Now, for one that will make you mad, sad, and maybe cry, watch and listen to Senator Durbin [D-IL] on the Senate floor [see also Durbin kept silent on prewar knowledge]…
And an update on our 4+ years of war casualties:
President George W. Bush warned Democrats Friday not to "test my will" by passing new legislation on a US troop pullout from Iraq after he vetoes a bill passed by Congress this week. Bush invited Democrats and leaders of his Republican Party to discuss a way out of their standoff soon after he strikes down the bill, which ties 124 billion dollars in war funds to a withdrawal that would start on October 1.
"And if the Congress wants to test my will as to whether or not I’ll accept the timetable for withdrawal, I won’t accept one," he told a news conference at his retreat in Camp David, Maryland, alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. "So if they want to try again that which I have said was unacceptable, then of course I’ll veto it," Bush said.
But even at that, this phrase makes abundantly clear that he hasn’t given a moment’s thought to what Congress says, or what the people say, or the dismal state of affairs in Iraq itself. He hasn’t even spent a moment alone with his own conscience. It’s simply about his will. He’s even stopped coming up with a rationale for his will. We’re so used to this kind of little boy, pissing contest talk that we don’t even react anymore when he says such things. We’ve stopped expecting him to act like a leader, or even a grown-up. Are his constituents really going to put up with this kind of prepubertal thinking for another 632 more days? It’s hard to imagine…
In fact, Mr. Tenet says he doubts that W.M.D.’s were the principal cause of the United States’ decision to go to war in Iraq in the first place, that it was just “the public face that was put on it.” The real reason, he suggests, stemmed from “the administration’s largely unarticulated view that the democratic transformation of the Middle East through regime change in Iraq would be worth the price.”
Well, Mr. Tenet, you might ought to mention the other "largely unarticulated" motive for a "democratic transformation of the Middle East through regime change in Iraq" – or "worth the price" to whom.
After his controversial tenure at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Bradley Schlozman was rewarded by being installed as the U.S. attorney for Kansas City. His time as U.S.A. there, which ended only a week ago, is notable mostly for his decision to bring four "voter fraud" indictments shortly before the election last year. (We’ll have more on that later.)
But Schlozman isn’t done at the Justice Department. In fact, he’s headed back to Washington to work at the office that supervises U.S. attorneys all over the country. A Justice Department spokesman told CBS Investigative Producer Laura Strickler that Schlozman will be "an attorney in the Counsel to the Director staff at the Executive Office for United States Attorneys." It’s not clear exactly what that means, and the spokesman did not indicate precisely what Schlozman’s duties would be. The EOUSA serves as the liaison beween U.S. attorneys all over the country and DoJ leadership in Washington…
This scandal is monsterous. Not that falsifying intelligence to start a war isn’t monsterous. Not that revealing the identity of a C.I.A. Agent isn’t monsterous. Not that the regular use of secrecy to run the government isn’t monsterous. But this one is actually focused on disenfranchizing voters [much like the "old south" in the era of segregation] as a matter of Republican Party policy. While it may be true that some Party members believe they are simply reacting to some kind of Democratic Party voter fraud, it’s becoming clear that the`Adminstration perpetrators know exactly what they’re doing – trumping up voter fraud to do some voter fraud of their own.
Right now, the Department of Justice is so infiltrated that it’s probably impossible to prosecute these people in a way their deceit deserves, and the best we can do is paralyze the scheme. It’s an almost unimaginable situation – a Department of Justice that has to be neutralized to prevent any more damage to our system. It’s the Deparment in charge of protecting our system. When the pundits said early on that this story had legs, we had no idea how long those legs really were.
Watch now Josh Marshall’s commentary and rerun of Rove’s speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association:
And check out what they’re giving out in their awards ceremony:
Former RNLA President Craig Burkhardt presents former Attorney General Edwin Meese III a Lucite containing “chads” from Florida
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prag·ma·tism
Pronunciation: ‘prag-m&-"ti-z&m Function: noun 1 : a practical approach to problems and affairs <tried to strike a balance between principles and pragmatism> 2 : an American movement in philosophy founded by C. S. Peirce and William James and marked by the doctrines that the meaning of conceptions is to be sought in their practical bearings, that the function of thought is to guide action, and that truth is preeminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief |
We humans do love to think, to theorize about the meanings of things or to scheme about how to make things change. Pragmatism isn’t so much a philosophy. It’s more a way of looking at truth, a way of putting a check on our penchant for theorizing by carefully evaluating the results. It could be thought of as a way of applying the scientific method to all ideas, but the simplest version is in the old saying, "the proof is in the pudding." No matter what we thought when we started, what matters is where we ended up.
