PMC Commentary

Loony birds of a feather

While reading these few excerpts from this profile of Iran’s president – a certifiable whacko who seems to thinks God admires conflict and destruction – see if someone else, as well as reaction to him, a bit closer to home doesn’t leap to mind.

The nuclear issue has provided fertile ground for the president to try to cultivate a new political class, one that is ideologically driven to provide a new, and at the same time reactionary, face to Iran.

“You get the feeling that Iran, under the present leadership, is looking for isolation and to go it alone,” said a Western diplomat based in Tehran who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as to be able to continue working here. “They want to show their way is the right way, and the former guys were wrong.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad and his allies have demonstrated that they are undeterred by the complaints of the establishment, whether liberal or conservative. They have instead taken their appeal directly to the … masses.
Mr. Ahmadinejad was largely unknown when he ran for office in June…. When he was elected, he was expected to fall into lockstep with the conservative forces that controlled every other institution of government. Instead, he has charted his own course.

Mr. Ahmadinejad has come to represent a generational split among conservatives, some political analysts said. They said he belonged to a group of ideologically conservative veterans of the Iran-Iraq war who effectively parked themselves among the so-called hard-liners.

With his team around him, Mr. Ahmadinejad has become the public face of Iran: aggressive, provocative and heatedly anti-American.

“If it wasn’t for the foreign pressures, perhaps Mr. Ahmadinejad, and his ministers, would have been called to the Majlis many times to explain themselves,” said Akbar Alami, a member of the foreign affairs committee of the Majlis, or Parliament, and an outspoken critic of the president. “As the pressure has increased, the safety margins for him to operate have widened.”

There is ample evidence that many powerful people within the establishment are still worried by the tone and direction Mr. Ahmadinejad has taken. And some people speculated that the supreme leader might in the end muzzle him, should consequences turn out to be too dire. But for now, hampered by nationalist reaction to the West’s pressure on Iran, even some of his harshest critics are treading lightly.

From the sidelines, reformers are now trying to regroup. Many of them say that the best factor in their favor is the president himself. The feeling is that the president can not, ultimately, meet all his economic promises, and that his policy of confrontation will undermine rather than improve people’s lives.

But so far the president has the upper hand.

The article could have ended by putting “president” in the plural.

Rumble in CA

I envy those of you living in Northern California’s 11th congressional district, for you have a shot on June 6 not only at removing one of the Republican Party’s true troglodytes from office, but at replacing him with a kind of political Borg.

Former Congressman Paul McCloskey – you probably remember him as “Pete” McCloskey, the singularly courageous party opposition to Richard Nixon in ’72 – has declared his challenge to U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo – recently voted one of the “13 Most Corrupt Members of Congress” by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and labeled “a one-man Category 5 environmental disaster zone” by the Sacramento Bee – for the Republican nomination.

Why is the 78-year-old McCloskey (photo, left) rejoining the circus? He told the Associated Press that “he felt compelled to jump back into politics, after more than two decades out of office, because of what he sees as a shift in Washington away from traditional Republican values…. ‘Winning isn’t the issue. The issue is forcing a debate on which way the Republican Party goes,’ he said.”

Amen.

“[McCloskey] dismissed critics who call him too liberal, saying traditional Republicans such as Gerald Ford, Bob Dole and John McCain do not support the corrupt lobbying system and spending policies many Republicans have adopted lately. He said he doesn’t believe conservative Republicans support those policies, either.”

Amen.

“They’re moving toward the highest deficit we’ve ever had in history,” said McCloskey. “That isn’t the Republican Party that I know.”

Amen.

Being the superior candidate, naturally McCloskey has challenged Pombo to a series of debates. And just as naturally, Pombo has refused the challenge, sending forth a campaign spokesman, Wayne Johnson, to iterate the inanity defense: “We don’t take him seriously as a Republican candidate. He’s a stalking horse for the Democratic Party…. We might as well debate Austin Powers. They’re both stuck in the 70s.”

Translation: We’re terrified of McCloskey. He has brains, public-policy knowledge and integrity – three little items foreign to the modern Republican Party.

I’m reminded of the Godfather scene in which Michael Corleone tells Kay, “Just this once I’ll tell you about my business. Just this once.” Well, just this once, I'd vote Republican. The prospective joy of watching Pete McCloskey take on the Republican Establishment from within would be too delicious to deny.

