1 Boring Old Man

A lot of bloggers are turning their sharp tongues on various Democratic candidates, or on Harry Reid, or on Nancy Pelosi, or on the Democratic Congress in general. Not me. With their bare Majority, turncoats like Lieberman, the blue dog Democrats, the persistant Conservative edge in the electorate, the Republican Dirty Tricks Machine, and the embers of the Religious Right – I’ll settle for whatever we can get. Bush and Cheney spent six years building a formibable firewall. They control both the Justice Department and Supreme Court. All I expected was investigations, and Waxman, Conyers, Leahy, Schumer, etc. are keeping on keeping on. More power to them.

If the Democrats win in 2008 and don’t deliver, that’s another story. We’ll have to form a Progressive Party. But right now, the Democrats are still swimming upstream. Let’s help!

Who is my favorite Democratic Candidate? The answer is Yes!

White House Declares Office Off-Limits
^{Administrator of Missing E-Mails Not Subject to Open-Records Law, It Says}

The Bush administration argued in court papers this week that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act as part of its effort to fend off a civil lawsuit seeking the release of internal documents about a large number of e-mails missing from White House servers.

The claim, made in a motion filed Tuesday by the Justice Department, is at odds with a depiction of the office on the White House’s own Web site. As of yesterday, the site listed the Office of Administration as one of six presidential entities subject to the open-records law, which is commonly known by its abbreviation, FOIA.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, said that given the previous ruling on the NSC, the White House may be successful in its bid to close off its administrative office to public scrutiny.

"It’s obnoxious, and it’s a gesture of defiance against the norms of open government," Aftergood said. "But it turns out that a White House body can be an agency one day and cease to be one the next day, as absurd as it may seem."

The donors who are financing the new multi-million-dollar TV ad campaign arguing against a withdrawal from Iraq include a Who’s Who of former Bush Administration ambassadors (to plum assignments like France, Italy, and Malta); a least one of Bush’s original Pioneers; the man ranked by Forbes (in 2006) as the third-richest American; and, of course, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.

msnbc.com 

from Talking Points Memo

…We are bigger than Iraq.

By that I do not mean we, as America, are bigger or better than Iraq as a country. I mean that that sum of our national existence is not bound up in what happens there. The country will go on. Whatever happens, we’ll recover from it. And whatever might happen, there are things that matter much more to this country’s future — like whether we have a functioning military any more, whether our economy is wrecked, whether this country tears itself apart over this catastrophe. But we’ll go on and look back at this and judge what happened.

Not so for the president. For him, this is it. He’s not bigger than this. His entire legacy as president is bound up in Iraq. Which is another way of saying that his legacy is pretty clearly an irrecoverable shambles. That is why, as the folly of the enterprise becomes more clear, he must continually puff it up into more and more melodramatic and world-historical dimensions. A century long ideological struggle and the like. For the president a one in a thousand shot at some better outcome is well worth it, no matter what the cost. Because at least that’s a one in a thousand shot at not ending his presidency with the crushing verdict history now has in store. It’s also worth just letting things keep on going as they are forever because, like Micawber, something better might turn up. Going double or nothing by expanding the war into Iran might be worth it too for the same reason. For him, how can it get worse?

And when you boil all this down what it comes down to is that the president now has very different interests than the country he purports to lead.

At least in Viet Nam, our motives weren’t suspect. We just made a mistake. We thought we were heroically fighting Communism, instead of intervening in a Civil War. In Iraq, we were unseating a blowhard we’d already beaten, and causing a Civil War – and our interests were tainted [oil].

^{Trex – Firedoglake}

Senior DoJ Official Resigns from Civil Rights Post

Yet another resignation from the Justice Department. Wan Kim, Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, announced today that he’ll be leaving at the end of the month, according to a statement from the Justice Department.

Kim took the helm at the troubled Civil Rights Division in late 2005, just at the tail end of the stormiest period in the Division, when lawyers left the voting rights section, and other sections, in droves. Kim, like his predecessor, Alex Acosta, has never been anywhere near as controversial a figure as Division appointees Bradley Schlozman and Hans von Spakovsky, the two fingered by former Department lawyers as leading efforts to politicize the Division, the voting section in particular.

Nevertheless, the Division continued in the direction set by the prior Bush years under Kim’s direction, often pursuing causes favored by conservatives (such as religious discrimination and human trafficking) to the detriment of the Division’s traditional emphasis (such as protecting African-Americans from discrimination).

Kim follows a flurry of senior resignations in the past few months, including former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, his chief of staff Michael Elston, White House liaison Monica Goodling, chief of staff Kyle Sampson, Acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer, and [Bradley] Schlozman, who had moved to a spot in the office that oversees U.S. attorneys.

