The Mad Neocon

If you ask Dick Cheney, changes in counter-terrorism tactics by the Obama administration mean we're all going to die in a big terrorist attack. And that's what CNN's John King did this weekend; ask Dick Cheney. As always, he was less than convincing. I don't think Dick's capable of excitement and this makes him a pretty bad liar -- his warning of the inevitable destruction of the world's first modern democracy was delivered in the same tone of voice he might use to talk about a flat tire. The destruction of America's unfortunate, of course, but that's just the way things are. No use getting all riled up about it.

Maybe Dick's like Cassandra, who was able to predict the future, but cursed in that no one would believe her. Why knock yourself out with histrionics if no one's going to buy it?

Another possibility is that Dick's not especially worked up over our oncoming doom because he knows it's a bunch of crap. That'd put him in the same boat as most of us, who also aren't extremely concerned about Cheney's doomsaying either. Other than the wingnut right who'll believe anything, we're all pretty sure that Dick's a BS dispenser and we don't lose a lot of sleep over his warnings.

There's a third possibility; that Dick believes what he says because he's a dangerous lunatic prone to paranoia. Cheney's not especially animated at the thought of another 9/11 because he's used to living in a world where disaster is always right around the corner. His lack of excitement doesn't indicate a lack of earnestness, it's just the consequence of living in constant fear.





After all, this is the man who wouldn't let Google Earth display his residence. If you're a paranoiac, the knowledge that satellites really are looking down and watching you must be unbearable. His obsession with secrecy was taken to absurd lengths, when he argued that the Office of the Vice President was actually a fourth branch of government.

Dick Cheney may have said and done crazy things as VP because Dick Cheney's crazy. Take his Vice Presidential Hit Squad. The White House had an "executive assassination ring" that answered to Cheney's office. "Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving," says investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. "That’s been going on, in the name of all of us." It's this sort of that Cheney argues is the only thing standing between us and destruction. He must believe it -- otherwise, why would this hit squad have existed?

"When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they're doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth ... they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required, that concept of military threat that is essential if you're going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks," Cheney told King in the interview.

It's an unfortunate coincidence for Dick that the things he thought had to be done to keep us all safe were revealed that same weekend. In an op-ed for the New York Times, journalist Mark Danner revealed details of a 2006 Red Cross investigation of US treatment of detainees. Not surprisingly, the methods used by US personnel indicate a desperation born of paranoia. These are the sorts of things you'd do if you really did believe the world was going to end tomorrow.

A few accounts from the detainees themselves tell us all we need to know:

– “I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room.”

– “Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing.”

– “A thick flexible plastic collar would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall..."

Unfortunately for the mental health of the nation, there's no shortage of cowardly "patriots" who are willing to argue that waterboarding isn't torture. Let's see them defend these practices; in what lunatic world is physical beating not torture?

"What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact," writes Danner. "We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away."

Torture didn't make us safer, it just proved the terrorist propaganda right. We were evil and unjust.

And how does this keep you safe? I'd point out that all of these people were suspects. None of them had been convicted of a crime. If the US government can grab you off the street, stick you in prison, and torture you without having to prove you did anything at all, how safe are you from the government? 3,000 people out of a population of some 300,000,000 died on 9/11 -- that's one in every 100,000 people. One million are on the terrorist watch list -- that's one in every 300 people. Which set of odds do you like better?

Maybe the time has come to admit the truth; there's a good chance that Dick Cheney -- who many believe was the real power in the Bush White House -- is pretty much completely insane. Keep that in mind the next time some media type seeks out his opinion.

-Wisco


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Planet America

Things are looking good for former Bush administration officials. You wouldn't think this would be the case, looking at some of the news stories that have come out after they'd packed up their stuff and left the White House. But that'd be because you think rationally; that doesn't fly in DC anymore. Post-Bush, the nation's capital is still dominated by denial.

Sure, Bush was an abuser of the law and -- under the paranoiac Dick Cheney's guidance -- played a little fast and loose with legalities. But that doesn't mean he actually broke the law and, since we don't know for sure, we should probably forget the whole thing. When it comes to anti-Constitutional behavior, human rights abuses, and war crimes, it's probably best to ignore things -- no one wants to open up that whole can of worms. We used to say that no one was above the law, now we worry that upholding the law might be inconvenient or embarrassing. As it is now, some people are above the law -- but only if those people are members of the Bush administration.

Outside the US, people don't get this. They insist on bringing this stuff up over and over. Out in the big, wide world, they just don't get that the Bush administration gets a pass for anything and everything, because to do otherwise would be bad politics. Forgive and forget. Look forward, not backward. Let's move on. Some people don't get the simplicity of solving a problem by pretending it never happened.

Take David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University. As a former UN prosecutor, Crane is a citizen of that big, wide world and doesn't see things through the lens of political expediency and an insular American media. For Crane, the United States is not a separate planet in its own orbit and things that happen in one nation inform and set precedent for things that could -- and sometimes should -- happen in other nations.

In Crane's world -- which, admittedly, is that part of the world that isn't the US -- a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir means that other leaders could be held accountable for their crimes.

Crane says that the Bashir warrant "may even be extended to the former president George W. Bush, on the grounds that some officials in terms of his administration engaged in harsh interrogation techniques on terror suspects which mostly amounted to torture." Turns out that when something's a war crime for one leader, it's a war crime for all leaders.

Crazy, huh?





But has the US actually tortured? We've called what we did "enhanced interrogation techniques." So it can't be torture, because we didn't call it that. Of course, the fact that we've "enhanced interrogation techniqued" people to death kind of puts a ding in that argument.

Griper News:

"[Prisoners] were handcuffed to fixed objects above their heads in order to keep them awake," reads the [Church report]. "Additionally, interrogations in both incidents involved the use of physical violence, including kicking, beating, and the use of 'compliance blows' which involved striking the [prisoners] legs with the [interrogators] knees. In both cases, blunt force trauma to the legs was implicated in the deaths. In one case, a pulmonary embolism developed as a consequence of the blunt force trauma, and in the other case pre-existing coronary artery disease was complicated by the blunt force trauma."

