1 Boring Old Man

Now that Bush has talked about our kids, can we ask about his?

George W. Bush During his press conference Thursday, the president got personal when talking about the threat from al-Qaida terrorists. "They are a threat to your children, David," he said to NBC’s David Gregory. It’s an understandable instinct. To persuade, we try to appeal to common experience. Policy debates can get abstract. Mention someone’s children, though, and they get concrete fast. The president found this such a useful tool that he used it a second time in the same press conference. "I would hope our world hasn’t become so cynical that they don’t take the threats of al-Qaida seriously, because they’re real, and it’s a danger to the American people," he said in response to a question about the war from Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times. "It’s a danger to your children, Jim."

For Bush, this line of argument is not a two-way street. Over the years, reporters have been censured and scowled at for asking about the president’s or vice president’s children in the context of a policy debate. The tone was set in the early months of 2001. After the president publicly urged parents to talk to their children about drugs and drinking, Houston Chronicle reporter Bennett Roth asked then-press secretary Ari Fleischer if Bush had taken his own advice with his daughters, one of whom had just been cited for underage drinking. Roth got no answer. He was later told ominously that his question had "been noted in the building," as if he should expect to wake to the sight of a horse head.

Wednesday, Vice President Dick Cheney welcomed into the world his sixth grandchild, Samuel David Cheney. The lad’s parents are the Cheneys’ daughter, Mary, and her partner, Heather Poe. When Wolf Blitzer asked Cheney months ago about a stalwart Republican political ally who’d claimed that two lesbian parents were not healthy for a child, the vice president did not answer, rebuking Blitzer with, "I think, frankly, you’re out of line with that question." (Another horse head, or maybe Gitmo.)

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It’s easy to understand the president’s impulse during his press conference. Making the private reference to the reporters’ children helped make his case in the most human terms possible. But he’s got to get, then, why other people make the same move. Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son in Iraq, asked the president if he’d talked about the war with his daughters and why they weren’t serving. It’s hard to imagine that the president and Mrs. Sheehan would ever have anything in common, but it seems that now, they do.

I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose. We Were Both Doing Our Duty.

Parents who lose children, whether through accident or illness, inevitably wonder what they could have done to prevent their loss. When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death.

Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son’s death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings.

This may seem a vile accusation to lay against a grieving father. But in fact, it has become a staple of American political discourse, repeated endlessly by those keen to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. By encouraging "the terrorists," opponents of the Iraq conflict increase the risk to U.S. troops. Although the First Amendment protects antiwar critics from being tried for treason, it provides no protection for the hardly less serious charge of failing to support the troops — today’s civic equivalent of dereliction of duty.

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As a citizen, I have tried since Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a critical understanding of U.S. foreign policy. I know that even now, people of good will find much to admire in Bush’s response to that awful day. They applaud his doctrine of preventive war. They endorse his crusade to spread democracy across the Muslim world and to eliminate tyranny from the face of the Earth. They insist not only that his decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was correct but that the war there can still be won. Some — the members of the "the-surge-is-already-working" school of thought — even profess to see victory just over the horizon.

 

I believe that such notions are dead wrong and doomed to fail. In books, articles and op-ed pieces, in talks to audiences large and small, I have said as much. "The long war is an unwinnable one," I wrote in this section of The Washington Post in August 2005. "The United States needs to liquidate its presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to decide their fate and creating the space for other regional powers to assist in brokering a political settlement. We’ve done all that we can do."

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To be fair, responsibility for the war’s continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son’s death, my state’s senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son’s wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don’t blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove — namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.

For Whom Does Cheney Speak?

Vice President Dick Cheney … spoke today to the graduating class at West Point. MSNBC described his speech as a "call to arms," urging the cadets to lead the troops against an enemy that is "massing" in Iraq.

We’re fighting a war over there because the enemy attacked us first," Cheney said. "These are men who glorify murder and suicide. Terrorists are defined entirely by their hatreds."

The terrorism fight now centers on Iraq, the vice president said, because that is where the enemy has massed. "The security of this nation depends on the outcome," Cheney said.

