PMC Commentary

More dishonesty

The progress being made in training Iraqi troops to defend their own nation is about to achieve warp-drive. It’ll be nothing short of miraculous how suddenly these troops are declared by the Bush administration ready for counterinsurgency combat, even though there has been virtually no progress made along these lines in the last two and a half years.

What will account for this remarkable turnaround?

The seedy, dishonest politics of George W. Bush, who’s about to slither out of Iraq the same way he slithered in: without a dram of honesty.

As the New York Times reported Monday: “In public, President Bush has firmly dismissed the mounting calls to set a deadline to begin a withdrawal from Iraq…. ‘When our commanders on the ground tell me that Iraqi forces can defend their freedom, our troops will come home with the honor they have earned.’

“But in private conversations, American officials are beginning to acknowledge that a judgment about when withdrawals can begin is driven by two political calendars – one in Iraq and one here…. Mr. Bush is under new pressure to begin showing that troop reductions are under way before the midterm Congressional elections next year.”

In brief, Americans will soon be waving bye-bye to ill-trained, ill-equipped Iraqi troops, but only after the former have lost tens of thousands of their own to death and mutilation in the most dishonest and destined-to-fail foreign venture this nation has ever engaged. It all will have been for naught, although “Mission Accomplished II” – otherwise known as “Cut and run” – will be sold as smarmily as “Stay the course.”

Dishonesty has been the venture’s hallmark. It accounts for how we got there, how we prosecuted the war and now, how we’re about to leave.

Asked in a recent Imus interview if he believed the Bush administration lied its way into the war, the New York Times’ Frank Rich said he believed it was more a case of the White House fervently wanting to believe, for ideological reasons, the selective evidence it passed to Congress. That fervent want led to the selectivity. Team Bush didn’t “fabricate” a casus belli so much as it fell victim to ideological arrogance.

I rarely differ with Mr. Rich, but in this instance, it seemed to me, he was too generous.

When the administration failed to come clean about what German intelligence reported about the WMD-fabricating “Curveball”; when the administration failed to disclose that its own Defense Intelligence Agency had labeled as unreliable another Iraqi defector’s claims about Iraq-al Qaeda ties; and when the administration failed to reveal to Congress the immediate, post-9/11 Presidential Daily Brief in which U.S. intelligence declared no Saddam-9/11 hijackers link, then everything else it presented or implied to Congress was framed within a calculated, premeditated, sin-of-omission “fabrication.”

In fact, Mr. Rich seemed to momentarily differ with himself on the air, given that two days earlier he had written of the administration’s prewar “web of half-truths and falsehoods,” adding that our “leaders who dissembled then are still doing so.”

It’s true there’s no credible evidence that the White House stayed up nights forging documents and counterfeiting intelligence reports to support a war; hence in the strictest sense of the word there was no fabrication. But the evidentiary standard for sending men and women into battle is much, much higher. The administration knew that the paper it was passing to Congress was suspect. Plainly, it selected doomsday evidence largely for the purpose of deception – and that, without a doubt, without splitting semantic hairs, without deciphering what the meaning of “is”, is, constituted an act of fabrication in itself.

By the time American troops wave their final goodbye to those hapless Iraqis about to be devoured by a Middle East vacuum of needless civil war fathered by a criminal fabrication, another thousand or more will have died. And with all due respect to the families and loved ones of the past-and-future fallen, they will have died for a lie.

Tortured logic

Like you, and like nearly everyone, I’m mystified by the School of Rationalized Torture embedded in our “war on terror,” especially since torture has been discredited as an effective technique by virtually all interrogation professionals. And that makes me even more mystified by its unwavering proponents.

Tucker Carlson, the boyish host of MSNBC’s “The Situation,” is perhaps the bluntest and most visible (as visible, that is, as ratings-underachiever MSNBC can manage) advocate of this tortured school of thought. You know Tucker. By all appearances he prides himself on thinking that his political thinking is loaded with tough, practical thinking – the hallmark of rationalized torture’s defense – and that his tough, practical thinking penetrates wimpish liberal thinking.

Carlson backhandedly praised torture to yet another of his incredulous guests the other night, saying he didn’t understand why torture has such high negatives. If it works (ignoring, once again, that it doesn’t), what’s the problem? he asked.

That’s pretty much Carlson’s thinking on everything. Nuances, schmuances. It’s all black and white. Forget that torture violates U.S. law, offends the Geneva Convention, ensures reciprocal treatment of our own fighting forces and upends every code of ethical behavior in the Big Book of American Values. If it works and it’s in our national interest – whatever “it” is – we should feel free to do it, is the manly Carlson code.

There’s nothing wrong with whatever works – just as, one gathers from Carlson’s argument, there was nothing wrong with Japan’s practical expression of national interest in sneak-attacking Pearl Harbor.