When you've got people dying because of your interrogation techniques, "enhanced" is an understatement. I'd also point out that interrogations are approached from a position of ignorance -- there are things you want to know, which is the entire purpose of the interrogation, and this means there are things you don't know. Among those things, you might reasonably include whether or not the subject knows anything more than you do and whether or not they're actually a terrorist. While many would argue that a terrorist deserves anything they get, not many would argue that we should punish a crime with torture or that we should punish a prisoner for a crime we don't know they committed. The assumption of guilt isn't justice.

But that's all logic and logic is a tool of that big, wide world. It's been banished from the separate planet that is the United States. Our government can do anything to anyone, because that's how they've kept us safe. Logic would dictate that if your government can do anything to anyone, then it can do anything to you, and this doesn't exactly make you safe from your government. Luckily for Bush and Cheney, logic doesn't fly here.

If it did, they might worry about a report on a UN probe of "secret" CIA prisons. I put "secret" in quotes because they're the worst-kept secret the US has -- everyone knows about them.

Of the prisons, Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, said, "We call on all governments to cooperate, not just in clarifying the facts, but in ensuring that such secret detention centres will no longer be used in the future." His colleague Martin Scheinin, Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism, went further, calling them "one of the most horrendous practices" that the Bush administration instituted after 9/11.

I'm guessing that Scheinin didn't know about this:

Raw Story:

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an "executive assassination ring" throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The remark came out seemingly inadvertently when Hersh was asked by the moderator of a public discussion of "America's Constitutional Crisis" whether abuses of executive power, like those which occurred under Richard Nixon, continue to this day.

"It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," Hersh said. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. ... Congress has no oversight of it."

"It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on," he continued. "Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."

I think the word you're looking for is "murder." When we weren't enhanced interrogating people to death, we were doing it the easy way -- with an assassin's bullet in their head. Hersh says he's collecting enough evidence to convince "even the most skeptical."

But, as I said, we don't live in the big, wide world where any of this is a problem. We live on Planet America, where the severity of a crime depends on the political convenience of that crime's prosecution. And prosecuting Bush, Cheney, and other former White House officials would be extremely inconvenient -- especially for a Democratic congress that refused to lift a finger while all of this was going on. There were no investigations into these international crimes and talk of impeachment was positively taboo. As a result, many of the Democratic congressional leadership are complicit. They may not have liked this stuff, but they allowed it and blocked every attempt to stop it.

And that's why we aren't going to see Bush or Cheney tried. Guilty of war crimes, guilty of murder, they'll make bundles of money speaking to right wing audiences about just how freakin' great they were. There's a truth commission building, but to be absolutely honest, that won't do a damned thing to keep a future group of White House lunatics and paranoiacs from doing exactly the same thing. Nothing short of arrest and trial would do that.

But that's not going to happen here on Planet America, because we want to pretend that the neocons acted alone. A complicit congress of enablers can't be shown for what they were.

-Wisco


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The Man in the Iron Bubble

Maybe if we all take up a collection, we can raise enough money to bribe Dick Cheney to just go away. He may be the most politically tone deaf politician in recent history, acting as if everyone agrees that the Bush administration's policies have been dazzling in their genius. You wonder if Dick actually checks any news sources or if he just relies on a circle of fawning sycophants who only tell him what he wants to hear. If Bush was the boy in the bubble, Cheney's may be the model that bubble was based on.

Or maybe "bubble" is the wrong word. More like "armored iron sphere." Not only doesn't truth seem to reach Dick, but it seems to be actively repelled. Nothing sinks in, because no truth ever gets close enough to touch him. There's a certain segment of the population who seem to believe that you can force your beliefs to become fact. All it takes is a sincere and fervent faith that your view of the universe is correct and it magically becomes true, true, true. You see it with creationists, Holocaust-deniers, global warming naysayers, free market moonies, and other various and assorted species of flatearthers. No fact can get in, because facts are the enemy of faith. Every bit of evidence that your position is wrong -- no matter how damning or conclusive -- is rejected immediately. The logic of this illogical thinking is simple; you're right, therefore, any evidence to the contrary must be wrong. That's all the proof you need to keep believing that the Earth is in the thrall of UFO overlords or that Vladimir Putin is really a robot or that Dick Cheney is right.

Of course, it may just be that the former-VP is just slinging propaganda when he pretends to be as ignorant and stupid as he often seems to be. It may just be that Dick's familiar with reality, but uses lies and fearmongering to try to change our perception of it. It may just be that he's not wrapped in a cocoon of yes men.

But, as always when we're talking about neocons, I'll go ahead and take them at their word on what they believe and don't believe. I'll assume that Dick Cheney's not a lying sack, but just a stupid and ignorant man. Honestly, you can't be generous with these people -- it's completely impossible. Your choices are always "they're lying" or "they're stupid." Somewhere along the line, we've established that it's a terrible, terrible thing to call these guys liars, so we're left with stupid. And that's being charitable.





While it's both fun and easy to throw rocks at Dick like this, I do have a reason to revisit the bad old days of a couple of weeks ago, when Dick Cheney and his sidekick (some guy named Bob Shrub or Jimmie Tree or Lennie Asparagus... something like that) worked in the White House, desperately trying to rewrite history in their favor. It was called the "Legacy Project" and the idea was to make a last, Hail-Mary attempt to rehab the neoconservative image after eight long years of nearly uninterrupted disaster.

But there's no reason that the attempt has to stop after the Bush administration (that's the name! Bush) left the White House. As former administration officials, they can still get a reporter or two to come a'runnin' whenever they feel the need drop some whoppers and try to get everyone to wet their pants just one more time.

In this case, it was three reporters; Mike Allen, Jim Vanderhei, and John Harris of Politico. I guess dealing with the sheer volume of horse crap here is a big job that takes many hands.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

That's right, one more pitch for torture. I won't say "one last pitch," because I'm sure it's not. If Dick's as much of a psycho- or sociopath as he seems to be, I'd imagine that it's hard to get him to shut the hell up about torture. I so don't want to know what sites the bookmarks on his laptop link to.

I could go through and point out the problems with Dick's view, but that'd just mean rewriting older posts. Suffice it to say that Dick only knows one song -- "WE'RE ALL GOING TO FREAKIN' DIE!!!" We all know how it goes, it's been stuck in our heads for the last eight years. Dick can come up with nothing new, despite the fact that the mojo wore off this particular spell a long time ago. We're tired of being terrified. It's probably time to give courage a spin.

