PMC Commentary

Cheney's CIA "hit"-paraders as laughable stumblebums

Their incompetence remains breathtaking.

Strike that. It's more breathtaking than ever, and, as the years pass, I'm sure, it'll come to be known as surpassing even the metaphysical Platonic Ideal of breathtaking incompetence.

I write, of course, of the Bush administration, which, for all its manly swagger and muscular chest-pounding, couldn't even assemble your plain, everyday, garden-variety hit-squad -- any kind of rudimentary assassination team, that is, that could shoot straight enough to avoid hitting its own ass.

Breathtaking? Nay, mind-boggling is the adjective that leaps from today's Washington Post page that reports that even though George W. Bush signed a "secret document" in September 2001 authorizing the CIA "to use deadly force against bin Laden as well as other senior members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups," the administration's secret pursuit of the baddest of bad guys went absolutely nowhere.

For just a minute, forget all the brouhaha about the program's probable illegality of non-disclosure to Congress. Instead, just ponder its utter, ineffable, and absolutely farcical ineptitude:

"The plan to kill top al-Qaeda leaders, which had been on the agency's back burner for much of the past eight years ... never progressed beyond concepts and feasibility studies...; was active in fits and starts [but] was essentially killed in 2004 because it was deemed ineffective."

Three years within which to reverse that ... and yet, no go.

Said a CIA spokesman, the Bush-Cheney superspooky operation "never took a single terrorist off the battlefield." And added an intelligence official, if we ever do need to whack someone, "smart minds will figure out a better way to do it."

Here's my take. Sure, Cheney loved skulduggery and cloak-and-daggery stuff and all that; undoubtedly part of the reason why he told the CIA to withhold disclosure. But more than that he was simply, immeasurably embarrassed.

Liz Cheney, or Congresswoman Cheney? Eric Cantor, or President Cantor?

My belief in the existence of a benevolent if mischievous God positively soars when I read that not only is Gov. Sarah Palin making sudden, premature moves toward 2012, but that -- O, Thank you, Lord! -- the unregal spawn of princely darkness, Liz Cheney, is pondering a political life herself.

What great deeds have we committed to merit such good fortune, such prankish grace? Nothing -- in fact, quite the opposite. Yet it seems that God is indeed a forgiving god: He's going to give us Candidate Liz Cheney anyway.

Or, at least, that's the celestial scuttlebutt. On Monday, when asked by the Washington Times if she's thinking of running, for something, Ms. Cheney said, "It's something I very well may do."

Now it's true that she later "demurred," as the Politico put it, when asked as well by MSNBC -- "Um ... well ... No. Look, right now I’m very busy, focused on helping my dad with his memoir. It’s something I may do down the road here, but it’s not something I’m contemplating right now" -- but in Politicalese, that's a yes. Liz has the bug. No doubt about it.

What's more -- yea, verily, You are a bountiful God -- Congressional Quarterly now reports that both Eric Cantor and Mike Pence, yet two more of the GOP's epically lobotomized pols, are "fueling speculation," via trips to Iowa and listening tours and staged policy klatches, "that they have their eyes on White House bids."

Think of it: two to three blissful years of Cantor misspeaking (yesterday he said, I kid you not, "The president is going to Michigan ... to throw out the opening bitch"), Pence dumbfounding, Palin crashing, and Liz Cheney poisoning.

If all that comes to pass -- if they all launch, that is, as speculation now has it -- then my still-tentative belief in a benevolent if mischievous God be will be irreversibly and forever confirmed. Amen.

Paul Broun, Liz Cheney, and other subterranean sightings

Where the hell does the Republican Party find these people? -- people, that is, like Rep. Paul Broun, M.D., of Georgia's 10th Congressional District, in which, I can only gather, 60.7 percent of the electorate resides under a mind-deadening rock.

I remembered Herr Doktor Broun from late last year, when he psychotically bollixed even the historical basics of his dissociative rant, "You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a Democratic Germany. I'm not comparing [Barack Obama] to Adolf Hitler; what I'm saying is there is the potential of going down that road."

But last week's outdid even that: "This program of 'government option' that is being touted as being the panacea, the savior of allowing people to have quality health care at an affordable price, is gonna kill people."

Well, naturally, Doktor Broun. That's what Hitler-wannabes aspire to, right? Hence from last November to this July, your running observations are somewhat tautological.

But he couldn't resist the bollixization of yet more history, adding to his mass-murdering health-care comments that "That is exactly what's going on in Canada and Great Britain today. They don’t have the appreciation of life as we do in our society, apparently."

