1 Boring Old Man

In one sense, we’ve read this story as a Profile in Courage – Jim Comey, Jack Goldsmith, and Robert Mueller standing up to the President and Vice President, defending the law of the land – doing their jobs. But I almost wish that they hadn’t engaged Condi to talk to the President – that they had resigned. Had James Comey, Jack Goldsmith, Robert Mueller, and maybe John Ashcroft resigned en masse, surely the reason would have come out. Meaning the whole John Yoo Memo debacle might have been known earlier, the NSA Unwarranted Domestic Spying Program might have been revealed,  we might even have found out about the Torture Program. Recall that all of this came before the 2004 Presidential election, two weeks after Abu Ghraib was made public.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
                  ^{t.s.eliot – burnt norton}

The Stimulus Trap
New York Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN
July 9, 2009

As soon as the Obama administration-in-waiting announced its stimulus plan — this was before Inauguration Day — some of us worried that the plan would prove inadequate. And we also worried that it might be hard, as a political matter, to come back for another round. Unfortunately, those worries have proved justified. The bad employment report for June made it clear that the stimulus was, indeed, too small. But it also damaged the credibility of the administration’s economic stewardship. There’s now a real risk that President Obama will find himself caught in a political-economic trap…

As I said, I was afraid this would happen. But that’s water under the bridge. The question is what the president and his economic team should do now. It’s perfectly O.K. for the administration to defend what it’s done so far. It’s fine to have Vice President Joseph Biden touring the country, highlighting the many good things the stimulus money is doing. It’s also reasonable for administration economists to call for patience, and point out, correctly, that the stimulus was never expected to have its full impact this summer, or even this year…

What Mr. Obama needs to do is level with the American people. He needs to admit that he may not have done enough on the first try. He needs to remind the country that he’s trying to steer the country through a severe economic storm, and that some course adjustments — including, quite possibly, another round of stimulus — may be necessary.

What he needs, in short, is to do for economic policy what he’s already done for race relations and foreign policy — talk to Americans like adults.

This has been kind of hard for me. Two of my favorite celebrities – Paul Krugman and Barack Obama – pitted against each other. From the start, Krugman has been saying "not enough!" and I’ve agreed. On the other side of the fence, the Republicans have screamed bloody murder about Communism and Socialism and everything else. I don’t know if Obama could’ve brought off what Krugman proposes. The opposition point is insane – running up the debt, tax increases, etc. They are in no position to scream about the debt or tax increases, however, they have a point – even if their reason for making it stinks. If the Stimulus fails, it’s a disaster. And now we’re beginning to hear Hoover analogies [Barack Hoover Obama]. Truth be told, Herbert Hoover took the hit for Calvin Coolidge, who was the problem in the first place. And I’ve always doubted that F.D.R. could’ve done what he did until things got so bad that there was no choice.

So, I’ve hoped that the truth lies between my two heros – Paul Krugman and Barack Obama. That Obama undershot out of necessity and that Krugman is too Keynesian and overshot his estimate. And that there’s a broad middle that will be the end result.

My fear, however, is that the excesses of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush years have caught up with us, and that the argument between Paul Krugman and Barack Obama is moot. It’s time for America to pay for her mistakes, and there really is no "fix" at this point. Sorry, but that’s both my intuition and my fear [though hope springs eternal]…

Palin: How she gained control and then lost it
Alaska Dispatch
By Donald Craig Mitchell
09 July 2009

"the first sitting governor in United States history to walk away"

 

It has been almost a week since Sarah Palin rocked the news cycle by announcing her intention to quit her job as Governor of Alaska. Since then, pundits from Karl Rove on the right to Mark Shields on the left have offered diverse answers to the two questions that every Alaskan has been asking every other Alaskan: Is Sarah Palin really the Whack Job that Tina Fey made her out to be? If she’s not, then What Could the Woman Have been Thinking?

[snip]

After watching the Friday news conference, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson said that he thought Sarah "seemed more like a spoiled celebrity than a serious public official."

What Gerson got wrong is that Sarah is a spoiled celebrity. But it’s not entirely her fault that she’s spoiled. Because the media attention that has swirled around Alaska’s governor-girl for the past ten months has altered the brain chemistry of a narcissistic personality that somewhere way back along the line was damaged decades previous.

An Australian friend of mine has theorized that Sarah’s odd behavior suggests that she has been afflicted since childhood with Reactive Attachment Disorder, a rare psychological condition that is described in volume four of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders. Many of the symptoms do seem to fit: superficially engaging and charming, lacks cause and effect thinking, inappropriately demanding, engages in lying, lacks a conscience, has poor impulse control, has abnormal speech patterns, etc. But I am not a psychiatrist. So I don’t know if that’s Sarah’s problem.

What I do know is that in 2002 when she began her statewide political career, Sarah Palin already was a legend in her own mind whose it’s-all-about-me sense of entitlement already was pathological…

Was The CIA Hiding Cheney’s "Executive Assassination Ring"?
Huffington Post
by Sam Stein
07- 9-09

The revelation from seven Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee that they were misled about a critical CIA program has sparked a debate that touches on the most sensitive areas of national security policy. What program, exactly, was being kept secret? No one is answering the question, citing the sensitivities that come when discussing classified intelligence matters. But in various conversations with sources on and off the Hill, two general theories have emerged. The first is that the CIA was keeping quiet about the use of waterboarding on terrorist suspects. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she was misled by the intelligence agency on that very subject. It’s also the story told to the Huffington Post by a source with knowledge of the letter the seven House Democrats penned to CIA chief Leon Panetta, in which they complained about being misled.