Harry Reid recently said, "The War is lost." Vice President Cheney immediately [and predictably] attacked Reid’s statement as defeatist. Liberals and Democrats agreed with him just as immediately – "at last someone spoke the truth." It’s easy to understand what Senator Reid was getting at. President Bush has opposed any re-evaluation of the War in Iraq – insisting that the only option is to "win." Reid was countering this now seemingly absurd idea. He was being a "pragmatist."
Rationale ‘A’ quickly fell apart when we learned there were no weapons of mass destruction to eliminate.That left us with premise or rationale ‘B’. But though many or most Iraqis were glad we’d overthrown Saddam, evidence rapidly mounted that most Iraqis weren’t interested in the kind of US-aligned government the war’s supporters had in mind. Not crazy about a secular government, certainly not wild about one aligned with Israel and just generally not ready to be America’s new proxy in the region. Most importantly, those early months showed clear signs that anti-Americanism (not surprisingly) rose with the duration of the occupation.
This is the key point: right near the beginning of this nightmare it was clear the sole remaining premise for the war was false: that is, the idea that the Iraqis would freely choose a government that would align itself with the US and its goals in the region. As the occupation continued, anti-American sentiment — both toward the occupation and America’s role in the world — has only grown.
I would submit that virtually everything we’ve done in Iraq since mid-late 2003 has been an effort to obscure this fact. And our policy has been one of continuing the occupation to create the illusion that this reality was not in fact reality. In short, it was a policy of denial.
– about Iraq [even if your senators are "Bushies" like mine]. Here‘s how to do it…
A House committee voted Wednesday to grant immunity to Monica Goodling, a key aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales during the firings of eight U.S. attorneys. She had refused to testify, invoking her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. The 32-6 vote by the House Judiciary Committee surpassed the two-thirds majority required to grant a witness immunity from prosecution. A separate vote to authorize a subpoena for Goodling passed by voice vote. The House panel’s action was one of several scheduled committee votes pertaining to subpoenas for Bush administration officials, among them Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whom lawmakers want to question about the administration’s now-discredited claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa – used in part to justify the war against Iraq.
But House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., postponed a vote on issuing a subpoena to former White House chief of staff Andrew Card on the same issue, saying White House Counsel Fred Fielding had made a compromise proposal worth pursuing. Democrats say they want to force into the open the story of why the prosecutors were fired and whether they were singled out to influence corruption cases. Republicans point out that Gonzales survived a brutal Senate hearing last week with President Bush’s support and no evidence of wrongdoing in the prosecutors firings.
Gonzales, meanwhile, was busy mending fences Wednesday. He was scheduled to return to Capitol Hill to meet with a key critic, Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., who has complained that Gonzales was not truthful with him over the dismissal of Bud Cummins, the former U.S. attorney in Little Rock, Ark. The Judiciary committee’s vote instructs a House lawyer to seek an immunity grant for Goodling from a federal court. The grant would not take effect unless Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., chooses to issue Goodling a subpoena compelling her to testify, Conyers said.
Goodling and her lawyer have invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, saying they believe Democrats have set a perjury trap for her. Conyers said Wednesday he hopes Goodling changes her mind and voluntarily tells the committee her story. "I do not propose this step lightly," Conyers told the panel. "If we learn something new in the course of our investigation … we can always stop the process before the court issues an order."
"Ms. Goodling appears to be a key witness for us, as to any possible undue influence or improper interference, and as to any internal discussions as to how forthcoming to be to Congress," Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) said at a morning committee meeting.
The committee also approved a subpoena for Goodling’s testimony. Under the deal — known in legal parlance as "limited-use immunity" — Goodling could not be prosecuted for anything she truthfully tells Congress. Some Democrats have questioned whether prior testimony to Congress by some senior Justice officials, such as Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, amounted to knowingly making false statements to Congress. McNulty has acknowledged several misstatements in his testimony two months ago on the reasons for the prosecutor dismissals.