Observed Media Matters, "Rep. Broun apparently isn't aware that Canada and Great Britain both enjoy a lower infant mortality rate and longer life expectancy than the United States." But I have this to say to the hyperpedantic folks at Media Matters: If we start pointing out everything that Rep. Broun doesn't know ...

As I write this I'm hearing in the background the sinisterly ubiquitous Liz Cheney, on MSNBC, impudently accusing others of politicizing the inherently fascistic bastardization of the U.S. Constitution and statutory law by Dear, Creaky Old Dad. And you know what? I'd bet you anything that 60.7 percent of Georgia's 10th Congressional District is also watching in little orgasmic fits. You go, girl! And you go, Doktor!

 

 

Congressman tackles Don't Ask, Don't Tell; Obama wisely waits for repeal

Pennsylvania's U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, a former Army lawyer and Iraq War veteran, announced at a Washington news conference last week that he's now spearheading the Congressional drive to overturn the idiotic, homophobic and national-security-damaging statute known as "Don't ask, don't tell."

"I've seen great soldiers get kicked out of the Army," Murphy told the Philadelphia Inquirer, "not because of sexual misconduct, but because of their sexual orientation. It's hurt our military, and it's a policy that's long overdue for a change."

Noting that DADT had "led to the discharge of 58 Arabic speakers since" 9/11, Murphy further observed that "they could be on the ground right now in Iraq ... producing vital intelligence that would help us win the war on terror"; as could, overall, the "nearly 13,000 gay service members" who have suffered involuntary discharge since 1993.

A bit more problematically, Murphy said "When I was in Iraq ... my men did not care if you were gay or straight; they just wanted to get the mission done and come home alive."

Why do I say problematic? Purely for political reasons, because as the Inquirer article pointed out in partial opposition to Murphy's assessment: "He's in a pretty serious minority as far as military people go," said Tommy Sears, the Center for Military Readiness' executive director, as evidenced by "a 2006 Military Times poll [that] showed that 58 percent of active-duty personnel support keeping 'don't ask, don't tell.' "

Needless to say, Congressional opponents of the measure's repeal will hammer away at that statistic with a self-satisfied relentlessness.

Nonetheless, Murphy's determined enthusiasm for repeal may erode that statistic over time, and, as he himself admits, Congressional repeal is "not going to happen in a couple days. It's going to be months." So time, Murphy knows, he has plenty of.

"Murphy said he doesn't expect Obama to use an executive order to bypass the legislative process" -- that is, "to stop the military discharges until Congress takes up the issue" -- and he seemed okay with that: "It's our job in the Congress to put a bill on his desk to overturn this policy."

In my recent, more idealistic days, I was supportive of an Obamian preemption. Would that have been the "right" thing to do? Absolutely; but, given the tepidity of this Democratic Congress, also the most politically wrong thing to do. The president's first year in office, as Bill Clinton discovered the hard way, is his best and often only year for signature legislation -- such as health-care reform, affecting 300 million Americans -- and, right as DADT's repeal may be, an executive order, now, to effectively accomplish the same, would be a complication on a much grander scale.

These political games are tedious, but also an unalterable fact of life.

Sarah Palin and that Coming Kingdom of Cash

Now here's a piece of underwhelming, gossipy news that isn't -- hence the reference to the underwhelming -- really all that newsy:

Levi Johnston, erstwhile fiancé of Alaska's pretend governor's daughter, told reporters last night that said pretend governor, despite all her roamingly proffered reasons of self-sacrificial duty to the good people of Alaska, is motivated mostly by ... brace yourself ... those bundles of personal cash to be had.

"Johnston claimed," reports the Politico this morning, "that in December he heard Palin talking about 'how nice it would be to take some of this money people have been offering us and just run with it, and saying forget everything else.' "

"I think the big deal was the book," said Johnston. "That was millions of dollars"; but also "talk shows, whatever, things like that," that last phrase being a catchall favorite with the 19-year-old dad -- "I've seen how stressful this job was for her and she came home late at night and things like that" -- but things like that do have a way of turning one's head.

So it's rather easy to understand why, notwithstanding Palin's official obligation to her state's constituents, she just up and quit. Given the broad circumstances, Levi's story is eminently believable.

What is and shall forever remain an utter mystery to the majority of us, however, is why her most indefatigable defenders don't themselves give up the fight and admit, while washing their hands of this brazenly flaky pol, that she's an unscrupulous harpie who's looking out only for Number One.

Don't get me wrong. I still hope like hell, for the entertainment value of it, that she makes a presidential run in 2012. But how others could urge her on, on the basis of a sincere belief in her good-faith conscientiousness, is simply beyond me.