Because MSNBC dutifully reported his statements without challgenge, we have to keep reminding ourselves that none of what Mr. Cheney said is true. There was never any link between the people who attacked America and Iraq or with the Administration’s justifications for attacking Iraq. As Ian Welsh just explained in the prior post, the Vice President doesn’t have a clue about what motivates al Qaeda or any other group the Bush/Cheney recklessly defines as "terrorists." There is no massive gathering of enemy troops arriving to fight Americans in Iraq, or any where else. And it is simply delusional hysteria to assert that any of the resistance groups opposing the US occupation in Iraq represent anything remotely resembling an existential threat to America. If there were, the generals there would be screaming for tens or hundreds of thousands more US troops, and millions of Americans would be lining up in every town to volunteer to defend the nation. Vice President Cheney is quitely simply, a lying nut case.

Is Dick Cheney truly the voice of the regime that the US Congress just authorized to continue its war and occupation in Iraq? We have the Vice President of the United States making false, bellicose statements even as our own military commanders are leaking stories to the media telling a very different story. Three months ago we were told that the "new strategy" under the new General was going to turn the tide in Iraq; we finally had it "right." Now the same generals are already signaling that expectations for prompt results are too high and that a different but familiar strategy focused on training Iraqis may be needed, while Secretary Gates and others in the Administration are arguing we will have to radically reduce our troop levels to be able to sustain what they fear will be a prolonged occupation lasting perhaps decades.

Reduced troops levels by 50 percent? That doesn’t sound like the response that would be called for if it were really true that the enemy is massing in Iraq and our survival literally depended on winning this battle. Who speaks for this Administration?

[see also this and this and this]

Cheney Attempting to Constrain Bush’s Choices on Iran Conflict:
Staff Engaged in Insubordination Against President Bush

There is a race currently underway between different flanks of the administration to determine the future course of US-Iran policy.

On one flank are the diplomats, and on the other is Vice President Cheney’s team and acolytes — who populate quite a wide swath throughout the American national security bureaucracy.

The Pentagon and the intelligence establishment are providing support to add muscle and nuance to the diplomatic effort led by Condi Rice, her deputy John Negroponte, Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, and Legal Adviser John Bellinger. The support that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and CIA Director Michael Hayden are providing Rice’s efforts are a complete, 180 degree contrast to the dysfunction that characterized relations between these institutions before the recent reshuffle of top personnel.

However, the Department of Defense and national intelligence sector are also preparing for hot conflict. They believe that they need to in order to convince Iran’s various power centers that the military option does exist.

But this is worrisome. The person in the Bush administration who most wants a hot conflict with Iran is Vice President Cheney. The person in Iran who most wants a conflict is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force would be big winners in a conflict as well — as the political support that both have inside Iran has been flagging.

Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney’s national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush’s tack towards Condoleezza Rice’s diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.

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There are many other components of the complex game plan that this Cheney official has been kicking around Washington. The official has offered this commentary to senior staff at AEI and in lunch and dinner gatherings which were to be considered strictly off-the-record, but there can be little doubt that the official actually hopes that hawkish conservatives and neoconservatives share this information and then rally to this point of view. This official is beating the brush and doing what Joshua Muravchik has previously suggested — which is to help establish the policy and political pathway to bombing Iran.

The zinger of this information is the admission by this Cheney aide that Cheney himself is frustrated with President Bush and believes, much like Richard Perle, that Bush is making a disastrous mistake by aligning himself with the policy course that Condoleezza Rice, Bob Gates, Michael Hayden and McConnell have sculpted.

According to this official, Cheney believes that Bush can not be counted on to make the "right decision" when it comes to dealing with Iran and thus Cheney believes that he must tie the President’s hands.

On Tuesday evening, I spoke with a former top national intelligence official in this Bush administration who told me that what I was investigating and planned to report on regarding Cheney and the commentary of his aide was "potentially criminal insubordination" against the President.

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Congress sent President Bush a new Iraq funding bill yesterday that lacked troop withdrawal deadlines demanded by liberal Democrats, but party leaders vowed it was only a temporary setback in their efforts to bring home American troops.

Why Bush hasn’t been impeached
^{Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn against some part of themselves}

But there’s a deeper reason why the popular impeachment movement has never taken off — and it has to do not with Bush but with the American people. Bush’s warmongering spoke to something deep in our national psyche. The emotional force behind America’s support for the Iraq war, the molten core of an angry, resentful patriotism, is still too hot for Congress, the media and even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront directly. It’s a national myth. It’s John Wayne. To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness — come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. And we’re not ready to do that.