There’s also a logical but laughable extension of Carlson’s thinking, a corollary that nevertheless avoids the rhetorical laughableness of reductio ad absurdum simply because it’s so close to Carlson’s original argument.

Suppose you’re driving to work one morning, fretting about how you’re going to pay the rent next month. You’ve known for some time it would be an impossible financial hurdle. You’ve tried every which way to come up with the cash and each has failed you.

Then – wait, what’s this? – “it” dawns on you. Why not employ the Carlson school of rationalized anarchy? All that’s important is that whatever you try, works. Be practical. Legalities and ethics are mere niceties compared to that, and only a liberal weenie would worry about such things. And you’re a real, practical mensch, just like Tucker.

So on your way home that night, you stop off at the neighborhood convenience store and stick it up. Well done. You now have a few hundred in cash: in short, the rent. No need to torture yourself about your crime being a crime. Whatever works, remember?

The analogy is simplistic, but so is the thinking of the Tucker Carlsons of this world.

See Dick snarl

I recall having once watched on television a golf tournament in which the physically powerful, but powerfully undisciplined, John Daly was playing. He had just sent another little ball screaming past its intended target when the announcer asked Jack Nicklaus, who was doing the color commentary, his opinion of Daly’s skill. Said Nicklaus out of annoyance, not humor: “Somebody should hide the one iron from that man. He doesn’t understand control.”

Seasoned political pros are now thinking the same about Dick Cheney and microphones. Permit a hot mic in the Vice-Smirk’s grip and he embarrasses himself every time as he careens about the Beltway, aggressively subtracting from the sum of human decency. And, incomprehensibly, but perhaps out of some compulsive death wish, the White House keeps handing him a microphone. It shows how unglued Bush-Rove’s once-astute political operation has become.

At a time when p.r. finesse, domestic diplomacy and at least a smidgeon of self-accountability are the only emergency tools capable of bailing out the sinking White House, Cheney’s brawling instincts only exacerbate the turmoil. Except for stimulating the caveman emotions and unthinking loyalties of the Bush administration’s basest base, there seems to be no reasoning or intelligent purpose whatsoever behind this strangest of political strategies.

Cheney’s latest embarrassment was Monday’s What, mea culpa? speech before the neocon-infested American Enterprise Institute. Playing the roles of both two-deferments good cop and three-more-deferments bad cop, he opened by opining that it’s not “wrong to criticize the war on terror or any aspect thereof.” (War on terror? Didn’t we recently retire that one so we could launch the war on Islamic radicalism?)

He expanded on the good-cop stuff by saying that “disagreements, arguments and debate are the essence of democracy, and none of us should want it any other way.” But there are exceptions to every rule, and in this case Cheney’s exception to essential democratic debate is anyone so “dishonest and reprehensible,” as he characterized the unnamed anyone, as to suggest that the Bush administration had manipulated prewar intelligence to make possible the postwar mess.

If it weren’t for the growing mountain of black-and-white, hardcopy evidence – hardly just speculation – of the administration’s manipulative prewar course, I suppose partisan declarations of skullduggery would indeed be dishonest and politically reprehensible. But evidence is evidence, facts are now indisputable facts, and barn-burning speeches by administration ghouls can’t change them.

What’s politically puzzling, however, is that the more Cheney dismisses the accumulating evidence as only twisted partisan opinion, the more sinisterly naked becomes his counterattack, which, in turn, only publicly confirms the administration’s eagerness to manipulate reality, which, of course, is precisely what the administration is denying in the first place.

If there’s a professor of logic out there who would care to explain to me the hidden sequitur in this non-compos-mentis non sequitur, I and millions of others would welcome the illumination.

Still, the good news is that Cheney’s suicidal shadowboxing is the surest sign yet of an administration in full-blown meltdown. It could not survive if it told the truth; and that, paradoxically, is the only thing that could possibly save it.

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Resignation isn’t that unthinkable

There arises the question of how much more we, as a nation, can take.

First, the balance of George W. Bush’s second term appears politically untenable. Given the president’s incredibly shrinking public approval, moderate congressional Republicans have abandoned W.’s ship of state, and even their extremist brothers – right-wing asylum grads like J.D. Hayworth and Rick Santorum – only want to see Air Force One flying over, not landing in, their states. It is no stretch to suggest that George has become a president without a country.

And then there’s the United States Senate -- a governing body in procedural shambles, a home to rabid mistrust, a basket case in which once-routine constitutional duties as basic as appointment confirmations now loom as threats capable of disabling the institution permanently. Things have gotten so bad, however, permanent disability is actually preferable to the likes of a Bill Frist and all the little Senate-Frists moving their antisocial agendas forward.

