed for longevity (they're all magnetic.) Even people who are against the war, support the troops. Huh?

In 2005, we take our all-volunteer military for granted. A lot of us don't see the military as a particularly attractive option, especially the more privileged among us. And everyone in the military has their own reason for joining; some needed college money, others wanted to see the world, some wanted better opportunities, and others just wanted to serve their country.

The fact is that, regardless of why they're doing it, military personnel are serving the country's best interests, even if they're doing something that a lot of us- including me- don't support. Having an established corps of professional, well-trained warriors is not something that a lot of other countries can pull off- most major European nations still have a draft between high school and college. We have enough courageous people who, for many different reasons, are willing to serve without being required to.

And they get ordered into some things- like Iraq- that many of us don't believe in. But nobody is disputing that the job they're doing is honorable, and they deserve to be supported by the people they serve. So it seems like a lot of anti-war folks say they "support the troops," but really just mean that they don't bear them any ill will.

I think it's fair to say that most military personnel would choose to be deployed to Iraq about as quickly as most liberals would choose to send them there. It's a miserable place, and 1,700 of them have gotten killed there, and counting. Not to mention all the servicemembers who lost limbs or eyesight or hearing in combat. We claim to support them, but many of us just don't pay them much attention.

And the body of evidence, from recent polls, shows that blue America believes in what the military is doing there now. There aren’t many liberals who would agree with the decision to go to war in the first place, but the majority would agree that since we did, we’re obligated to clean up the mess in Iraq before we head home. We broke it, so to say, and we bought it. Even if there is widespread dissatisfaction with how things are going, it’s safe to say that Americans believe in bringing peace to Iraq after we brought war.

So we all support the troops and the mission of rebuilding Iraq, but the liberal establishment hasn’t exactly been printing up “Hug A Soldier” bumper stickers. I’m not saying that MoveOn.org ought to start selling camo. I do think that, since blue America supports the troops, too, we ought to do something about it. If I had my way, the College Democrats would start sending care packages overseas.

That might be tough, so I decided to start doing it myself. There are a lot of Americans getting shot at, in the middle of a godforsaken desert, who are in need of stuff like air freshener and a couple DVDs. I don’t make a lot of specific appeals, but please check out www.anysoldier.com, browse through the profiles of the personnel deployed overseas, and do what you can. If you support the troops, do something about it.

Okay, I'm Back Now

So it's been four months since I updated this beast, and Jeff Gannon/James Guckert was the hot item back then. There are a number of things I want to get to (filibusters, Bolton, creationism, McCain vs. Hillary, 2008 in general, and the looming war about judicial nominations) but I'm gonna start out one at a time.

I think Blue America handed Bush his first major defeat in Social Security, and I'm pretty psyched. If you read in depth about his Social Security tactics, it was essentially an issue of accounting. I'm a writing student. I don't do much accounting in my line of work. But the Bush Social Security plan was based upon the assumption that the Social Security trust fund was going to
run out. Answer being, that depended on the economy. Okay, fine. Looks like
we need to do some long-term planning. Agreed.

Here's what started to get me mad- although you'd think, after five years of this pigheaded ignorance in the White House, I'd be used to it. The Bush team claimed that anybody who opposed their team was "against Social Security reform." Are you kidding? Everyone in Washington has a plan for Social Security reform, and it's my personal belief that everyone's is a little bit different. But claiming that your plan is the ONLY plan? Even Teddy Kennedy doesn't pull this kind of crap.

I was reading The Hill, which I highly recommend to anybody who gets their regular news from CNN.com (like me.) If you want a lot of intelligent commentary on the most up-to-date political scuffles- and some good early warning before they arrive- the Hill has it. Granted, Roll Call (the other daily Capitol Hill newspaper) is significantly better written and researched, but they're kind of expensive to sign up for. When I win the lottery, or rob a bank, I'm going to shell out the $309 a year to get Roll Call delivered to my apartment. After I pony up the extra $40 to renew my Foreign Affairs subscription.

Side note about Foreign Affairs: They raised the price from $24 a year to $44. I paid $18 because I sent them a photocopy of my student ID and paid the student rate- and because it was cheaper than the Economist. It bugs me that FA expects me to pay an extra $26 a year now, but they must assume that their target market can afford to pay it. Most of the ever-multiplying ads are directed at CEOs, and not political-science-nerdy college kids. They even eliminated the student discount. Maybe I can get a CEO to pay for my subscription.