When the Nixon administration begins to look like a paragon of political virtue and constitutional propriety, you know the jig is about up.

Richard Nixon finally said “Uncle.” And even though this nation was bordering on a constitutional crisis that the president could have forced, we averted one because the system worked as it’s supposed to. We had assertive checks and balances. We had a Congress concerned about unrestrained executive power and courts concerned about the law. In the end, Nixon had no choice but to bow to the American Way.

Today, the checks and balances appear to have gone on holiday. George Bush isn’t acting like a power-hungry dictator only because deep down he is one. He’s acting like a power-hungry dictator for the same reason the dog pleasures himself – because he can. There’s no one with any power in Washington willing to stop him. Congressional Republicans kowtow like the Bush Youth Corps; the federal courts are packed with executive-adoring Reaganites and the like; the media are far more concerned with protecting profits; and the Democrats … well, yes, so much for the voiceless Democrats.

A straightforward reporting piece in this morning’s New York Times encapsulated the problem writ large, without writing largely:

The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response....

The White House’s stance on storm-related documents, along with slow or incomplete responses by other agencies, threatens to undermine efforts to identify what went wrong, Democrats on the committees said Tuesday....

In response to questions later from a reporter, the deputy White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said the administration had declined requests to provide testimony by [White House officials]. Mr. Duffy said the administration had also declined to provide storm-related e-mail correspondence and other communications involving White House staff members....

“The White House and the administration are cooperating with both the House and Senate,” Mr. Duffy said....

Nevertheless, both [Republican Senator Susan] Collins and Representative Thomas M. Davis III, a Virginia Republican who is leading the House inquiry, said that despite some frustration with the administration’s response, they remained confident that the investigations would produce meaningful results.

The NYT piece wasn’t about Katrina, folks.

On Bullshit

In the academic world, one wearies of the hypocrisy. In the real world, ya’ get sick of the bullshit.

Same sentiments, just different ways of putting it. And with apologies to my academic friends of more delicate expression, am I ever sick of the bullshit emanating from the current regime. (My apologies as well to Harry G. Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, who penned the now-famous treatise, “On Bullshit.”)

Consider merely this week’s cycle of bullshit.

First, we have the president of the United States running around the country defending himself on a matter no one – absolutely no one – is debating. He smirks and grins and proclaims he just can’t understand why his opponents don’t want him ferreting out those nasty terrorists. Shucks, he thinks he should be allowed to do that.

Of course he should, and every critic agrees. But, also of course, the critics have a problem with Bush doing it illegally. That’s the only debate. And until every objective print and broadcast journalist leads his or her story on Bush’s campaign with something to effect of, “The bullshit continued today …,” then Bush will keep half the public believing that his critics are weak on national security and he’s not and that’s the debate. And that’s as much bullshit as the original bullshit.

Then there was the unctuous California Republican David Drier on some cable network within the last week, spouting off about how inclusive his party had been in the House versus how those arrogant Dems used to run things. Why, to hear him tell it, David & Friends hug the opposition every morning and practically beg for their participation.

Bullshit. As though we didn’t already know it was bullshit, there was this in today’s Washington Post confirming the bullshit:

House and Senate GOP negotiators, meeting behind closed doors last month to complete a major budget-cutting bill, agreed on a change to Senate-passed Medicare legislation that would save the health insurance industry $22 billion over the next decade…. That change was made in mid-December during private negotiations involving [members of the Republican House and Senate leadership].

House and Senate Democrats were excluded from the meeting.

Returning for a moment to White House bullshit, there was this in today’s New York Times:

The White House was told in the hours before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans that the city would probably soon be inundated with floodwater, forcing the long-term relocation of hundreds of thousands of people…. A Homeland Security Department report submitted to the White House at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, hours before the storm hit, said, “Any storm rated Category 4 or greater will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching.”

[This] contradict[s] statements by President Bush and the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, that no one expected the storm protection system in New Orleans to be breached.

“I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," Mr. Bush said in a television interview on Sept. 1. "Now we're having to deal with it, and will.”

Let’s see, can we think of any other catastrophes that Bush claimed no one could have anticipated – despite repeated, written warnings?