Now the House has become as laughably dysfunctional as both its sister institution and the White House. With its erstwhile majority leader under criminal indictment and out of the game, the substituted leadership mob has managed, in record time, to lay waste to its once-disciplined machine.

Yet as with the Senate, its dysfunctionality is preferable to efficient depravity. Friday’s spectacle over the mutilated Murtha resolution – what Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi labeled as a hallmark of “new lows, even for them” – was simply a caricature in motion of the unscrupulousness that House Republicans have come to represent.

Most of all, what propels the politically untenable is that the American people have passed the point of merely disapproving of their government. They now downright distrust, even despise, that government. With the predictable exception of the roughly one-out-of-five Americans who would support corrupt, right-wing pols no matter how sick the debauchery gets, the nation is unified in opposition to its ruling powers.

The point of surveying our hopelessly dysfunctional government has been, of course, to make the additional point that such a government is unsustainable. It is inconceivable now to envision the White House, arm in arm with the equally discredited Congress, proceeding to operate for three more years with the level of legitimacy necessary in any nation shy of banana-republic status. Democratic governments rule only with the consent of the governed, and we have reached the point – or at the very least, we have reached its precipice – at which that legitimacy is virtually nonattendant.

Something has got to give. The only questions are who and what, how, and how much. And by now one conceivable scenario – and don’t laugh; no one ever thought Tricky Dick would do this, ever – is the resignation of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

In the comings months it will become increasingly undeniable to the public and mainstream media that Bush-Cheney’s actions in ginning up the Iraq war were nakedly impeachable. Consequently the White House will have even less of a base – even in Congress, whose members will be running faster and farther away from the administration as the midterm election nears.

The president and vice president could well be subject to a hostile Democratic majority in 2007, which, propelled by an angry, vengeful public, could feel obligated to initiate impeachment proceedings. Hence Mr. Bush could decide that the better part of valor might be to issue a round of pardons – the first one for himself – leave the White House keys under the mat and get the hell out of Dodge before the impeachable crap hits the congressional fan.

Sure, it sounds improbable. But this has been a supremely improbable administration.

Senate to the rescue?

Before last week, one would have been hard-pressed to think of any institutional group of bunglers that could mismanage the Iraq war more than the bungling Bush administration. But then the United States Senate nominated itself for the job. Its recent but long-neglected act of oversight served only as a reminder of just how irresponsible that once-revered, deliberative body has become.

Naturally there’s a good deal of hyperbole implanted in the hypothesis that anyone could do a worse job of war management than the Bush administration. Worse, in what way? What standard of mismanagement has the administration not already excelled at beyond all possible supersedure? At best, between the White House and Capitol Hill it’s a dead heat as to who could do a better job at doing the worst possible job.

Team Bush 1) got us there on a lie; 2) immediately botched the immediately ensuing occupation; 3) has us bogged down in meaningless firefights; and 4) has no exit strategy, believable or otherwise, whatsoever. Now the Senate – which rubber-stamped number one, let slide number two, countenanced for more than a year number three, and is as befuddled as the administration on number four – steps in and declares itself a concerned player.

The Senate’s amendment to the defense authorization bill that hit the headlines was, as everyone knows, nothing more than a political overture. It permits the administration to stumble ahead, stay the course, and file with Congress more fabrications as to the war’s progress – while saving not one American life except the political ones of not a few senators.

The final, watered-down GOP “admonishment” of the White House lacked only the official sponsor of Senator Caspar Milquetoast from the great state of Irresolution. The doddering John Warner and finagling Bill Frist substituted for Caspar, removing what the Washington Post characterized as Democrats’ “odious language, the requirement for the administration to establish an estimated timetable for withdrawal.” Oh heavens. How odious an “estimate” – meaning a date plucked from thin air – must have seemed to these lawmakers of vision and courage.

Yet even the failed, Democratic amendment alternative – “that 2006 should be a year of ‘significant transition’ to Iraqi sovereignty … [operating under] … an estimated timetable for the eventual redeployment of U.S. forces” – would have accomplished nothing. It was words on paper, spouted by many of the spineless Democrats who first supported the war for political reasons and now oppose it for political reasons.

Furthermore, when it’s a Republican who begins to sound more in touch with his inner enlightenment than any Democratic “progressive,” you know the end is near. The Republican I write of is, of course, Chuck Hagel, who recently eviscerated the Bush administration for implying that war critics are traitors. We “must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them,” said the debuting presidential contender, adding that “to question your government is not unpatriotic -- to not question your government is unpatriotic.”

It is a sad commentary on the human condition that each generation must relearn that fundamental lesson. The sadder commentary is that no war-supporting Democrat or Republican in the United States Senate ever had to relearn it. Each knew better all along, but bowed instead to the baser instincts of an emotional electorate rallying around a swaggering president with no one’s interests at heart but his own.

