Yes..the lunatics are running the institution and have been for a long time.
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council98 PowerGlenn Greenwald, New York Times bestselling author and former constitutional law and civil rights litigator, shares opinions through his political blog.
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John J Ferrariblack on Moyers- fraud of bank bailout
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Allen's article offers a helpful glimpse into the mind of the standard establishment journalist (Allen previously covered the White House for Time and The Washington Post). According to him, all Bush officials other than Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are too cowardly to criticize Barack Obama on the record -- "They have new careers, and they know it’s a fight they’ll never win. He’s popular; they’re not; they get it" -- so what is a poor reporter like him to do other than agree to anonymity? If all senior Bush officials are really such cowards -- too afraid even to criticize Obama because of his approval ratings -- that would be a worthwhile story in its own right.
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There are two sides and only two sides to every "debate" -- the Beltway Democratic establishment and the Beltway Republican establishment. If those two sides agree on X, then X is deemed true, no matter how false it actually is. If one side disputes X, then X cannot be asserted as fact, no matter how indisputably true it is. The mere fact that another country's behavior is described as X doesn't mean that this is how identical behavior by the U.S. should be described. They do everything except investigate and state what is true. In their view, that -- stating what is and is not true -- is not their role.
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it did allow a former top government official to make all sorts of factually dubious and sensationalistic claims without any accountability at all. That's why anonymity, when used so recklessly and for such shallow ends, is so poisonous.
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As Sullivan said, "Allen broke one of the most basic rules in fair journalism and should apologize, not dig in" (though the way Allen broke this rule is now so common that the rule violation is far more the norm than the rule itself).
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we forget that a core premise of our government is transparency; that the law permits secrecy only in the narrowest of cases; and that it's certainly not legal to suppress evidence of government criminality on the grounds that it is classified.
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"No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we require him to obey it. Obedience to the law is demanded as a right; not asked as a favor."
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we've gone from Paine ("so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is King") and Adams ("an empire of laws, and not of men") and Roosevelt ("No man is above the law") to Newsweek and Jon Meacham ("That is not to say presidents and vice presidents are always above the law") and David Broder (holding leaders accountable for lawbreaking is ugly, destructive, populist vengeance except when it involves a sex scandal).
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The most notable aspect of Allen's article is his explanation for why he decided to grant anonymity -- what might be the single most self-contradictory paragraph ever written (h/t linus bern):
I figured that readers could decide whether the former Bush official’s comments sounded defensive or vindictive. . . . So at the bottom of the Axelrod story, I tacked on an ellipsized excerpt of the former Bush official’s quotes, removing several ad hominem attacks on Obama. I quoted less than half of the comment and took out the most incendiary parts -- a way to hint at the opposing view without giving an anonymous source free rein.
I find that paragraph so perfect in its illogic and self-negation that I have come to cherish it in some perverse way. Allen's excuse for anonymity was that readers could decide for themselves whether the anonymous Bush criticisms "sounded defensive or vindictive." But he then confesses that he edited out "the most incendiary parts," including "several ad hominems." So, like a good servant-editor, he first helpfully sanitized the Bush official's smears by making them appear more sober and substantive than they actually were -- by removing all the parts that reflected vindictiveness towards Obama -- and then justified the anonymity he granted by saying he wanted readers to see for themselves if the criticisms of Obama's decision were grounded in vindictiveness. He evidently confessed all of that without realizing that his actions completely negate his claimed justification.
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ubin, Summers and Greenspan succeeded in inducing Congress -- funded, of course, by these same financial firms -- to enact legislation blocking the CFTC from regulating these derivative markets.
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HOLY CRAP! Sanchez is describing the fact that the CIA and US forces tortured a man to death. Hansen doesn't express shock, disgust, surprise...anything. She manages a brief interruption to ask who "Iceman" was, but that's it.
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One can certainly criticize Obama for vowing that no CIA officials will be prosecuted if they followed DOJ memos (though that vow, notably, does not extend to Bush officials), but -- assuming the reports about redactions are correct -- there is no grounds for criticizing Obama here and substantial grounds for praising him.
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But the first duty of the American media -- like the first duty of American citizens -- is to oppose oppressive behavior by our own government. That's not as fun or as easy, but it is far more important. Moreover, obsessively complaining about the rights-abridging behavior of other countries while ignoring the same behavior from our own government is worse than a mere failure of duty. It is propagandistic and deceitful, as it paints a misleading picture that it is other governments -- but not our own -- which engage in such conduct.
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y definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring.
There have been very few, if there have been any, better explanations of the role our establishment media plays than that. That is the idea that most of our "journalists" serve and revere, and from that necessarily follows the belief that "law" is something that only restricts what the lowly masses do but not "the ruling class." Thomas did everyone a great service by so clearly describing their true role.
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After all, the reason the winger crowd can’t find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. That’s why even people like [Glenn] Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over. . . .
Actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish . . . can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff.
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Ross' report about Mohammed -- like his report about Zubayduh -- was based on nothing more than his mindless recitation of what unnamed Bush administration sources whispered to him about Mohammed's interrogation treatment, and it was false from start to finish.
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That passage, more than anything else, is the mindset that has destroyed the rule of law in the U.S. and spawned massive criminality in our elite class. Accountability for crimes committed by political leaders (as opposed to ordinary Americans) is scorned as "retribution" and "laying blame for the past."
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Demanding that political leaders be subjected to the rule of law -- and finding ways to force the appointment of a Special Prosecutor -- is what citizens ought to be doing.
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Either we care about the rule of law or we don't -- and if we do, we'll find the ways to demand its application to the politically powerful criminals who broke multiple laws over the last eight years.
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Establishment journalists are integral and well-rewarded members of the same system and thus cannot and will not see it as inherently corrupt (instead, as Newsweek's Evan Thomas said, their role, as "members of the ruling class," is to "prop up the existing order," "protect traditional institutions" and "safeguard the status quo").
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There were several bombings of Al Jazeera offices by the U.S. this decade. Shouldn't the American media be much more interested in covering the attacks on press freedoms by their own government than those by other governments -- or, at the very least, as interested in the assaults on press freedoms by the U.S. Government?
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Similarly, Politico's Mike Allen -- in the same article where he granted anonymity to a cowardly "top Bush official" to do nothing other than smear Obama as a friend of Al Qaeda (and marvel at Allen's pathetic "justification" for doing that) -- proceeded to describe conduct authorized by the OLC memos this way: "aggressive interrogation practices critics decried as torture." I think I know how to speak Politicoese: the attack on Iraq was "aggressive diplomatic outreach critics decried as an invasion"; Lewis Libby's lying was "spirited and inventive story-telling critics decried as obstruction of justice"; and a super-important, extremely influential and profoundly brilliant person with intimate knowledge of many, many important things told me last night: "Politico is a trashy gossip rag with only one governing principle: What will Drudge like?" Another top, key insider added: "they should hand out Mike Allen columns to journalism school students as a guide to what they should avoid at all costs."
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Given that they were never given any trials, how could Lake possibly know that the multiple reporters we imprisoned (and, in Jassam's case, continue to imprison) were "using their press cards as cover for terror"? He, of course, has no idea. Indeed, in Jassam's case, an Iraqi court ruled there was no evidence to justify his detention; in Hussein's case, the first (and only) court to review his imprisonment ordered him released; and, as Kristof said about al-Haj: "there was never any real evidence that Sami was anything but a journalist." All Lake knows about them is that they're Muslim and that the U.S. Government claimed (with no evidence and no charges) that they were involved in "terror," and that's good enough for him to cheer on their indefinite imprisonment without charges. Amazingly, this is the person purporting to lecture Iran today about what "civilized countries" do and don't do when it comes to imprisoning journalists.
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Whether the DOJ prosecutes in a specific case should be grounded in apolitical legal considerations, not political ones. That's what "the rule of law" means.
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Politically influential people aren't entitled to immunity when they break the law on the ground that immunizing them would make the President politically stronger.
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There are few things more common than reporters mindlessly reciting what their anonymous government sources tell them to say, and no matter how many times that dynamic results in pure fiction being "reported," that slothful, propagandistic practice continues to be the staple of our modern press corps.
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Indeed, one could write volumes about the myths and falsehoods that are regularly "reported" when establishment media reporters uncritically repeat as fact what anonymous government officials tell them to say. Yet that continues to be the central method for how establishment media outlets convey information about the government. And no matter how many times they are exposed as spreaders of absolute falsehoods -- as Ross, yet again, is so exposed today -- they continue to engage in the same behavior, rendering unavoidable the conclusion that such falsehood-spreading behavior on behalf of the government is what they are eager to do.
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UPDATE: Ross' report about Mohammed breaking down and confessing everything after less than 3 minutes on the waterboard was obviously completely false. That report was based on nothing but anonymous sources who ostensibly told that to Ross. Basic journalist ethics compel a reporter to identify one's sources if those sources lie to the reporter with the intent to have the reporter disseminate falsehoods, but just as Ross did with his sources who falsely told him about the Saddam-incriminating bentonite in the anthrax, Ross will almost certainly continue to protect his sources here who fed him patent falsehoods about Mohammed's interrogation. What matters to them is that they continue to be chosen to be fed "exclusives" by anonymous government officials -- not whether the claims are true or false.
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But that's good enough for our modern journalist: after all, if a government official insists that something is false, they will refrain from stating that it is true -- no matter how true it is. That's because their only role is to pass on what each side says and leave it at that. That, of course, is the very definition of a "mindless stenographer" -- a term they bizarrely find offensive even as they apply to themselves its defining traits.