Karl Rove's 12-Step Program to Power: A Timely Revisit

As the iniquitous Mr. Rove rather involuntarily makes his way back into the headlines -- "House Panel interviews Karl Rove About Attorney Firings," declared WaPo yesterday in a virtually content-free story, given the proceeding's thoroughgoing gag -- I thought, What better time to reprise my summation of what, over the years, got him there?

It, "Karl Rove’s 12-Step Program to Dry-Drunk Power: A Primer," debuted on April 19, 2005 -- that is, this "reader’s digest of Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, by James Moore and Wayne Slater" -- and now find the retrospective to be a remindful launching point for what millions hope is sweet justice: finally, some payback for all the corrupt, underhanded turd blossoms that this defiler of American politics dropped in our path for far too many years.

So here it is, "brief notes I took when reading [Moore-Slater's book] ... add[ing] when necessary a clarifying word or two" -- notes on Karl Rove's long-cherished political campaign strategies, some of which are now beautifully biting him right on the ass:

1. Use surrogates to attack your opponent. Never let your guy (or yourself, if you happen to be running) rip into the other guy. Find some lackey who’s more than willing to get vicious ugly for you. Your guy will look like a disinterested prince.

2. Leak harmful information. This is pretty much your basic opposition-research stuff. But leak it; don’t announce it. And certainly it helps to develop friendly relations with journalists of a whorish bent. Devastating information on your opponent isn’t worth much if you can’t get the word out.

3. Turn rumor into fact. Better yet, start a rumor about your opponent and use the media whores with whom you’ve developed a good relationship to hammer away at whatever you’ve invented. Before long everyone will at least assume that where there’s smoke there’s fire.

4. Use well-organized 3rd-party groups to make allegations. This is closely related to #3. In short, if you can find a Swift-Boat kind of outfit to go libelous on your behalf, do it. Also see #1 – surrogates and the disinterested prince.

5. Funnel money to a 3rd-party candidate similar in ideology to your opponent’s to dilute your opponent’s vote. Self-explanatory.

6. Use ties to law enforcement to launch bogus investigations against your opponent. You’ll need to be comfortably in bed with a high-powered D.A., though, so this tactic isn’t for the chronically un-empowered. You also can’t harbor any compunctions about bankrupting an innocent person through legal expenses or even sending him to jail and destroying his family. This is rather big-league stuff, and not for the squeamish.

7. Associate your guy’s political positions with God and flag. Be creative. If needed, rewatch Animal House for inspiration, the part in which Otter defends his incredibly guilty pals before a college court in a rip-roaring burst of offended patriotism. It can be done.

8. Always position your opponent as an agent of the status quo, your guy as the candidate for change. Self-explanatory.

9. Build your messages on what the public already believes in. Closely related to #7. Don’t ever try to introduce the electorate to something unfamiliar or convince it of something new. Another angle is to play on preexisting prejudices. If the public hates freckled people, your guy hates freckled people. Always has.

10. "Explaining is losing." This is the only direct quote I’ve lifted from the book, because it is key, absolutely critical. If your guy has to explain anything – his policies, his past, anything – then your guy is playing a losing game. Voters in general don’t want to be burdened with policy details and candidates certainly don’t want to get mired in personal explanations. Just forget explaining anything -- anything at all -- and move on. It’ll work. You’ll be amazed.

11. Use push polling. Again, this is high-powered stuff for the monied pros. Don’t call registered voters and ask if they like so-and-so’s position on something. Call and ask if they like the satanic plan your Illuminati opponent wants to shove through Congress should he get there with all his corrupt campaign cash. You get the poll results you want, and better yet, you leave the right impression of your opponent in the minds of the questioned.

12. Pick off special-interest support for your opponent. In other words, be a hypocritical flip-flopper like all get out (and don’t bother explaining it). Bush’s decision before the 2004 campaign on erecting steel tariffs is an excellent example.

Karl, one way or another, it's time you answered for all this.

The Moron-Count: More than 4 out of 10

My Internet was out for most of this morning, so for my current-events edification I was forced to resort to cable, whereupon I landed in "Morning Joe"'s little coffee klatch, and thereupon strongly regretted it.

The cause of my remorse was an MSNBC graphic, derived from the headcounters at Gallup, showing two figures; one of no surprise, but the other a real jaw-dropper:

Would you consider -- I'm paraphrasing here, with only memory to serve -- voting for Sarah Palin in 2012? headlined the graphic. Among Republicans, unsurprisingly (although, it seemed to me, perhaps a trifle inflated), the yea-count was 71 percent.