“After months of lies….”

Because nailing Saddam Hussein was uppermost on Republicans’ agenda under the Bush administration, I thought it would be interesting to go back and read their reaction to Bill Clinton’s 1998 missile-slamming of the tyrant. It was that year, in December, when “U.S. and British forces were targeting sites the Iraqi president had denied to U.N. weapons inspectors, including suspected sites associated with weapons of mass destruction, sites that provided security for such centers, Iraqi security forces, airfields, air defense sites, and military communications and intelligence headquarters.”

Some pretty nasty stuff, right? WMD, WMD-security centers and the like. Yet for the GOP of just yesterday, domestic politics trumped this hair-raising foreign threat. Saddam could wait.

You see, the 1998 air strikes occurred on the day before the House was to open debate on Slick Willie’s impeachment, and even though the Iraqi dictator had long been advertised as a major boogeyman to the U.S., the record reveals that many Congressional Republicans preferred to let Saddam slide until Clinton – not the threatening boogeyman – got nailed.

Here’s a sampling from contemporaneous news accounts:

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., took the rare step in a military crisis of denouncing the administration minutes before the first bursts of fire lit the sky in Baghdad. “While I have been assured by administration officials that there is no connection with the impeachment process in the House of Representatives, I cannot support this military action in the Persian Gulf at this time,” he said.

Rep. Gerald Solomon of New York said in a blistering statement: “Never underestimate a desperate president. This time he means business. What option is left for getting impeachment off the front page and maybe even postponed?” [Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 17, 1998]

Many Republicans were unable to contain their anger, voicing suspicions that the attack was politically timed to distract the nation from the president’s domestic woes.

“He’s a liar, and he can’t be trusted,” shouted Rep. Dana Rohrbacher, R-Calif. as he walked into the meeting.

“The suspicions some people have about the president’s motives in this attack is a powerful argument for impeachment,” said House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Irving. “After months of lies the president has given millions of people around the world reason to doubt that he has sent Americans into battle for the right reason.”

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Ennis, said that “today’s events have reinforced the need for President Clinton to resign or be removed from office.” [Houston Chronicle, December 17, 1998]

And here’s further evidence – as if it’s needed – of politics ueber alles in the Republican playbook. Despite having been initially, and adamantly, opposed to Clinton’s military actions …

Trent Lott [soon] backed off his criticism of the bombing, saying he now supports the action.

Why the sudden flip, I hear you cry? Well, …

Pollsters found the American public strongly supports the Iraq attacks despite GOP criticism about the timing. [New York Daily News, December 18, 1998]

So with political pandering nicely tidied up,

House leaders cleared the way … for President Clinton’s impeachment, scheduling the historic debate for today despite scathing dissent from Democrats about deciding Clinton’s fate during the US attack on Iraq.

And as those impeachment proceedings got under way against Clinton for his adulterous affair, it was reported that …

House speaker-designate, Robert L. Livingston, told the 228-member Republican caucus last night that he has engaged in adulterous affairs during his 33-year marriage. [Boston Globe, December 18, 1998]

The Grand Old Party. Integrity. Always integrity.

It takes a pillage

The old saying goes that it would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Yet the Bush administration often has a way of making them compatible. Every day we expect, even welcome in some twisted way, more tidings of pratfall incompetence and skullduggerish corruption.

Like Nixon’s resignation, it’ll almost be a letdown when this crowd leaves office, because one doubts this level of truly entertaining maladministration will reappear in our lifetime.

And then there are moments when it’s not funny at all.

The latest of these was Condoleezza Rice’s trip – see “stunt” – to Iraq. To evade shoulder-fired missiles she flew in unannounced to declare that the city of Mosul – “this violent, Sunni-dominated city,” as the New York Times described it in the present tense – “had recently become a success story for the strategy of using Iraqi forces to quell the insurgency.”

It must be a very recent success story. And even if that were true, the momentary truth would merely be the latest in the bloody game of Whackamole we’ve been playing there since botching the occupation that, you’ll recall from Cheney & Co.’s prewar statements, was sure to go so warmly, profitably and peacefully.

“Ms. Rice said she wanted to show that the American approach of ‘clear, hold and build’ was working.” Yes, enough firepower can make anything work for a while, at least until we have to redeploy to extinguish a fire elsewhere, at which point Mosul will ignite once again, at which point we’ll return, then clear and hold again, then move to another fire, clear there, then return to Mosul’s re-reignited fire….