The truth is that Bush’s high crimes and misdemeanors, far from being too small, are too great. What has saved Bush is the fact that his lies were, literally, a matter of life and death. They were about war. And they were sanctified by 9/11. Bush tapped into a deep American strain of fearful, reflexive bellicosity, which Congress and the media went along with for a long time and which has remained largely unexamined to this day. Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn against some part of themselves. This doesn’t mean we support Bush, simply that at some dim, half-conscious level we’re too confused — not least by our own complicity — to work up the cold, final anger we’d need to go through impeachment. We haven’t done the necessary work to separate ourselves from our abusive spouse. We need therapy — not to save this disastrous marriage, but to end it.

I think that’s partially right. We wanted to have an enemy we could go after. There’s more. I think it’s hard for us to get our collective minds around how corrupt this Administration really is. It’s almost too painful to admit that it’s our turn to be the aggressors, the bad guys, the greedy ones, the crooks. And those things only scratch the surface. We’re the ones that have become the torturers. We’ve undermined the Geneva Conventions. We’re the ones who deny prisoners their day in court. We’re the ones with the big dangerous bombs. We’re the ones that have turned the atmosphere against the planet. We’re the ones with a Justice Department that’s a political arm of Party. We’re the ones that has a Congress that can’t hear the will of the people. We’re the ones that started a senseless war that’s killed untold civilians.

We don’t impeach Bush because to do so is to admit how far we’ve plunged. Well, it’s time for us to find a way to look deeply into that mirror… 

President Bush told NBC reporter David Gregory at a Rose Garden news conference today that terrorists are a "threat to your children, David." The President’s reaction came after Gregory asked him why he should be considered a credible source on terror intelligence.

I find this comment infuriating. None of us are unaware of the threat al Qaeda poses to David Gregory’s children, or our own. None of us wants to ignore al Qaeda. What David Gregory was asking was crystal clear. Why should we consider George W. Bush a credible source for what we should do about these threats? Why should we consider George W. Bush or Dick Cheney credible sources of anything?

Ex-Justice Aide Admits Politics Affected Hiring

 

Ms. Goodling appeared to contradict Mr. Gonzales’s testimony to the committee this month in which he said he had not spoken to his senior aides since the firings “to protect the integrity of this investigation.”

During a meeting in March before she resigned, Ms. Goodling said, Mr. Gonzales asked her questions that left her uncomfortable. She thought he might be trying to compare recollections, so their stories would be consistent if they were questioned about their actions, she said. “I just thought maybe we shouldn’t have that conversation,” she said.

Brian J. Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement that Mr. Gonzales “has never attempted to influence or shape the testimony or public statements of any witness in this matter, including Ms. Goodling. The statements made by the attorney general during this meeting were intended only to comfort her in a very difficult period.”

Ms. Goodling also accused Paul J. McNulty, the outgoing deputy attorney general, of misleading Congress when he testified on Feb. 6 to a Senate panel. Specifically, she said Mr. McNulty knew more details about the White House involvement in the firings than he acknowledged in his testimony.

“I believe he was not fully candid,” she said.

Later, Mr. McNulty sharply denied her assertions. “I testified truthfully at the Feb. 6, 2007, hearing based on what I knew at that time,” he said in a statement. “Ms. Goodling’s characterization of my testimony is wrong and not supported by the extensive record of documents and testimony already provided to Congress.”

We all recall the concerted campaign to go to war with Iraq – Weapons of Mass Destruction, al Qaeda connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. Then it became clear that neither thing was true. And then we learned that there never was any real solid evidence that those things were true. And yet we are still at War in Iraq for no reason except conquest in search of oil rights.

When the Valerie Plame Affair came up, we were assured that anyone in the Administration caught leaking her name would be fired. Now we know of twenty or so such leaks. And while Scooter Libby was convicted of a related crime, there have been no actions of any kind by the Administration.