But Dick's in his iron bubble and it doesn't make any difference whether the bubble is real or he's just pretending it is. Either way, he can't stop behaving as if we're all on the same page, 100% behind the path the mastermind Bush administration laid out for us.

It's almost sad, really. This tired, sick old mental patient babbling away as if anything he said made any sense and as if every word hadn't worn out its welcome a long, long time ago. Like a lunatic on street corner, Dick yells out "The end is near!" to anyone who comes within shouting distance.

Maybe it's time everyone started avoiding that street.

-Wisco

It's Torture. We Tortured. There was Torture.

Let's start out with a few quotes.

I think on the left wing of the Democratic Party there are some people who believe that we really tortured.
--Dick Cheney

It's torture. It's a means of extracting information that I didn't even believe these people probably had. It's a means of making their lives more miserable.
--Chris Arendt, formerly stationed at Guantanamo

We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case [for prosecution].
--Susan J. Crawford, convening authority of military commissions

Some on the left may think "we really tortured" Dick, but those in the know do too. We've gotten to the point where simple denial isn't going to be good enough. "We don't torture" doesn't wash when everyone knows we do. When cases are thrown out of court because the accused was tortured, then there was torture. When people who work in the prisons say they saw torture, then there was torture. When people coming out of those prisons say they were tortured, then there was torture.

At this point, denial isn't just useless, but it's insulting to everyone's intelligence -- the denier's included. There was torture.





Front page on the Washington Post yesterday was the article "Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official." It kind of gives the impression that someone was tortured -- namely, accused would-be 20th 9/11 hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani. The finding was made by Bush-appointee Susan J. Crawford, who oversees the trials -- such as they are -- of Guantanamo detainees. According to the report, "Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured."

Hey Dick, that doesn't sound much like "the left wing of the Democratic Party," does it? Sounds more like a principled conservative with respect for the rule of law. The Post piece lays out the specifics.

"For 160 days his only contact was with the interrogators," said Crawford, who personally reviewed Qahtani's interrogation records and other military documents. "Forty-eight of 54 consecutive days of 18-to-20-hour interrogations. Standing naked in front of a female agent. Subject to strip searches. And insults to his mother and sister."

At one point he was threatened with a military working dog named Zeus, according to a military report. Qahtani "was forced to wear a woman's bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation" and "was told that his mother and sister were whores." With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room "and forced to perform a series of dog tricks," the report shows.

The interrogation, portions of which have been previously described by other news organizations, including the Washington Post, was so intense that Qahtani had to be hospitalized twice at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which in extreme cases can lead to heart failure and death. At one point Qahtani's heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the record shows.

When your interrogation is so harmful to you that you need to be hospitalized, you kind of think that this might qualify as torture. Asked for comment, the White House took Dick's lead -- deny the obvious. "Let me just make sure it's clear -- and I'll say it on the record one more time -- that it has never been the policy of this president or this administration to torture," spokesperson Dana Perino told the Associated Press.

AP also got a comment from the Pentagon:

"We have always taken allegations of abuse seriously," [Pentagon spokesman Bryan] Whitman said. "We investigate all allegations, all credible allegations, of abuse," and have done some dozen investigations of interrogation methods, Whitman said.

And the Pentagon did investigate Qahtani's case in 2005. US generals Randall Schmidt and John Furlow looked into it. The Schmidt-Furlow report documented everything that Crawford mentions in the WaPo piece, as well as "twice reducing his body temperature to 92-97 degrees Fahrenheit." The dog tricks, the insults, the humiliations were all laid out, yet Schmidt-Furlow found it was all "legally permissible under the existing guidance," that it didn't "rise to the level of prohibited inhumane treatment," but warned that if overdone, it would be abusive -- "the cumulative effect being degrading and abusive treatment," the two fine generals wrote.

Wait a second, making a guy where women's underwear and forcing him to perform dog tricks is only degrading if you do it too often? Really? What's the number of times that goes too far? How often can you humiliate someone before it becomes degrading? And aren't "humiliating" and "degrading" pretty much synonymous? Schmidt and Furlow apparently left logic to reach conclusions they wanted to reach.

But someone out there is reading this and thinking, "Qahtani deserved it." Here's a question for you, what other crimes do you think people should be punished for before they're tried? What if you had to pay a fine first, then go to court to see if you got your money back? Would that seem fair or just to you?

Somehow, I doubt it. If it had turned out that Qahtani was innocent, how would you pay him back for nearly killing him twice anyway? When punishment precedes trial, justice is impossible.

Yes, there may be some people out there who believe we really did torture, Vice President Cheney. And those people may actually believe that torture isn't just wrong, but un-American, unjust, and illogical.

Those people are what you call "realists."

-Wisco

A Little Free Advice

There's no shortage of people willing to give incoming president Barack Obama advice. Even Readers Digest has gotten in on the action with advice ranging from the jaw-droppingly hypocritical (Karl Rove advises him to "encourage debate") to the solid (former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright says, "Restate the Case For U.S. Leadership Abroad"). I always say that free advice is often worth only what you paid for it. Luckily, the advisee's under no obligation to take it.

For a great example of worthless advise, we can turn to the reclusive Vice President Dick Cheney. Many believe Dick's the power behind the throne, the real president using Bush as a figurehead. I think it's probably a little more complicated than that, but the portrayal's probably true enough for brevity. George can barely manage the English language, so someone's doing all the mental heavy lifting in the Bush administration. That someone seems to be Dick.

The problem, of course, is that while Cheney's more articulate than Bush, he's not any smarter. He just thinks he is. If Cheney's as hands-on as everyone believes he is, then he shares the blame for what a freakin' disaster George W's two terms have been. For example, Cheney -- like the rest of the neocons gathered around the White House -- thought invading Iraq was the best idea anyone ever had. No matter what you think about the idea that Dick Cheney's the true leader of the Bush White House, everyone agrees that he plays the part of a top adviser, at the very least. So recent history shows that we can put Dick's free advice in the "worth what you paid for it" column.

