1 Boring Old Man

Sources Question Governor’s Story
Gov. Mark Sanford Says He Disappeared To Go Hiking
June 23, 2009

GREENVILLE, S.C. — WYFF News 4 has received exclusive information from sources who say they have information about Gov. Mark Sanford’s whereabouts during a mysterious absence over the past several days.

Sanford’s wife Jenny said she last talked to him on Thursday, and though she didn’t know where he is, she said she wasn’t concerned. She said he had left to have time to write. Joel Sawyer, communications director for the governor’s office, then said the governor had been on the Appalachian Trail. Sawyer said staffers heard from Sanford on Tuesday morning and the governor plans to return Wednesday. Sawyer said the governor is surprised by all the attention.On Tuesday, sources told News 4’s Nigel Robertson that a state vehicle is missing and was tracked down, not to the Appalachian Trail, but to the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta. Sources told Robertson that a federal agent spotted Sanford in the airport boarding a plane. Robertson was told that the governor was not accompanied by security detail.Sanford has been out of reach for more than four days, including Father’s Day…

Car believed to be Sanford’s found at South Carolina airport
June 23, 2009
From CNN Political Producer Peter Hamby

The car is believed to be the one Sanford used to leave town.

COLUMBIA, South Carolina (CNN) – The black Chevy Suburban believed to have been used by South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to leave town has been found in the parking lot of Columbia Metropolitan Airport. CNN was alerted to its location by a law enforcement official.

Sanford is expected to return to Columbia tomorrow after a mysterious six-day absence. His office has said the governor, a possible 2012 presidential candidate, has been hiking the Appalachian Trail to clear his head after a tough legislative session.

The SUV is outfitted with blue police lights and two-way radio. Inside the vehicle: A baseball cap, running shoes, sunscreen, a pair of shorts, a canvas bag and a sleeping bag. A parking permit for the school attended by Sanford’s children is visible on the windshield.

Argentina, Not Appalachia: Lost Governor Is Found
New York Times
By ROBBIE BROWN
June 24, 2009

The mystery of the missing governor has taken another plot twist.

A South Carolina newspaper is reporting that Gov. Mark Sanford said he has been in Buenos Aires, Argentina, since Thursday, not hiking the Appalachian Trail, as his staff had told reporters.

Mr. Sanford’s staff had been unable to reach him for four days, starting on Thursday, and his wife had told The Associated Press that she did not know his whereabouts on Monday. But a spokesman for the governor told reporters on Monday night that Mr. Sanford had been reached, was hiking an unspecified portion of the Appalachian Trail and would return to the office on Wednesday.

In an interview with The State newspaper of Columbia, S.C., Mr. Sanford said he had taken an unplanned trip to the South American country to recharge after a difficult legislative session in which he battled with lawmakers over accepting a portion of the federal stimulus funding.

He had considered hiking the trail, he said. “But I said ‘no’ I wanted to do something exotic,” Mr. Sanford told The State. “It’s a great city.”

Mr. Sanford could not be reached for comment, although his spokesman, Joel Sawyer, said the governor would hold a news conference at 2 p.m. today.

The governor was interviewed by The State upon his return from Argentina in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta…

 

But I understand some things. The people of Iran are people like us, and they’re mad as hell about how things are going right now. Whatever is happening there is both none of our business, and is of great interest, because in these last few days, all of the propaganda from the Bush years has been rendered inoperative. I don’t think it even matters what those people in the streets think about the future of Iranian-American relations. It doesn’t look to me like they’re thinking about that at all. What matters is that they feel that they have been wronged, and I doubt very seriously that whatever we thought we were going to be dealing was even in the ball park.

Until it becomes clear, all we can do is watch in awe as this incredible story unfolds – and it is an incredible story. From today:

My friends tease me about my "theories." It’s kind of a hobby, piddling with theories to see if they fit. And one of my favorite theories of all time in the Group Theory of Wilfrid Bion [or at least my version of it]. The part I resonate with has to do with the formation of a cohesive group – something that I’ve seen to be true over and over. There’s no precedent for using such a theory to describe a group as large as a country, but I am undeterred.