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Who cares if NPR is "seen" as siding with the White House or its critics? How it is perceived -- and who it angers -- should have nothing to do with how it reports. Its reporting should be guided by the truth, by verifiable facts, and by the objective meaning of words [notably, NPR's excuse -- "the Right will get angry at us if we call it 'torture'" -- is identical to The Washington Post's excuse for why they stopped calling Dan Froomkin a reporter (it angers the Right); it's amazing how much The Liberal Media makes editorial decisions based on a desire to please the Right].
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This Thursday will be a very significant test for how much influence the anti-accountability camp exerts within the Obama administration and for how serious Obama's pledges of transparency were, as that day is the latest deadline for the Obama DOJ either to release the three key OLC torture-authorizing memos, release them in heavily redacted form, or refuse to release them at all.
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So the President emphatically said it was torture. So did the Attorney General. But they issued "no overarching statement" on the issue? What does that even mean? What’s an "overarching statement"? More to the point, why do they need Obama to say it in order to report it? Something is either true or it isn’t -- even if Obama doesn’t issue an "overarching statement" acknowledging it. Why should the claims of political officials determine what a news organization does and does not report and how they report it?
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It's hardly a surprise that if you empower the very people most connected to the Bush CIA, there will be substantial forces blocking any attempt to bring accountability under the rule of law for the crimes that were committed.
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not only are we failing to investigate or indict those who authorized torture, but we haven't even reached the point yet where we've decided that these crimes are bad enough that those implicated ought to be barred from serving in the highest positions in our Government.
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Our political class has simply never come to terms with how severe are these war crimes and how acquiescent to and outright supportive so many officials from both parties -- and so many of our media stars -- were.
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As is virtually always the case with modern journalists, those who scream the loudest about how they must refrain from stating facts in order to maintain "neutrality" are the ones who, in reality, are the least neutral of all. They're just too dishonest to acknowledge it.
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But that's what our establishment media organizations are first and foremost: spokespeople for government claims, and they take their cues from the government. (Note, similarly, NPR's free-wheeling and quite subjective use of the descriptive term "extremist" when it suits them, even in the face of substantial dispute over its applicability).
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Thus, the only way to object to what Spain is doing here is if one: (a) suffers from total ignorance of the basic provisions of Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture; (b) believes that the U.S. has no obligation to abide by its treaties even though the U.S. Constitution provides that such treaties are "the supreme law of the land"; and/or (c) believes that the U.S. need not abide by rules we impose on other countries, such as when we prosecuted other countries' leaders for war crimes in the past. None of those is a particularly noble excuse.
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if, on Thursday, Obama does anything other than release the three OLC torture memos more or less in fully unredacted form, that will be rather compelling evidence negating Sullivan's speculation. Conversely, as I said earlier this week, if those memos are released essentially in full over the vehement objections of key intelligence officials, Obama will deserve some substantial credit for doing that.
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As sysprog suggests in comments, Sullivan's theory about Obama's secret plan -- that Obama intends simply to remain neutral when it comes to legal proceedings aimed at Bush's torture regime; that "he will not defend it, but he will not be the prosecutor either''; and that his strategy is to "allow the evidence to slowly filter out" -- is extremely difficult to reconcile with the fact that Obama has been ordering his Justice Department to take extraordinary steps to block all judicial accountability for Bush officials and to insist that Bush's interrogation and surveillance programs are such vital state secrets that any disclosure would "gravely harm national security."
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Put another way, Obama has been far from neutral. At least thus far, he has been the prime agent working overtime to keep these illegal Bush policies as secret as possible and to shield them from any and all accountability.
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It's not the nice men in the suits doing the stealing but the very people, often minorities or illegal immigrants, with no political or financial power who nonetheless somehow dominate the government and get everything for themselves.
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The poorer and weaker one is, the more one is demonized in right-wing mythology as all-powerful receipients of ill-gotten gains; conversely, the stronger and more powerful one is, the more one is depicted as an oppressed and put-upon victim (that same dynamic applies to foreign affairs as well).
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it should be emphasized -- yet again -- that it was not our Congress, nor our media, nor our courts that compelled disclosure of these memos. Instead, it was the ACLU's tenacious efforts over several years which single-handedly pried these memos from the clutched hands of the government.
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Along with a couple of other civil liberties organizations, the ACLU (with which I consult) has expended extraordinary efforts to ensure at least minimal amounts of openness and transparency in this country, something that was necessary given the profound failures of these other institutions to do so.
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I won't repeat some of the words that he used to describe just how pathetic he considers US political journalism, but it’s clear that he believes it has completely abdicated its duty to — as Froomkin describes it — call bullshit on the government.
