ReMarksDC

Stop the bailout: Letters to My Sister- &Brother-1 & 2

2008-09-21T18:24:00.000-07:00

This morning (9/21) I sent this to my brother and sister in Georgia and Florida respectively:

"You both live in states where you have actual voting representatives in Congress and in the Senate. Please write them all now and in as nice a way as possible tell them: Don’t give my money to crooks.

The bail out plan is horrible. It may or may not help some, but it will cost 700 BILLION dollars all of which has to come from the US Treasury and eventually from the US taxpayer. What do you, the tax payer, get in exchange? Nada, zilch the big zero with no numbers in front of it.

When the financial system melted down in Sweden, they nationalized the banking system, threw out all the crooks running the banks, recapitalized the banks and then let them pay back the taxpayer for all the money it cost. Nothing like that in this deal.

And suppose you don’t like it? Here’s what the law says: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

This is a blank check to steal the public’s money that comes with a get out of jail free card. If John McCain is elected president, the odds are that the Secretary will be former Senator Phil Gramm, the man who with the help of Enron wrote the legislation that made all this possible and got it passed by slipping it into a must pass budget bill.

Today, e-mail your senators and representatives. Be polite but tell them, don’t give my money to crooks.

e-mail number 2:

This is the run up to the Iraq war all speeded up. Yes, there is a serious threat out there. But what changed between Monday morning, when they said, no more bail outs, and Friday, when they said $700 billion?

This is bigger than the Iraq war—at least then we had about 6 months to debate the pros and cons going to war in Irag. Quite frankly this costs more than all we have spent in Iraq in five and half years. It is just as bad as Iraq in that they don’t have any mechanism to pay for it. And it is just as bad as the Iraq war because they are playing it as if the objectives are one thing when in fact their real agenda is something else. And it is just as bad as Iraq because it appears that the Democrats are going to be as spineless now as they were then.

The supposed objective is to save the economy. Note that they talk about the financial system but do everything they can to make it sound like it is saving the economy. Sorry, this WILL NOT save the economy. Until Americans start living within their means—which will be extremely painful—we are going to be in trouble. There will be a recession if not a depression whether the $700 billion gets appropriated or not. George Bush and the Republicans from 2001-2006 screwed things up royally and there are no good options.

What the $700 billion bailout WILL do is save a bunch of folks on Wall Street from having to sell their second house in the Hamptons and their ski lodge in Aspen and so on. These guys engaged in a big Ponzi scheme only they were stupid enough to also put their money into the pot and they don’t want to be left holding the bag. (Actually, the original Ponzi had his money in the pot and was wiped out too).

I don’t know what the solution is. There are a couple of principles I would insist on: If the taxpayer puts out money the tax payer should get something in return. Ok, we buy $100 billion in bad debt from Citibank at face value; then we also get to get some piece of Citibank as part of the deal. Maybe tie it to how much we can get out of this debt: say we realize 30 cents on the dollar of debt, then we get 70 cents worth of Citi. Or we pass a $700 billion bailout package and we pay for it by raising taxes on incomes over $1 million a year to the extent that they pay for it—even if that means taxing every penny of income over $1 million (it won’t).

We will not get a real solution until people who screwed up are forced to deal with consequences of screwing up. They don’t have to be taken out and beheaded, but they have to have some real consequences for their failures. This $700 billion bill is all about removing any consequences for these guys for their failure.

Remember the Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, ran Goldman Sachs before he became Treasury Secretary. Under this bill he gets to decide who gets the money and CAN'T BE SUED FOR CONFLICT OF INTEREST if it all goes to Goldman Sachs. This bill makes him above the law. Nick and my Goldman Sachs mutual funds might do better under this deal (right now they are down almost 25% from their original purchase price) but let me tell you he ain’t doing for the country.

Is Andrew Sullivan Completely Divorced From Reality?

2008-09-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

In an "E-mail of the night" Andrew Sullivan gives this summation of conservatism:
"government needs to be kept in its place, taxes should be low and budgets balanced, individuals should be able to pursue their dreams as free of government control as possible, families do matter and need to be free from government interference, free markets and enterprise are the only guarantees of prosperity, moral choices - and their consequences - should be faced by the individual responsibly, and we have to be strong in our defense and prudent in foreign policy."

He then claims that John McCain subscribes to this philosophy. On what evidence?

As far as I can tell, John McCain receives 3 government checks: his Navy pension, his Senate salary and his social security check. His father and grandfather were also on the government dole. McCain has far less experience with the free market than Sullivan himself. The last time we had a balanced budget--well, more than a balanced budget, a government surplus paying down the national debt--Bill Clinton was president. The only enterprise that McCain demonstrated was in marrying his second wife--a very cut throat example of the principle that "families do matter." And exactly what moral consequence did he face in the moral choice of ditching that first wife? (Not to mention that McCain is firmly on record as opposing the right for Andrew Sullivan to form a family.) McCain's foreign policy is "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran." Is that prudent?

There seems to be this weird notion throughout the press that John McCain is some sort of secret saint hiding under the robes of an election winning wolf. Sorry, but look at what is under your own nose.

Letter to My Sister 4-1-2008

2008-04-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

Hi, Nancy—

We took the dogs to Rock Creek Park on Sunday. It was not at all like spring—cold and damp without actually being rainy. The dogs of course thoroughly love this kind of weather. We walked along Beach Drive, which is shut down to motorized traffic from Pierce Mill to the Ranger Station (a mile and a half). About half way up to the Ranger Station, we crossed over Rock Creek on a footbridge and let the dogs off the leash on the trail that parallels Beach Drive. They were in puppy dog heaven, running at the top speed their little legs would take them. Fortunately, they don’t like to get too far from Nick and Jim, so Manny would tear off, Jamie in hot pursuit, go about 100 yards, check up on the old men, run back to us, and then repeat. They only took one wading session in the creek, so they weren’t as filthy at the end as we feared they might be (and I’m afraid most of the mud and sand rubbed off on our clothes on the way home). Nick snapped this picture of me and the pups about 1/3 of the way up on the trail—he’d stayed back to photograph and the dogs were keeping me company.

Nick was out of commission today so I took the animals for their midday walk. I keep saying I should bring the camera along and today I did.

I made my theme of the day the Victorian Mansions of Logan Circle, cherry trees and neighborhood front gardens.

I suppose I've said a hundred times that Logan Circle was nothing but drugs and prostitutes when I moved to DC. Now it is very upscale (reminds me of the neighborhood you lived in in Savannah—like Savannah, Logan Circle was too poor to tear down). Mostly the blog has consisted of political rants, so pictures of the neighborhood will be a change.

I think the one I like the best was of a white flowering fruit tree (apple?) set against a dark blue wall. Unassuming house (unlike the row houses on Logan Circle) but the limited color palate and the diffuse lighting (it had been a drizzly day—this morning reminded me of the trip Nick and I took to the Lake District) made for a nice shot.