And frankly, that picture up in the right hand corner worries me. Monica Goodling has been out of Law School for nine years, only a few of which have been involved with "the law." She’s mostly been a Republican Operative in administrative political jobs – assistant to the big guys. The only thing that explains her being in such a top level job is that she’s competent and loyal, kind of cute – sort of a "my gal Sal" type. I’m worried that she’s hooked on power. Being loyal in this Administration is synonymous with an almost "medical immunity" against everyday, common sense morality. She strikes me as the kind of person who could rationalize moral lapses as justified in light of the evil sodomizing, abortion-promoting, vote-frauding straw men her handlers make Democrats, Liberals, or Progressives out to be – that Machiavellian twist promoted by the Dobson, Falwell, Robertson Christianity and the Bush, Cheney, Rove Fascism.
I would suggest these Congressmen interview her in private first. Let her Lawyer be there if she wants. The best way to "un-Demonize" themselves would be to show her in some kind of personal interview that she is dealing with patriotic, real human beings rather that fire-breathing creatures from the Evil Empire. It gives her time to recover from the cognitive dissonance that will surely develop if her stereotypes turn out to be untrue. She’s important, because she knows what happened – all of it. She needs to be treated as a girl who has gone astray rather than a beast from the Evil Empire. 
Kyle Sampson is some mother’s son, and Monica Goodling is some parent’s child. If I’m wrong about that and she’s simply a wolf in sheep’s clothing – it doesn’t matter how she’s treated.
As a matter of fact, I expect that’s true of all of them. They’ve been so caught up in the atmosphere "inside" that they need exposure to the real world before being questioned. "Grilling" them just confirms their mind-set – persecuted martyrs on a "holy crusade."
Some, however, think otherwise [and I can’t really argue with their frustration]:
Monica Goodling will soon get immunity to come clean with Congress. So much for this evangelical beacon of righteousness taking the Fifth. Let’s see if Monica can answer the following questions:
With Attorney General Alberto Gonzales vowing to remain in his job and President Bush standing by him, Senate Democratic leaders are seriously considering bringing a resolution to the floor expressing no confidence in Gonzales, according to a senior leadership source.
“I don’t think [Gonzales] can survive, no matter what the president says,” said the source. The vote would be nonbinding and have no substantive impact, but it would force all Republican Senators into the politically uncomfortable position of saying publicly whether they continue to support Gonzales in the wake of the scandal surrounding the firings of eight U.S. attorneys. Democratic leaders have not yet set an exact time frame for when they would bring such a resolution to the floor.
The idea of a no confidence vote is expected to be discussed at today’s Senate Democratic luncheon.
There’s a lot of frustration that the Democrats, now in control of the House and [barely] the Senate are getting so stonewalled by the Administration. Some question their not being up to the task of putting the skids of the erosion of America by the Bush machine. My take is different. I think they’re doing a stellar job. The difficulties are two-fold: First, Bush. Cheney, and Rove have had six years to build their fortress. They’ve seeded every agency with partisan operatives as we learned this afternoon with the Office of Special Counsel. Second, there are still a lot of Americans who, even though they may now be awake about the worst of things [The Iraq War], they are still in denial about how corrupt the government has become. Virtually every agency that’s tasked with protecting our rights has been essentially dismantled. The problem is not the resolve of the Democrats. It’s the Republican Fortress that shields the President using federal agencies as partisan arms. The only real choice the Democratic Congress has is to keep hammering until the wall cracks. And it’s going to crack. It’s inevitable…
In my last post, I read the L.A. Times article about the investigation of Rove, and felt excited. Was it possible that there would be a real investigation. So I wrote my first few paragraphs? Then I looked up the Office of Special Counsel. I wondered, "Had someone found an Agency uncontaminated by the Administration?" and wrote some more. Then, I put Scott Bloch into Google, and found that others had already discovered that he was a Republican Operative extrordinaire.What I hate is being put in the position of being cynical enough these days to be Googling Scott Bloch immediately to be sure this isn’t a fraudulent investigation to run out their clock in office and cover-up the whole thing. I hate that they’ve done this to us – turned us into a bunch of reflex paranoids. Only, unfortunately, we’re "pseudo-paranoid," because, as usual, our skepticism and suspicions turn out to be right.
