1 Boring Old Man

Their Confidence is Meaningless

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Bush and Vice President Cheney’s optimistic predictions about the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular have proved to be almost completely and consistently wrong for years now. ("Last throes," anyone?)

Before the 2006 election, White House political guru Karl Rove was supremely self-assured in his public predictions of Republican victory.

White House spokesman Tony Snow recently assured the press corps that Bush had enough votes in the Senate on the immigration bill. "I’ll see you at the bill signing," Bush himself told a skeptical journalist on June 11.

Bush and his staff’s credibility regarding statements of "fact" is a frequent subject of debate. But their track record on predictions is something else entirely. The evidence is pretty overwhelming that those predictions are unreliable.

I mention this because Bush’s core argument against a troop drawdown in Iraq — something supported by a large majority of Americans — is basically a prediction. As he put it again yesterday: "If we withdraw before the Iraqi government can defend itself, we would yield the future of Iraq to terrorists like al Qaeda — and we would give a green light to extremists all throughout a troubled region. The consequences for America and the Middle East would be disastrous."

Lonely Dick

The following item was written by Matthew Blake, a Nation magazine intern:

This past week The Washington Post ran a four-part, as much-depth-as-you-can-take series on Vice President Dick Cheney. It unflinchingly documents Cheney’s unprecedented power and secrecy. His wide-ranging influence stretches from encouraging the use of torture during interrogations of suspected terrorists to orchestrating a massive fish-kill in Oregon.

The articles so thoroughly reinforces the image of Cheney as a dark, ruthless powerbroker that the question is not "How awful is this guy?" but, "Who can now defend him?" While Cheney has earned a reputation for dismissing public opinion, he has long enjoyed support from conservative and neoconservative pundits and advocates. Surely, then, some of his ideological pals must have come to his rescue…

First, I turned to Fox News, but its Web site contained nary a word on the Cheney series. No acknowledgment of its existence–and no counterattack. Next, I visited The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times. Nada. The Web sites of these centers of conservative opinion were letting their champion in the White House dangle in the wind…

The crusading neocons of The Weekly Standard, I figured, must be firing back. After all, Cheney helped bring about the war in Iraq they had craved for years. And a Weekly writer, Stephen Hayes, has been working on a positive Cheney bio. The Standard could set the world straight on the real Dick Cheney. But its Web site, updated daily with conservative opinions from both staff writers and the blogosphere, offered nothing on Cheney.

Could it be that conservatives were cutting-and-running on their great torchbearer. I performed a Lexis-Nexis search for every article with "Dick Cheney" from newspapers, wires and blogs for the days the series ran. Once again, there was no one defending Cheney…

… I had overlooked a key source. I hadn’t checked the National Review. With 50 years of principled conservative commentary, NR would not be intimidated by a report loaded with named sources in the liberal media… On the magazine’s Web site, Jonah Goldberg had posted a column with the courageous title, "Confessions of a Cheney Fan." … But in ensuing paragraphs, Goldberg betrays his love and tosses Cheney overboard. "It becomes clear," he wrote, "that the Cheney method leaves a lot to be desired." Goldberg concluded that Cheney’s shadowy, uncompromising approach to government is "ultimately counterproductive."

He’s right! I hadn’t really noticed. There’s been silence from the Talking Point Press. I even searched the Rush Limbaugh site and found nothing [I’ll admit to not listening to him to see if he said anything on the air]. Same with Bill O’Reilly. I would interpret this peculiar silence as a possible plan – "don’t dignify the Washington Post’s series by even mentioning it" [meaning: not everyone reads the Washington Post so don’t call attention to it]. Even if it is a strategy to keep the faithful away from the series, it’s still odd that there’s nothing there – absolutely nothing. It’s deafening…

A friend sent me a summer mystery she thought I might enjoy. It was a murder mystery built into Freud and Jung’s trip to America in 1909. She was right. Though the plot was tortured, the history was accurate, and I did enjoy the book. But the part that stuck with me was the opening page – which had little [or everything] to do with the rest of the book:

I wish I’d had that thought all by myself. It’s a gem that I doubt I’ll ever forget. We’re about to leave for a trip to Eastern Europe – Budapest, Prague, and the Danube in between. When we lived in Europe in the early 70’s, we couldn’t visit those places – the iron curtain was very "up." So we’re going now to pick up on the piece we missed. There was a welcomed lull in the preparation, and I was happily on the front steps lost in watching the various bees and insects busying themselves in the blooming buckeyes and hydrangeas, and I thought of those paragraphs.