It is now bright sunny and 74 degrees (my computer says). I sat in a chair in the sun in the garden for about 15 min. It looks like it will be a race between the growing power of the perennials and the digging power of the dogs. Little Jamie had chewed the spikes of a hosta down to the nub, but now the hosta is trying to stage a comeback and Jamie might not be interested the second time around. We’ve made makeshift cages to protect the peonies we rescued from Nick’s family house in Annapolis.

You asked about the Federal program to save the financial system. My guru for economics is Paul Krugman in the New York Times. He says that the most regulated part of the financial system, the traditional banks, have done ok in this current crisis. The most unregulated parts of the financial system—the investment banks, the hedge funds, the private equity—are the ones that have gotten us into this mess. So of course, the Treasury wants to relax regulation on the traditional banks and engage in a lot of wishful thinking on the rest of the financial system. There is nothing so bad that this administration can’t make it worse. (Bet I sound like my brother.)

Washington Post Death Spiral Watch

2008-03-16T13:36:00.000-07:00

(Non Brad Delong edition)

Jim Hoagland has an op ed in today Washington Post with an excellent title "Needed: Honesty on Iraq". I'm betting that some editor wrote the headline, though, since the article reads as if it were written by someone from another planet who had no concept of earth-bound reality and no actual knowledge of the history of the US and Iraq.

To begin with, the op ed is that favorite in the journalistic nihilistic universe of the Washington Post, it is a "meta" piece--that is, it doesn't really bother to be honest about Iraq, but rather, it talks about the need for politicians to be honest about Iraq. What Jim Hoagland thinks the US should do in Iraq he doesn't deign to say beyond suggesting a generalized "stay the course." There is the usual Washington Post pretence of "pox on all their houses" with Hoagland claiming to find fault with all three candidates for President, although of course he really only finds fault with the Democrats. There is the familiar Washington Post editorial bloated rhetoric, with Hoagland generously sharing with us that the three politicians are "insulting the future," whatever that is supposed to mean.

But it is in recounting the history of the US with Iraq that Hoaglan launches into fantasyland. Here he is on Bill Clinton: "Bill Clinton used sanctions and pinprick missile attacks that helped protect the Kurds and Iraq's Arab neighbors. But those tactics also had the effect of aiding Hussein in grinding into dust any remaining social cohesion in the country." So, without any evidence presented, Bill Clinton somehow becomes a partner of Saddam Hussein in the oppression of his people. In the previous paragraph Hoagland skirted lightly over the fact that the Reagan and first Bush administration had provided material aid to Hussein (" did little to prevent or to punish" Saddam's actions against the Kurds is Hoagland's closest approach to that truth) , going so far as to send Donald Rumsfield to shake the tyrant's hand, and then proclaims the first Bush in some sense the "victim" of the policy ("They reaped Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait as reward.") Somehow, no doubt for reasons of space, the first Gulf War goes unmentioned, as does the immediate aftermath when President George H. W. Bush encouraged Iraq's shi'ites to rebel and then stood idly by when Saddam viciously put the rebellion down, even though we had overwhelming military force on the ground in the area. Somehow in Hoagland land, protecting the Kurds so that they could set up their own defacto state (which has some earmarks of democracy in it, however it may fall short) is "aiding" Saddam, but standing by while Saddam slaughters his own people is not worth mentioning.

Other inconvenient facts similarly are kept at bay. The Clinton administration had a fairly activist foreign policy, which did involve military action in the Balkans to protect Bosnia from a ruthless dictator, and then engage in the diplomacy and peace-keeping and aid necessary to keep the whole enterprise afloat. This sort of nation-building, which presumably Hoagland is retrospectively advocating that Bill Clinton should have done in Iraq, was of course the subject of attack by George W. Bush when he ran for President in 2000.

In the world of editorial writing, at least as practiced by Hoagland, word counts are the only restraint. But in the real world in which politicians must act, there are limits of resources such as money and troops. Hoagland talks about "moral obligations" that Iraq poses for Americans, but he seems to ignore the actual financial and physical obligations of the war on Iraq. I'm all for John McCain spelling out how much his "victory" in Iraq is going to cost in blood and treasurer, and what sort of taxes he's going to levy to pay those costs. Let's see, the war is approaching $200 billion a year and at best we've managed to achieve a fragile stalemate. Are we talking adding another $100 billion/year? $200 billion? and for how many years?

The war in Iraq has been a disaster because it has been from the beginning based on lies. The Washington Post Outlook section in which Hoagland's op-ed appears has as its lead story an article that points out that after five years, we still don't know the real reasons we went to war in Iraq. Colin Powell went before the United Nations and lied that we had proof that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Paul Wolfowitz went before congress and said the war would pay for itself. Donald Rumsfield, he who had gone to Baghdad to shake the tyrant's hand, assured us that there would be no need for hundreds of thousands of troops and that the war would be over quickly. They told these lies and the Jim Hoagland's of the press repeated these lies and now say in that oh-so-grand "no insult to the future" way, we must continue to muddle along because "fresh thinking is badly needed."

When I first read Hoagland's let's-be-honest-without-being-honest op ed, I thought how Thucydides had dealt with the way words decay in war and how partisans stop speaking the same language even when the words remain the same. I looked up the passage (Thucydides is talking about the civil war in Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War) and found it more apt than I had recalled:

"To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action."

Could anything better describe the behavior of the mainstream press when it came to their reporting and cheer leading on Iraq?

Let it rain

2008-03-07T18:19:00.000-08:00

Ok, I was wrong about the red phone ad.Whatever it was that put HRC over the top in the last election (Ohio-Texas-Rhode Island-Vermont) I don't regret it. The News Hour tonight played three clips from the campaign. John McCain tried to talk about the economy. It was all talking points, trying to walk a tight-rope between acknowledging that Bush had screwed the economy up while promising that he could fix things (the default position for the Bush administration is that the government has no impact on the economy--except when they want to claim that tax cuts do). I couldn't exactly tell you what Obama was saying, although he wasn't as bad as McCain. Hillary, on the other hand, was present in the moment. She had the stump speech economic points going for her, but she homed in on the price of gasoline. She said, I won't be walking " hand in hand" with the people gouging the American consumer. It was masterful politics. If its about the economy, stupid, in November, I want this Hillary charging the ramparts. She's loose, she smart, she's funny, she's cutting and she's talking about issues that matter to real people in ways that real people will understand. It was a roller coaster ride with Bill, so why won't it be one with Hill? She's got the moxie.

The Day Hillary Lost Me

2008-02-29T18:11:00.000-08:00

I don't know what genius created the "red phone" ad, but that person and everyone who signed off on it should be fired.

I voted for Hillary in the DC primary. I made my living as a photographer in Washington DC from roughly 1982-1992. I photographed Barbara Bush and witnessed her Junior League photographer. The fact that Sharon Farmer worked as Hillary Clinton's staff photographer when she was in the White House speaks volumes to me about HRC's vision (and that Sharon became the White House head photographer is no less inspiring). That HRC will incorporate many points of view when she is president is why I voted for her.

