Double the standards, double the fun!

I had the misfortune of passing by the telly when Kay Hutchinson was taking the newest leak spin - that perjury is a mere technicality - for a test drive on one of the Sunday morning yak-fests. I was exposed to a toxic dose of hypocri-trons. Fortunately, Think Progress and the DSCC have concocted an antidote: scads of entertaining quotes from the days when Hutchinson and her ilk were outraged by perjury. (I have yet to see a single news story refer to these flip-flops.) It must just kill these folks to see Fitzgerald repeatedly portrayed as fair, honest, thorough, and non-partisan.

Update: Kay Hutchinson now says she was “misconstrued” and that perjury is indeed a terrible crime. Let’s review what she says was “misconstrued”:

I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn’t indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars.

That’s not just a flip-flop; that’s a full gainer!

Piggybacking onto last Saturday’s post by MizM’s, I refer you to James Carroll’s latest column. I don’t know anybody else writing for a general-circulation newspaper who understands the politics of meaning, or the search for the spiritual (if not religious — I’m never sure the two are or should be all that separate, but that’s a subject for another time), better than he. Most of the time I read his work and think, “Why should I ever bother to try to write anything at all? He’s given words to what I know deep down is true.” Read and ponder, for example, this:

”What’s going on with this world?” If something new is happening, it probably has less to do with the tragic occurrences that have befallen the human population this year, from the tsunami to Hurricane Wilma (although the quickened pace and ferocity of hurricanes seems a special warning), than with our recently acquired knowledge of the universal character of jeopardy. We used to speak of innovations in information flow as if they were only technical, but to have instantaneous knowledge of far off events is also to be vulnerable to them. If all politics is local, Tip O’Neill might be telling us today, all local politics is global now.

Avian flu makes the point. A disease that incubates among the world’s most impoverished people can threaten the most privileged. The melting permafrost makes the point, too. We humans are all downriver from the same coming flood. We need a new politics, one which reflects this unprecedented fact of our existence. No one is safe unless everyone is. [italics added]

Extreme Makeover

Her increasingly desperate backers have launched a new “sales” campaign, and her detractors are exploring her withdrawal options. But finally, someone has sunk to my level and addressed Harriet Miers’ eyeliner issues. Who else but the inimitable Donald Asmussen?

Tidying up

Well, it’s happened again. It’s Saturday morning, and I’ve been storing up links all week, hoping to integrate them in meaningful ways. But since they’re getting stale, I’m going to post them all right here.

While we all await what many are calling “Fitzmas”, here are a few interesting speculations about successions, big boo-boos that implicate the president, the prospect of presidential pardons, and genuine anxiety at the White House. Oh, and the prosecutor’s office has suddenly launched a web site, often a convenient way of posting indictments, etc., but we’re not supposed to read anything into that.

“Pro-life” Republicans grant sweeping immunity to gun manufacturers.

Judy Miller’s editor suddenly has regrets.

Great Eric Alterman piece, here. It begins:

Here is the liberals’ problem in a nutshell: More than 30 percent of Americans happily answer to the appellation “conservative,” while 18 percent call themselves “liberal.” And yet when questioned by pollsters, a super-majority of more than 60 percent take positions liberal in everything but name. Indeed, on many if not most issues, Americans hold views well to the left of those espoused by almost any national Democratic politician.

Read it and see what you think. And as long as you’re contemplating the future of the left, chew on David Sirota’s thoughtful discussion of the left’s lack of an overarching ideology. I’ll just quote the conclusion here, but it’s really worth plowing through the whole article:

This, in part, explains why the Democratic Party emanates such an image today: It is not only the spineless politicians in Washington who have no compass, but also a large and vocal swath of the base that lacks ideological cohesion as well. The politicians are, in a sense, just a public representation of that deeply-rooted lack of conviction. Put another way, looking at the typical evasive, jellyfish-like Democratic politician on the nightly news is like putting a mirror up to a growing swath of the grassroots left itself.