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There are many reasons why establishment media discussions of our political conflicts are so incomplete, distorted, vapid and unsatisfying. But one significant reason is that one of the most important causes of our decayed political culture is a topic which is excluded almost completely from those discussions: namely, the central role the establishment media itself -- with its uncritical and loyal subservience to political power -- plays in enabling and protecting that decay.
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"I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up [in the run-up to the war] and say 'this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this,' that we didn't do our job. I respectfully disagree. It's not our role" -- NBC News' David Gregory, thereafter promoted to host Meet the Press.
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"Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.
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Other than redactions to protect the identity of intelligence agents and (arguably) cooperating foreign governments, the only conceivable reason to suppress information of Bush's torture regime is to hide evidence of the crimes committed by government officials. No debate should be necessary to demonstrate that that concern is not a legitimate reason for secrecy.
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There’s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive
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Put simply, restoration of the Constitution, transparency and the rule of law is impossible if the government continues to maintain a regime of secret laws and if it actively conceals evidence of criminality at the highest levels of government.
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"If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bullshit more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.
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Why was Froomkin deemed "liberal," inappropriate and biased? Because he pointed out that the Bush administration's claims were false and their policies radical -- i.e., he wrote what was factually true. But that -- writing what is factually true and pointing out false statements from those in political power -- is the number one sin in establishment journalism. As David Gregory said, that's not their role.
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In the Bush era, pointing out the lies of Bush officials was all that was necessary to be deemed a leftist. Stephen Colbert explained why: "reality has a well-known liberal bias."
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Froomkin -- unlike David Gregory -- believes that reporters should actually point out when the Government is lying. That's what he did. That's why, to The Post, he wasn't a real reporter but, rather, an "ideologue." That's the sickness of American journalism in a nutshell.
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27 Mar 09
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As The Guardian reported, the British Government was, in essence, forced into the criminal investigation once government lawyers "referred evidence of possible criminal conduct by MI5 officers to home secretary Jacqui Smith, and she passed it on to the attorney general." In a country that lives under what is called the "rule of law," credible evidence of serious criminality makes such an investigation, as The Guardian put it, "inevitable." British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has clearly tried desperately to avoid any such investigation, yet as The Washington Post reported this morning, even he was forced to say in response: "I have always made clear that when serious allegations are made they have got to be investigated."
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political leaders and media stars virtually across the board spouting lawless Orwellian phrases about being "more interested in looking forward than in looking backwards" and not wanting to "criminalize public service." These apologist manuevers continue despite the fact that, as even conservative Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum recently acknowledged in light of newly disclosed detailed ICRC Reports, "that crimes were committed is no longer in doubt."
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steve02169Glenn Greenwald, New York Times bestselling author and former constitutional law and civil rights litigator, shares opinions through his political blog.
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Monday Sept. 22, 2008 07:47 EDT
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Growing right-wing opposition to the Paulson plan
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(updated below - Update II)
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On Saturday morning, I noted -- quoting Atrios -- the almost complete lack of debate over the ever-changing dictates issued by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.
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Last week, whatever Paulson said on any given day -- no bailouts; only selected bailouts; massive $700 billion bailout plan -- immediately became the unchallenged conventional wisdom.
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That has all changed. Prominent economists, who had previously been defending Paulson for the most part, began voicing serious doubts about his plan.
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As the AP put it yesterday: "Many of the same economists and opinion-makers who'd provided a bipartisan sheen of consensus to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's previous moves have quickly begun casting doubts on the wisdom of a policy that would allow Treasury to purchase without oversight hundreds of billions of dollars of difficult-to-price assets from financial institutions."
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Not only Paul Krugman, who was a skeptic from the start, but conservative economic experts have also now expressed opposition, including former Bush and Romney advisor Greg Mankiw and -
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in an excellent column on Saturday -- Sebastian Mallaby, who described the rapid move to embrace Paulson's plan as "extremely dangerous."
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And now, some of the most rabid ideologues on the Right are voicing increasingly strident opposition as well.
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At National Review last night, Newt Gingrich wrote that "watching Washington rush to throw taxpayer money at Wall Street has been sobering and a little frightening" and said he "hopes Congress will slow down and have an open debate."
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Add Sticky NoteThereafter, NR's Yuval Levin proclaimed that nobody could read through the Paulson proposal "without concluding that everyone in Washington has lost their minds."
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In The New York Times today, Bill Kristol said he's "doubtful that the only thing standing between us and a financial panic is for Congress to sign this week, on behalf of the American taxpayer, a $700 billion check over to the Treasury," while Michelle Malkin posted a lengthy alarmist screed warning that "Hank Paulson must be contained."
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Right-wing opposition to the Paulson plan is vital for having any meaningful chance to stop it.
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Does anyone have any confidence at all in the Democrats' willingness and/or ability to impede this bailout train if the Bush administration and the Right were vigorously behind it,
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warning the nation of impending doom unless we submit to vast, unchecked government power of the type Henry Paulson is demanding?