That's why the "red phone" ad has so turned me off. I don't expect HRC to pick up the red phone and make an instant decision. I expect her to make sure that the five most relevant experts on this threat are called and are either brought into the White House or made available. I expect HRC to determine where the threat is coming from and who the enemies are. That's true to her character and her resume.

Sorry, she's not the "shoot first, ask questions later" girl. That's why I supported her. Whoever crafted this ad thought somehow that they could go against her biography and character and portray her as a woman of action. Sorry, not her persona.

I don't know why she cast that horrible vote for enabling GWBush to go to war in Iraq. There had to be some political calculations at the time which made sense to her. They didn't make sense to me then and they don't now. Barak is correct: he took the right position at the time when it mattered.

I'll happily vote for HRC in the general election if that is the choice. But I'm saying goodby to the Clintons for now.

Broken Kristol

2008-02-18T12:06:00.000-08:00

In today's New York Times, William Kristol plays a George Will trick: quote a celebrated author and then use that author to make a point that has no relationship to the actual thinking of the author quoted. George Orwell today gets dragooned into Kristol's column with Rudyard Kipling thrown in for good measure.

Berkeley University Professor Brad DeLong goes to the trouble of quoting Orwell in context, just in case there might be any doubt that Orwell was some sort of neocon before there were neocons. (For the George Will trick to be even a plausible rhetorical gambit, Kristol has to assume that the audience has no actual knowledge of the author quoted, and is too lazy to check it out.)

But the real howler is not the ill-use Kristol makes of Orwell, but the ludicrousness of the claim he purports to make.

To quote: "Having controlled the executive branch for 28 of the last 40 years, Republicans tend to think of themselves as the governing party — with some of the arrogance and narrowness that implies, but also with a sense of real-world responsibility. "

Of course, what distinguishes the last 8 years of Republican control of the executive branch has been its determination not to assume any real-world responsibility. Pass a tax cut, but pay for it? Start a war, but plan for it?

The case-in-point real-world responsibility is, as in all of Kristol's NY Times editorials, just the latest Republican talking points (Robert Novak basically wrote the same column in today's Washington Post, with trial lawyers serving the same function as Kristol's Orwell). Namely, he argues that in refusing to grant legal immunity telecommunications companies that helped the government spy on Americans (to quote again: "certain legal arrangements regarding surveillance abilities"--talk about Orwellian New Speech!) the Democrats are putting the nation (and not George W. Bush) at risk. Of course, to prove this point Kristol parades a group of Bush appointed lackeys saying so, pretends they are "non-partisan" and then goes on his merry way, actual proof and real world evidence apparently not something that needs to be part of an argument (well, he got the arrogance and narrowness right). Exactly where "responsibility" comes in allowing large corporations to evade the consequence of breaking the law is of course an point never considered.

That Kristol could think, and the New York Times put in print, that Orwell somehow believed that it is OK for governments to spy on its citizens in itself boggles the mind. He should have saved the money he spent on Orwell's essays and spent it on Orwells 1984.

Letter to my brother in Georgia--Hillary's burden

2008-02-05T17:00:00.000-08:00

Paul,

As you know, I see the press coverage of the Washington Post through very jaundiced eyes. The Post has been opposed to Bill Clinton from day one—he’s not one of the cool kids and the cool kids can never get over that this redneck hick is class president. I’m sure that no Georgetown cocktail party these opinionators attend ever happens without the ritual of passing on the latest nasty Bill Clinton gossip, accompanied by rolling eyes and much tut-tutting about how stupid people are to fall for this guy.

Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post op ed is standard issue Villager attack. It pretends to be even handed by throwing in caveats about “of course, this is unfair” and then returns to repeating the unfair attacks. It is counterfactual. The impeachment was NOT a debacle for Bill Clinton. His approval ratings rose continuously during the mess and the Democrats made gains in the midterm elections. It was a debacle for the Republicans, costing Newt Gingrich his speakership and then Bob Livingston his. I can’t say what a Bob Livingston-led House would have looked like, but it sure wouldn’t have been that nakedly partisan, openly greedy, enthusiastically stupid House that Tom Delay and his puppet Denny Hastert built. It might very well still be in power.

Finally, note that Robinson doesn’t deal with a single issue of substance. He parades a bunch of trumped up controversies (why won’t they release papers..who are Bill’s contributors, etc.) that are probably very important on the Georgetown cocktail party gossip circuit, but have very little bearing on how Hillary Clinton will actually run the country.

You can compare this with the Cynthia Tucker Atlanta Journal editorial you e-mailed me a few days earlier, in which Tucker compared Obama’s opposition to the war in Iraq to Clinton’s vote for authorizing force against Iraq. It raises an issue of substance. If Clinton loses the nomination, then this will probably be the deciding issue among Democratic party voters.

Tucker sees the clear advantage to Obama, but I’ve been considering what it really says about HRC. It seems to be agreed everywhere, and I will take it as a truth, that HRC is a deeply politically calculating person, weighing the short term and long term pros and cons of every decision she takes and how she will present them. What could have been the calculations behind her vote? 1) She may be telling the truth when she says that she didn’t think the President would take the country to war on such flimsy evidence. Even before the war the Army Chief of Staff went to Capitol Hill and testified that it would take “several hundred thousand” troops to secure the country. The President’s own budget director said it would cost $100-200 billion dollars (and he got sacked for saying it). I think that from HRC’s perspective of having been in the White House, she anticipated that GWB would be getting some hard headed, realistic assessments behind the scenes, and that much of his war bluster was Karl Rove-inspired fear mongering designed for 2002 political gain (which it achieved) that would not be backed up by the actual use of force once the Republicans had destroyed the Max Clelands of the Democratic party. It took a lot of people a long time to realize the extent to which the Bush administration was not reality based and how effectively it shut out information it didn’t want to know. 2) She may also have been making a medium term calculation: give the guy enough rope to hang himself. The Clinton administration did not invade Iraq, even though they may very well have had some of the same fears that the Bush administration had. Their foreign policy was very belligerent; Sect. of State Madeline Albright complained that the Army didn’t want to use its forces. They must surely have been given some insight into the difficulties that would arise from any use of troops in Iraq and the Middle East. She would have known that invasion might result in a president mired down in a deeply unpopular war. In other words, she might have been thinking ahead to 2004 or 2006 or 2008. 3) I think the answer she gave on CNN in the California debate on her vote against the Levin amendment is telling: she thought it would inappropriately tie the hands of the chief executive. Of course she wouldn’t be making a big deal of this in 2002, when George Bush was becoming an object of deep hatred among the core of the Democratic Party, and when she was denying she had any ambitions beyond the Senate, but she may very well be telling the truth: she was thinking ahead to 2009, when she would be the chief executive. She’d seen how a Watergate era reaction to Richard Nixon, the special prosecutor legislation, had run amok and been used to harass her husband’s administration. Don’t give your opponents ammunition. (This is the same argument, by the way, that Hillary friendly folks like Paul Krugman are making against Obama’s reprise of the Harry and Louise attack ads against HRC’s health care plans. Don’t give the enemies of universal health care ammunition: you’re going to have to pay for health care if you get elected.)