ANYWAY. Back to the Hill. I was reading a commentary by Lynne Sweet, who discussed a recent interview with former Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois. Rosty, as she refers to him, claimed that Bush could probably strike fear into the hearts of Democrats by taking his plan off the table and saying, "Fine. You come up with a plan of your own." Theoretically, all of us blue-state types would be running around like chickens with our heads cut off since we'd been focusing primarily on dismantling Bush's ideas. (Rostenkowski, I might add, was a Democrat.) The fact is, Rostenkowski (and Scott McClellan, who I hate even more than Ari Fleischer) has forgotten about the over-$90k rule. All earnings are taxed at 12.4% to fund Social Security until you pass $90,000. Then they're not taxed at all. Removing this cap would essentially eliminate the funding shortfall.

This seems like a pretty logical option to me, but I strongly doubt anybody on the red side of the aisle would get behind it. It brings me back to one of those things that drives me crazy about Republicans (and here I'm not saying conservatives, I'm saying Republicans.) They manage to convince the rural poor that there is more value in voting "guns, God and gays" than in doing anything that would economically benefit them. I have no doubt that people like Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts would be hollering all the way back to Kansas, distorting the plan and saving a lot of money for the wealthiest folks in America at the expense of their rural, poor constituents.

(Does anybody else ever get Pat Robertson the evangelist and Pat Roberts the Kansas senator mixed up? I think they're one and the same, and it's a Republican plot.)

Regardless of how obvious the solution to Social Security seems to be, and how disgusting it seems to the Republican Party, it seems to be a moot point. A comfortable majority of the country thinks it belongs in the trash can, and even though Bush is out there campaigning for it, he's getting hammered. He's even taking a one-two hit from Social Security and the Iraq war, where the rest of the country is finally starting to wake up. Like I said on my day-after-Election-Day piece, look to 2006. If we build a strong Democratic identity, and include some decent contenders for 2008, we may not be able to derail the Republican freight train, but we can sure as hell slow it down.

An important aspect of this is exploiting the "six-year itch" and making Bush look vulnerable. If his leadership comes under major fire- which he's thus far been able to avoid by simply ignoring the question- and he can't ignore the criticism any more, he falters and collapses. Guaranteed. The reason George W. Bush has succeeded so far is because, when he's confronted with intelligent people who disagree with him, he claims that they're out of touch with reality and instead of offering alternatives, they're creating roadblocks. When a majority of this country starts to move in a different direction than George Bush, he's going to become accountable-and then we're going to eat him alive.

Jeff Gannon. Journalist. Hero.

I’m not going to gloat about Jeff Gannon, I swear.

Nope. Not gonna do it.

Oh, hell, how can I resist?

Granted, tearing into Jeff Gannon and Talon News/GOPUSA.com is like driving my 1992 Ford Taurus over a lump of right-wing roadkill that’s already been hit by every 18-wheeler on the road. But honestly, the whole thing was an incident, the sort of which the Daily Show’s writers couldn’t have dreamed. Leaving out this guy’s sordid personal life, Jeff Gannon (a.k.a. James Guckert) was a “reporter” who wasn’t even cleared as a member of the White House press corps, yet managed to make it into the most heavily-guarded building in Washington on a near-daily basis. This raises the first important question- who was letting this guy in the door?

Gannon (I’ll use his pseudonym because I can’t type “Guckert” without giggling like a schoolgirl) was getting into the White House on what’s known as a “daily pass.” This is for visiting reporters, the type for whom a trip to the White House might be a once-in-a-career deal, or high school students who won a 500-word essay contest.

Real reporters have to go through a vetting process, including an FBI background check, to get into the White House. Even the Senate Press Gallery denied him a pass, citing questions over his press credentials (his host website was GOPUSA.com, for God’s sake- a right-wing rag sponsored by a Texas Republican named Bobby Eberle.)

However, Jeff Gannon was coming into the White House, since February of 2003, on a near-daily basis, billing himself as the “White House Correspondent for Talon News.” And I know the Secret Service doesn’t just hand those press passes out like lollipops. While I don’t trust the administration very much, I do trust the White House security apparatus- and their ability to find out things like whether you used to be a paid male escort for hotmilitarystuds.com. If somebody like that just keeps wandering in on a “daily pass,” you better believe that the Secret Service will notice.