To get an idea of just how poor Dick's advice can be, we can look at his interview with Rush Limbaugh yesterday, See, the vice president will not sit down with anyone who's likely to ask him difficult questions and no one else is guaranteed to throw softballs the way Rush did.





We get our info from The Hill, because we don't want to send traffic Limbaugh's way unless we have to:

Vice President Cheney predicts that Barack Obama will be grateful for the state of presidency he inherits from President Bush.

And while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other congressional Democrats have repeatedly criticized Bush for grabbing power, Cheney argued that Obama, the Democratic president-elect, will be glad of it.

“My guess is, once they get here and they’re faced with the same problems we deal with every day, that they will appreciate some of the things we put in place,” said Cheney Monday in a telephone interview with conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh.

"I think the Obama administration is not likely to cede that authority back to the Congress," he said. "I think they’ll find that given a challenge they face they’ll need all the authority they can muster." So, Dick's advice to Obama is to be as contemptuous toward the Constitution as he and George have been. You've got to wonder if he's been paying attention -- didn't Obama run against that sort of thing? There's no shortage of Republicans urging Obama to become more Republican, but Darth Cheney's advocating a complete 180 to the dark side. Somehow, I don't see that happening.

Then again, that was always Cheney's reasoning. It may be that his biggest project as VP was to expand presidential power beyond constitutional limits. Once a future president had those expanded powers, he thought, they wouldn't give them up. It's a lot easier to do things the wrong way, as opposed to the legal way. Convenience would tie future executives' hands.

But the flaw in his reasoning is that it hasn't been easier. Cover-ups are pretty labor-intensive. Once Dick got his expanded powers, he spent most of his time hiding from the law and the congress. In the end, all these handy-dandy executive powers Dick and George made up turned out to be more trouble than they're worth, resulting in bargain-basement approval ratings and a period of scandal, crime, and wide-spread distrust of government. I said before that Dick Cheney's probably not as smart as he thinks he is and the idea that doing things this way is easier than just abiding by the Constitution should prove that.

Better advice on how the president should view the Constitution comes from Sen. Russ Feingold. I've been saying that Barack Obama was my third choice for Democratic nominee, but I now realize he was my fourth -- Russ Feingold was my first choice, until he ruled a presidential run out pretty early. It's Feingold's advice to Obama that reminds me why I thought he'd make a very good president.

While you will face many difficult issues in the comings months and years, I want to raise one that I believe is critical for the presidential transition: restoring the rule of law. The countless abusive policies of the past eight years and the extreme legal theories on which they were based have left our nation weaker and our constitutional framework in a precarious position. In light of this recent history, I believe that one of the most important things that you can do as President is to take concrete steps to restore the rule of law in this country -- that is, to return to the White House respect for an appropriate separation and balance of powers among the branches, for the President's important but not paramount place in our constitutional system of government, for the laws that Congress writes and the importance of its oversight functions, and for the judiciary's crucial role in interpreting the law. I am sure that as a constitutional scholar you can appreciate that we must ensure that the Bush Administration's views of executive supremacy do not become so ingrained in our system of government that they become the "new normal."

I can actually abbreviate that a bit -- everything Dick Cheney believes about the Constitution and executive power is wrong. He's wrong when he says it's legal, he's wrong when he says it's desirable, and he's wrong -- in a simply practical sense -- when he says it works. It doesn't. We've seen the results of putting his theory into practice and it's turned the White House into a barely functioning legal fortress, repelling the attacks of law and reason. If you want to wind up like Bush, with approvals in the toilet and not a single accomplishment to speak of under your belt, you go ahead and take Cheney's advice.

On the other hand, if you want to actually get something done -- other than spend 24 hours a day cooking up creative legal arguments -- you go ahead and listen to Russ. That's my free advice Mr. President-Elect, as unasked for as anyone else's, but worth much more than Dick's.

Listen to Russ.

-Wisco

KBR, a Typical Privatization Story

Today, our service men and women continue to inspire and strengthen our Nation, going above and beyond the call of duty as part of the greatest military the world has ever known. Americans are grateful to all those who have put on our Nation's uniform and to their families, and we will always remember their service and sacrifice for our freedoms.
- George W. Bush, Prayer for Peace, Memorial Day, 2008

There's "above and beyond" and then there's "above and way beyond." Bush, in his "prayer for peace," neglects to tell us just what America's fighting forces are expected to face. We know about the nuts with guns and RPG rounds. We know about the roadside bombs and sectarian violence. We even know about the heat. What we don't get a lot of coverage of is how they're expected to live. Turns out, that's a really big story. And, despite having broken yesterday, it's still not getting a lot of press.

Military Times:

A Georgia man has filed a lawsuit against contractor KBR and its former parent company, Halliburton, saying the companies exposed everyone at Joint Base Balad in Iraq to unsafe water, food and hazardous fumes from the burn pit there.

Joshua Eller, who worked as a civilian computer-aided drafting technician with the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing, said military personnel, contractors and third-country nationals may have been sickened by contamination at the largest U.S. installation in Iraq, home to more than 30,000 service members, Defense Department civilians and contractors.

“Defendants promised the United States government that they would supply safe water for hygienic and recreational uses, safe food supplies and properly operate base incinerators to dispose of medical waste safely,” according to the lawsuit, filed Nov. 26 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. “Defendants utterly failed to perform their promised duties.”

The details are horrific.We're told about suffering from "skin lesions that subsequently spread, filled with fluid and burst," about "vomiting, cramping and diarrhea," about "severe abdominal pain." Worse, the lawsuit tells the story of "a wild dog running around base with a human arm in its mouth. The human arm had been dumped on the open air burn pit by KBR."

KBR also reused ice from mortuary trucks. Troops were served ice that "still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them..." That's above and beyond the call of duty. That's way beyond anything that should be expected of anyone.





While the lawsuit was filed by a single service member, the Times was able to provide some backup to the claims. "Military Times has received more than 100 letters from troops saying they were sickened by fumes from the burn pits, which burned plastics, petroleum products, rubber, dining-facility waste and batteries," we're told.

KBR has become the world's worst military contractor in the years since they were granted a no-bid contract by a Bush administration intent on providing business to their cronies. KBR's connection to parent company Halliburton had more to do with the contract than anything. Vice President Dick Cheney used to head up Halliburton.