All of this is to say what everybody knows: this is a battle between someone who does their homework and hedges their bets against someone who is inspirational (but may be gambling). It doesn’t to my mind get HRC off the hook: the Iraq policy was disastrous and anyone with sense knew it would be disastrous in 2002. There was very little push back and leadership from the Democratic party (look at how John Kerry had to waffle about his votes) and it looked at the time as if Rove/Bush were going to sweep all before them. A lot of backbone from someone with a lot of stature might have allowed a bigger pushback then and in 2004. But I can’t say it was a miscalculation on HRC’s part to step aside and let opposition to the war be between Bush and the American people and not between Bush and HRC and the liberal democrats. Even if she acted wisely in context, this is not to say that Obama was not acting wisely when he spoke out from the beginning. He was not a member of the US Senate, he probably had no thoughts of how, say, his opposition to the war would affect his relationship to the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he became president: in short, they both may have acted wisely (and he acted well) given the context both of them were in. He could afford idealism.

You don’t have to be pro-Hillary to be very disturbed by the character of the Washington Post’s editorial page. They’ve enlisted former GWB officials to praise Obama and attack Hillary and Bill Clinton as “mendacious and ruthless” (as if the GWB administration hadn’t set the bar for being mendacious and ruthless). I went page back though about a month worth of Post editorials/op eds before I started writing this note, and it was amazing how overwhelmingly relentless and negative their attack on HRC has been, and from almost all quarters, including even E.J. Dionne who can usually be counted on for some degree of sanity.

I’ve ridiculed these folks as superficial high schoolers and I don’t for a minute not think that they are deeply superficial – the culture of journalistic nihilism that pervades the Post editorial pages was revealingly displayed in the late, to my mind, too-much lamented longtime Editorial page editor Meg Greenfield’s last novel, Washington published posthumously in 2001. (I love this blurb: “For more than three decades as a columnist and editor, writes Katharine Graham in a loving foreword, "she helped create the institutional voice of the Washington Post." These people really have no self awareness. They believe the whole world shares their high self-regard.) But while I think the Post editorial worldview is shallow and pettily-personal, it also in some respects accurately represents Washington, which is after all a company town. The vast majority of its citizens inhabit one of the many inter-locking bureaucracies. Bureaucracies value order, hierarchy, showing up at the office at 9 and leaving at 5, where the CEO only talks to the senior vice presidents for personnel and finance and management and so on down the line and everything can be reduced to a 25 slide power point presentation. This is what the Bush people are very, very good at and that is why they have gotten essentially a free ride from The Washington Post. (There was a good example in today’s Editorial page, which took the Bush budget to task. Not really because they disagreed with ideas or priorities, but because the whole thing is simply an unruly mess with all sorts of details swept under the carpet. One got the sense that if the Bush administration would go ahead and say, we take $750 billion out of the Social Security trust fund to cover the deficit to do all we want to do, they’d go right along. They don’t object to the priorities, they just want the accounting to be clean.) From this mind-set, people like Bill Clinton are the enemy. They don’t accept the status quo. If the 30 minute meeting hasn’t given them a good sense of the issues involved, they make folks stick around for another 30 minutes to get it right, even though that cuts into lunch hour and quitting time. They think they can get good ideas from people who aren’t the Vice President for thinking up good ideas. And they don’t think that sucking up to the Washington insiders is the path to knowledge or even power. So it makes sense that within the hometown view of the Post, Bill Clinton should be the object of such hatred and loathing. The irony is that Mitt Romney is right—John McCain is the Washington insider; the Clintons are deeply disliked by many pillars of the Democratic (such as the Kennedy wing of the party) and Washington establishments.

What they don’t realize is that the world doesn’t look the same to those outside their little bubble. Because they hate Bill Clinton, they want him “under control”. I’m of the opposite view: I don’t want him “under control.” I want him thinking outside the box and raising uncomfortable questions and pushing to look at things from a different angle. Similarly I want Hillary Clinton to be ruthless. I want whoever she appoints to be Attorney General to go through the Department of Justice and find all those home-schooled mouth-breathing Christianist lawyers and roust them out of the government and send them off with so many well documented black marks on their record that even Liberty University will be ashamed to hire them. It is no comfort to me to think that Obama will be too nice to root out these folks who want to create a Christian nation and who think torture and spying are compatible with our history and principles. I want real change, not a different preacher in the White House.

Seriously, if you don’t think that Robinson op-ed isn’t standard issue Washington Post group think, ask yourself, could George Will have written it? (yes) Charles Krauthammer? (yes, although he would have thrown in an entirely fictional description of a red faced screaming Bill Clinton to enliven his diatribe.) How about former GW Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson? (yes, although he would have had to have an obligatory paragraph on the great compassion of GWB signing a piece of AIDS legislation and how moral intending he was in invading Iraq even if it didn’t, well, work out so well—“it is possible to be wrong without being wicked” said preacher Gerson in self-absolution on the Diane Rehm show a week ago.) How about Richard Cohen (oh, but then he is so out of touch with reality that he wrote a piece today in which he explained how we really have a constitutional monarchy where the real responsibility of governing belongs to, get this, the unelected chief of staff. As the church lady would say, how convenient.)

I’m not opposed to Obama, but he’s not a savior and people who vote for him thinking that somehow the political system will be transcended will be bitterly disappointed.

This horrible bait-and-switch war

2007-04-26T19:40:00.000-07:00

Alas, St. Petraeus has uttered what is no doubt the truth. There will be worse times before there are better times. That to create a better (fill in the blanks) Iraq the US will have to sacrifice (i.e., lots of young men and women must die). Of course, he declines to define the scope of the effort that will be needed. Not even ranges. Ten to fifteen years? 10,000 American dead? Paul Wolfowitz demonstrated that saying this war would be difficult was tantamount to treason. The "surge" was supposed to be temporary (until August, 2007, as I recall) and limited. All the promises have proved false. The whole war has been a horrendous bait-and-switch in which the only winners have been private contractors, like, say, Halliburton?

Epicurian 1

2007-04-23T17:08:00.000-07:00

We went to the Dupont Circle Farmers' Market on Sunday. Didn't get a whole lot but wanted to consume what we'd purchased as soon as possible. Also, I'd bought rhubarb on Friday, and wanted to use that. Since I'm cooking my way through Lydia's Family Table, I turned to that for a recipe. Didn't have quite enough rhubarb, so supplemented it with strawberries.

Tonight's Menu:

Baby leeks (from the farmers' market) baked in olive oil with lime juice
Diced beets marinated in olive oil and balsamic vinegar

Collard greens (from the farmers' market) braised in bacon fat
Left over barley risotto
Chicken Paprika (with left over Greek-style yogurt in place of sour cream)

Upside down Italian rhubarb and strawberry cake.