Bion was talking about the process that goes on in the formation of an unstructured therapy group. His basic premise is that when groups of people come together, a lot of emotion is mobilized – fear and aggression being two big ones. He understood the dynamics of group formation in terms of these two emotions. Since the members of an unstructured group have nothing to coalesce around, they will begin to search for something. So a variety of things begin to happen. Some member, usually someone with a quirky personality, will begin to get on people’s nerves. And the group will begin to coalesce around getting rid of that person [called the scapegoat]. Or the group might discover a shared prejudice and begin to mobilize around this shared dislike. Bion’s point is that in response to the fear of being rejected by the group, members become aggressive and "rejecting." If the group is allowed to eject a member, it becomes a killing group and may continue in that mode forever. Such a group is unsafe. If the group is allowed to form around a shared enemy, it becomes a hate group – also unsafe. Other dangers include the formation of subgroups, like on those reality shows on t.v. – again unsafe.

So the main job of the group leader in the early days of a group is to keep the mobilized aggression of the group from finding a target, and it’s a daunting task in practice. What is the reward for succeeding as a leader? Sooner or later, the aggression of the group will be turned on the leader. In practice, this is not much fun, because by the time this happens, the group will have developed a number of resentments towards the leader, and the attack will be aimed at something the leader has actually done – some real insensitivity or error along the way. It’s a peculiar reward for success in defending others to be the brunt of a unified attack, but it’s required. An effective leader must be brought down to size. The only task for the leader at that point is to survive, by no means guaranteed. If the leader prevents subgrouping, scapegoating, and being personally expelled, the reward is a group that has tamed its collective aggression and is readsy to get down to work helping [and loving] each other. Such therapy groups are a powerful agent for change and last for years.

You can over-ride these dynamics by being an autocratic leader, or by allowing the group to have a shared enemy. But such groups rarely bring about therapeutic results. They just play "follow the leader" or "get the enemy." My extrapolation to presidential politics whether warranted or not should be obvious from the way I told the story. Jimmy Carter succeeded in becoming the focus of attack, but was expelled. Bush/Cheney/Addington were paradigmatic autocrats leading us to ruin. Obama has positioned himself to be the kind of leader that has the potential to be effective and bring about change. His opponents have battered him and battered him, yet he has refused to become the darling of his supporters. He’s continued to reach out to the dogs that bite his hand, in spite of their viciousness. He is being attacked from all sides, has taken a hit in his popularity/approval ratings, yet he moves along carefully staying as neutral as possible in the face of a lot of pressure. I think it will get much worse before it gets better, and I think he has more than a few rounds to lose along the way. But his trajectory is aiming towards survival. I, for one, think he’ll make it. And maybe, just maybe, he’ll move us closer to being a "safe", "non-killing", "non-scapegoating" group. I refer to such large, safe groups as "a country" – as in "united we stand, divided we fall."

Drew Weston is a colleague of mine and one of my favorite political writers. His book [The Political Brain] and the books of George Lakoff [The Political Mind] have, in my opinion, been the antedote to the madness of the Conservative Revolution of The Reaga/Bush/Gingrich/Bush insanity. Drew recommends that Obama be stronger in reminding us how we got here – how the Financial Institutions and the Conservatives brought us to the brink of destruction. There are lots of people saying the same thing from other quarters – Obama should take a stronger stand on …blah, blah, blah…

I’ve avoided saying much about Obama’s approach to things. I’d just end up being monotonous, an apologist of sorts. But I would like to compromise that position here for just a moment. Barack Obama has undergone the most vicious attack from an opposing political party I’ve seen in my lifetime. From where I sit, it has been shameful. The Republican Party; Rush Limbaugh; the former Vice President; A 24 hour filth machine called Fox News. No matter what he does, the wheels of the attack machine rev up to make it into some dramatic global failure of character. A friend reported that one of our neighbors  [a talk radio type who chews tobacco] stopped by his yard on his ATV and began to rant about that "n—-r president," something I haven’t heard in years – even here in the South. It has been unmerciful. Everything Obama has done has been spun into Socialism, or Communism, or Islamic-leanings, or worse, some kind of racial epitepth – such bull-shit the likes of which I’ve never experienced in my days on this planet. And the attacks haven’t just come from the Right. The Left is asking Obama to be their champion for Gay Marriage and any number of other things – many of which I support.