To me, it’s obvious that the White House knew who this guy was, because the alternative is too unpleasant for the likes of Scott McClellan to contemplate. (“Really? He was a reporter for a site sponsored by GOPUSA.com? Well, WE didn’t know that. We thought he’d just gotten lost off the White House tour.”) When the Press Gallery at the Republican-controlled Senate tells you that your employer isn’t a real news agency, the White House should say the same thing- unless they know who you are, and want you to be there.

I’m not suggesting that the White House wanted the former star of a gay-prostitution website asking President Bush softball questions about whether the Senate Democratic leadership was “divorced from reality.” (I think that “divorced from reality” is an accurate term to describe the White House Press Office at this point.) But what I am suggesting, is that President Bush- influential Texas Republican- got a phone call, a while back, from another Texas Republican, Bobby Eberle who was running GOPUSA.com. Bobby asked George for a favor- give his “news service” its own White House correspondent. George (or, more accurately, George’s press office) found a way to do this that wouldn’t require the unpleasant publicity of digging up the reporter’s association with the aptly-named GOPUSA.com. Enter Jeff Gannon.

(Brief aside. Can you imagine what would have happened if, in the Clinton or a hypothetical Gore White House, a reporter- gay hooker or not- was found to be representing DEMSUSA.com or some such? FOX News would be so happy, they’d probably sacrifice forty goats to the Dark Lord, Rupert Murdoch.)

While the hypocrisy of a gay prostitute, working as a conservative “reporter” in the heart of the White House, is hilarious, it raises questions which are decidedly un-funny. Armstrong Williams, a conservative black columnist, was exposed earlier this year for receiving $240,000 to promote Bush’s education plan. It blows my mind. They were paying him off to publish rave reviews of administration policy in news outlets which were ostensibly independent. He even interviewed Education Secretary Rod Paige and encouraged other black journalists to promote No Child Left Behind.

I’m going to repeat this. The Bush Administration spent $240,000 of taxpayer money to bribe a journalist into promoting their policies. You better believe that “this column sponsored by the White House Press Office” didn’t appear on Armstrong William’s byline.

Of course, Armstrong Williams and his unfortunate sources of supplemental income weren’t the first Bush administration attempt to pollute the independent media with propaganda. (I’m not shying away from the P-word, because, honestly, that’s what it was.) They developed “video news releases,” meant to sound like the print kind- sheets of paper attributed to the White House, written like a news article and outlining a new policy or making some kind of statement. However, “video news releases” were filmed to look like real TV journalism- and didn’t make any mention of the agency that produced them. The General Accounting Office, one of the few Congressional watchdog agencies that retains teeth in this day and age, called the Bush White House out on it. It was illegal, and the GAO made them stop.

The fact is that unbiased research and reporting makes conservatives and their policies look really, really bad. Listen to the incessant complaints about the “liberal media” and conservative complaints about how colleges and universities are overwhelmingly left-wing. Think about it. Media outlets and universities are paid to sit around and carefully analyze the facts of historical and current events. They have codes of ethics (which do not condone getting paid off by the government to promote their agenda.) That’s all they do- learn from history and research what’s currently going on. And for some STRANGE reason, most of these organizations seem to have a liberal slant. Huh. That’s funny. I wonder why.

I don’t mean to extol the virtues of the modern media. They make mistakes and they screw up (look at poor Dan Rather.) But over the past decade, Republicans and conservatives in general have realized that their policies don’t hold up under the scrutiny of the professional media. This is not because the media is liberal. This is because an accurate look at the truth is liberal, and when the media reports the truth- about Iraq, Social Security, gay rights, evolution or health care- Republicans look bad. Via FOX News, “video news releases,” the bribing of Armstrong Williams or the illegitimate clearances of “Jeff Gannon,” it’s become very clear that a lot of conservatives in this country are afraid of the truth, so the answer is to broadcast lies.

I’m still making Jeff Gannon jokes, and so are my friends- my girlfriend told me today that she was sad about the whole affair, “because Jeff Gannon and Talon News were my source for unbiased and no-spin reporting.” But the whole affair lays bare a frightening conservative mentality- that if smart people are reporting something that’s not friendly to the way you look at the world, you should report the opposite, regardless of whether or not it’s the truth. And if you do that, your supporters will believe that your “news,” however morally and factually questionable it might be, is a legitimate alternative to what the real media is saying. In America, in 2005, the truth is bad news for Republicans, and Jeff Gannon was one of their ways to make it go away.