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The instances of complete Democratic acquiescence under those circumstances -- including when they "controlled" the Congress -- are far too numerous to allow any rational person to think Democrats, standing alone, would stop the Paulson plan. As sad as it is, meaningful right-wing opposition is critical for that to happen.
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More interesting are the reasons why these right-wing polemicists have decided they have real doubts about the wisdom of the Paulson plan.
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In opposing the plan, each of them cited -- with alarm -- the provision which vests full, unfettered and unreviewable discretion in the Treasury Secretary to determine how the $700,000,000,000 is allocated:
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Levin (plan gives "essentially unlimited power to use $700 billion to make purchases the scope of which is defined very loosely and vaguely");
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Gingrich ("We are being reassured that we can trust Secretary Paulson 'because he knows what he is doing'. Congress had better ask a lot of questions before it shifts this much burden to the taxpayer and shifts this much power to a Washington bureaucracy");
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Kristol ("There are no provisions for — or even promises of — disclosure, accountability or transparency");
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Malkin (Washington is demanding we "fork over $700 billion to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and allow him to dole it out to whomever he chooses in whatever amount he chooses -- without public input or recourse").
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Apparently, the same political faction that has cheered on every instance of unchecked, absolute executive power over the last eight years -- which demanded that the President, and he alone, decide which citizens, including Americans, can be spied on, detained, even tortured, and that no oversight or disclosure was needed for any of that -- has suddenly re-discovered their desire for checks on federal government power.
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Add Sticky NoteThe reason? They say it themselves: with the looming prospect of an Obama presidency, they may no longer be in charge of that Government and these "small government conservatives" have thus suddenly re-awoken to the virtues of checks and balances, oversight and other restraints.
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True
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In explaining his opposition to the Paulson plan, Levin warns:
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Even if Hank Paulson were the all knowing god of economics, would it make sense to give this kind of power to the treasury secretary for the next two years just forty days before an election? Shall we go through our mental list of who an Obama administration (or a McCain administration for that matter) is likely to put in that post?
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Gingrich writes:
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Imagine that the political balance of power in Washington were different.
If this were a Democratic administration the Republicans in the House and Senate would be demanding answers and would be organizing for a "no" vote . . . . But because this gigantic power shift to Washington and this avalanche of taxpayer money is being proposed by a Republican administration, the normal conservative voices have been silent or confused.
It's time to end the silence and clear up the confusion.
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Malkin is actually worried about vesting such power in Paulson himself -- she thinks he's basically a tool of the Communist Chinese, a follower of "Gore-esque" eco-zealotry, and worst of all, someone with ties to some Democrats --
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but the point is the same: people have long predicted that the Right will do a complete reversal (once again) in their positions on vast federal power and unlimited executive authority the minute that such power is vested in someone they oppose and fear rather than in themselves.
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The remarkable spectacle of watching these right-wing authoritarians suddenly demand Congressional oversight and voice opposition to unlimited executive power -- two months before a highly possible Obama victory -- is quite obviously reflective of that shift.
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Rather hilariously, this was the very first comment from a Malkin reader after she sounded the alarm about the provision in the Paulson plan providing that his decisions are "non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency":
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Add Sticky NoteSo something that is unconstitutional cannot be reviewed by a Federal court? I guess, not even the Supreme Court. Well, if it is accepted, a precedent has been set, which will allow other proposals/bills to go through, regardless of legality, being "non-reviewable" by Federal court. A government running amok . . . with people cheering.
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Where have you been, lady, for the past 8 years?!
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This person obviously has no idea that such provisions are hardly "unprecedented," but have been appearing in several of the most controversial bills of the last eight years (as but one example, The Military Commissions Act, a right-wing favorite, essentially purported to bar courts from reviewing the President's decisions about who to detain and further barred judicial review of the Congressional scheme, and similar "court-stripping provisions" have long been a right-wing favorite in all sorts of contexts).
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And more generally, this is how our Government has worked: the President demands unlimited power and Congress gives it to him.
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Add Sticky NoteIt's only because visions of a Muslim, terrorist-sympathizing, socialist President Obama are haunting them in their feverish nightmares is the Right suddenly deeply fearful once again of vesting vast power in the Federal Government and the Executive.
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Exactly
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But no matter. The blatant hypocrisy here, while extreme, craven and obvious, is also healthy.
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Hypocrisy of this sort is actually a vital part of how checks and balances are supposed to work. It is expected that political factions, when in charge of the government, will seek to obtain greater power for themselves, and the check against that is that the "opposition party" will battle and resist -- not necessarily out of ideology or principle but due to raw power considerations and self-interest.
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That is what has been so tragically missing from our political process for the last eight years: while the GOP sought greater and greater government power, Democrats acquiesced almost completely when they weren't complicitly enabling it.