Dinner washed down with Yellowtail Chardonnay.

Standout: the leeks.

Summertime weather today in DC. Manny the puppy kept balking over continuing his walk (he loves to lie in the cool grass) . Substitute teacher in the lunchtime spinning class--we opened up with Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars." Listened to the whole album this p.m. Like this version of the British invasion.

All roads lead to Dick

2007-04-15T17:17:00.000-07:00

It all made perfect sense. Paul Wolfowitz got his mistress a sinecure at Liz Cheney's $80 million State Department office to change hearts and minds in Iran and Syria. This epitomizes the way this administration governs: everything is a slush fund to reward friends and punish enemies. Give it a patriotic name and we're good to go.

Shorter Cheneys

2007-01-25T11:56:00.000-08:00

Shorter Liz Cheney Wash Po Op-ed: Osama bad. Hillary bad. Daddy good.
Shorter Dick Cheney CNN Interview: The operation was a success; unfortunately, the patient died.

Apres Moi

2007-01-22T20:03:00.000-08:00

Am I mistaken in getting a whiff of fatalism coming out of the Bush Administration? Certainly the news coverage suggests more than a usual cynicism about the administrations motives and actions. If I can sum up the general narrative, it seems to be that the last election has alerted the B/C apparatchiks that there may be consequences for the their actions, and their efforts now are to stave off those consequences as long as possible.

Item 1: Iraq. Every time Bush thinks about Iraq, he has visions of the helicopters taking off from the roof of the Saigon embassy. Jerry Ford's funeral must have brought this vision uncomfortably close. The cynical spin on the surge is that it is a feeble effort that will have poor if any results. It bears all the hallmarks of Bush's great adventure--poorly thought out, inadequately resourced, based on little or no intelligence and ungrounded in the reality of the situation. No matter how brilliant a general Petreaus is, he doesn't have a partner in the Iraqis. To the extent that it looks like this is the last hurrah, then he will have even fewer partners. But hard fighting--with the spike in American deaths that will result--will only make the political situation in the US worse. To the extent that there is any strategy at all, it must be to lose ugly, and blame the Democrats for failure. (If today's lame Washington Post op-ed piece by Liz Cheney is any indication, the only plan the B/C folks have is to hope that everyone will forget that they've been in charge for six years and they can blame the defeat on some Fifth Column of people who don't want to win. As if pointing out that Bush's great Iraq adventure is going down the tubes is the equivalent to wanting it to go down the tubes. With these people, telling the truth is always wrong.)

I don't think that will work. For almost 4 years, this has been entirely a Republican war. No Democrats were at the podium when Bush gave his "Mission Accomplished" speech. If the Democrats came out of Vietnam with the stink of military failure it was because the public knew that the war was Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara's war, that the Democrats dealt brutally with the voices within their own party that wanted the war to end. The party was ever after divided, the victim of its own pre-1968 rhetoric. Nixon failed to solve the Democrats problem. If the Democrats inherit this war, the public will understand in its marrow who lost it and will expect nothing more of the Democrats than an exit--honorable, if possible.

Second, things appear to be moving too fast on the ground. 20,000 troops might have made a difference in March of 2003, when the Iraqis looted and we simply stood by. Whatever is happening now, we are on the sidelines, powerful and dangerous to the players, but not their main concern. The two sides are squared off and fighting to the death; we're important only in so far as we can provide aid or can retard their efforts.

At this point, it is impossible to tell what victory would look like. What would failure look like? I believe when it comes it will be swift and terrible. No one has planned for reversals or how to get out--anyone in the military who had would have been cut off at the knees by Rumsfield and his cronies. What happens when one of the brigades gets isolated and slaughtered or captured? What happens if the Baghdad airport should fall to insurgents, or be cut off from the rest of Iraq? It sounds as if Petreaus figures its going to take him some time to get up to speed once he's in Baghdad. Best guess they are giving is that it will take at least six months to see results. (About the general on a white horse: the criticism of Petreaus on PBS tonight by Col. Douglas MacGregor (Ret.), U.S. Army, was withering--a history of failure in Iraq.) What's going to stop the downward spiral in the meantime?

What will we see--troops making a mad dash for Kuwait and Kurdistan? I recall the shock and dismay when Jimmy Carter's attempt to rescue the hostages crashed and burned in the desert. The public didn't give him any props for that one. But he was able to absorb defeat and move on. The Bushies are going to want to launch World War 3--even if they don't have anyone to launch it against. If it comes to this impasse, we're going to have major constitutional and institutional problems--who in the Pentagon is going to go along with some desperate measure?

Item 2: The missing DAs. Why is the Justice department firing successful district attorneys? It can't be just to put some political hack in to polish his/her resume, although that would be a bonus. It sure sounds like the they want to gum up the works on some investigations which will show how US security was for sale to the highest bidder. Investigations which will go from bought congressmen to bought CIA officials and to bought Defense Department officials. These are scandals that are all too close to the scandal that is the Iraq war.

The problem is that the administration only has hacks to put into these positions. That will only anger career staff and increase the leaks of misconduct. Will they be able to keep the lid on before there are calls that Alberto Gonzales be impeached for obstruction of justice?

Finally: the Scooter Libby Trial. Events at the trial today suggest that these crooks and liars may not be able to outrun the consequences of their actions. The Libby trial seems set to showcase an administration in meltdown. There was no more shameful and dangerous act these people committed than revealing an undercover CIA operative's name for a purely partisan reason. Now questions are being raised about whether Dick Cheney should resign. Liz had better be sharpening her pencil--she'll need to do better than sputter with outrage to win this battle.

Entitled to Enabling Behavior

2007-01-18T16:51:00.000-08:00

One of the more curious arguments made by President Bush on behalf of his surge policy is the insistence that the Democrats who oppose the surge must put forward their own plan for victory.

The argument, as many have pointed out, is both logically and factually challenged. Factually, the Bush surge plan is not the only one on the table. The Baker-Hamilton Commission, Senator Joseph Biden and Congressman John Murtha have all proposed alternatives to the current policy. And why, logically, should the Democrats be the ones to pull Bush's bacon from the fire? Opponents of the war have argued from the beginning that it was a bad idea, that it would lead to sectarian violence and destabilize the region. Now US Senator Jim Webb made this argument explicitly in a Washington Post Op Ed in 2002, as did former Vice President Al Gore in a September 23, 2002 speech. Those who argued against the war were attacked in the most vociferous, no holds bars terms, dismissed as stupid and ignorant. The administration didn't hesitate to name undercover CIA operatives in an effort to silence critics. The administration can hardly expect those who worked so vigorously to silence to now buy into their failed enterprise.

So if the argument is patently absurd, what is going on? The prevailing view seems to be that this is mere rhetorical swordplay, and with the number of Republicans, from press secretary Tony Snow on down, repeating the talking points, that's probably part of what is going on.