Why should this be troubling to the average progressive? First, it is both soulless and aimless. Partisanship is not ideology, and movements are not political parties - they are bigger than political parties, and shape those parties accordingly through pressure. As much as paid party hacks would argue otherwise, the most significant movements in American history did not emanate from the innards of the Democratic or Republican Party headquarters, and they did not come from groups of activists who put labels before substance: They spawned from millions of people committed to grassroots movements organized around ideas - movements which pushed both parties’ establishments to deal with given issues. Without those movements transcending exclusively partisan concerns, American history would be a one-page tale of status quo.

Second, even for those concerned more about electoral victories than ideology, this Partisan War Syndrome that subverts ideological movements ultimately hurts electoral prospects. Today’s Republican Party, for instance, could not win without the corresponding conservative ideological movement that gets that party its committed donors, fervent foot soldiers and loyal activists. That base certainly operates as an arm of the GOP’s party infrastructure - but few doubt it is fueled less by hollow partisanship, and more by their grassroots’ commitment to social, economic and religious conservatism.

This is why resisting Partisan War Syndrome and doing the hard work of rebuilding an ideological movement is both a moral imperative and a political necessity for the left. A grassroots base that is organized around hollow partisan labels rather than an overarching belief system - no matter how seemingly energized - will never defeat an opponent that puts ideological warriors ready to walk through fire on the political battlefield. If we do not rekindle that same fervor about actual issues on the left, we will continue living in a one-party country, losing elections into the distant future, and most disturbing of all, watching as our government serves only to protect those in power.

Did I link to this before? A majority of Americans favor impeachment if it turns out that Bush lied about the reasons for invading Iraq. (It’s really hard to type that with a straight face.) In fact, support for Clinton’s impeachment (over lying about a blow job) was much lower.

Here’s a great interview with one of my favorite writer/thinkers, Barbara Ehrenreich.

The Amazonian rain forest is shrinking much faster than anyone thought. Also, read this George Monbiot piece about the devastation caused by Brazilian beef production. You’d think you were reading about the diamond industry, but no… Beef.

Winning hearts and minds… By starving and dehydrating Iraqi civilians.

Here’s a wonderful James Carroll column:

(Excerpt)Who is this ”God” in whose name so many diverse and troubling things take place? Why is it assumed to be good to affirm one’s faith in such an entity? Why is it thought to be wicked to deny its existence? Most striking about so much talk of ”God,” both to affirm and to deny, is the way in which many who use this language seem to know exactly to what and/or whom it refers. God is spoken of as if God is the Wizard of Oz or the great CEO in the sky or Grampa or the Grand Inquisitor. God is the clock-maker, the puppeteer, the author. God is the light, the mother, the wind across the sea, the breath in every set of lungs. God is the horizon. God is all of these things.

But what if God is none of them? What if every possible affirmation that can be made of God, even by the so-called religions of revelation, falls so far short of the truth of God as to be false? Who is the atheist then? The glib God-talk that infuses public discourse in contemporary America descends from an anthropomorphic habit of mind, dating to the Bible and beyond, that treats God like an intimate friend or well-known enemy, depending on the weather and the outcome of battles. But there is another strain in the Biblical tradition that insists on the radical otherness of God, an otherness so complete that even the use of the word ”God” as a name for this Other One is forbidden. According to this understanding, God is God precisely in escaping and transcending comprehension by human beings. This can seem to mean that God is simply unknowable. If so, humans are better off not bothering about it. Atheism, agnosticism, or childish anthropomorphism — all the same.

But here is where it gets tricky. What if God’s unknowability is the most illuminating profundity humans can know about God? That would mean that religious language, instead of opening into the absolute certitude on which all forms of triumphal superiority are based, would open into true modesty. The closed creation, in which every question has an answer, would be replaced by an infinite cosmos where every answer sparks a new question. If what we mean by ”God” is the living pulse of such open-endedness, then God is of no use in systems of dominance, censorship, power. God is everywhere, yes. But, also, God is nowhere. And that, too, shows in America, especially in its fake religiosity.