Oddly, the thoughts ultimately brought to mind these pictures :

I wonder if he’s ever really happy – ever just watches the bees moving from blossom to blossom. He looks happy when he’s with his daughters sometimes. And there a few shots of him gufhawing [though I wonder what the jokes really are about]. But, mostly, I was wondering about how he got to be the way he is – what wound he suffered, what blow to pride, what indifference he dealt with that gave him such a dark persona. And the part that’s with me the most these days – his lies. I wonder if he believes his own lies, or if he’s more one who believes that what he’s doing justifies them, or if he’s just a person who doesn’t feel the pangs of guilt and shame that keep the rest of us in line.

I expect he’s "ruth-less" in person, in the true sense of that word – lacking the qualities of Ruth, the biblical figure. In a perverted way, Cheney is "in the moment" – he’s lost in it. He’s in the moment of getting the Oregon farmer’s votes – without thinking that he’s destroying the Northwestern fisheries. He’s in the moment when he thinks of invading Iraq, unseating Hussein, and opening up the Iraqi oil fields – without considering that he’s destabilizing the entire Middle East, wrecking our Military, and probably changing the world’s view of America forever [for the worse]. He’s in the moment when he’s protecting the oil industry by suppressing the science about the progression of Global Warming.

But, I doubt that he’s ever been really happy. I expect that the best it gets for him is feeling "pleased with himself" when he pulls off one of his schemes. And what of "meaning?" The "meaning" Cheney’s achieved in the last six years is anything but what I think he must have envisioned. I expect he had a vision of returning to his glory days – Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Papa Bush. His legacy [besides becoming an icon for power-mongering run amok] will be a string of failures on two fronts – failing to advance his own ideal of an Imperial Presidency and, in the long haul, failing at everything he set out to achieve – the War, the Oil, the Reagan World of his fantasy Maybe there will be enough like-minded types around to say "great job Dickie." But I expect he’s at least smart enough to know the truth, even if he can’t tell it. Yet I doubt that he’ll ever acknowledge that the roots of his failure lie in his own flawed soul. If there were ever a man wrecked by success – Dick Cheney’s that man. History offered him a chance to shine, a chance for pride and maybe even happiness, and he threw it away – skillfully…

I got an email joke today from a former colleague who is one of those people who forwards jokes daily. 

President Felipe Calderon of Mexico, has announced that Mexico will not participate in the next Summer Olympics. He said that, "Anyone who can run, jump, or swim has already left the country."

Impeach Cheney

The vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped
By Bruce Fein

Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president’s insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney’s multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify.

Federalist Papers #65

The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.

For what it’s worth, I think the main reason to impeach him them is something else – he is they are incompetent. We are in a crisis right now, and they’re still farting around with their idiosyncratic agendas, and doing nothing to further the real needs of the country. They’re lost in a sea of self-serving and largely immaterial issues, spending most of their time trying to cover their asses for previous sins, and doing absolutely nothing to get us on course. So, impeach him them on the grounds of misguidedness or incompetence [or corruptness, or lying, or sedition]. The grounds don’t really matter. They just need to go to their respective ranches.

Waxman Challenges White House on Security Claim

The Bush administration has asserted, in recent days, that it has properly safeguarded confidential information since taking office. However, information collected by Congressional investigators contradicts the White House claim.

On Friday June 22, White House Spokesperson Dana Perino said that "[t]he president and the vice president are complying with all the rules and regulations regarding the handling of classified material and making sure that it is safeguarded and protected."

Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House of Representatives’ main investigative body, the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has been compiling evidence regarding the mismanagement of classified documents by the Bush administration. Waxman has taken sworn testimony from whistle-blowers from within the White House security agencies. The statements of these whistle-blowers "casts doubt on [White House] assertions," Waxman said in a letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding on Tuesday.

According to White House whistle-blowers, "White House practices have been dangerously inadequate with respect to investigating security violations, taking corrective action following breaches and physically securing classified information," Waxman said in his letter.