(Post script: For more on this, you should read Al Franken’s slightly-dated “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.” However, a current, better-detailed, and significantly less humorous look at this situation can be found at Media Matters for America, online at MediaMatters.org. I had to stop reading after a while, because it was too upsetting- and more importantly, too true.)

Retroactive Justification

A few weeks ago, the search for weapons of mass destruction was called off and nobody cared. It wasn’t really a story. The Presidential inauguration was coming up, the Iraqi elections were in various stages of disarray, and Iraq itself was getting merrily car-bombed back to the Stone Age. There were much more important things going on in the world than the Bush administration’s oh-so-quiet admission that the original pretense for going to war in Iraq had failed.

I noticed, and so did the Daily Show, which has transitioned from an entertaining and goofy way to spend a half-hour, to my sole source of political gallows humor. Of course, Jon Stewart was able to spin this into something funny, but I can’t. We went to war for one reason and, instead of admitting we were wrong, the administration and the America right simply created a new reason for the same war.

I grant that it must be unspeakably difficult to walk in front of America and say, “I screwed up. We went to war to find nonexistent weapons and thousands of American soldiers died. Oops. Sorry. Won’t happen again.” But while the war in Iraq is a tough issue for conservatives, the war on terror isn’t. Solution? Make them one and the same. Iraq, prior to our arrival, was a terrorist backwater- when you start killing clerics and instituting a secular regime, al Qaeda won’t exactly be banging down the door to lend you a hand.

Of course, AFTER we arrived, we created a cause celebré for the Islamic radicalist movement. Regardless of who had been running the show before us, al Qaeda affiliates had a new battleground on which to kill Americans- conveniently across the street from their spiritual base of Saudi Arabia. So yeah, Iraq is now a front in the war on terror- one which we, by wrongfully invading a country, created. Oops.

What upsets me most about neoconservative foreign policy, is its inherent fear of showing weakness. If you break down the neocon ideology, they are fully convinced that we need to be such a strong, unstoppable force that no terrorist group will dare to challenge us- and that we should use that force to influence the spread of “freedom and democracy throughout the world.” There’s a little truth to that- very few democracies have bred terrorist cells- but to paraphrase an Iraqi man in Fallujah this week, people don’t usually appreciate a democracy that arrives on the back of a tank.

Today’s American foreign policy is being dictated by the same mentality that convinced the middle-school bully to beat up the smaller kids. Theoretically, fear should inspire respect, and to the people who are instilling fear, it looks like it’s working. But a foreign policy that instills respect is infinitely more complex and subtle, and requires an approach to the Iraq problem that the Bush administration is unwilling to adopt and totally incapable of implementing.

It requires us to support the Iraqi government by working better with its neighbors- including Iran- to protect the viability of the fledgling democracy. It requires a broad-based foreign policy with a conciliatory message to bring in more support from European and Asian countries who want little to do with Iraq. But most importantly, it requires Americans to leave. Soon.

Paradoxically, American forces are the only thing that is keeping the Iraqi resistance viable. There are two primary types of Iraqi insurgents- Shiite religious zealots in the southern regions, and Sunni fighters in the Baghdad area, who draw their support from regime loyalists and foreign, al-Qaeda-linked fighters. Currently, they have a common enemy- the American imperialists. The American Humvee and helicopter are targets that any militant can shoot at, without angering the local population. However, when insurgents kill Iraqi police, National Guardsmen and civilians, Iraqis tend to blame the Americans for the death, saying Iraqis would not kill their own countrymen.

I’m not advocating leaving tomorrow, and I’m not advocating a departure simply because Americans are dying. We made this mess and we need to clean it up. But there is going to be a civil war in Iraq when we leave, no matter how strong the government is. The Sunni minority is better-armed and battle-hardened, and the Shiites have suffered for a long time under Sunni repression and are looking for revenge. This battle will happen, no matter what. When the Americans leave, and these sides can’t make common cause anymore, they’re going to war.

Islamic militants are fond of telling the civilian population that the Americans came to conquer Iraq and take its oil. That may have been the Bush administration’s idea- cheap oil from Iraq and convenient military bases in the Middle East. But even Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld can tell that American troops need to leave Iraq. So they need to start now, by publicly announcing the beginning of the American departure from Iraq. They don’t need to pull out more than a hundred troops or so, and they can take longer to withdraw the main body of the force. They just need to make it clear that we plan to leave, and leave for good.