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While the Executive was off the charts in terms of the power it seized, the Congress was off the charts in its passivity and eagerness to relinquish its Constitutionally assigned powers to the Bush White House.
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That's what has caused the extreme imbalance, with a bloated Republican Party and virtually unlimited presidential power: the failure of Democrats and the Congress to serve as a check on any of that.
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As their newfound contempt for unlimited power makes conclusively clear, the executive-power-worshipping Republicans of the last eight years -- if there is an Obama presidency -- will quickly re-discover their limited government power "principles" and won't be nearly as accommodating.
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UPDATE: I should add that Congressional Democrats, while largely on board with the fundamentals of the bailout plan, have been making noises about demanding some limits and oversight on how this fund is managed, and the political climate is certainly part of what is motivating the Right to voice these doubts, as illustrated by the bizarre and deeply cynical spectacle of the GOP presidential nominee -- of all people -- joining with the Democrats to demand limits on CEO compensation.
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The point, though, is that Democrats typically make noises of this type and then capitulate at the end if they stand alone.
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This Paulson bill can be stopped only with widespread opposition that cuts across the standard ideological/partisan lines, and it shouldn't be that hard to argue why handing over $700 billion to the very people who caused this disaster, while allowing them to walk away soaked with profits, is not a good idea,
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and that vesting unlimited power in the Bush administration to manage that is a particularly bad idea. If Democrats can't win that argument, what argument can they win?
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UPDATE II: A Rasmussen Reports poll released today found that "most Americans are closely following news reports on the Bush Administration's federal bailout plan for the country’s troubled economy, but just 28% support what has been proposed so far."
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As El Zongo notes in comments, this bailout -- like the FISA gutting and telecom amnesty which preceded it -- has no real constituency beyond the Washington establishment.
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Thirty-seven percent oppose it and 35% are unsure.
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That the public is so opposed and/or primed to oppose it more doesn't mean this won't pass -- we don't exactly have a substantial connection between what Washington does and public opinion -- but it does provide an important foundation for derailing this if political leaders decide they should or must.
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-- Glenn Greenwald
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01 Sep 08
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04 Aug 08
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Duley herself has a history that, at the very least, raises questions about her credibility. She has a rather lengthy involvement with the courts in Frederick, including two very recent convictions for driving under the influence -- one from 2007 and one from 2006 -- as well as a complaint filed against her for battery by her ex-husband. Here is Duley's record from the Maryland Judicial data base:
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Just three months ago, Duley pled guilty and was sentenced to probation (with a suspended fine of $500), as a result of having been stopped in December, while driving at 1:35 a.m., and charged with driving under the influence:
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On April 21, 2006, Duley was also charged with "driving a vehicle while impaired by alcohol," driving "while impaired by drugs or alcohol," and reckless driving, and on October 13, 2006, she pled guilty to the charge of reckless driving and was fined $580. Back in 1992, Duley was criminally charged with battery against what appeared to be her now-ex-husband (and she filed a complaint against him as well). Later that same year, she was criminally charged with possession of drug paraphenalia with intent to use, charges which appear to have been ultimately dismissed.
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rior to the restraining order against Ivins which Duley obtained two weeks ago, Ivins had no criminal record at all, at least not in Frederick. A story in today's Frederick News-Post quotes Duley's fiancee as claiming: "She had to quit her job and is now unable to work, and we have spent our savings on attorneys." But she doesn't appear to have used an attorney for her complaint against Ivins. If anything, her savings were likely depleted from attorneys' fees, court costs, and fines and probation for her various criminal proceedings (Larisa Alexandrovna has more details on Duley).
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That's because The Post's role here has been and continues to be what the establishment media's role generally is -- to serve government sources and amplify their claims, not to investigate their veracity. That's how it was Saddam Hussein who was the original anthrax culprit, followed by Steven Hatfill, and now Bruce Ivins. It's how Jessica Lynch heroically fought off Iraqi goons in a firefight, how Pat Tillman stood down Al Qaeda monsters until they murdered him, how Iraq possessed mountains of WMDs, and now, how Russia has assaulted the consensus values of the Western World by invading a sovereign country and occupying parts of it for a whole week, etc. etc. All of those narratives came from the Government directly into the pages of The Washington Post, which then uncritically conveyed them, often (as in the case of the Jessica Lynch lies and WMD claims) playing a leading role in doing so.
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Similarly, here is an Associated Press article from last week, by AP's Matt Apuzzo, purporting to report on what it admits are many "meticulously researched" questions that have been raised (including by me) about the FBI's case, yet repeatedly demonizes such skepticism with these phrases, laced throughout the article: "the ingredients for a good conspiracy theory"; "skeptics and conspiracy theorists"; "armchair investigators, bloggers and scientists"; "one of the great conspiracy theories, like whether we landed on the moon or whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone"; "anti-Jewish writers blame the attack on a Zionist plot"; "You can't prove aliens didn't mail the letters."