However, I don’t agree that Obama should be "stronger," or more forceful in fighting the Right, or more pro-active in championing the Left, or, in fact, more anything. Our government has been run on political strategies for far too long. No one is fooled by strategies, at least no one who has any sense. The Bush/Cheney Administration was only strategies – campaigns to get us to think a certain way. And they succeeded temporarily and almost destroyed the country [I hope "almost" is right]. Strategies create an audience that is always listening for what’s behind the words – a paranoid audience. If the American people need to be reminded who got us here, the American people are fools. If the American people need to be reminded that the massive spending is because of what came before, the American people are fools. If the American people can’t see through the strategy of the current attacks, the American people are fools.

I don’t think that the American people are fools, nor does Barack Obama. We just have a lot of fools – actually more than we need. I say, "Stay the course." I say, come out swinging in the midterms. I say, make the right speeches at the right times, just like you’ve done before. If the American people are fools, that’s too bad. There’s no strategy to deal with that. If Obama is going to succeed [not guaranteed], he’ll succeed by playing it very straight. So I don’t disagree with Drew exactly. He’s giving good advice. I just don’t think Obama will take it, and I’m kind of glad. I prefer this kind of audacity:

Confidential memo reveals US plan to provoke an invasion of Iraq
The Observer
21 June 2009

A confidential record of a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq, outlining their intention to go to war without a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the official inquiry into the UK’s role in toppling Saddam Hussein. The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction [WMD] they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover". Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions. The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be "brought out" to give a public presentation on Saddam’s WMD or that someone might assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed even without a second resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair told Bush he was "solidly with the president".

The five-page document, written by Blair’s foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, and copied to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK ambassador to the UN, Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, the chief of the defence staff, Admiral Lord Boyce, and the UK’s ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, outlines how Bush told Blair he had decided on a start date for the war. Paraphrasing Bush’s comments at the meeting, Manning, noted: "The start date for the military campaign was now pencilled in for 10 March. This was when the bombing would begin"…

The memo notes there had been a shift in the two men’s thinking on Iraq by late January 2003 and that preparing for war was now their priority. "Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," Manning writes. This was despite the fact Blair that had yet to receive advice on the legality of the war from the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, which did not arrive until 7 March 2003 – 13 days before the bombing campaign started. In his article today, Sands says the memo raises questions about the selection of the chair of the inquiry. Sir John Chilcott sat on the 2004 Butler inquiry, which examined the reliability of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, and would have been privy to the document’s contents – and the doubts about WMD running to the highest levels of the US and UK governments…

WHITEHOUSE:  And you have to get to a certain place before you go on.  And we‘re not quite at that place so that decision hasn‘t been made.  I hope it gets made.  I think it will be made.  There is, I think, justification for it to be made. But it does raise additional issues about getting beyond the purview of the intelligence committee and into what the Bush administration contended was protected by executive privilege. 

MADDOW:  Right.

WHITEHOUSE:  So conceivably, other investigations, executive branch investigations, might have gotten under way by that point and against an executive branch investigation, executive privilege doesn‘t apply.  So I guess, stand by.

"One came in a combative memo to the Justice Department. It was signed "Alberto R. Gonzales," but the composition had all the familiar Addington tropes. Comey and his staff called it the "fuck-you memo." It rejected every point in the Thursday-night letter that Goldsmith and Philbin had brought Gonzales at home. Oddly out of sync with what Bush had told Mueller in person, the document reiterated the president’s sole authority to decide the law and reasserted the lawfulness of every element in the program. Any adjustments would come for strictly operational reasons, at the president’s own discretion. Comey read it in his fourth floor office, then looked up at his chief of staff. He summarized, "So, ‘You suck. You don’t matter. But by coincidence, as it happens, we’re going to make some changes.’" If this was stictly for the record, that was one thing. If the White House was backpedaling on Bush’s promise, quite another. Gonzales called Justice and left a message, practically announcing that the memo was not his. "Tell the DAG not to overreact," the message said. "We’re going to make the changes."