What a puzzler.

Whether from the White House, the House or Senate, these days it’s government of bullshit, government by bullshit, and government for bullshit.

My Webster’s defines “bullshit” as “nonsense;… usu. considered vulgar.” I suggest adding the subdefinition: “the vulgar, early 21st-century government of the United States.”

Everyone already knew this, but Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman made it official before a Republican National Committee gathering on Friday: The GOP will rely on the lowest-brow common denominator of demagogic appeal as its campaign strategy in 2006.

As the Washington Post synopsized their thinking, “They see national security … at the heart of the GOP appeal to voters.”

If you can say “chutzpah,” then you’re a qualified Republican strategist. For the strategy is nothing else. Here’s a guy – Rove – who is under federal investigation for betraying national security lecturing his party on the supremacy of national security as a political issue.

And, naturally, since we’re talking chutzpah, the chutzpah doesn’t stop there.

They defended Bush’s use of warrantless eavesdropping to gather intelligence about possible terrorist plots. “Do Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean really think that when the NSA is listening in on terrorists planning attacks on America, they need to hang up when those terrorists dial their sleeper cells in the United States?” Mehlman asked.

Not a single Democrat or other critic of the Bush administration’s illegal surveillance has suggested that the government should cripple its intelligence-gathering efforts. Not one. Critics simply prefer – demand – that these efforts be conducted under the law. So Rove and Mehlman and their GOP candidates will be stumping for the next ten months about an issue that never was, and isn’t now.

Suppose Karl Rove, Esq., were defending a man accused of stealing a loaf of bread. No doubt his defense before the jury would be, “Would you deny this man the opportunity to feed his family?” The prosecutor might – and obviously would – counter that no one has a problem with the man feeding his family, but he should have gone about it in a legal way: gotten a job, hence a paycheck with which to pay for the bread.

But Rove is hoping for another Simpson jury to personify the American electorate in 2006. The chutzpah has worked wonders with mass gullibility so many times.

Al Gore charged the Bush administration with "breaking the law repeatedly and insistently," to which the slithering Scott McClellan said: "Al Gore's hypocrisy knows no bounds."

It should first be noted that this was purely a political defense on the White House’s part – McClellan did not deny the administration is indeed breaking the law repeatedly and insistently.

Second, McClellan had his facts wrong. The Clinton administration committed no similar acts, and the actual legal sin committed by Clinton as opposed to Bush is comically insignificant.

Third, where are all McClellan’s friends in the thick of this fascistic challenge to Americanism – those civil-liberties-loving Republicans who so self-righteously denounced the “jackbooted” Clintonites only a few years ago? Talk about hypocrisy knowing no bounds.

But fourth – and perhaps most important in the context of a single speech – Gore signaled that he’s grown tired of knitting doilies at home and has decided to rejoin the human and political race. This would be welcome news as long as he’s also forsworn aides who worry about shirt colors and Greek-alphabet appellations.

If Al is determined to be Al, then he has a lot of friends.

In the 6-3 dissenting opinion on the assisted-suicide case just settled by the Supreme Court, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the government could – should – use its power “for the purpose of protecting public morality.”

Give me a fiery-eyed, anarchistic libertarian any day before the likes of a pompous, conspiratorial Oval-Office thief who believes public morality can be legally defined by his hypocritical standards, and is thus worth necessary protection – meaning imposition.

Sleaze on a Cross

The Washington Post has an excellent piece on Ralph Reed’s self-made political and legal predicament. The boy is going down – fast – and the article makes clear not only why he’s going down, but, implicitly, that Reed is intent on greasing the skids of his own demise. Hallelujah.

He was asked at a recent GOP coven in Georgia, where he’s running for lieutenant governor, if he had “accept[ed] any gifts, commissions or other payments of any kind from [Jack] Abramoff, and are you likely to be a party in the unfolding investigation?”

Reed’s response was, “No. No to all these.

“I was building my small business in 1999 when I was approached by a friend [Abramoff] of almost 20 years from one of the most respected and prestigious law firms in the nation. I agreed to [work with him] having been assured that none of the funds used to pay my firm were derived from gambling activities.”