Bob of I am a Christian Too, puts this nicely, and with more generosity than I can muster:

The founding meme of this blog is a response to conservative Christians that imply, or even baldly assert, that given my political views I am not a Christian. I refuse to commit this same sin in return. I disagree strongly with conservative Christians on politics, and I differ from them on many theological grounds. But we are saved by God’s grace, not by our works, and justification by politics is just another form of works-righteousness. We are all saved, and not by our own doing, or our political beliefs.

Conservative Christians are my political enemies, but are still my brothers and sisters in Christ.

"Senators on the committee were dismayed."

I just love understatement. “Senators on the committee were dismayed” by an exchange of emails between the office of Michael Brown (slightly disgraced former FEMA director) and the desperate agency officials already on the ground in New Orleans:

On Aug. 31, Bahamonde e-mailed Brown to tell him that thousands of evacuees were gathering in the streets with no food or water and that “estimates are many will die within hours.”

“Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical,” Bahamonde wrote. “The sooner we can get the medical patients out, the sooner we can get them out.”

A short time later, Brown’s press secretary, Sharon Worthy, wrote colleagues to complain that the FEMA director needed more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant that evening. “He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 minutes,” Worthy wrote.

“Restaurants are getting busy,” she said. “We now have traffic to encounter to go to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc. Thank you.”

In an Aug. 29 phone call to Brown informing him that the first levee had failed, Bahamonde said he asked for guidance but did not get a response.

“He just said, ‘Thank you,’ and that he was going to call the White House,” Bahamonde said.

Senators on the committee were dismayed.

“We will examine further why critical information provided by Mr. Bahamonde was either discounted, misunderstood, or simply not acted upon,” said GOP Sen. Susan Collins (news, bio, voting record) of Maine, who heads the committee. She decried the “complete disconnect between senior officials and the reality of the situation.”

OK, I know I’m piling on, but let’s just savor part of that again:

“Restaurants are getting busy,” she said. “We now have traffic to encounter to go to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc. Thank you.”

Bush knew

Ok, just this one little item, then more later. According to this NY Daily News story, Bush knew Rove leaked Valerie Plame’s name and was angry — not that he’d done it, but that he’d been sloppy about it.

Other sources confirmed, however, that Bush was initially furious with Rove in 2003 when his deputy chief of staff conceded he had talked to the press about the Plame leak.

Bush has always known that Rove often talks with reporters anonymously and he generally approved of such contacts, one source said.

But the President felt Rove and other members of the White House damage-control team did a clumsy job in their campaign to discredit Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, the ex-diplomat who criticized Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussen tried to buy weapons-grade uranium in Niger.

A second well-placed source said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President.

Josh Marshall is providing the best ongoing commentary on the story… e.g., here, here, here, and here. But AmericaBlog gets right to the point.

Things that make you go "hmmmm"

I turned 43 on Monday. My mother wonders how she could have a 43 year-old kid; I got a card from a friend who reflected with amusement that we’ve known each other over 25 years, now; and a younger colleague who asked me what living in Phoenix was like - when I stipulated that I was there in 1989-1991 - scoffed “oh, that’s so long ago!”

And now I learn that it’s been 12 years since the last Kate Bush album - which I still enjoy?! Is that really possible? A new one is (finally) due out November 8!

(Yes, there are probably more important things to blog about. Thank heaven for my sensible co-blogger abc. And I’ll get some more stuff up here later tonight.)

Juan Cole says, "We have no idea why we’re in Iraq"

This, from one of the leading experts on the Middle East, as he began a talk last night in Palo Alto sponsored by the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center. Before the usual audience for this sort of thing (bunch of graying ex-Vietnam protesters like myself), Cole offered his analysis of why the Bush administration has taken us into “this mess” and what he thinks should now be done. He sees the decision to invade as having been influenced by a number of forces:

1. The Defense Department’s drive to create and control “the architecture of oil security” (policing the Gulf region so that oil will continue to flow to the US)

2. Cheney’s tenure at Halliburton, leading him and others to contemplate the appealing possibility of direct ownership of oil fields in the Middle East (something that has not been possible since all such fields were nationalized in the early 1970s)

3. The desire of evangelicals to open the Middle East as a mission field, leading to (as they imagined) massive numbers of religious conversions

4. The desire of the neocons and “rightwing American Jews who are close to Likud and Ariel Sharon” to create alliances with the Sunnis that would somehow stabilize Israel’s position.