Two independent security agencies are tasked with monitoring the White House compliance with rules regarding the control of classified documents and information. They are the White House Security Office (WHSO) which is a part of the Executive Branch, and the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), a division of the National Archives and Records Administration. Both security agencies appear to have been stymied by the Bush administration.

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Whistle-blowers pointed to mismanagement of the WHSO in their statements to Congressional investigators. Former Director James Knodell and Deputy Director Ken Greeson "routinely violated basic security guidelines," by bringing "their Blackberry devices and cell phones into the sensitive compartmented information facility," a high security storage room for secret information. According to the former security officers, Knodell and Greeson also allowed visiting White House personnel to break this rule. The security officers who informed Waxman’s committee of these violations also blamed Knodell and Greeson for causing "extreme frustration and plummeting morale" in the White House Security Office, which lead to the "departure of more than half of the White House security officers within the last year."

The Directors of WHSO also prevented investigations into breaches of security in the White House, according to the whistle-blowers. They told Waxman’s committee that "the practice within the White House Security Office was not to document or investigate violations occurring in the West Wing or to take corrective action." According to Waxman, this policy "appears to be a direct violation" of the executive order regarding the handling of classified information.

One security breach that was never investigated was the leak of CIA Agent Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert status. According to Waxman, in an Oversight Committee hearing in March, Knodell "confirmed that although his office was required to investigate whether classified information had been leaked inappropriately, no investigation of the leak of Ms. Wilson’s identity occurred."

Lawyers for the office of the vice president has made the claim that Vice President Dick Cheney is not a part of the executive branch and thus not subject to inspections and oversight by ISOO. But Cheney’s office filed annual security reports with ISOO regarding the classification and declassification of information in 2001 and 2002. Subsequent reports have not been filed. The leak of CIA Agent Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity appears to have originated in the vice president’s office in 2003, the same year he unilaterally declared his office exempt from outside oversight.

The Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO)

The Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) is responsible to the President for policy and oversight of the Government-wide security classification system and the National Industrial Security Program. We receive our authority from Executive Orders 12958 "Classified National Security Information" and 12829 "National Industrial Security Program"  as amended.

We are a component of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and receive our policy and program guidance from the National Security Council (NSC).

White House faces tough crowd on Iraq

President Bush is sending his top aide on national security affairs to Capitol Hill on Thursday to confront what has become a tough crowd on the Iraq war.

A majority of senators believe troops should start coming home within the next few months. A new House investigation concluded this week that the Iraqis have little control over an ailing security force. And House Republicans are calling to revive the independent Iraq Study Group to give the nation options.

While the White House thought they had until September to deal with political fallout on the unpopular war, officials may have forgotten another critical date: the upcoming 2008 elections.

…

Other GOP senators have aligned themselves with a similar position, including Sen. George Voinovich. On Tuesday, the Ohio Republican sent Bush a letter calling for "responsible military disengagement" from Iraq.

Republican Sens. Norm Coleman< of Minnesota and John Sununu of New Hampshire also say they want to see troops departing Iraq by early 2008. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Wednesday she is working with Sens. John Warner, R-Va., and Ben Nelson, D-Neb., on a new bipartisan policy for Iraq.

In another challenge to Bush’s Iraq policy, House Republicans urged the White House on Wednesday to revive the Iraq Study Group. A blue-ribbon panel chaired by Republican James Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton, the group concluded last December that U.S. troops could leave by March 2008 if certain steps were taken.

Last week, the House voted 355-69 to appropriate a $1 million budget for another study, though the bill is unlikely to become law for a few weeks. Reps. Chris Shays, R-Conn., and Frank Wolf, R-Va., said they hope the administration will move ahead on its own to reconvene the group.

Back to the Eighteen Minute Gap

I’m still obsessing about Paul Clement’s opinion on whether Bush can assert executive privilege over documents relating to the US Attorney purge. Here’s a little tidbit I find interesting.

Clement is discussing the third chunk of things Congress requested.

The final category of documents and testimony concerns communications between the Department of Justice and the White House concerning proposals to dismiss and replace U.S. Attorneys and possible responses to congressional and media inquiries about the U.S. Attorney resignations. These communications are deliberative and clearly fall within the scope of executive privilege.4

And here’s what that footnote says:

4 To the extent they exist, White House communications approving the Department’s actions by or on behalf of the President would receive particularly strong protection under executive privilege.

Does that make anyone think of the 18-day gap?