The End of the Month

Um, today is August 23. The "end of the month," August 31, is approximately 6 business days away.

Where I come from in the business world, when a top executive quits with less than a month’s notice, he’s trying to hide something, usually the imminent collapse of his business unit. When a top executive quits with less than two week’s notice, that thing he’s hiding may involve legal repercussions.

Mr. Kim is getting out of Dodge in an awfully big hurry.

You know, for a Department that’s done absolutely nothing wrong, they sure are leaving like rats jumping off a sinking ship. And, as emptywheel points out, Mr. Kim [a career staffer], is in a really big hurry to leave. Except for the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, the lifespan of a DOJ official is like a seventeen year Cicada – very short. Who’s left besides Gonzales and the Janitorial Staff? It looks to me like everyone involved flown the coop – including the ones at the White House [Sara Taylor, Harriet Miers, Karl Rove]. I guess their U.S. Attorney Plan didn’t work out so well…

 
^{Can you pick the one that’s still there?}

Sometimes you read something that just "clicks." KagroX’s post [Reversing Watergate] on The Next Hurrah was such an article for me. I had read Jane Mayer‘s article on David Addington in The New Yorker last year. I had noted Steve Clemons‘ review of this article and his comments about Cheney. And I have read and re-read the various Cheney political biographies. But it hadn’t all quite come together for me. KagroX begins by reviewing Mayer:

Remember what The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer told us last year, in her article on Dick Cheney’s now-Chief of Staff, David Addington:

He thought the Presidency was too weakened. He’s a believer that in foreign policy the executive is meant to be quite powerful.” These views were shared by Dick Cheney, who served as chief of staff in the Ford Administration. “On a range of executive-power issues, Cheney thought that Presidents from Nixon onward yielded too quickly,” Michael J. Malbin, a political scientist who has advised Cheney on the issue of executive power, said. Kenneth Adelman, who was a high-ranking Pentagon official under Ford, said that the fall of Saigon, in 1975, was “very painful for Dick. He believed that Vietnam could have been saved—maybe—if Congress hadn’t cut off funding. He was against that kind of interference.”

And how Mayer confirmed this with Jane Harman?

Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who has spent considerable time working with Cheney and Addington in recent years, believes that they are still fighting Watergate. “They’re focussed on restoring the Nixon Presidency,” she said. “They’ve persuaded themselves that, following Nixon, things went all wrong.” She said that in meetings Addington is always courtly and pleasant. But when it comes to accommodating Congress “his answer is always no.”

And how Cheney himself confirmed it, too?

In a revealing interview that Cheney gave last December to reporters travelling with him to Oman, he explained, “I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of Presidential power and authority. . . . A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both, in the seventies, served to erode the authority I think the President needs.” Further, Cheney explained, it was his express aim to restore the balance of power.

Dick Cheney is trying to take us back to the Nixon days, the time before Watergate brought that era to an early end – in his mind, apparently, a golden age. I’d read it, even said it, but seeing it in black and white drove it home for me.

Dick Cheney was knocking around like the rest of us back then – going to school [at least in part, to avoid the Draft]. So while I was in Medical School, he was doing some kind of graduate work [never completed]. When he was no longer draftable, he went to Washington as an Intern. His first job was as Donald Rumsfeld’s Assistant in the Office of Economic Oppurtunity in the Nixon Administration. Their task was to basically keep the lawyers from filing cases [to shut it down]. When Nixon resigned, Cheney became Ford’s Deputy Chief of Staff, then Chief of Staff when Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense. When Ford lost to Carter, he went back to Wyoming and ran for the House of Representatives where he served for 10 years as, by far, its most Conservative member. As a Congressman, he voted and lobbied for every Reagen policy and voted against anything that "smelled" Liberal [Head Start, the Clean Air Act, MLK’s birthday as a national holiday, etc.]. In 1988, he was picked by George H.W. Bush to be Secretary of Defense, overseeing the First Gulf War.

What clicks for me is that he came out of the Nixon era disgruntled about what had happened. As Ford’s Chief of Staff, he urged Ford to not give in to Congress. He was a believer that we could win in Viet Nam and dismayed when Saigon fell. Bush’s recent speech with the analogies to Viet Nam could’ve come right out of Cheney’s mouth. In Congress, he opposed the post-Watergate Reforms. As Secretary of Defense, he was a "Hawk," and while he publicly supported George H.W. Bush in limiting the First Gulf War, one doubts that his support was genuine.