But I think that there is something more. I think Bush genuinely believes that it is other people's job to bale him out when he gets in a fix. That is, after all, his life history. Drunk driving ticket? Fix it. Problem with the selective service? Nice berth in the National Guard comes along. Doesn't show up for duty? No problem. Oil business in financial trouble? Here comes Harken. Needs to bail on Harken? Wow, some sucker wants to buy my worthless stock. Couldn't win the popular vote in Florida. Hey, what's Jim Baker for?

This is why Bush (and alas, the rest of us) is in so much trouble in Iraq. There's no fix for this problem. They haven't had a policy, only a politics, for six years and even if they were up to the job of getting one, its too late. Bush's lame broken egg remarks to Jim Lehrer on PBS shows that the problem is dimly seeping into his consciousness, but he's still in denial.

The consequences is that this is going to end very very badly. Bush may not still be on the bottle, but he has an alcoholic's inability to change behavior until he hits bottom. Since hitting bottom is going to be worse than the helicopters taking off from the roof of the Saigon embassy. And since we--the country as a whole--have been his enablers, we're going to be there when the whole thing goes to smash.

Humpty Dumpty

2006-12-13T18:26:00.000-08:00

How far broken is Iraq? I read all the various proposals to "solve" the problem, and my immediate reaction is, "Humpty Dumpty took a great fall; all the king's horses and all the king's men could not put him back together again".

Obviously there are limits to the broken egg analogy. A country--or a geographical region, if you will--is not a limited entity. There will be people, resources there. Culture, history, crime, poetry...the full extent of human effort and emotion. But it remains: what was there was smashed.

Whatever the future, the fate of Iraq was sealed in the very early days of the war. When the national library was looted and burned, when the national museum was looted and burned, when Donald Rumsfield said, "stuff happens", and equated anarchy with freedom, it was clear that no good would come of this. When the head of an intensely hierarchical, regimented organization cannot distinguish between freedom and anarchy, it is clear that the our leaders have slipped their moorings and drifted off into psychological waters whose divorce from reality knows know depth. When the inmates are in charge...

I don't know how broken Iraq is. I do know that any thoughts that it is "fixable" are hubris. It has become a cliche that there are no good choices but...there are no good choices. Given the folks who are in charge, I think that our government will continue to make the worst choices. It is the end of the world as we know it.

Shut up and sing!

2006-12-12T18:11:00.000-08:00

On the day my home town newspaper (The Washington Post) came out in favor of that dispicable dictator Pinochet (and really, what does a terrorist murder on Washington's Embassy Row, 3,000 + murdered Chileans--they were all leftist anyway---and 20,000+ tortured citizens matter when there is MONEY to be made?) Nick and I saw an early show of Shut Up and Sing, the Dixie Chicks concert tour documentary. It was painful to revisit early 2003. The nation was living in some mass hallucination. One of the previews was a documentary of the Jim Jones People's Temple mass suicide, and while wild horses could not drag me to see that depressing film, 2003 sure seemed in retrospect a period when the great bulk of the nation was drinking the poisoned Kool-Aid.

The key moment was the first one. As the movie showed, up to a million people were on the streets of London protesting the soon to take place war. The Hammersmith theater where the concert took place was a wonderfully intimate venue. A young woman deep inside the pop music bubble could never expect her words to stir up the storm of protest that followed.

That's why the film's look back was so depressing. I could not believe then, I can not believe now, that the Bush administration's mendacity was accepted with such alacrity, and that those who didn't accept it would be greeted with such universal derision. Natalie Maines doesn't come across as a deep thinker (although she does come across as someone with integrity and no shortage of self-confidence and ability to think for herself). She was just some ordinary person who said, the emperor has no clothes, and got bashed for it.

There's a bit of sentimental mush in the movie (a bit heavy on the motherhood side) but the film is great on the hippie aesthetic of the LA recording sessions, honest about the money-making corporate side of the business, ditto honest about the Chicks ambitiousness.

Bonus item was Oregon Republican Gordon Smith waxing sanctimonious about how the "Hollywood" personalities shouldn't be surprised when there is a business consequence for expressing an honest opinion. Smith has lately been shedding aligator tears about the immorality of the war. Hope this clip gets played a lot when he's running for reelection trying to explain why he was for the war before he was against it.

Worse ahead in Iraq?

2006-10-30T07:42:00.000-08:00

For several months I've worried that we could be in a much more danger in Iraq than has been acknowledged in the media. Actually, longer--when Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army fought pitched battles with US forces in Najaf in the April 2004 . I was, I believe, Juan Cole who observed at the time that American supply lines were dangerously exposed. More recently, retired CIA operative Patrick Lang has maintained that supply lines remains exposed. I am no military expert, and while I was trying to figure out under what circumstances this potential disaster could be realized, Juan Cole's Informed Comment pointed to William Lind's warning about the most likely scenario: Iranian reaction to an American attack.

I'm hoping that Dick Cheney's "full speed ahead" in Iraq comment was sheer pre-election bluster. I take Rumsfield's resignation as a semi-coup by the professional military to try to impress some reality upon a delusional civilian leadership. The signs, however, don't look good. The in-coming Secretary of Defense has a reputation of tailoring intelligence to support the Reagan administration's preconceived notion. If he's been put in charge to carry out Dick Chaney's irrational fantasies and make sure the trains run on James Baker time, nothing really has changed. Augustus Ceasar lost a legion in Germany, and we could lose an army in Iraq. Who will the Republicans blame?

Empty Suits

2006-10-04T21:25:00.000-07:00

I know it's the sex that is giving the Mark Foley scandal sizzle. But it's the substance that is giving it staying power.

I've been seeing this picture all over the internet: I took this version from John McQuaid's Huffington Post blog. He looks at it and sees symbols (well, of course I do, too). But the message this picture, and the whole mess that this sex scandal has become, sends the American people is that the folks in charge are clueless.

The first serious criticism of the Bush administration came in an article by Run Suskind in Esquire "quoting John DiIulio, former Bush director of the White House Office Of Faith-based and Community Initiatives, saying that politics, not policy run the Bush White House, that speeches come first and policy is hastily and sketchily constructed later, that Bush is kept on the short leash of far right preconceptions of the world that often don't jibe with reality, and that fear of Karl Rove prevents staffers from providing him with news from the real world that might contradict his extreme, conservative vision.

In DiIulio's words, 'there is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: complete lack of a policy apparatus.'"

The one thing to add is that this is not just the modus operandi of President Bush; it is the modus operandi of the entire Republican Party at this point. Nor is this a new thing. If you paid attention to the Clinton Impeachment trial, the astonishing thing was the way the Republicans served up their conspiracy theories as if they were factual, and then were left high and dry when it turns out Vernon Jordan wasn't in Little Rock cutting a deal with a judge but on a plane over the Atlantic on his way to Europe. And what made it truly astonishing was: the Republicans apparently never even considered the need to check their facts.