KBR's actions were discovered by the military when they were "were attempting to improperly dispose of medical waste at an open-air burn pit by backing a truck full of medical waste up to the pit and emptying the contents onto the fire." The truck caught fire.

Sadly, this is nothing new. KBR's performance in Iraq has been absolutely criminal. Among the problems with the company is troops being electrocuted in showers, because of shoddy wiring in KBR constructed buildings. The pentagon knew this, but covered it up. KBR knew it, but did likewise. Neocons did what neocons do -- approached the problem as a public relations problem. If you don't know there's a problem, then there is no problem.

There was a time when the military built their own buildings, when they served their own food. But the Republican push to privatize everything under the sun succeeded and those days are gone. The reasoning -- which only works with people who are hopelessly bad at math -- tells us that private companies can always do things cheaper and more efficiently than government, so private companies should do everything government does.

But if there are X resources allocated to government, government can use it all. Private companies only have X-Y to work with, with Y equal to profit. This means cutting corners, which privatization moonies call "efficiency." Saner people call it negligence and fraud.

Worse, since these companies are all about profit, corners are cut acutely. For instance, KBR is accused of a crime that's either false imprisonment or slavery -- you make the call.

McClatchy Newspapers:

About 1,000 Asian men who were hired by a Kuwaiti subcontractor to the U.S. military have been confined for as long as three months in windowless warehouses near the Baghdad airport without money or a place to work.

Najlaa International Catering Services, a subcontractor to KBR, an engineering, construction and services company, hired the men, who're from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. On Tuesday, they staged a march outside their compound to protest their living conditions....

The laborers said they paid middlemen more than $2,000 to get to Iraq for jobs that they were told would earn them $600 to $800 a month. Some of the men took out loans to cover the fees.

According to the report, "The men live in three warehouses with long rows of bunk beds crammed tightly together. Reporters who tried to get a better glimpse inside were ushered away by armed guards." The workers had to pay for the privilege of being imprisoned in a warehouse in Iraq. Now that's profit.

How long are we going to let the privatization moonies pull this crap? We have all the evidence we'll ever need that the whole idea is deeply, deeply flawed. It doesn't work, it encourages fraud and other crimes, and it produces really crappy service. Like the free market moonyism that's been dealt a tremendous blow by the market meltdown, privatization moonyism should be reeling as well.

But the corporate media has been laying down on the job here. They'll report these things, sure -- but then they go away. We're freaking out about bailouts and the celebrity scandal of the week, while soldiers in Iraq are being poisoned and electrocuted, while people are being enslaved, while we're all being ripped off. Every one of these stories should be a huge scandal on the scale of the response to Hurricane Katrina (another failure of privatization, by the way) but they come and go like yesterday's weather report. The stories are reported and then forgotten.

I guess the moral of this story is that if government can do something for itself, then it should. I think the Armed Forces of the United States are probably capable of running a goddam kitchen. I think they can probably throw stuff into a fire as well as anyone else. In fact, as each of these examples demonstrate, they can do it better -- because they couldn't possibly do it worse.

Meanwhile, maybe we can get KBR execs to run a prison kitchen -- personally, while they serve their sentences. Dick Cheney can make the freedom fries.

-Wisco

Regrets, He's Had a Few

It's one of the most embarrassing moments from Bush's presidency. At a press conference in 2004, he was asked to name his biggest mistake since 9/11. For President Clueless, this was a stumper.

"I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it..." Bush said, hemming and hawing. "I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with answer, but it hadn't yet."

He went on to name some things he didn't consider mistakes, then realized that he was drifting. "I don't want to sound like I have made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't... you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one," he said, leaving the question unanswered. It's ironic that standing in front of the cameras trying to figure out the least embarrassing answer was a mistake in itself. Politicians field these questions all the time -- the trick isn't to not answer, but to deliver a non-answer. There's a difference.

"No one scores 100% in this office and I'm sure you'd be able to find many of my critics who can answer that question better than I," a smarter Bush might've said. "But we need to look forward, not backward. Americans aren't interested in navel gazing, they're interested in solutions. Next question please..." Instead, Bush spent a long time trying to find a convincing, but unembarrassing answer -- there wasn't one.





It took him over four years, but Bush has finally come up with an answer to that question. These things need to percolate a while. In fact, when asked about regrets by CNN's Heidi Collins, Bush came up with three.

Bush: I regret saying some things I shouldn't have said.

CNN: Like?

Bush: Like "dead or alive," or "bring 'em on." And, by the way, my wife reminded me as president of the United States, you better be careful what you say. I was trying to convey a message. I could have conveyed it more artfully. Being on this ship reminds me of when I went to the USS Abraham Lincoln and they had a sign that said "Mission Accomplished." I regret that sign was there. It was a sign aimed at the sailors on the ship, but it conveyed a broader knowledge. To some it said, well, Bush thinks the war in Iraq is over, when I didn't think that. But nonetheless, it conveyed the wrong message. So, there are things I've regretted...

Yeah, those were pretty bad. Especially standing in front of a big banner reading "Mission Accomplished," while telling everyone that "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." You can really see how people might've gotten the idea that he thought the war was over. Of course, the banner was just a PR problem, an embarrassing photo. The real problem was that he said the war was over. That's why everyone got the idea that was what he meant. It wasn't the banner.

"In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty, and for the peace of the world. Our nation and our coalition are proud of this accomplishment -- yet, it is you, the members of the United States military, who achieved it," Bush said. "Your courage, your willingness to face danger for your country and for each other, made this day possible. Because of you, our nation is more secure. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free."

See that's Bush's biggest mistake -- or, at least, representative of it -- he was never, ever straight with the American people. Bush pretended to make "the tough decisions," all the while following the path of least resistance and the lowest road, like water running downhill. When the truth would've made him look pretty bad -- which was about 90% of the time -- we didn't get the truth. Even that mistake question in 2004 was met with evasion. Bush knew his mistakes then, but he didn't think you should.

So we wound up with a White House fueled by propaganda and coverup. It happened after 9/11, when it eventually came out that he ignored a daily briefing entitles "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the US." It happened after Hurricane Katrina, when it quickly became clear that Brownie hadn't done a heckuva job. It happened in the Gonzales investigation, the Valerie Plame scandal, the FISA scandal, after Dick Cheney shot some poor guy in the face, torture, corruption, on and on and on.