Since all of this has gone massively wrong, says Cole, the question is, what next? His proposal is to withdraw foreign (mostly US) ground troops, but carefully so as not to create a sort of vacuum in which a real civil war ensues. He would have the US pursue a counter-insurgency strategy and keep “Special Ops” and the air force in the country. He thinks we cannot leave until the Iraqi army is ready, which he acknowledges would take 5-8 years.

There was lots of discussion about how to get out. In this audience, there was nobody speaking up for “staying the course,” and there was a lot of hostility to his proposals. One man challenged Cole to show how his proposals differ from Nixon’s “Vietnamization” course in that conflict. Cole responded that the two situations are quite different, and he courteously held his ground in the face of the questioner’s increasing agitation. I was struck, as I am so often in these situations, by the inability of “liberals” of my generation to listen to any argument with which we do not already agree. This is a serious defect that I recognize in myself with almost as much regret as that which I feel when I see it in others.

Much of what Cole had to say is contained in a two-part interview he did with Tom Engelhardt, and for these you may visit here. Still, if you have a chance to see him in person, do so. He has a very low-key style and a dry wit that made the evening entertaining if not enjoyable because of the gravity of the subject.

Give this man a prize…

…for a pretty clear-eyed look into the future from back when. One of the more dubious privileges of retirement is that I get to clean off my desk at home, where reside the unread articles printed from the internet and tosed into ever-growing stacks. The other day I came across the piece linked above, a series of predictions by Robert Reich in the spring of 2004 about what might happen in a second term of the Bush administration. Apart from a misstep that has Rumsfeld as national security advisor and Wolfowitz as defense secretary, it’s pretty much on target — except that we have, in addition to the woes Reich enumerates, the unexpected surprise of all these indictments, issued and still to come. “The moral arc of the universe is long,” said Dr. King, “but it bends toward justice,” and we can all hope for that.

All this just goes to show that karma still operates, that “what goes around comes around”: or, in the formulation that has been coming to my mind lately, “God is not mocked.” For more along these lines, there’s a nice old essay from The Christian Century that ends with these words:

Maybe the only comfort we the comfortable can legitimately embrace lies in the realization that God cannot be forever mocked — that his [sic] grace will not forever endure ridicule, that the mockery of easy American Christianity will not endure forever. Perhaps our deliverance will come when we can hear those very different words of Paul, “God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, that will he reap” (Gal. 6:7), and find in them incredibly good news.

Is George Will feeling betrayed?

Really, I almost feel sorry for the guy. But I’m sure he’ll write something next week to shake me out of it.

[Excerpt] DeLay is exhibit A for the proposition that many Republicans have gone native in Washington. Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, leader of the more than 100 conservative members of the Republican Study Committee, charges that some Republicans think “big government is good government if it’s our government.” DeLay’s troubles, and his party’s, may multiply with coming revelations about the seamy career of uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He is emblematic of DeLay’s faux conservatism—K Street conservatism. That is Republican power in the service of lobbyists who, in their K Street habitat, are in the service of rent seekers—interests eager to bend public power for their private advantage.

Since 2000 the number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled, from 16,342 to 34,785. They have not been attracted to the seat of government, like flies to honey, for the purpose of limiting government.

Conservatives are not supposed to be cuddly, or even particularly nice. They are, however, supposed to be competent. And to know that scarcity—of money, virtue, wisdom, competence, everything—forces choices. Furthermore, they are supposed to have an unsentimental commitment to meritocracy and excellence. The fact that none of those responsible for the postwar planning, or lack thereof, in Iraq have been sacked suggests—no, shouts—that in Washington today there is no serious penalty for serious failure. Hence the multiplication of failures.