But across the electorate at large? Forty-three percent responded in the affirmative -- and the poll was taken post-rambling-resignation speech.

Furthermore, as Gallup enumerated this most curious state of affairs, 53 percent of everyone polled agreed with the proffered statement that the media's treatment of the soon-to-be ex-governor has been "unfairly negative."

Now, the 53 percent figure I came close to understanding, since the electorate detests the media about as much as it does pols. But to see that more than four out of 10 would voice an unprompted willingness to cast a vote for such an indisputable blob of scatterbrains on stilts was nothing short of appalling.

There is, however, one possible mitigation, although it's purely notional. And it is this: If Gallup were to call me today to ask about my willingness to vote for Sarah Palin in 2012, my eager, immediate, even unthinking response would be, "You betcha!" And maybe I'm not alone.

Anything to lighten the political atmosphere and to urge her forward. Run, Sarah, run. We -- especially those of us in desperate need of cheap entertainment -- are beggin' ya.

Funnyman Franken needs your prayer-offerings

If, as a yeomanly United States senator, Al Franken manages to retain his famous sense of humorous sanity, it will be nothing short of a minor miracle.

Honest to God, I feel sorry for the guy. He seems to want to legislate, in earnest, for the benefit of Minnesotans as well as the nation -- but, to quote King Lear, O, that way madness lies.

That's not to suggest that Franken is naive. He's been around the political block and he knows -- in large but still academic part -- what's in store. So, in best junior-senatorial fashion, he has chosen to start off by fitting in.

"Sen.-elect Al Franken’s first day on Capitol Hill was Not A Circus, and the soon-to-be junior senator from Minnesota was Not Funny At All," riffed the Politico. "Those were the messages Team Franken toiled to convey to the press and the public Monday, tamping down anything that resembled a spectacle surrounding Franken’s arrival and stressing the former comedian’s sober side."

Which he may wish, soon, to nevertheless intoxicate with some sanity-saving levity. For it's further reported, with a few realistic modifications added here, that yesterday he met with "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to discuss the agenda" -- legislative delays, nomination holds, filibuster threats, bribery negotiations, counterproductive amendments, private airings of petty grievances, and in general the wholesale sell-out of the democratic will -- "for the week ahead."

Said peppy Franken-adviser Eric Schultz: "I think you’re going to find, as Minnesotans found, that he’s a serious, thoughtful person who wants to come to Washington to work" -- and try not to leave drooling, babbling, sedated, and straitjacketed.

But perhaps Franken is just playing it "solemn and staid," as he was additionally described yesterday, while he quietly goes about collecting plentiful comedy material for "Saturday Night Live" or a blockbuster Michael Moorelike film, "Dude, Where's My Democratic Senate?"

Whatever the case I wish him all the best, and I pray for his sanity.

Sarah Palin could always join the Democrats

In this morning's column I referenced two passages from Vanity Fair's "It Came from Wasilla" as most exemplary of the Alaska governor -- Sarah Palin's "extravagant self-regard," which finds itself comfortably housed within "a political party that ... often demands qualities other than knowledge" -- but upon further reflection, I believe I was remiss.

There was a third -- today a rather pedestrian, ho-hum quality which invited oversight, but whose implications are politically transcendent: "Palin has always been a party of one."

With respect to Palin alone, VF's Todd Purdum noted she possesses "no political principle or personal relationship [that] is more sacred than her own ambition. To be sure, Palin is 'conservative,' whatever that means, but ... in a June interview with Sean Hannity, she sounded like a New Dealer when she proudly proclaimed that 'a share of our oil-resource revenue goes back to the people who own the resources—imagine that.' In the next breath, sounding like a 'starve the beast' conservative, she said she hoped the price of oil, the principal variable of state revenue, would not rise too much."

Confused, contradictory, and, as Purdum put it, "all over the lot in the articulation of her platform." Yet Palin is hardly alone, and that's where, logically, the "transcendent" part comes in -- and it's something that Democrats, in general, and on a macro level, are far more guilty of than Republicans.

As a party they're confused, contradictory, and all over the lot. Now it's true that ever since Democrats broke from their nineteenth-century and Southern states rights' mold they've tried their best to square with Will Rogers' observation about political incoherence, yet for a few decades running they at least -- roughly -- stood for civil rights, equal opportunity, progressive taxation, and (post-Vietnam) a vaguely intelligent and humbler foreign policy.

Today? Take any Democratic pol and you're also taking your pick, philosophically speaking. He or she might be neoconservative in foreign-policy approach, might not; might be for more equitable taxation, might not; might wish to legislatively overcome historical traditions of inequality, might not; or, in the most current debate, might demand health care for all, or, might not.