---

^{Gellman, Barton. Angler. p. 321.}

Gellman doesn’t say this part. In the literature about people with Narcissistic Personality Disorders, there’s an observation made by many clinicians. While such people are usually unempathic with others, and discount any opinions of others, they generally have an "idol" – some idealized "other" who they count on and follow blindly. I suspect that in Cheney’s case, that person was David Addington — an arrogant, contemptuous, jerk. And that’s tragic, because David Addington is sick as a goat. Please observe:

WaPo Loses Its Top Web Columnist
Harpers
By Scott Horton
June 19, 11:00 AM, 2009

For years, the best thing going at the Washington Post’s website has been Dan Froomkin’s “White House Watch” (originally called “White House Briefing.”) In fact, aside from the need to link to pieces from their print edition, there has been no other consistent reason to visit the website. Froomkin bored into the Bush Administration’s selling of the war with Iraq, its introduction of warrantless surveillance, and its treatment of prisoners, particularly the policies that encouraged torture and official cruelty. On each of these points, he was a strong counterpoint to the official editorial page voice of WaPo, which was an essential vehicle for selling the Iraq War and for soliciting support for Bush-era policies, even while it occasionally feigned criticism of them. With the arrival of the Obama team, Froomkin hasn’t let up for a second, a clear demonstration that he doesn’t play the partisan political games of old-media hacks like David Broder who clog the WaPo roster. Froomkin’s handling of the torture issue, among other things, consistently brought far deeper insights to the issues raised than the Post’s increasingly fact-challenged editorial page. Froomkin was particularly strong in discussing legal matters, a fact I link to his brother Michael, a prominent law professor. Froomkin’s work was heavily read and circulated. Indeed, as Glenn Greenwald notes, Froomkin was the author of three of the ten most closely followed columns published at WaPo. His work was consistently well regarded. So why would WaPo say good-bye to its premier web writer?

The answer to that question certainly lies with Fred Hiatt and his plans to push the WaPo editorial page to the Neocon right. Anyone in doubt about that should just have a glance at the line-up in today’s paper: Charles Krauthammer, Paul Wolfowitz, David Ignatius, all in a coordinated attack on Obama for not intervening in Iran, plus Michael Hayden, telling us that we will all die in our sleep if torture-mongers are held accountable for their crimes. Alone among the voices at WaPo, Froomkin has had the temerity to remind the Neocons of their mistakes and call them on their falsehoods. Charles Krauthammer, for instance, recently threw a fit when Froomkin dissected his use of the intellectually dishonest ticking-bomb scenario. Froomkin noted that the ticking-bomb scenario was a fiction from the world of Hollywood. Which is true: the scenario has never occurred in the totality of human experience. Krauthammer recently made plain what he was up to when he praised Fox News for engineering an “alternate reality.” Unable to refute Froomkin, Krauthammer used the approach of a bully. He called Froomkin “stupid,” and from that point it seems Froomkin’s days at WaPo were numbered. Froomkin’s departure accentuates a clear trend: WaPo’s opinion pages are emerging as a Neocon remainder bin.New York Times op-ed column went unrenewed, and unknown Neocon chatterboxes regularly find a hearty welcome in its pages. William Kristol found harbor there after his The dismissal of Froomkin seems doubly curious given the WaPo editorial page’s notorious problem with factually inaccurate columns over the last eight years. The best-known problems have been on the right side of the ledger, with Neocons selling a war with Iraq and my favorite Tory, George Will, embarrassing himself with bogus claims on global warming. Froomkin has had no issues with his accuracy–indeed, his accuracy seems to drive the Neocons nuts…

There’s no doubt that Froomkin’s pieces, which frequently raked the Neocons over the coals and challenged some of their counter-factual op-eds, were a thorn in the side of the forces that shape opinion at the paper. And that without a doubt cost him his job. But it cost WaPo its best web columnist.

Republicans urge Obama to get tougher on Iran
Washington Post
by Kevin Drawbaugh and Paul Simao

Hopes for US-Iran Ties Imperiled by Election Turmoil, Analysts Warn
FOXNews
by James Rosen