Thus all the weird and delicious dust the wingnutteria is serving up right now: blame the gay activists, blame the Democrats, blame the pages, blame the press, just please, in the age of accountability, don't blame us.

What this huge imbroglio shows is that while the Republicans think an awful lot (and frightfully well) about getting elected, they simply are completely lacking in any thing that would resemble a political philosophy, much less a governing philosophy and totally without the ability to engage in critical thinking.

What this huge imbroglio shows is that there are no more adults left in the Republican Party. What coherence the party had was built around Tom Delay and his ability to enforce discipline. He made the Republican party a disciplined parliamentary party that came into its own when it could mark in lockstep with its executive leader. I'm sure the political history professors will be having a field day studying what he did for as long as we have political history professors. Maybe the past six years have resembled the gilded age of the 1870s, but was that Republican party really so disciplined or just corrupt? Could a single figure in that era enforce his will the way Delay could--across not just the party apparatus in Congress, but across the web of lobbying shops and think tanks.

What this huge imbroglio most clearly shows is that with Delay gone, there's no one to enforce discipline. The only role the current house leadership has ever had was to keep the money flowing and keep the apparatus greased to do Delay's bidding. Now, its every man for himself.

The sad thing is that no policy (other than putting oneself up to the highest bidder) is worse than bad policy. Just as with the parliamentary party falling off a cliff, the fiscal pressures are also going to drive the country over a cliff. Bad things will happen in a hurry. They believe their policies only produce good things, so they will continue their policy to prove reality wrong. Exhibit A: Iraq.

It is a big and fabulously prosperous country, with many strengths which I hope means I am wrong. But I believe that six years of Republican rule has fundamentally weakened the country, that far worse disasters than a middle-aged man exchanging ribald talk with a teenager lurk in our near future, and that if these folks remain in charge, we are finished as a world power. I look at Baghdad and keep thinking: if these people have their way, that's what they'll make of Washington.

Hoisted on their own petard

2006-10-01T19:52:00.000-07:00

The Foley thing goes from bad to worse. Apparently the GOP Cardinals had a pretty good sense 5 years ago about the guy's predilections. The MSM's coverage has a lot of helpful graphics showing the 5 congressmen who were informed about the "creepy" e-mail. I can understand why the kid's parents didn't want to make a big fuss about this--they were Republicans who had seen how the party machine could turn John Kerry's Viet Nam service into a liability. Imagine what those powerful people could have done to their son. These are scary people. Read Autumn of the Patriarch if you want to understand what world we're dealing with here. I had an employee who had been abused by one of Cardinal Law's priests. His parents had gone to the church's authorities and had been told, get out of our face. And we still haven't heard about actual sex as opposed to the internet variety.

Update, 10/2/06

The Washington Post this a.m. confirms that the pages were not reporting Foley's advances because of fear of retribution:

"That's part of your concern about coming forward," Loraditch [who runs the U.S. House Page Alumni Association's Internet message board] said. "You take down a Congress member, and you can't end up trying to do something later."

Two additional thoughts: If it is true that incoming pages were warned to watch out for Foley five years ago, Foley must have done something before that that raised concerns. What did he do? When we know what the Republicans knew about Foley in 1999 and 2000, then we'll have a better sense of how bad this is for the Republicans. And I continue to believe that where there's smoke, there's fire: Foley's clearly trolling for young flesh in these IMs. Are we to believe that in 12 years in Washington, he didn't succeed once?

This can't be the way they planned to start the fall campaign

2006-09-30T11:35:00.000-07:00

My morning news and blog reading was been dominated by the twin sensations of the new Bob Woodward book and the story of Florida Congressman Mark Foley resigning over his more than avid interest in communicating with young male pages via the Internet. Of the two, the Woodward is the meatier, the Foley the juicer.

Politically, this has to dismay the G.O.P. Combined, the two stories drive a stake in the heart of the fall strategy, which depends on banging the war-on-terror drums while getting the Pharisees all worked up over family values. (Haven't we done this before?). The Woodward excerpts published so far make Cheney look like a micromanaging buffoon and Bush an obstinate block of wood. And of course its hard to appear holier-than-thou when everyone is pointing out that your point man on cracking down on sexual predators is himself a sexual predator.

I'm betting that the juicier story consumes more media oxygen. (AMERICAblog seems the most obsessive in prying up the rocks and seeing what vermin squirm out.) First, it has the smell of a story where not all the shoes have dropped. Any man as avid in pursuit of young boys as Foley seems to have been must have caught at least one. (I'm recalling Nicholas Von Hoffman's biography of Roy Cohn which documented the aging right-winger's many conquests.) After dipping into a bit of the IM transcripts, I'd be astonished if at least one steam room grope doesn't come to light. And of course, pack journalism has taken over.

It also seems to be playing into the Democrats "culture of corruption" narrative and the classic Washington "its not the crime, it's the cover-up" narrative. Already the newspapers are publishing stories with Republicans pointing fingers at each other. It's clear that Foley's tastes were an open secret on the Hill. Specific charges got buried. The Republicans have a choice of being perceived as dishonest or incompetent. (Haven't we been here before?)

I'll conjecture that the Republicans will try to pass this off as just your usual Washington sex scandal, a la Bill and Monica. I don't think the psycho-sexual dynamics play that way. Leave aside that Foley is the stalker (and Monica was the one pursuing Bill). Leave aside (for the moment) the child predator part. The Clinton/Monica story played into a larger narrative that the American public was already familiar with. Bill, we all knew, was a man of large appetite. His pleasure in life was one of the characteristics that won him the presidency. An afternoon romp with Monica was tacky and tawdry and undignified and all that other stuff that the polite Washington crowd claims to be distressed about, but it didn't contradict the man's basic persona.

When the Starr report was being published and impeachment was in full swing, I developed the crazy English teacher explanation for why Clinton's popularity numbers kept rising. The crazy English teacher has read T.S. Elliot's The Wasteland (notes included) and knows that it is the king's job to be potent. When the king isn't potent, the crops dry up and the kids go hungry. Yeah, I know this is premodern mumbo jumbo but that doesn't mean that it doesn't capture some sense of how our kings are supposed to act. The more the Republicans railed against Clinton, the more they reminded the public that he had a working schlong. We don't elect eunuchs president.

The Foley thing doesn't play that way. To the public in general, he has no persona; to the extent that he has a persona, it is diametrically at odds with his real self. I suppose there's a way to spin a relationship between a 16 year old boy and 52 year old man into some sort of Greek mentor thing, but the items that have surfaced so far don't have much educational uplift. He's chatting about DC weather, not Being and Nothingness. In short, he looks like pure predator, Internet version. The GOP/Religious Right complex has spent so much energy vilifying homosexuals as just the sort of person Foley is turning out to be, it's hard to see how they can spin their way out of this. For the most delicious take on Foley, check out Jesus' General ("Foley's gift to guys like us").