Keep talking, keep explaining, Ralph. Your explanations may appease a few local voters, but federal prosecutors are likely to take a nasty view of your comments about pure innocence colliding so harshly with the record.

Such as emails – like the one Ralph zipped off to Jack in 1998: “I need to start humping in corporate accounts!… I’m counting on you to help me with some contacts.”

As the Post then notes: “Within months, Abramoff hired him to lobby on behalf of the Mississippi Band of Choctaws, who were seeking to prevent competitors from setting up facilities in nearby Alabama.”

Continues the Post …

In 2004, when the casino payments to Reed were disclosed, Reed issued a statement declaring “no direct knowledge of their [Abramoff’s law firm’s] clients or interests.” In 2005, however, Senate investigators released a 1999 e-mail from Abramoff to Reed explicitly citing the client: “It would be really helpful if you could get me invoices [for services performed] as soon as possible so I can get Choctaw to get us checks ASAP.”

Whoops.

And how can we know beyond any doubt that Reed is one of the world’s worst sleazebags? When even Jack Abramoff had had enough of him, that’s how.

One of the most damaging e-mails was sent by Abramoff to partner Michael Scanlon, complaining about Reed’s billing practices and expenditure claims: “He is a bad version of us! No more money for him.”

Voters, even GOPers, have had enough. “A recent Zogby poll performed for the [Atlanta Journal-Constitution] had troubling findings for Reed: When voters were asked to pick between ‘Republican Ralph Reed’ and ‘a Democrat,’ the generic Democrat won 36 percent to 33 percent, although the state leans strongly Republican.”

Reed is just the tip of dung heap. There are dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of little Ralph Reeds dug deeply into today’s self-righteous Republican establishment – all of them wrapped in a Patton-sized flag and drenched in phony Christian purity.

One by one, they eventually crash and burn. Their hunger for power assures it.

You and friendly authoritarianism

Joe Biden got it only half right when he suggested that Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for Supreme Court nominees be abolished, since they elicit nothing of insightful value from the mind of the nominee.

Sure, confirmation hearings should be cancelled till further notice. For one thing, they interfere with celebrity trials and cute-animal stories on cable-news networks.

But why not go all the way and just abolish the Supreme Court? It’s so old school, what with its quaint notions of constitutional proprieties and balance of government powers. And where it counts, few are paying attention to the Court anyway, least of all the executive branch, which treats its edicts – say, along the lines of detainee policy – as a mere nuisance.

The Court has no enforcement powers, the Bush regime is quite aware of that, and the powers-that-be on Capitol Hill are no more interested in reining in this out-of-control administration than the Reichstag was in telling Hitler to cool it. Hence by abolishing the Supreme Court we would properly and cleanly kill the pretense that we, as a nation, are still committed to “no-man-above-the-law” platitudes.

The hypocrisy of espousing them when our actions are brazenly contrary is every bit as sickening as the actions themselves.

In a NYT analysis of the Alito hearings, Adam Liptak noted that “Judge Alito drew the line in what he would discuss almost exactly where Chief Justice Roberts had in his confirmation hearings in September. The similarity of the two men’s positions should not be surprising,” according to Bush-booster Professor John Yoo, “as they were both government lawyers when Edwin Meese III served in the White House and the Justice Department in the Reagan administration.”

“It shows the fruition,” said Professor Yoo approvingly, “of the Reagan-Meese approach of grooming young lawyers in the 1980’s who could do well at hearings 20 years later.”

And what they are doing “well at” is hiding the ultimate reality of the unitary executive theory of government – whose logical extension is that absolutely no power is forbidden to the president.

If, under the guise of protecting the nation, the commander in chief chooses to wiretap your phone without court approval, he may legally do so. If he chooses to throw you in a military detention center and deny you access to a lawyer and the courts, he may legally do so. If he chooses to imprison journalists whom he deems are aiding terrorists by impeding his unlimited freedom to act against those terrorists, he may legally do so.

For that matter, if he chooses to “extend” his stay in office so as to protect the nation, then one supposes this is not only not a violation of the constitution, but a necessary act to protect it.

It’s the black-is-white, freedom-is-slavery, destroy-the-village-to-save-it theory of democratic government. It is nothing less than the fruition, to use Professor Yoo’s word, of the right’s obsession with authoritarianism.