Bush and Cheney treated the White House as a hiding place and every move they made was treated like a state secret. The idea of "executive privilege" was stretched to absurdity. Secret emails, secret memos, secret conversations, secret wiretaps, secret prisons with secret prisoners, etc. Transparency was apparently a dirty word for this White House. If you needed to know it, they'd hold a press conference. Otherwise, you can shut the hell up and stop asking questions. What, do you think this is some sort of democracy or something?

It may have taken four years for George W. Bush to come up with mistakes he regrets and his choices tells us a lot about his philosophy of governance. Each one was a public relations gaffe, a problem of bad messaging. They were things that made him look bad, not things that had damaged the nation or had taken people's lives. Bush's mistakes were mistakes that made problems for Bush, not you. You he could care less about.

Never before has two months seemed so long. Goodbye George, we won't miss you.

-Wisco

Creating a New Mandate

I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.
-Franklin Roosevelt, comment to reformers

Yesterday, I wrote that the winners of the 2008 election were the people and that the winners shouldn't go home. We can count on Obama to work on the agenda he spelled out on the campaign trail, but there is still a place for activism after your guy wins. While the right is trying to launch an "Obama doesn't have a mandate" narrative, this seems doomed to failure to me, since it requires you to believe BS about what it is you want. I kind of think you're the expert there. You really don't need some jerk explaining to you what you think. As spin jobs go, this one seems a little pointless.

But Obama only has a mandate to do what he proposed in his presidential campaign; restoring tax fairness, reforming health care, rebuilding the economy, getting out of Iraq, investing in infrastructure and green energy, etc. These are the things we can expect the new president to address in his first term.

But there are issues that weren't brought up on the campaign trail. In discussing the president-elect, we tend to forget the sitting president. George W. Bush hid out during the campaign, an invisible president who avoided the public spotlight the way a vampire avoids sunlight. One big issue was fairly successfully avoided by John McCain and that was what the hell to do about George W. Bush and company.





A mandate isn't only given at the ballot box. When the people demand that something be done, that becomes an instruction to the government. "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny," Thomas Jefferson once said, "When the government fears the people, there is liberty." Government should be responsive to the people, not the other way around. The fact that we've been running this whole thing backwards needs to be addressed. Future executives must know that running the country like a dictatorship won't be without consequence, that the Constitution actually means something, that we are a government of laws.

Which brings us to a remedy proposed by my own congress member, Rep. Tammy Baldwin:

Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin has introduced the Executive Branch Accountability Act of 2008, calling on the next President to reverse the damaging and illegal actions taken by the Bush/Cheney Administration and to collaborate with Congress to proactively prevent any further abuses of executive branch power.

“Over the past several years, serious questions have been raised about the conduct of high ranking Bush/Cheney Administration officials in relation to some of the most basic elements of our democracy: respect for the rule of law, the principle of checks and balances, and the fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights,” said Baldwin. “The list of abuses of executive branch power is long, as are the Administration’s attempts to impede congressional oversight.

The act would:

-Ensure that any Bush/Cheney administration official guilty of a war crime is prosecuted under the War Crimes Act and the Anti-Torture Act.

-Affirm that it is the sole legal right of Congress to declare war.


-Restore the writ of habeas corpus as an essential principle of our democracy.


-Ensure that torture and rendition are uniformly prohibited under United States law.


-Immediately close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.


-Ensure that Americans can bring claims against their government.


-Immediately take affirmative steps to protect all documents from the Bush/Cheney Administration and publicly reaffirm that the Office of the Vice President is indeed part of the executive branch.


-Publicly review potential abuses of the presidential pardon process.


-Reform the use of presidential signing statements.

"On January 20, 2009, the next President of the United States will stand before the American people and take an oath of office to '...preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.' Along with this oath, it is my fervent hope that he will take the decisive actions detailed in this legislation to restore our democracy," Baldwin says.

"On the surface, this may seen like a last jab at Bush and Cheney, and surely the portions of this proposal that address holding the former president and vice president, and members of their administration, to account will not sit well with those who would prefer to forgive and forget," says Baldwin constituent and writer for The Nation John Nichols. "But the real focus of the Executive Accountability Act is on the next presidency and the next Congress."

In a sane world, all of the provisions of the Executive Branch Accountability Act would be seen as redundant. But the validity of the Constitution of the United States of America has become a partisan issue, with the right seeming only to give a damn about the Second Amendment. I've joke that the Republican view of the Constitution can be summed up as "You can't take our guns. Praise Jesus. The End." Everything else is just crap we can all go ahead and ignore.

But without that founding document, this nation is nothing. There is no core, no guiding principles. And, if we allow a president to ignore the Constitution whenever the law becomes inconvenient, then we don't actually have one. It becomes meaningless and when someone actually cites constitutional requirements, it becomes a mere technicality that only nitpickers and anal retentive types care about. As a result, the president exists in a virtually lawless world which, as we all know now, leads to disaster for the nation.

Whether or not Baldwin's legislation actually goes anywhere is an open question. But if a fight is worth winning, then it's worth fighting regardless. I'd lose a thousand battles in a war for the right thing. I'd imagine that Barack Obama would probably be resistant to the idea, but as FDR pointed out, we can make the president we need.

We've got at least four years to pull this off and -- even if it only keeps Bush and Cheney from sleeping soundly at night -- it'd be worth the effort. Law without consequence is not law.

-Wisco

Vote or be Dicked

Some endorsements mean more than others. For example, I don't know who Jay Leno is voting for and that's probably because I'm just like everyone else -- I don't care. Celebrity endorsements don't mean too much, because anyone who looks to celebrities for guidance is probably not going to vote. Other endorsements may help a little, because it bumps the candidate up in the news rotation. The more a candidate is mentioned in a positive light, the better.

But some endorsements can't possibly be seen positively. For example, John McCain scored the less than coveted al Qaeda endorsement. Turns out that having the US dumping money and blood down the drain in Iraq is pretty much exactly what the terrorists want. "Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election," reads an internet posting from the organization. "[We] will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda then will succeed in exhausting America."