The Woodward book doesn't have the same tabloid appeal as the Foley story. John Dickerson at Slate points out that Woodward has behind him a huge publicity machine that guarantees the story will be in the public arena for a long time. True, but the daily headlines out of Iraq will give keep this book relevant. By the way, what's up with that "curfew" in Baghdad, the first time that pedestrian traffic has been shut down. Somebody was planning to drive a car bomb into the barriers around the Green Zone? Yeah. As Woodward says, things are worse than they seem.

I love the way Woodward talks about the gems uncovered when you "replow" old ground. Hah! This book is all the stuff he left out of books 1 & 2--until it was politically convenient. It is hard to imagine a more cynical operation than The Washington Post. The editorial page to this day continues to be dominated by the Meg Greenfield School of Journalistic Nihilism, perfectly enunciated in the late (and too much lamented) Post editorial page editor's novel Washington. The only reason Charles Krauthammer and George Will are published in the Post is because they were part of Greenfield's little right-wing cabel--celebrated in the pages of the Post itself in an obituary column by Krauthammer. [Without the hypothetical conditional ("If wishes were horses, beggars would fly") the collected works of Charles Krauthammer would shrink to a few pages extolling his own virtues. See: the column for his deceased brother which CK turned into an occasion for remarking how great a person he had become because of said decease brother. Pet peeve: I digress. ]

Bottom line: the GOP had planned to bolt out of the starting gate trumpeting their strength in the war on terror. Instead, they have to devote their energy to scraping off the macaca of a sexual predator and a hopelessly misconceived and mishandled war. Every time Bush reminds the American public that he intends to stay in Iraq until he proves that Viet Nam could have been won, he bolsters the fortunes of the Democrats. There are too many names at the Viet Nam Memorial; how even more dead American boys and girls, men and women, will lead to success, Bush can't quite say.

Friday, 9-29

2006-09-29T19:14:00.000-07:00

In a predictable life, Nick and I went shopping this morning at Whole Foods--our Friday AM chore. Of course, our first order of business was checking the progress of the Metropole going up across the street. After months watching the excavation and then the foundation, the construction is in that galloping phase, where a floor (or more) is added a week. Last week, the building had reached street level; this week, one floor and counting. (Apropos of watching buildings being erected: the final quarter I taught English at Georgia Tech, Coca-Cola was building a skyscraper across the street. Try keeping engineering students attention when there's 30 stories of construction going on outside the window.)

Whole Foods was nearly devoid of drama. At the fish counter, we waited while a woman was very deliberate (and time consuming) about her purchase. Finally, she selected her filet, it was weighed, wrapped and handed over to her. She promptly opened her purse and put it inside. The lady fishmonger watched, incredulous. I think the staff was keeping an eye on that woman from then on.

If it is 12:30, I must be at studio cycling. Quiet today: neither Ennis was in the work out room, and only one Jack. The Sidekick-Looking-for-a-Kick adopted a spinning regular (obviously not a regular today since he was out in the weight room). The Sidekick is a sweet looking kid, friendly, somehow just a little too eager in a puppy way to have a buddy. No doubt I over interpret.

The day's drama came at dusk. My cell rang: Brian had parked his car illegally and it had been towed. I arrived home to a scene not without tension. Brian distressed and searching for his car. Nick once-more nonplussed that Brian had gotten another unnecessary ticket. In between stirring the polenta and frying the pork chops, my efforts at mediation failed. Brian snuck out of the house to retrieve his car. I was not happy to call him to dinner and discover he was gone.

Still, the chops were not bad (fried in a cold pan and served with a sauce of red onion, red pepper, smokey mustard and sage); a little kefalotiri cheese punched up the polenta nicely, and the 365 brand Chianti was more than adequate for a Friday night dinner. I groomed the dog as Nick cleaned dishes, Brain repossessed his car and grudgingly ate his dinner (and sipped a little of the Chianti) and peace descended upon the valley.

Vale Res Publica

2006-09-28T12:35:00.000-07:00

Mark today on your calendars, citizens. By the time the dust has settled, our elected Federal officials will have voted to end our Constitutional democracy and enter into a government based on the principle of military power vested in the commander-in-chief.

The blogs I read are all in high dudgeon over the soon-to-be passed detainee treatment bill. Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing at the Washington Post provides a good compilation; Slate links to the NY Times editorial as what the Times should have published as news analysis on its front page. Nearly everyone refers to a LA Times op-ed by Bruce Ackerman. If Ackerman's assessment is correct, that's it for the constitution:

"This dangerous compromise not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops "during an armed conflict," it also allows him to seize anybody who has "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison."

Ackerman goes on to note that this is not an idle speculation, since one American citizen (Jose Padilla) has been held under precisely these powers.

Am I the only one who feels like I've joined Alice down the rabbit hole and ended up in some alternative universe? How did we get here? Why are so few people alarmed?

Of course, the short answer is 9/11. I've been arguing (around the kitchen table) since 9/12 that the attack called not for "war" but that much derided police action. I'll even surrender the point that action against the Taliban was called for. But the "war"metaphor has been a pernicious one. It has enabled this very evil government to whip up emotions that are simply not justified by the facts, i.e., that actual threat. The most pernicious result of this metaphor is that it seems to have become accepted as a basic assumption by the news media and the public at large. If the general public weren't buying into this metaphor, then all the monstrous actions that have flowed from it would have met far more resistance.

Why does the American public stand for this kind of invasion into their rights? My keystone here was a TV report on searches on the NY Subway system in which one commuter said he had no problem with it; if you were innocent, you had nothing to worry about.

This has it exactly backward. The huge assumption of power by the Bush administration is worrisome only to those who are innocent. Terrorist will know they need to be wary of law enforcement agents. It is only the innocent who will be unable to demonstrate their innocence due to the changes enacted today. Guilty until proven innocent is now the new standard of jurisprudence in America.

The same people who think that they are safe from the cold hand of government repression are those who have contempt for the pointy-headed bureaucrats. I have no explanation for their belief that government bureaucrats only interested in drawing a salary can suddenly become fonts of wisdom separating the innocent from the guilty when it comes to terrorism.

What next? Start from the premise that critics of torture are correct when they say that it is not a useful means of interrogation and that the administration knows from experience this truth. So the purpose of this vast expansion of government power was never to fight terrorism. Instead, it is a 2-fer: a club to beat the Democrats as in the 2002 campaign and a means of consolidating political power.

Whatever happens in the next election, the Bush-Cheney administration will be in power for two plus years. Anyone who thinks that it will become competent or be anything other than a vehicle for funneling tax dollars to party contributors. Which means that they will need a means to deal with anyone who attempts to confront them with reality.

The measures passed this week then will serve as a gauge of the administrations desperation. When they are used to silence--disappear?--journalists who provide "material support for terrorists" by printing the contents of National Intelligence Estimates or the frank assessments of military officers in the field, we'll finally be taking the full measure of this wicked and profoundly unAmerican regime. And of course, by then it will be too late.