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As always, in Establishment Media World, nothing is more insane or radical than refusing to believe every word the Government says. Even after Iraqi mushroom clouds and the whole litany of Government falsehoods, the establishment hallmark of Seriousness and Sanity is accepting the Government's word. When it says Iraq was behind the attacks, then it was. When they said Hatfill was the culprit, he was. Now that they say that Ivins is, he is, and only "conspiracy theorists" -- comparable to those who disbelieve we landed on the moon -- would question that or demand to see the actual evidence. The FBI is relying, understandably so, on their mindless allies in the media to depict its case against Ivins as so airtight that no real investigation is necessary.
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Leahy: What I want to know -- I have a theory. But what I want to know is why me, why Tom Daschle, why Tom Brokaw?
[Vermont Daily Briefing, 9/5/2007];VDB: Right. That all fits into the profile of a kind of hard-core and obviously insane ideologue on the far Right, somebody who would fixate on especially Tom Daschle, who at that point was the target of daily, vitriolic attacks on Right-wing talk radio.
Leahy: [Slowly, with a little shake of the head] I don't think it’s somebody insane. I'd accept everything else you said. But I don’t think it's somebody insane. And I think there are people within our government -- certainly from the source of it -- who know where it came from. [Taps the table to let that settle in] And these people may not have had anything to do with it, but they certainly know where it came from.
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The anthrax attacks were the first lethal biological attack on the United States. The attacker(s) sought falsely to link the anthrax to Muslim extremists, as did numerous "sources" who fed the media with such claims.
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15 Jul 08
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21 Mar 07
Tom DawkinsJust about the best blog on US politics going around, incredibly well-written
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26 Feb 07
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On what conceivable basis is Joe Lieberman accorded even the most minimal respect or credibility? He is obviously a person who will say anything at any time in order to defend this war, and, now that everything he said in the past is revealed to be completely false, he does not have even an iota of integrity or honesty to admit any of that. Instead, he stands up and pretends that he never said any of those things -- he actually pretends that he knew all along that our military strategy was wrong -- and simply makes the same promises and commitments as he has been making all along with a sense of entitlement that he has credibility on these matters and should be listened to.
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What happens is -- you don't filibuster it and let it get enacted because you don't want it to be used against you, but it ends up being used against you anyway, so by not making the case for it, by not taking a principled stand -- while 34 Democrats did vote against it, most of them did not even announce their vote until the day before the vote was held because they had been hiding behind John McCain and John Warner and Lindsey Graham -- so the debate was never engaged by Democrats.
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Is this conventional wisdom among Democratic politicians that this is a smart way to proceed because that is what consultants are telling them -- why is this so embedded culturally? Look at what the Republicans are doing. They are filibustering everything, they are not afraid of being labelled "obstructionist." Why are they so much more aggressive in the tactics they are willing to use?
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And that is what is so frustrating -- to see this same mindset over and over and over again -- where Democrats say they have to capitulate or else it will be used against them, and then it's used against them anyway, but it's even more effective because Democrats haven't fought or made the case for their position.
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There are so many lazy and fact-free assertions in these two paragraphs -- which shape the entire article and which, in some sense, are also shaping the overall Iraq debate -- that it is hard to know where to begin.
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even when facts make inescapably clear that their premises are false (the premise that Democrats are politically endangered by their "antiwar left" was the basis for an entire Fox show hosted by Wall St. Journal ideologues last week, and that theme then arrives unscathed in the pages of The New York Times this morning).
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a 53% majority of Americans believe the U.S. should bring its troops home as soon as possible
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"Among Democrats, roughly two-thirds (68%) want Congress to stop funding in an effort to block the troop buildup" and "more Democrats also support a troop withdrawal than did so in January (74% now, 66% then)." So apparently, 3 out of 4 Democrats -- along with a majority of independents -- are now part of the "antiwar left."
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The national media continues to depict demands for an end to this war as the by-product of the fringe "antiwar left," and perpetuates the banal myth that Democrats face political peril because they have to satisfy this fringe element of their party. In fact, the true fringe group is the group of hard-core war supporters who support the President's desire that the war continue indefinitely. Did Stolberg and Broder happen to notice the results of the 2006 midterm election?
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the best strategic option for ending the war
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namely, finding the most effective legislative weapon for compelling an end to the war, because that is what not only the overwhelming bulk of Democrats want, but also a clear majority of Americans.
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To enable their lazy and fictitious storyline -- "Democrats are in trouble due to shrill demands from their radical leftist fringe" -- Stolberg and Broder invent a complete fiction: namely, that the dreaded "antiwar left" is "pushing for conditions on war financing," and such measures "will alienat[e] moderate Democrats and Republicans." But to the extent there is such a thing as the "antiwar left," it is not in any way attached to the specific tactic of imposing conditions on war funding.