But it seems that Americans are done with giving a damn what terrorists want. Good on us. They're freakin' insane. We should've stopped making decisions based on what crazy people want or don't want a long time ago. Al Qaeda's endorsement probably didn't do much to change anyone's mind. In fact, most media sources reported it as a "News of the Weird" piece, if at all. It wasn't the sort of thing that anyone really took seriously.





But another endorsement may be the final nail in McCain's electoral coffin. Yesterday, a certain Vice President made this statement:

I believe the right leader for this moment in history is Sen. John McCain. John is a man who understands the danger facing America. He's a man who has looked into the face of evil and not flinched.

Mr. Helpful also had nice things to say about Sarah Palin, saying McCain had "chosen a running mate with executive talent, toughness and common sense, our next vice president, Sarah Palin." The McCain campaign will not be sending a thank you note to Dick Cheney's office. In fact, this endorsement -- and its timing -- are widely seen as so damaging that many are openly wondering why Cheney hates McCain. There's no law that says the Vice President can't just shut the hell up, not endorse anyone, and hope everyone forgets about him.

Oddly -- but not surprisingly -- Cheney's endorsement is getting a bigger negative reaction than al Qaeda's. And Obama was quick to jump on it:

That endorsement didn’t come easy. Senator McCain had to vote with George Bush 90 percent of the time and agree with Dick Cheney to get it.

George Bush may be in an undisclosed location now, but Dick Cheney’s out there on the campaign trail because he’d be delighted to pass the baton to John McCain.

He knows that with John McCain you get a twofer: George Bush’s economic policy and Dick Cheney’s foreign policy – and that is a risk that the American people cannot afford to take.

Obama said that McCain deserved Cheney's endorsement, because he "really earned it." Ouch.

Dick's the heart of the neocon wing of the White House. Dick's the dark stain that will color our national self-perception for decades. The head liar, the chief crook, the author of torture, the despiser of law, the tapper of phones. Dick Cheney is everything that brought the GOP to this point in history, reviled and discredited, ruined and wrong.

Does Dick Cheney want McCain to lose? I doubt it. He doesn't really strike me as a big fan of hope and optimism, so Obama's not his guy. But, at this point, it's pretty clear McCain's screwed regardless, so Cheney couldn't resist the sadistic impulse to sucker punch Bush's old rival just one last time, in public, while he's already down. Of Obama and McCain, there really shouldn't be any doubt who he would've preferred, but America's Blofeld doesn't allow failure, so McCain must be thrown into the shark tank.

But McCain isn't without hope himself. And that hope is that you think this thing's in the bag, stay home, and don't vote. Whatever motive Cheney had for endorsing McCain, we can safely assume that he wanted him to win. After all, Bush endorsed him as soon as he was the presumptive nominee.

So let's look at some of John McCain's endorsements; George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and al Qaeda. If that doesn't get you up off your ass before the polls close Tuesday, nothing will.

-Wisco

Not Even a Bump in the Road

I had to go to Fox News to find the headline, but I knew someone out there must've written one. I ran "Palin won debate" through Google News and came up with "Sarah Palin, McCain’s Secret Weapon, Wins the Debate," from Andrea Tantaros -- billed as a "Republican Political Commentator."

There, we learn that Sarah Palin is a "Lazarus in lipstick," who "won the debate because she exceeded expectations and connected with the American people on a personal level."

"Governor Palin breathed life into the McCain campaign and rectified public opinion about her competency, which was crucial," Tantaros writes. "Republicans, heave a sigh of relief." In other words, all she had to do was avoid drowning in a glass of water and the right would declare it a triumph of statesmanship. Low expectations do that for a candidate. But isn't this a confused metaphor? If Sarah Palin "breathed life into the McCain campaign," then she's Jesus -- McCain is Lazarus. You've got to be careful with those biblical references.

After watching the debate, I scored it to Biden. I wasn't alone. Early polling from CBS gave it to Biden, as well -- 46%-33% among undecided voters. In fact, that polling showed Biden nearly twice as successful as Palin at recruiting converts to the cause; while 10% said Palin convinced them to back McCain, 18% said that Biden brought them over to Obama. Still, 71% didn't commit either way.





With Obama ahead in the polls, I thought that Biden should play for a tie. He played it a little better than that, but still pretty safe. Joe Biden has always struck me as a little bit of a dick -- the kind of guy who points at you by making pistols with his fingers, then winks and says, "there he is!" Maybe it's just me, but that kind of guy always struck me as a phony. That side of him was mostly in check last night, although I did laugh out loud when he said he spent a lot of time at Home Depot -- I have my doubts.

Later polling by CNN kind of caught me by surprise. They gave it to Biden as well, by an even wider margin -- 51%-36%. But what got me was that more found Palin likable -- 54%-36%. I found her forced, with a contrived folksiness, and stuck on "perky," like a local morning news anchor. In the end, she didn't make me think of a possible future president so much as a cartoon chipmunk with an accent straight out of the movie Fargo. Maybe she benefitted by a comparison with Biden's personality. Still, it doesn't seem to have mattered -- they gave it to Biden anyway.

Palin turned in a mostly gaffe-free performance -- although at one point, she seemed to believe a civil war general was running things in Afghanistan. Gen. David McKiernan is the man she was thinking of, not Gen. George McClellan. In the end, Palin managed to exceed expectations by not wandering off the stage.

I was switching around after the debate and I lingered on CNN's replay of the debate for a moment. They've got this weird focus group dial polling thing scrolling at the bottom of the screen -- dial up if you like what you're hearing, down if you don't. Twice while I was watching, Palin used the "mavericks" line and it failed miserably; the group dialed it down immediately. That attempt at branding doesn't seem to be working. I think it tickles people's BS sensors. I'd been wondering why calling yourself a maverick didn't look like bragging to people. I don't wonder about that anymore -- it does.

Biden did let people know there was an actual person in that suit. Talking about his family, he choked up. "But the notion that somehow, because I'm a man, I don't know what it's like to raise two kids alone, I don't know what it's like to have a child you're not sure is going to -- is going to make it -- I understand," he said. His daughter and his first wife were killed in a car accident, his sons were badly injured. I guess it's true what they say about that kind of loss; you never get over it, you just get used to it. It's always there.