Unprincipled principles

Amidst the tedious, self-aggrandizing opening statements by bloviating senators at the Alito hearings, awe-shucks Senator Lindsey Graham said, “In a time of war, I want the executive branch to have the tools to protect me, my family and my country.”

As a general proposition, no one would argue with that. It applies in times of war as well as times of peace. But, in the mind of any thinking person concerned with civil liberties, it is also loaded with reservations and stipulations and conditions that tend to trash the general proposition in the Bush administration’s case.

One can start – and finish – with Graham’s opening condition: “In a time of war.”

Well, how did the war come about? Was it a legal war? Was it a justified war? Was it a necessary war? Was it a war in the true interest of national security?

Or was it a war launched on an ideological whim, with the added benefits of whacking the political opposition and tightening a stranglehold on the freedoms of the American people – freedoms that might interfere with the Bush administration’s pursuit of unfettered power?

Can one say with any level of honesty that any such executive branch should then be handed additional “tools” to “protect” us? Was there any intention of protection from the get-go? Or was it just a convenient power grab?

One must also see past the naked partisanship in play. Would Senator Graham and his fellow Republicans have tolerated a President Gore indulging in such power-grabbing? And that, of course, is nothing more than a rhetorical question.

And what are these “tools”? Do they pass constitutional muster?

Here’s a thought. If they don’t, and if they were fashioned with criminal disregard of the separation and balance of powers, then impeach the bastard.

How’s that for a general proposition?

Match.com

The New York Times has a couple interesting – and colossal – understatements in the first paragraph of its latest piece on Tom DeLay’s woes.

The lead sentence tells us that Mr. DeLay has been “swept into an election-year lobbying scandal,” which is like saying that John Gotti was “swept” into involvement in Paul Castellano’s assassination in 1985.

The second sentence – still first paragraph – notes that DeLay’s resignation from Republican leadership comes amidst “a campaign season tinged by corruption,” which, to continue our mob simile, is like saying Gotti’s business dealings were “tinged” by questionable practices.

As for DeLay’s future – and let’s just continue beating a dead horse with the mob thing – Tom should ponder the rudderless direction of the Gambino family of late.

Tom, you need a leadership post and the family needs a leader. I can’t think of a better match.

What's left to say?

I must admit to being somewhat speechless, what with our new form of government having taken hold and all.

I’ve lived in a constitutional republic up till now, but no longer. And as I said, it’s left me a trifle dumbstruck.

It seems in the president’s steely quest to vanquish terrorists, there is no longer any power outside his purview. Judicial authority is quaint, to be tolerated only at the president’s pleasure. Same for Congressional authority and oversight – but Lord knows those boys were too busy processing Abramoffian graft to notice, or care, that their check-and-balance obligations were being swept under the Oval Office rug.

There is virtually nothing the president cannot do now. He requires, he says, absolute power under the guise of wartime necessity. If a presidential act involves fighting terrorism, then it’s legal. Case – and all other cases – closed.

Warrantless wiretapping? No problem. Warrantless searches? Same. He has the legal authority, he says, and who’s to say otherwise? Well, you can say if you like, but the ones formerly with the power to do anything about it have resigned from public responsibility.

In fact, given Bush’s legal rationale for all his latest illegalities – that is, noble battles against terrorism – should he decide to disband Congress in the name of winning the global war on this, that, or anything else, then let ‘er rip.

Bush didn’t take this power entirely on his own, of course. Ultimately it was handed to him. It was handed to him by the American public, always available for hoodwinking in times of stress.

Don Imus is a perfect and highly visible example of the nation’s lowbrow complicity. A couple mornings ago Mr. I-gnora-mus mumbled that he didn’t really see anything wrong with Bush’s incredibly illegal actions, a comment quite reflective of so much public opinion these days.

Let’s see, as I recall from my basic comparative government course, when one man proclaims himself above the law, and when that man is the chief executive, and when there is no congressional oversight left, and when the courts can be ignored by the executive, then what we have, in living fact, is a dictatorship.

What can one say after that? What other issues remain for discussion in this country as long as we’re living under a dictatorship? And if what Bush is arguing isn’t the very definition of dictatorship, then someone needs to explain to me what, precisely, he is arguing.

Like I said. It’s all left me a bit speechless.