If you weren’t there, it would be hard to imagine how devisive the political climate was in those days. Civil Rights workers beaten or killed. Student anti-war protesters beaten or killed. Almost universal polarization in the political electorate. Hatred abounded – the ugly kind, on both sides. For those of us coming into young adulthood during those years, that period left its mark on us for all times. I know I still measure political matters with the same ruler I had in the end of the 60’s. I’m pretty sure Dick Cheney has his same ruler too [though ours obviously differ].

He’s still fighting with those old dragons. He became skilled as a Congressman in the political ways of the Legislative Branch, becoming Minority Whip right before being picked as the Secretary of Defense. But, even though his longest stint in government was as a Member of the House of Representatives, he has always been an Executive Branch man. I think he sees our government as a political struggle for power between the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch. So he resists and opposes any "Oversight" by Congress whether it matters or not.

In many ways, he reminds me of another of my least favorite politicians – a man on the other side. Lyndon Baines Johnson was a longstanding Congressman and a master of Congressional Politics. But in the Executive Branch, he played Congress like a violin – and basically did what he wanted to do much as Cheney has. Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin was little different from Cheney’s Iraqi WMD’s – a ruse to get around Congress. Both of these men, in my opinion, became so tied up in the politics of the Congress/Executive axis that they forgot something – this is a government "of the people, by the people, for the people." Whether Cheney thinks we should have stayed in Viet Nam or not is a moot point. Whether Cheney thinks we should continue in Iraq is equally irrelevant. What matters is what we want – and we want out yesterday. In his endless fight with Congress, he regularly forgets who in the hell he works for…

While it seems odd to be criticizing Bush’s speech before he even gives it, the pre-released comments about tonight’s speech to the VFW are enough to make my blood boil. He is reportedly planning to make analogies to the Viet Nam War. I remember back in 2003 feeling sort of lame about saying that Bush’s upcoming invasion of Iraq was a repeat of the Viet Nam War. It was such an obvious analogy – everyone was making it. We were saying "don’t make the same mistake by jumping into an ill-conceived war we can’t get out of." As I recall, the Bush Administration dismissed these criticisms out of hand.

Bush is apparently going to argue that pulling out of Viet Nam was a mistake that lead to a "bloodbath" and weakened our reputation in the world. What weakened our reputation in the world was that we were in Viet Nam in the first place, or worse, that we stayed there long after any fool could see that it was a lost cause – or even a wrong cause. That was a war in which some 50,000 Americans died [some of them my friends and classmates]. What can he possibly be talking about? If staying and fighting in Viet Nam were such a fine idea, why didn’t Bush, Cheney, and Rove go fight themselves?

^{Brief interruption while 1boringoldman gets a cup of coffee and calms down.}

The sentiment that sent us to Iraq in the first place had its origins in those Viet Nam days. The era haunts us. Back then, we were in ludicrous camps – Hawks and Doves. Hawks were accused of being war-mongers itching for a fight. Doves were accused of being cowards, or naive fools with a blind eye to the true nature of the world. We were Good Guys and Bad Guys, like in the old westerns. We just differed on who was wearing the white hat. Dick Cheney typified one side of that argument. He was Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff when Saigon finally fell. He then served five terms in the House of Representatives and later became George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense – masterminding the first Gulf War. And he was certainly a major force advocating for for our more recent Iraq misadventure. It is no reach to say that Cheney never got over the fall of President Nixon, or the defeat of Gerald Ford, or George H.W. Bush’s unwillingness to occupy Iraq in the first Gulf War. In that sense, it’s understandable why Bush is bringing up Viet Nam in discussing our current situation in Iraq. They’re still there – still pushing the logic of 30 years ago.

I know that the Civil Rights era and the Viet Nam era solidified my own political leanings for all times. I can’t fault Dick Cheney for also being heavily influenced by the agonies of those days. We all were. And although I know it’s George W. Bush that’s making the speech tonight, I hear Dick Cheney all over what he’s going to say. I think I’ve heard Dick Cheney all over everything George W. Bush has had to say as President.

We learned something in the Viet Nam War – something big. In World War I, we learned that war can make people crazy. Back then, it was called Shell Shock. But we never really got to the persisting effects of the condition. Shell Shock was a problem because it took soldiers out of the fight and we ignored it’s lasting effects. By World War II, we’d renamed it Combat Fatigue, and had the delusion that giving soldiers a rest would take care of the problem. But in Viet Nam, we finally had to face the fact that traumatic experiences of wartime can leave a lasting imprint on the personality – sometimes a disasterous imprint. We called it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And we learned something that should have been obvious – the advice "put it behind you and move on" is absolutely no help. How can you put the worse thing that ever happened to you out of your mind and live as if it never happened? We learned that traumatized people needed to find a new way of living that incorporates their traumatic experience, otherwise they endlessly repeat their traumas in a failed attempt to undo them.