But once the Americans start to leave, the fight between Sunni militants and Shiites will begin. That’s when the first major challenge to the truly independent Iraqi government will unfold. No matter how much progress American troops make against the Hydra-like insurgency, the Iraqi government will lack legitimacy until they can protect their people without foreign- especially Western- help.

The fact is that we went to war to find weapons of mass destruction, and we found ourselves in a country without them. So the Bush White House invented a new reason- bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people. He claimed that’s why we went to war originally, which was false. But he was telling the truth when he said that American troops are fighting for a free and secure Iraq. I just wish he would add the obvious reason WHY American kids are dying to protect Iraqi freedoms.

The American military, at this point, is fighting a war to go home, and that's about it.

Senator Joe Biden Throws Thunderbolts

There are days when politics feels a lot like sports. You can celebrate the victories for weeks, and rue the defeats for years. And regardless of how many teams there are in the league, there are never really more than two- your guys and the other guys. (Of course, if politics were like 2004-2005 sports, the Boston team would always be winning, and therefore Kerry would be in the White House. Oh well.)

Obviously, politics is a lot more complex, because you don’t root for your entire team. There are plenty of different voices in the Democratic Party, and on the left as a whole. Some of the people in the Party barely even qualify as liberal in the first place- Zell Miller being the obvious example. But there’s actually an unpleasant crew of Democrats called the Blue Dogs. They take their name from the old Southern “Yellow Dog Democrats” (i.e. their constituents would vote for a yellow dog, before they voted against the Democrats.) The Blue Dogs are socially conservative Democrats who are mainly from Southern states, and they love to vote against the party line just about every time an important vote comes to the floor.

Anyway, everybody’s got a team- Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, whatever- and within those teams, political nerds like me have a few players that they really like. Not just your own elected representatives, since they occasionally suck, but the ones you agree with, almost every time they say anything. These guys might not have the most promising future, or might not make the evening news every night, but we like them- cringe at their scandals and applaud whenever they score political points.

Tom Daschle was one of my favorites. He represented the Democratic Party when it was truly a big tent. He was able to appeal to the progressive instincts of a socially conservative state, anchor the party in the American heartland, and avoid looking wishy-washy. And he was a damn good politician, too. He used his decades of Washington experience to work the system and effect change for the people who put him in office.

Of course, Tom Daschle isn’t playing anymore. So, if Capitol Hill was a fantasy football draft, I’d have a couple other picks for my team. North Dakota Rep. Earl Pomeroy is one of them. A former insurance commissioner, Pomeroy- who I actually got to know during my time on Capitol Hill a few years ago- represents a rural, socially-conservative state whose people still recognize the need for a progressive approach to education and the economy.

Wesley Clark is another one. If it hadn’t been for the fickle nature of the New Hampshire primaries, Wes Clark could be President today. Should be President. Wesley Clark had a progressive agenda with a smart Iraq policy and the guy spent his entire career in the military. Democratic strategists have dreams about a guy like him, and because he couldn’t rile up the Granite State, his candidacy faltered. Christ. Wesley Clark would have embarrassed George W. Bush on the campaign trail and the Values Voters would have been split right down the middle. I’m keeping my eye on him because I can see him as a senator or, God willing, a Presidential candidate in 2008.

But if anyone would be the all-star on my fantasy political team, it would be Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, who proves that the size of the state you represent is not proportional to your influence in Washington. (Can you name a Texas Senator? I can’t. Okay, fine, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, but she’s evil.) Joe Biden is a center-left Democrat from Delaware who’s been around for a good long time. There are four Senate committees that actually get things done: Appropriations, Foreign Relations, Judiciary, and Select Intelligence. He’s on the Judiciary and the ranking Democrat on Foreign Relations- in the Democratic Senate, he was the Chairman. It would be safe to say that he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to foreign policy.

This is good, because he’s a staunch opponent of the Iraq war for the same reasons I am. We went in there to find weapons of mass destruction and therefore make the world a safer place. Now the administration claims it’s about “spreading freedom and democracy.” If Bush had said we were going into Iraq just to spread freedom and democracy, Colin Powell would have thrown Donald Rumsfeld off the roof of the White House. So Biden- and I- are pretty upset about the way the war is going, because something like 1,300 Americans have gotten killed in a war that was launched to find imaginary weapons.