Each is, Palinlike, merely "a party of one." And since overcoming many of society's inbred problems first requires a factual, non-subjective, pragmatic, one-size-does-indeed-fit-all approach, the Democratic Party's collectivity of individual deviations means that it, too, is fast becoming "a political party that ... often demands qualities other than knowledge."

Al Franken, Daily Kos, CQ, Health Care, and NO EXCUSES

As CQ Politics alone has just pointed out, again, for the gazillionth but hardly final time, Al Franken's ascension (or descent, if you prefer) into the now-60-Democratic-member U.S. Senate means less than elementary math might tell us.

It's more like a job for theoretical physics, perhaps even metaphysics, for "In a caucus that now spans the ideological spectrum from Franken on one end to Arlen Specter on the other, the Democrats" -- our nation's fuzziest, most insubstantial word -- "can’t actually do whatever they feel like doing."

CQ emphasized its didacticism with a specific senatorial example -- that being the Democratic-caucusing Joe Lieberman, who, having received in the past four years $423,644 from insurance companies, $359,870 from health professionals, and $297,090 from "pharmaceuticals/health products," according to OpenSecrets.org, is now selflessly "skeptical" of a public option in any health-care reform bill.

So, bingo, right there, on just this one issue, you see, the Dems are down to 59.

The online publication then moved on to educating Markos Moulitsas, of the Daily Kos, who, on MSNBC yesterday, said "Let’s do what the American people have asked Democrats to do, and let’s not use any excuses like this 60-vote nonsense, which is now obviously no longer an issue."

That "statement proves," wrote CQ's David Nather, that "Moulitsas doesn’t really understand the Senate. But there are lots of people who will agree with him."

David, count me among the willfully ignorant. Because you know what, David? When it comes to the paramount, three-score-old issue of comprehensive health care, Mr. Moulitsas and I, as well as millions of other Americans, do not, to be really blunt about it, much give a sympathetic shit about the theoretical physics and higher mathematics of Democratic seat-counting.

No, we hired these clowns to do a job -- one which, by the way, they, as a party, had already promised to do.

When they hire staffers, do they accept excuse after excuse when pressing tasks are left undone? Of course not. They can them. Results -- that's what the good senators demand, and no excuses are allowed.

Well guess what, senators. It's your turn. We don't care how you do it, we don't care how many corrupt bargains you must cut, we don't care whom among you has to be blackmailed into doing the right thing on health care. Just do your damn jobs, as you promised you would. And no excuses.

Dick Cheney's unrelenting self-destruction

As American troops initiated their pullback from Iraq's urban centers earlier this week, in the ultimate pursuit of a near-total withdrawal by 2011, former Vice-President Dick Cheney told The Washington Times' "America's Morning News" radio program that "he is a strong believer in Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and that the general is doing what needs to be done," according to the Times.

OK, so you know what's coming. BUT ...

"What [Odierno] says concerns me," said Cheney. "That there is still a continuing problem. One might speculate that insurgents are waiting as soon as they get an opportunity to launch more attacks. I hope the Iraqis can deal with it. At some point they have to stand on their own, but I would not want to see the U.S. waste all the tremendous sacrifice that has gotten us to this point."

I no longer see any plausible alternative explanation for Cheney's unendingly irresponsible, reprehensible, "I'm saying this now for an 'I told you so' moment" comments than that's precisely what he wants to see. And that in itself marks a major and profound degradation of American politics.

As much as I, in addition to roughly 80 percent of all Americans, despise Dick Cheney, I resisted that belief; it was, until lately, unimaginable that this nation's once-second-highest official could actually yearn for the slaughter of U.S. troops, just so that he could be proven correct in his vilifications of his successors' broader policies.

The inconvenient details behind Cheney's slithering malignancy -- for example, that the pullback's timing was his own administration's doing in its status-of-forces agreement with Iraq; or, of course, that it was chiefly his lies which sucked us into this unnecessary, wasteful war to begin with -- are insignificant. Reason, facts, and reality have never afflicted the former vice president's thinking. He operates on fear, and the greatest fear today is his own: he knows, as does the world, that Iraq's impending explosion and reentry into unbridled sectarian atrocities will expose his and George Bush's "successful" surge as the politico-military disaster it is.

But, Dick being Dick, he is casting pre-blame for what was always predictable, and predicted.

Most dishonorable men have at least a few redeeming qualities, and along those lines I hereby make this further prediction: America's future and favorite parlor game will consist of trying to name just one in Richard B. Cheney.