I suppose that we can say the same thing about society as a whole. The Viet Nam War was a national trauma. It’s still with us [as in Bush’s speech], and it lives on in the current Iraq War and the minds of its architects, just as it lives on in those of us who oppose this War. Bush is apparently bringing it up as an example of why we shouldn’t abandon the cause in Iraq. Better he would bring it up for other reasons. We made a terrible mistake in Viet Nam. Now we’ve made another terrible mistake in part as an attempt to repair our wounded image. We might revise the saying "history repeats itself" to say that "bad history repeats itself trying to fix old wounds."

Bush to discuss Vietnam’s legacy in speech on Iraq

President Bush plans to argue today that a hasty "retreat" from Iraq would lead to the kinds of bloodbaths that followed U.S. withdrawals from Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s.

In a speech he is to deliver here at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention, Bush will also say that the recent increase of U.S. troops is producing military progress in the war-racked country.

"Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they are gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq?" Bush says in prepared remarks released by the White House late Tuesday.

The VFW speech and another address Bush is scheduled to deliver next week to the American Legion convention come as supporters and critics of the war are seeking to influence members of Congress ahead of a report to be delivered next month by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on the war’s progress.

With Congress in recess for the summer, the debate over Iraq policy has moved from the Capitol to the airwaves with direct appeals to the public through multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns.

That may or may not be true. We can hardly count on Mr. Bush to know. But it’s not the content of his speech that matters. This is another Talking Point – nothing more. Bush resists leaving Iraq no matter what. I wonder if he even knows why anymore. He surely can’t still think the war will give us dibs on the Iraq oil. He can’t still think that there is any kind of winning to be done in Iraq. He can’t still think that we can have any real effect on the Sectarian fighting in Iraq. I guess it’s just stubborn inertia. But who is he to talk about the Viet Nam War? He couldn’t even bring off serving in the Reserves.

Everyone seems to want to figure out why Karl Rove resigned. What’s he got up his sleeve? Even the Washington Post‘s Dan Froomkin weighed in [Another Rove Fake-Out?]. He and others he quotes wonder if Rove’s recent attacks on Hillary are an attempt to solidify her as a candidate – the one they want to run against. Many people echo Frank Rich, "Karl Rove’s departure was both abrupt and fast… Inquiring Rove haters wanted to know: Was he one step ahead of yet another major new scandal? Was a Congressional investigation at last about to draw blood?" Is he on the lam? Is he up to something? Will he be in constant phone contact with Bush? or the Republican Party? I even developed my own theory right after he resigned. I surmised that he told Bush and Cheney that the Republicans couldn’t win in 2008 if they didn’t back off on the War, back off on Iran, and get rid of Alberto Gonzales. They said, "No," No," and "No." So he got out while the getting was good. That was my last week’s theory.

“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

"I didn’t know her name. I didn’t leak her name,"

There’s an old saying, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." It’s more famous these days because Bush couldn’t even remember how to say it. These people have fooled us so many times that our shame knows no bottom. Surely there’s something they’ve cooked up by having Rove resign now, while Bush is on vacation, while Congress is in recess. Surely everything Rove says is some attempt to get us to think something or another. Obviously what he or Bush say has nothing to do with whatever is actually going on. But, why should we care anymore? We know all we need to know – that George Bush and Karl Rove have been a huge blotch on American history. We know that whatever they say or do is an attempt to manipulate public opinion in their favor. And the biggest thing we know is that whatever they’re up to, it is not something that is designed with the general welfare of the American people in mind. That’s all we need to know at this point.

The only thing that matters between now and the 2008 elections is that we do everything in our power to minimize the damage Bush can do in the time he has left, and to marginalize his impact on the future political process in this country. We know the dirty tricks will come next year. They’ll attack Hillary using Bill’s infidelity. They’ll mock Edwards and Obama. It’s hard to imagine that Rove [or at least Rovian methodology] will disappear with his resignation. It’s all they’ve got right now. So I don’t object to people keeping an eye on him and his proteges. But I do revolt at the thought of having to spend any time caring why he resigned now, or caring about what he says about any Democratic candidates.

Karl Rove is a tragic figure. He has a classical character flaw, apparent in his earliest days as a College Republican – the kind of flaw Aristotle described in his Poetics centuries ago. And now he’s choked on it. His dream of an enduring Republican Dynasty is in shambles, as is his reputation. He may think he’s winding up for another run as a political pundit, but I really doubt it. His best future is avoiding indictments. This whirlwind of appearances on the talk shows may look like a triumphant exit march, but in the end, Karl Rove struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.