The difference between Joe Biden and me, is that he has the ability to do something other than whining about it on his web page. Specifically, he can put people like Condoleeza Rice in the hottest of hot seats. And this brings us to the #1 reason why Joe Biden is my hero- when it comes to the important issues, he doesn’t talk like a politician. He says the things we all wish we could say to the guys who are screwing things up. (The following quotations came from CNN.com.)

Last week, during the Rice confirmation hearings, Biden decided to- in political terminology- beat the snot out of soon-to-be-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. I read the transcript later and it was like reading the play-by-play of this year’s Red Sox Game 7 against the Yankees. It just made me ecstatic.

Biden set the tone pretty quick. “It seems to me, Dr. Rice, that you have danced around [the issue of Iraq] and…stuck to the party line, which seems pretty consistent. You’re always right. You never made any mistakes. You’re never wrong.”

He kept going, saying he hoped that Rice would have the courage to say, “Hey, boss, it’s not going that well. Hey, boss, read a little history.” (You would think that such statements wouldn’t require that much courage, but when it comes to the Bush administration, it does, and I understand why. If for a moment they admit they’ve done anything wrong, their whole demented foreign policy unravels.)

“God love you, please do us a favor,” Biden told her. “Start to tell us the whole deal.” (At this point, I was practically cheering.) “And for God’s sake, don’t listen to Rumsfeld, he doesn’t know what in the hell he’s talking about.”

So what’s the conclusion here? (Other than Joe Biden being the thunderbolt-flinging God of Kicking Ass?) The point is that, while Republicans may have control of Congress and the White House, there are plenty of Democrats out there who are not about to roll over and let the newly-re-elected (shudder) Bush team just do what they want. The important thing is that we maintain that fighting spirit.

Obviously, we don’t have the luxury of setting our own agenda- it’d be impossible to count how many Democratic bills get killed before they even see the floor of the House or Senate. And we can’t fight every Republican initiative- some are worth actually supporting, and many aren’t worth the effort it will take to fight them- because if we do, we’ll come out looking like obstructionists who are still sore after 2004.

The important thing is that we fight for the stuff that needs to be fought for. Stem cells. Health care. Fixing the steaming pile of ineffectiveness that is No Child Left Behind. And for God’s sake, opposing any new Rumsfeld-powered adventures in the Middle East. I know Joe Biden will be leading the charge when that fight comes. And if we stick to our guns, then come November 2006, we can really win one. Kicking the neoconservatives out of Congress so we can finally rein in the excesses and ignorance of the Bush administration.


(Post script: For those of you who aren't from the great state of Delaware and want more information, Joe Biden's office runs a great website, and it's worth checking out.)

Hillbilly Political Armor

First, an update on the Secret Service thing. Over the last two days, there has been zero indication that the President has made any stops at Johns Hopkins Hospital. However, after Dick Cheney's December 7th trip to Afghanistan for Karzai's inauguration, the last place he was seen was a hangar at Shannon Airport in Ireland, early in the morning on the 8th. There hasn't been any word on his location since. Then again, Dick Cheney moves in mysterious ways. I'm going to guess it was either Cheney- in secret- or a massive exercise. The exercise would be less interesting, but it would explain that strange afternoon event. Also, www.isdickcheneydeadyet.com has posted no updates on his condition, so I'm inclined to believe the Vice President is okay.

(Also: My favorite quote of the week. Paul Wolfowitz on TV, stating, "No one could have foreseen that it would take more troops to stabilize the country than to overpower it militarily." Well, I guess if you deliberately ignore it, nobody can see it coming, Paul.)

Anyway. This recent ruckus about how National Guardsmen and Marines are running around Iraq without any armor on their Humvees is really good for the country to hear, but I'm fairly nervous about the backlash that's going to occur, since a reporter helped script the questions for the soldier who put Rumsfeld on the spot yesterday. Without doubt, the conservative press is going to try to spin this one into a cautionary tail of the liberal media, exploiting the honorable servicemen in Iraq and causing our enemies to perceive us as weak and incompetent in battle.

Okay, granted, I don't really like the fact that Ed Pitts from the Chattanooga Times Free Press had to manipulate two soldiers into asking Rumsfeld the kind of tough questions that are now getting all this coverage. It makes the story a lot less heartwarming, that the courageous Guardsman, a specialist named Jerry Wilson from Nashville, had actually been coached on what he was going to say.

On the other hand, I feel pretty bad for Pitts. He'd been embedded with a regimental combat team for a while now, and was regularly exposed to the same dangers as the National Guard soldiers he worked with- especially since the Humvees he was riding in weren't armored. He saw firsthand how the Tennessee Guardsmen had to scrounge for whatever extra armor they could find in scrap heaps.