Given her boss’s tumbling approval rating, the true aim of Rice’s visit was, of course, domestic politics. She wanted to counteract “criticism at home that the Bush administration lacked a plan for success in Iraq.” Less a criticism, actually, than an observation. But at any rate here’s the specific plan today: Permanent Whackamole. And “in general, she said, the American objective was to ‘redefine the mission’ toward more cooperation between military forces and the effort to rebuild the area.”

Redefine the mission? The one we had been assured was already accomplished, way back when? Or this mission, the one to build more “postwar” cooperation, the one that’s not new at all, the one that’s been regularly mismanaged since we accomplished the first mission?

Minus a minor tactical shift here and a subtle strategic move there, the only redefining taking place is in the administration’s propaganda. We are, in reality, staying the same old course.

One other passage in the NYT story said a lot without saying a direct word. “Mosul … was secure in the occupation's first year, but fell to insurgents after American forces withdrew a year ago. Virtually the entire local Iraqi police force collapsed, overwhelmed by the growing violence that American officials attributed in part to Al Qaeda.”

There you go: “Overwhelmed by the growing violence [of] al Qaeda.” Lately we’ve seen a stream of security/military/intelligence/terrorist experts appearing on every network and in numerous print publications reemphasizing one very fundamental but oft-forgotten point. Because of his secular bent and distrust of any organization he couldn’t control, Saddam Hussein was our best ally in the fight against al Qaeda. We ousted him in trade for a terrorist factory of our own creation – one bigger and better and more motivated and freer to operate in a wider geographic area than ever before. That is the mission we’ve accomplished.

And for what? To “clear, hold and build” at the expense of American lives so that six months later at more human expense we can reclear, rehold and rebuild the same neighborhoods – and so on, in perpetuity.

It is tragic, and for a change, quite unfunny, that this could be Rice’s “success story.”

Right on the run

Somehow the White House found a staffer not under indictment, not under investigation and not under a cloud of suspicion to teach ethics to all its other staffers who are under indictment, or are about to be indicted, or are under a cloud of suspicion. The classes began Tuesday and before they’re over, reports the Washington Post, “A total of 3,000 administration officials … will attend the hour-long briefings.”

I’m sure we’re all quite impressed.

The ethically fuzzy three thousand attending the course – presumably titled “Welcome Back Codifier” – are filing alphabetically into a classroom over a two-week period, though it’s reported that war-marketeer Andy Card and presidential-pal Harriet Miers, who is merely incompetent, attended the opening class.

Unethical – in the polite, understated sense that Carlo Gambino was “unethical” – and incompetent. Those glaring Bush-administration qualities pretty much explain why Democrats walked away with all the goodies in Tuesday’s elections. Those are the qualities against which the electorate protested at the ballot box.

The administration knows it, and its operatives are cracking from the strain. They’ve dominated the p.r.-propaganda game and intimidated the press for so long, this spell of adversity has been more than their nerves can handle.

The usually collected Scott McClellan, for example, suffered a mental meltdown the other day upon implying to reporters that Middle America broadly condones the brutal torture of terrorist suspects. He then sputtered in frustration that the press corps’ relentless insistence on learning more details about the illegal practice only shows that prissy, pinstriped journalists just don’t understand Middle-American values.

McCarthyism isn’t exactly the image the White House wants to project right now, but there McClellan was, projecting it nevertheless.

And, also this week, just after Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid deplored Veep Cheney’s nasty habit of submersing himself in intelligence manipulation, Mr. McClellan bizarrely characterized Reid’s comments as a “rant,” one “unbecoming of a leader.” In short, a pol who condemns malfeasance is vulgar, while one who promotes the slaughter of innocents is tasteful. Got it?

But, as mentioned, there was slaughtering of a good sort on Tuesday. It makes no difference what you might think of Senator Jon Corzine, or if, by any wild chance, you have any thoughts whatsoever about Lt. Gov., now Gov.-Elect, Tim Kaine. The important thing is that voters took both of their Republican opponents to the cleaners. And on another local yet transcendently national level, St. Paul’s Democratic mayor, Randy Kelly, went down to major defeat by a fellow Democrat for the singular reason that Kelly had endorsed George W. Bush for reelection.

Before, during and after Election Day the media were full of dissociative political commentators warning that whatever the results, one simply cannot find cause and effect between presidential popularity and regional-election outcomes. The closest suggestion of such a relationship that I happened to read was this, from the Post: “Some said [the election results] may vindicate the concerns of some Republicans that the GOP base – beset with internal rifts and with some conservatives demoralized by Bush’s recent poor approval ratings – was simply not as energized as its Democratic counterpart heading into Election Day.”

That may be. It may be that Democrats were, indeed, uncustomarily energized. Or, it may be that Democrats didn’t so much turn out en masse, as Republicans stayed home. Or, it may be, after all, that little or no presidential cause and effect existed. But I doubt it.