Now we have the firing of the U.S. Attorneys. We were assured that they were for performance related reasons, not political reasons. We now know that is not true – very not true. And there have been no disciplinary firings, nothing. The Attorney General just keeps telling us he did nothing wrong. The President doesn’t do anything. Essentially, the lies up front, like in the other two examples, are just not mentioned. The most we hear is "mistakes were made," a telling use of the passive voice to disavow responsibility for anything.

They simply ignore charges and move ahead, adjusting today’s lies to cover yesterday’s lies, in preparation for tomorrow’s lies. Now, with the utter paralysis of the Justice Department, the Congress can have hearings ad nauseum, but until Congress takes action on its own, nothing is going to happen. We will smolder along in Iraq, smolder along at the Justice Department, and Congress will have its hands tied with the rest of the government essentially taken over by the Bush Administration.

We’ve never had a government that simply ignores everything and goes along doing whatever it wants to do. The only recourse is for Congress to act, and I’m not sure it can do that right now. The problem is the Republican Senators who just keep supporting their corrupt Executive Branch. When there is a crime wave, the responsibility falls on the police force. When there is an Administration as bad as this one, the responsibility rests with the Congressmen who refuse to vote honestly, respecting their constituency over their Party. Very discouraging. Meanwhile, the former Justice Department employees are arguing about who was a bad guy in this particular scandal. I think the answer is "Yes." They all let us down. They’re all bad guys. They are all still letting us down. And the Administration just keeps on with its ignore-ant stance…

I’ve been thinking all afternoon about what bothered me about Monica Goodling’s testimony today. She struck me as a sincere person, someone who thought she was doing the right thing in some idiosyncratic frame of reference. I don’t think she thought of herself as a political operative, though I think it’s virtually impossible that she was so deeply involved in the "Attorney Replacement Plan" without knowing what it was about. I’m willing to accept that the monsterous things she was involved in do not mean that she is a monster. She seems terribly efficient and articulate – the kind of person I’d hire as an Administrative Assistant and be glad to have working for me.

There were two things that bothered me. The first is simple. She didn’t sound like a lawyer – at all. When she talked about her asking about political affiliations, or ruling out people with "liberal" leanings in their background, she used the phrase "stepped over the line." When she talked about her conversation with Gonzales, she "felt uncomfortable" and didn’t respond to him. She balked at either thing being "unlawful" or even "inappropriate." What did she mean, "Stepped over the line?" She was way on the other side of the next county, far beyond sight of the "line." What Monica Goodling did for a living was screen applicants for jobs at the DoJ to insure that they were loyal Republicans –  more than that, that they had no hint of "liberal" leanings. That’s not the way lawyers talk. Her whole job, her reason for being, was against the law for very obvious reasons, and she didn’t seem to really understand that. Monica Goodling was a political operative of the first kind – analogous to a Nazi Bureaucrat making sure no one with Jewish or Gipsy traits got into the Reich’s heirarchy, and she doesn’t seem to have known that’s what she was. The LAW wasn’t a part of what she said, at least not the LAW of the land. Even ambulance chasers know the LAW.

The second thing is harder to explain. Monica Goodling talked as though what she was doing was a good thing, the right thing. Somehow, when she was distraught in Margoles’ office saying, "all I wanted to do was serve this President, this Administration, this Department," she was serious. Hers was a morality of service for a higher cause, and, of course, making sure that the hirees were good Republicans [good Christians] and not "liberal" [Satan’s Spawn] was serving her President/Administration/Department [the Lord]. That is an absolutely amazing mentality – a Hitler’s Youth mentality, a Red Guard mentality. Monica Goodling appeared to me to be a brain-washed person – the American counterpart to the Islamic Jihadist suicide bomber.

This obviously competent woman went to Pat Robertson’s Law School and came out with none of the natural carriage of her profession, brain-washed with a holy mission that is in direct opposition to the basic tenets of the government she served and its Constitution. The Administration’s agenda, and the agenda of her particular religious affiliations was a higher power than the LAWs of our country.

Her naivity and seeming innocence was more damning than had she been an Ann Coulter or a Jack Abramoff. I doubt she has any idea what a tragic figure she has allowed herself to become. When confronted with something, she often responded, "I didn’t mean to," like a little girl who had spilled milk on her new dress – still not seeming to realize the gravity of her misdeed.