Of course, Donald Rumsfeld and the administration hadn't been making his life as a reporter any easier. Throughout the war on Iraq, the communications wing of the Bush administration has made it supremely difficult for journalists to gain access to major figures and ask real questions. The gentlemen's agreement between the general press, and the administration, used to go something like this; if the press were allowed occasional, unscripted access to major policymakers, then the press would grant decent coverage to the administration's more scripted events.

At this point, those scripted events are all the press can get. This President has held, by far, the fewest solo press conferences in his first four years of any recent chief executive. Granted, if I were Scott McClellan, I'd want to keep that linguistic goofball 100 yards from a microphone. If your boss is the kind of guy who calls suicide bombers "suiciders," then it makes sense to play the game safely. Keep him from speaking off the cuff and make sure he sticks to his core message.

I understand what McClellan's doing, I just hate that it's working. Bush and his cabinet end up preaching the same ridiculous platitudes every day- "We're resolute, we're strong, this is crucial to the war on terror, we have to make sacrifices," and especially my new favorite, "You go to war with the Army you have." To add to this, the only media opportunities become staged events, like campaign stump speeches but worse. The President's unavailable for questions, every time- supposedly because of his busy schedule, but not so busy that he can't spend more time on vacation than any other sitting President.

When your foreign policy- and domestic policy, I might add- is really tanking, it's a good idea to get out there and be honest with people. I've always wondered what would happen if the President walked out in front of the White House Press Corps tomorrow and gave us a "you break it, you buy it," speech. (Yeah, we really dropped the ball on Iraq, but we gotta fix what we did wrong so we can go home.) It wouldn't represent a change of policy whatsoever- Bush and the hawks would just admit they were wrong, try to fix their mistakes, and once we got out of there, the only casualty would be their pride. And our European allies might suddenly be more willing to help out, to say nothing of the UN.

I'll stop with the what-ifs, because asking an administration like this to admit they screwed up is borderline delusional. (Remember what happened when that poor woman asked Candidate Bush what his regrets were over his first term?) Granted, some might see the administration as completely delusional. I actually think they see the situation just like we do- ("Holy s--t, this is really bad-") but every appearance on TV is one more chance to save face and convince Americans that, nah, it's not really that bad.

But thanks to Ed Pitts and Jerry Wilson- a soldier from Tennessee and a previously-unknown reporter from a fairly conservative newspaper- the most hawkish hawk of them all, Donald Rumsfeld, finally had to face some real questions about why the war in Iraq is going so damn badly. And hopefully, there are going to be some American lives saved over in that hellhole, because so many people are paying attention to the problem now.

If the right wants to complain about how Rumsfeld was embarrassed by a newspaper reporter, fine. Let them. Because they're hiding from the real issue. The embarrassing moment didn't come when Rumsfeld was put on the spot by a soldier who'd been coached by a reporter.

It came when, after hearing Wilson's pointed question, 2,300 soldiers all started cheering.

And I'm pretty sure nobody was coaching them.

Breaking News (Wednesday, 12/8)

The glory of the Internet is that I can put up news that even the wire agencies haven't gotten ahold of yet.

About an hour ago (1:30 pm Eastern) I got a phone call from a friend who works at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. A motorcade of around 25 vehicles, all black SUVs surrounded by Baltimore police cars, had blocked off the entrance to most of the hospital. A SWAT team, with "SECRET SERVICE" on their vests, was moving around on foot. And an all-black ambulance, with Secret Service markings, had pulled into the Hopkins emergency department.

The only Secret Service ambulances (that I know of) are stationed at the Naval Observatory (the Vice Presidential residence) and the White House. However, this makes very little sense. Even though Hopkins is the best all-around hospital in the mid-Atlantic, any emergency procedures could be done at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, or the George Washington University Hospital, three blocks from the White House. Why come to Hopkins?

My semi-educated guess is that it's a routine procedure, like a minor surgery or a cardiac monitoring session, for either the President or the Vice President. They would bring the motorcade for a routine procedure, but would keep it a secret until it was complete and the President/VP was home safe. And since, after an hour of searching, I can't find any information on where either the President or VP are today, I'm going to presume that one of them is at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

I know that most people don't check this blog for late-breaking news, or even late-breaking speculation, but hey. I just got the information, so here you go.