It’s undeniable that something big – really big – is in the electoral air, something that exit pollsters cannot statistically capture on paper. Not yet, anyway. But looking back on this week in November, 2006, political strategists may rethink its history as the week of Black Tuesday – as the week that everything changed, in apparent fact, as well as mood.

Shut-R-Down

Until the Bush administration comes clean – which is to say, is forced to come clean – on its manipulation of prewar intelligence, Congressional Democrats are not only entitled, but obligated to impede all other business. In the nation’s interest they should neutralize the powers that be with every parliamentary trick in the book until we have answers and accountability. No legislation, no spending bills, no court confirmations, no nothing until the governed know how deep the governing malfeasance went.

The latest bombshell pointing to criminal duplicity is that the White House continued disseminating discredited intelligence well after it knew better, a fact that belies apologists’ mantra that the Bush administration only believed what everyone else believed. When it came to intelligence on Iraq’s nefariousness, so the tiresome party line goes, the poor dears at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue were as duped as the world and the Clinton administration before.

Now, however, there is direct evidence that the party line on flawed intelligence findings has been as deliberately contrived as the war’s rationalizations, just as so many suspected from the get-go.

According to a Defense Intelligence Agency document released by the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Carl Levin, the administration continued citing – as “credible” – information provided by a Qaeda captive quickly deemed quite in-credible by the defense agency itself.

It seems a certain Mr. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi had at first spun tales to U.S. interrogators about WMD-terrorist-training links between his organization and Saddam Hussein’s government. Yet “newly declassified portions of [the] document … showed that the administration was alerted” by the DIA in February 2002 that the captive “probably was lying.” In fact, “he could not name any Iraqis involved in the effort or identify any chemical or biological materials or cite where the training was taking place….

“The DIA concluded that al-Libi probably was deliberately misleading the interrogators, and he recanted the statements in January 2004,” according to an Associated Press story this week.

Al-Libi’s on-the-record unreliability was of no bother to the White House, though. Notwithstanding classified, contrary evidence the administration continued suggesting a Qaeda-Iraq link, and got its war. I’m not a lawyer, but when, in the act of preliminarily justifying a war, an administration spreads as “credible” a report disputed as untrustworthy by its own intelligence experts, do not high-crimes-and-misdemeanor terms like “criminal negligence” come into play?

Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, protested over the weekend that “work by his committee and other commissions did not point to any evidence that made him believe that intelligence had been distorted.” And White House spokesman Scott McClellan remained on right top of things, saying “he had not seen a report about the documents”; and, well, shucks, “issues about postwar intelligence have been explored in the past.” Besides, McClellan noted with his customary dismissive air, “steps have been taken to ensure the administration has the best intelligence possible.” No doubt he’s on target there, just as he was when denying Karl Rove and Lewis Libby’s involvement in the CIA leak.

McClellan also performed the well-rehearsed song and dance about how members of both parties, as well as the previous administration, “came to the same conclusion, that Saddam Hussein was a threat and a threat that needed to be addressed.” What McClellan didn’t say, and what no one on the right ever says, is that it was this administration that cherry-picked and fed selective intelligence to a gullible Congress, and whatever the Clinton administration might have thought about Saddam Hussein, it wasn’t the one to blindly dive into a full-scale invasion.

Republican Senator George Allen said Sunday that we need proper intelligence, “but what we don’t need is a bunch of partisanship.” He’s so right. We just need the truth. But we’re not going to get it as long as Bush’s congressional allies, such as Roberts and Allen, are allowed to conspire in a partisan cover-up.

Last week, in shutting down the Senate for two hours, Democrats were accused of crass sensationalism. Yet it’s the administration and its Congressional protectors who genuinely excel at what Frank Rich labeled as “change-the-subject stunts” – and before the subject gets changed again, Democrats should shut down Washington’s business as usual until they learn the exceedingly unusual whats, whys and wherefores of the administration’s excellent adventure. There can be no greater duty before Congress than getting at the truth of what sent this nation into war.

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A long reversal of fortune

George W. Bush’s fall from popular grace is literally one for the history books. Since the advent of reliable polling, no president has looked so weak this early in his second term.

Given the self-inflicted hits Bush has taken in recent weeks – the federal indictment of a top White House aide, the Katrina fiasco, mishandling a Supreme Court nomination, surpassing 2000 American deaths in Iraq – it’s easy to forget that his plummeting numbers are not a sudden phenomenon resulting from these setbacks alone. Despite his post-election, hubristic declaration of owning piles of political capital, Bush has been crippled for at least a year.