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war opponents favor whatever Congressional measures will work to compel an end to the war -- whether that be a recission of the AUMF or a modification of it or anything else. And that is what a majority of Americans want, according to virtually every poll. Who are the people on the "antiwar left" demanding a funding cut-off as opposed to other binding measures to end the war? They don't exist -- at least not in any substantial degree, if at all -- so Stolberg and Broder just made them up and then depicted these unnamed, imaginary de-funding absolutists as representative of the "antiwar left" which, in turn, became the basis for their whole "antiwar left" article.
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to depict war opponents, rather than war supporters, as a small and radical fringe whose unreasonable demands are -- just as happened in 1972 -- endangering the Democrats.
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There is not a word about the danger to Republicans of continuing to tie themselves to one of the most unpopular wars in our nation's history.
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At a September 2006 gathering of right-wing pundits, Bush waxed endlessly about his belief that the U.S. is currently in the midst of a Third Religious Awakening and that the wars over which he presides are a central part of that Awakening. At least in large part, Bush sees the "battles" he is waging in epic theological and religious terms, and as a result, political constraints and pragmatic limits are irrelevant to his actions. It is such an uncomfortable reality -- that religious fervor drives our wars and other foreign policy -- that it has been ignored almost completely over the last five years, even though ample evidence exists proving that it is true, beginning with his own continuous statements.
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The danger in cynically dismissing religious fervor as a motivating force for Bush -- the insistence that Bush's religious beliefs are contrived and nothing more than a political tool -- is that it conceals the true threat posed by having a President who is not merely religious (there is nothing uncommon or dangerous about that), but who draws no distinction between his political decisions and his religious obligations.
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What makes this all the more appalling is that it was so easily avoidable.
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"It's more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn't exist."
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Bush told us back in January 2002 that he believes Iran is Evil, and just as was true for his identical statement about Iraq, he meant it. The religious views of our political leaders matter and ought to be open much more to examination and questioning. That is particularly true when they continuously tell us, even if we don't want to believe it, that their beliefs and decisions are grounded in theology and religion and moral absolutism, not politics or pragmatism.
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"the word of an American president is good enough for me."
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it was but one of numerous covert spying programs aimed at Americans.
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This is something Establishment Washington and the media simply refuses to digest.
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Instead, these Wise Elite Opinion-makers continue to believe -- long after any rational person could -- that Bush is susceptible to Washington Wise Man persuasion, or to political pressure, or to the constraints of resources. That simply is not how Bush works. He believes he is supported by a much higher authority and as long as he acts in accordance with that, nothing can or should stop him.
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I should have been more skeptical about it.
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While the premise of this behavior is that Democrats must avoid appearing "soft" and "weak," one article after the next describes their behavior as "surrendering," "capitulating," "bowing to pressure," "caving in" and "suffering defeat" -- all at the hands of a weakened, isolated and pervasively despised lame duck President whose political party is in shambles. The worst thing one can be in American politics and American culture generally is a loser, and Democrats perpetually turn themselves into losers and convince themselves when doing so that they are appearing "strong" and "tough."
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what do you think would be a cause for any optimism about what the Democrats are doing in Congress with the majority that they were given in 2006?
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Democrats could have stuck to their guns and insisted on their version. Instead, nervous about being blamed for any terrorist attack and eager to get out of town, they accepted the unacceptable. Most Democrats opposed the measure, but enough (16 in the Senate, 41 in the House) went with Republicans to allow it to pass, and the leadership enabled that result.
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In the process, they gutted the few existing restrictions on the government's power to spy on us. They revitalized the GOP base which is revelling in their Victory and dispirited and infuriated their own base. They revealed themselves, yet again, as weak and principle-free as they are politically inept.
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Yet here they are, after refusing to legalize warrantless eavesdropping prior to their midterm victory, allowing this legislation to pass now that they are in the majority. It is as politically self-destructive as it is unconscionable on the merits.
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if Democrats can't stand up to the President even on what ought to be the strongest possible ground, it really does prompt the question - what will they ever stand up over and assert any kind of resistance against the administration?
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"I made errors in judgment. There are things that I should have done differently." What are those things?
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There are people who are running for office and winning from all sorts of different places whose views are substantially different. Yet they are running as Democrats. So you've got that problem.
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Everything we do in the Middle East has religious and theological overtones.
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As I said yesterday, there were some positive aspects to Obama's speech. His resolve to close Guantanamo in the face of all the fear-mongering, like his release of the OLC memos, is commendable. But the fact that a Democratic President who ran on a platform of restoring America's standing and returning to our core principles is now advocating the creation of a new system of indefinite preventive detention -- something that is now sure to become a standard view of Democratic politicians and hordes of Obama supporters -- is by far the most consequential event yet in the formation of Obama's civil liberties policies.
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19 Feb 07
Public Stiky Notes
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