But the dates don’t line up. In their letter, the lawmakers note that members of Congress were "misled" for "a number of years, from 2001 to this week." Pelosi, however, contended that the CIA lied to her about the use of harsh interrogation techniques during the fall of 2002. And in a conversation with the Huffington Post, Rep. Anna Eshoo, (D-Calif.), one of the letter’s signatories, said that Panetta "stopped the program the day after he was informed." Waterboarding was ended as a practice during the Bush years.

So what are the "significant actions" that these seven lawmakers insist were kept from Congress? Another theory being bandied about concerns an "executive assassination ring" that was allegedly set up and answered to former Vice President Dick Cheney. The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, building off earlier reporting from the New York Times, dropped news of the possibility that such a ring existed in a March 2009 discussion sponsored by the University of Minnesota.

"It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," Hersh said. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him… "Congress has no oversight of it," he added. "It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths. Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us"…

Asked if this was the basis of her letter to Panetta, Eshoo said she could not discuss what was a "highly classified program." She did, however, note that when Panetta told House Intelligence Committee members what it was that had been kept secret, "the whole committee was stunned, even Republicans." A Republican committee member told Who Runs Gov‘s Greg Sargent it was something they hadn’t heard before. Panetta himself was kept in the dark about the program – whatever it was – having only been told about the classified activity on June 23. "His own top leadership didn’t even brief him that this program existed," said Eshoo.

The day after he found out, on June 24, the CIA header briefed members of Congress about the matter. Two days later, on June 26, the seven lawmakers wrote Panetta asking him to publicly correct an earlier statement he had made, in which he declared that it was not the CIA’s "policy or practice to mislead Congress"…

She did, however, note that when Panetta told House Intelligence Committee members what it was that had been kept secret, "the whole committee was stunned, even Republicans." A Republican committee member told Who Runs Gov‘s Greg Sargent it was something they hadn’t heard before. Panetta himself was kept in the dark about the program – whatever it was – having only been told about the classified activity on June 23. "His own top leadership didn’t even brief him that this program existed," said Eshoo. The day after he found out, on June 24, the CIA header briefed members of Congress about the matter. Two days later, on June 26, the seven lawmakers wrote Panetta asking him to publicly correct an earlier statement he had made, in which he declared that it was not the CIA’s "policy or practice to mislead Congress."

GOP Rep: Panetta Told Us Something CIA Hadn’t Told Congress
The Plum Line
Greg Sargent’s blog
July 9, 2009

I just got off the phone with a GOP Congressman who was in that Intel committee meeting where CIA director Leon Panetta allegedly revealed that his agency had misled Congress for years. It was a cryptic conversation, but the Congressman did confirm Panetta revealed something to the members of Congress that the CIA hadn’t divulged to Congress before.

“He brought a matter to our attention that had not been brought to the committee’s attention before,” the Congressman, Mac Thornberry, told me.

The claim could be significant, and coming from a Republican it could go some way towards bolstering certain aspects of the assertions being made by Dems. Late yesterday, the news broke that seven Dems on the Intel committee charged that in closed-door testimony, Panetta revealed that the C.I.A. concealed “significant actions” from Congress from 2001 until last month.

Coburn blasts ‘untruths’ from Ensign mistress’ husband
Politico
By MANU RAJU
7/9/09

Hampton suggested that Coburn urged Ensign to write a February 2008 letter apologizing to Hampton’s wife, Cindy, a campaign aide to Ensign. But on Thursday, Coburn said: “He is in error, and he’s manipulating the situation and you are all buying it.” “I was never present when a letter was written, never made any assessment of paying anybody anything. Those are untruths. Those are absolute untruths”…

In the meantime, the scandal has touched Coburn, a fellow Christian conservative.

“Dr. Coburn did everything he could to encourage Sen. Ensign to end his affair and to persuade Sen. Ensign to repair the damage he had caused to his own marriage and the Hampton’s marriage,” Coburn’s office said in a remarkable public rebuke of his friend and fellow Christian conservative. “Had Sen. Ensign followed Dr. Coburn’s advice, this episode would have ended, and been made public, long ago.”

On Thursday, Coburn declined to go into detail about his conversations with Ensign.

“I’m not going to go into that – that’s privileged communications. I’m not never going to talk about that anybody. … I never will, not to a court of law, not to an Ethics Committee, not to anybody – because that is privileged communication that I will never reveal to anybody.” And the senator lashed out at the media for continuing to focus on the matter and for helping “tear apart” the Hamptons and the Ensigns, who each have three kids and have known each other for years. “You’ve got two families that are back together and you guys are going to help tear them apart. What do you think their kids are thinking about what you’re writing right now? You’re helping tear apart two families that are back together – you need to quit.”

Anatomical Controversy?
07.09.09
By Josh Marshall

Now that Sen. Coburn (R-OK) has said he will not answer any questions about his conversations with Sen. Ensign (R-NV) because he was acting as his physician (and spiritual counselor), TPM Reader DE reminds us that Dr. Coburn is an OB/Gyn. A deeper scandal than we’d ever imagined?

Judge not, that ye be not judged.^{Matthew 7:1}

"… I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness… If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think that I am a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me…. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

Ensign Acknowledges Mistress Payment 
Washington Post
The Fix

Nevada Sen. John Ensign has acknowledged his parents gave his mistress nearly $100,000. Nevada Sen. John Ensign has acknowledged that his parents paid his mistress and her family $96,000 in April 2008, according to a statement made by his attorney moments ago.