Immediately after the presidential election, Gallup put Bush at a 53 percent approval rating, which, noted the polling firm, “is actually the lowest of any of the last seven presidents who won a second term in the first poll conducted after their re-election.” By comparison Bill Clinton received a 58 percent approval rating in the post-reelection period, Ronald Reagan stood at 61 percent, Richard Nixon hung tough at 62 percent amidst a growing scandal, Lyndon Johnson had a 70 percent rating, Dwight Eisenhower 75 percent, and even expected-loser Harry Truman racked up a 69 percent approval.

From Truman through Clinton, each chief executive did his best to whittle down his popularity; but not one, right out of the gate, was as successful at self-immolation as George W. Bush.

The latest CBS News poll puts Bush’s job approval at 35 percent – not many points higher than felonious Tricky Dick’s final tally as he left the White House practically in handcuffs. Bush’s Congressional allies are hovering at roughly the same approval rating (34 percent), while sidekick Dick Cheney’s “favorable rating is down nine points this year to just 19 percent.” As Don Imus observed last week, the BTK killer is more loved than that.

What’s more, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found “what may turn out to be one of the biggest free-falls in the history of presidential polling” – said free-fall being that “Bush’s job-approval rating among African Americans has dropped to 2 percent.” Put another way, after all the right’s scheming to bring blacks into the pseudoconservative fold, only 20,000 out of a million would now tell Bush that his coat’s on fire. Commented pollster Peter Hart: “African Americans were not supporters [of Bush before Katrina], but I don’t think that they outright detested him – until now.”

The bad news for Bush just keeps piling up. The most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll revealed that six out of 10 Americans now disapprove of the president’s performance, and about the same number questions Bush’s honesty. In other words, most Americans now believe their president is a liar. Even more (68 percent) believe this country is on the wrong track; 65 percent saw the economy as “not so good or poor”; 60 percent believe we should not have invaded Iraq; “a clear majority – 55 percent – now says the administration deliberately misled the country in making its case for war with Iraq”; and a whopping “two in 3 say Bush does not understand the problems of people like them.”

The most worrisome news for the Republican National Committee, however, must be this little fact from the WP/ABC poll: “Among independents … 66 percent disapproved [of Bush’s performance]. In January, independents were evenly divided, with 49 percent approving and an equal percentage disapproving.”

In short, the all-important swing voters – the nonpartisan crowd, the deciding middle – have been steadily moving against Bush and, it can be safely conjectured, against Bushism. As a result, political strategists are now thinking what was unthinkable just a year ago: not only the White House in 2008, but the House and Senate in 2006 are in serious play.

Bring in the stuntmen

Congressional Republicans thought labeling this week’s Democratic Senate shutdown a “stunt” would be damning. Majority Leader Bill Frist summoned his formidable acting abilities to appear livid and sincere: “This is an affront to me personally,” said Frist. “It’s an affront to our leadership. It’s an affront to the United States of America.” It was nothing but theatrically unrighteous politics, he of unwaveringly righteous politics declared.

Frist further huffed that the Senate had been “hijacked by the Democratic leadership.” Why the felony? Because Democrats “have no convictions, they have no principles, they have no ideas.”

That’s generally true these days, Bill. But this time Democrats did have an idea – an excellent, albeit imitative, one: Use a baseball bat to pull a Republicanesque stunt, one that would get the elephant’s attention and that of the circus barkers, a.k.a. network-television journalists.

It’s taken me some time to succumb to the siren song that Democrats should adopt the cheap, lowbrow tactics of Republicans. But Tuesday’s press reaction convinced me. Journalists were thrilled to cover cheap, lowbrow tactics coming from someone other than GOPers for a change. Apostate Chris Matthews even brushed aside an MSNBC anchor’s question about the propriety of the Democratic maneuver. To paraphrase, Matthews asked who gives a rip how Democrats got Frist’s attention, as long as they did; and upholding Senate protocol, he added, doesn’t begin to compare in importance to uncovering administration lies.

If stunts can get Chris Matthews’ attention and add to the demands for accountability, then I’m for stunts.

The next day the NYT reported this comedy: Senator Pat Roberts, un-chairman of the Senate un-Intelligence un-Committee, “denied having done anything to slow the inquiry [said slowness causing said stunt-affront]. In fact, he said, Intelligence Committee staff members were aggressively working on what is known as the Phase 2 intelligence inquiry.”

Uh-huh. The Washington Post reported that same day: “Sources familiar with the committee’s work said there has been little examination … to date.” That’s the stone wall that Senate Democrats have been up against.

And consider this from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, dated May – as in five months ago – 2005:

On July 9, 2004, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued its 511-page report on intelligence failures before the Iraq war…. Questions about whether White House officials manipulated the intelligence to build the case for war were waved off to … sometime after the November election.

“We simply couldn’t get that done with the work product we have put out,” Republican committee Chairman Sen. Pat Roberts said at the time, promising speed. “That is a top priority,” he added. “It is one of my top priorities.”

“To keep going over this, over and over again – I’m more than happy to finish this, and I want to finish it, but we have other things that we need to do,” Roberts told NBC’s Tim Russert last month.

So much for Roberts’ claim of “aggressively working on … the Phase 2 intelligence inquiry.”

Since Watergate it’s been a Beltway truism that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. That wisdom doesn’t hold true for the Bush administration, for nothing could be worse than manipulating intelligence to launch a bloody, costly and needless war. But it certainly is shaping up for this Republican Congress – and surprise, it has come at the hands of the usually hapless Democrats.

And in case there’s any doubt about the effectiveness of this week’s Democratic extreme, consider this as well. On Wednesday, CNN’s Lou Dobbs asked Democrat and Intelligence Committee Vice-Chairman Jay Rockefeller about the “stunt’s” propriety. Rockefeller said he knew just one thing: The tactic accomplished more in two hours than Democrats had accomplished in 20 months of proper pleading.

Stunts work – well, they do when the opposition’s approval rating stands at an overall 35 percent.

Apocalypse Now

Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court can do far more than replace Sandra Day O’Connor amidst a short-term political battle. Done right, the Democrats’ response can set the political stage for the next three years. For the loyal opposition versus right-wing power, it’s eyeball to eyeball, now or never, showdown time at the OK corral, and every other apt cliché in the book.

This, from the NYT, framed the opening salvo of the needed Armageddon: “Over the weekend, Senator Harry Reid … warned President Bush not to pick Judge Alito, 55…. And on Sunday, he did not rule out the possibility that Democrats would try to block a nominee by a filibuster…. But Senator Lindsey Graham [said] if the Democrats staged a filibuster against Judge Alito … because of [his] conservatism, ‘the filibuster will not stand.’”

Good. Wonderful. Let us pray that Graham – that theatrical, awe-shucks charlatan of the formerly compromising Gang of 14 – means what he says. Senate conservatives have been terribly frustrated since experiencing nuclear interruptus last spring, have been itching for a shot at deploying the option, and it’s time to let them let it rip. The fallout will dust no one but themselves.

Few dispute that presidents have every constitutional right to nominate any candidate of their choice. That’s not the issue, although in the coming weeks we’ll hear that old dog of distraction barking regularly from the right as it unleashes its parliamentary mushroom cloud. And few dispute that presidential nominees are deserving of an up-or-down Senate vote, although it was the right that denied Harriet Miers that opportunity. Even fewer dispute that it’s rather nice to have a qualified job applicant, such as Alito, nominated to the highest court, although, once again, it was the right that initially defended as qualified the utterly unqualified Miers.

Conservatives will further protest that partisan politics shouldn’t drive the Alito-confirmation process. That also will be typically disingenuous – though it backfired, White House politics played a huge, if not singular, role in the Miers nomination – but let conservatives sing their familiar song. We’re all used to hearing it.

Nevertheless on this occasion it should come down to politics for Senate Democrats. George W. Bush has spent his entire presidency transmogrifying principled governance into sordid partisanship. Now Bush is playing the hardest of hardball by nominating not a mainstream conservative in ideological tune with the nation’s middle, but a hardcore conservative, simply to recapture a disaffected base. Since Alito’s nomination was based solely on narrow politics, the opposition is justified in responding in kind.

The core object of reciprocal game playing, however, should have less to do with Alito’s ultraconservatism (prominently displayed in his somewhat odd interpretation of the commerce clause – machine guns are your friend – and dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey) than with finishing off what’s left of Bush’s extremist agenda. That is to say, in response to Republicans launching the nuclear option to overcome a filibuster and confirm Alito, Democrats can entangle the Senate’s business in Byzantine procedural complications for the next three years – such as yesterday’s enormously satisfying, closed-session maneuver. They can bring legislative business to a crawl and gridlock what remains of the right’s schemes. What’s more, Democrats will have perfect cover: If Republicans had only held to revered Senate tradition….

Alito will be confirmed, no matter what. Any voice of Democratic reason will be rolled by the right in the process. Since reason is out, Democrats might as well force the nuclear option and thereby get something major in return – a politically justified logjam.

It’s a pity that high-minded debate grounded in constitutional philosophy can’t be atop everyone’s priorities when it comes to a Supreme Court nomination. Frankly, I feel a bit sleazy opining that Alito’s nomination should be knifed – though the victim will surely survive – purely on political grounds. But since Bush has thoroughly politicized governance, has repeatedly disregarded his pledge to work both sides of the partisan aisle and, above all, has taken this nation on an unadvertised radical ride, the nomination process has become an unavoidable battleground of raw politics. In brief, Bush and his congressional allies asked for it. So stick it to ‘em.