I don't think that there was any one place where she lost this; Palin's performance was consistently sub-par throughout. But, if you put a gun to my head and made me choose one mistake, I'd choose this:

IFILL: Governor, you mentioned a moment ago the constitution might give the vice president more power than it has in the past. Do you believe as Vice President Cheney does, that the Executive Branch does not hold complete sway over the office of the vice presidency, that it it is also a member of the Legislative Branch?

PALIN: Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president's agenda in that position. Yeah, so I do agree with him that we have a lot of flexibility in there, and we'll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation. And it is my executive experience that is partly to be attributed to my pick as V.P. with McCain, not only as a governor, but earlier on as a mayor, as an oil and gas regulator, as a business owner. It is those years of experience on an executive level that will be put to good use in the White House also.

Wow. She's repeating Cheney's philosophy here. Bad move -- jock itch is more popular than Dick Cheney. Biden lost no time diving on this:

Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.

And the primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there's a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit.

The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he's part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive and look where it has gotten us. It has been very dangerous.

A-freakin'-men. McCain=Bush is one thing, Palin=Cheney is a clincher. Neither is a winning message.

In terms of success, I give this to Obama-Biden. Sarah Palin needed to do more than just prove she's not an actual intellectual invalid, she had to make some sort of difference in the race. She didn't. Personally, I think she did a better job than McCain did in the first debate -- he was seriously awful -- but it turns out that's not good enough. Biden didn't knock it out of the park, but he didn't need to. Obama-Biden is ahead right now, all he needed to do was just maintain the lead and not change anything. He did that.

Palin proved she was able to cover her ignorance by dodging questions. At least one time, when she should've been able to talk in depth and defend her position, she only repeated what she'd just said. And, at times when she was addressing her opponent, she was looking directly into the camera -- which struck me as a little weird. I imagined a lot of people sitting at home thinking, "My name's not Joe Biden, lady."

All in all, I found the first and only vice presidential debate mostly boring. It was newsworthy only because of its participants. Nothing really happened, nothing was changed.

Which has to be what Obama-Biden were hoping for.

-Wisco

The Trojan Trust

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Congress isn't authorizing the $700 billion bailout immediately! Good freakin' God, if they don't pass it five minutes ago, we're all doomed! If Wall Street doesn't get all that lousy debt bought up, we'll return to the stone age. We'll be reduced to hunter/gatherers, chasing down white tail deer with rocks and spears. The only thing we'll have to wear will be smocks made from our now useless money. What is the holdup? What is the holdup?!?

Sen. Chris Dodd:

It would do nothing in my view, to help a single family save a home, at least not upfront. It would do nothing to stop even a single CEO from dumping billions of dollars of toxic assets on the backs of American taxpayers. While at the same time do nothing to stop the very authors of this calamity to walk away with bonuses and golden parachutes worth millions of dollars. And it would allow the Secretary and his successors to act with absolute impunity without review of any agency or court of law. After reading this proposal, I can only conclude it is not just our economy that is at risk but our Constitution as well.

OK, so there's that. The bill authorizing the bailout, as written, is freakin' awful. The White House tried to buffalo Congress into passing the bill, trying to whip up panic and using the crisis as cover. They'd managed to pull that off once before, and we got the PATRIOT Act. They thought they could do it again.

But the problem with the Trojan Horse is that you can only use that tactic once, then everyone's on to it. If the Achaeans had shown up at the gates of another city with a big wooden horse a few years later, I doubt anyone would've said, "Cool! Let's bring it in."





But here are the Bushies again, showing up at the gates of Congress with their hollow horse, asking Congress to let them in. It didn't go well.

Politico:

There was a time when Dick Cheney could turn back a Republican revolt on Capitol Hill.

That time is gone.

The vice president traveled to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to silence a chorus of GOP complaints about Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion plan. But House Republicans who walked into a closed-door meeting with Cheney steaming over the plan walked out just as angry, and they described what happened in between as both “a bloodbath” and “an unmitigated disaster.”

Don't you wish there was video?

At issue was thirty-two words which were a really bad idea. Section 8 of the bill reads, "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." I'm not sure, but I think this level of oversight constitutes a literal license to kill. It's certainly a license for abuse. Treasury Secretary Paulson insisted he wanted oversight, but thought it would've been "presumptuous" to write oversight in himself -- a claim the wording of the section makes laughable. Apparently, it's not presumptuous to give yourself dictatorial powers and declare yourself above any law.

Polling shows that voters oppose bailouts -- 55%-31%, even if collapse would hurt the economy. But it seems almost certain to happen. That same polling show that voters think Obama would do a better job with the crisis than McCain -- 45%-33%.

Obama's take on the bailout looks good. Section 8 is out, in his opinion, but that's really a no-brainer and no one likes that -- it's a dead issue. A lack of regulatory reform is a deal killer, as is a lack of help for homeowners. International aid for what is essentially an international crisis is an Obama requirement as well.

But what we really need here is a healthy round of good old fashioned trust-busting. We're bailing out these companies because they've become too big to fail. As a result, the taxpayer becomes the insurer of the last resort, since the United States cannot allow these institutions to collapse. "Too big to fail" should become synonymous with "too big" and anti-monopolistic measures should be taken to make sure no corporation, company, or firm is "too big to fail." When this happens, bailouts will become a thing of the past. Our current system of bass-ackward socialism, where profit is private and loss is nationalized, can't continue -- especially not with the unbelievably massive debt the Bush administration has left us with. Debt upon debt upon debt will bankrupt us eventually. It has to stop. Antitrust laws really aren't anything more complicated than not putting all your eggs in one basket.

Odysseus Cheney may not have tricked us into bring the horse inside this time, but the problem isn't this law, the problem is a system that allows companies to grow so huge and so important to our economy that this one company -- just the one -- can't ever be allowed to go under. When Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch, that was the wrong thing. That was the mistake we've been allowing to happen again and again and again. Giant mergers are anticompetitive, almost by definition, and leave us more and more reliant on fewer and fewer companies.

The root of the problem isn't a lack of oversight and regulation, although those definitely need to be addressed. The problem is that there are institutions in America that are "too big to fail." We may not have fallen for Bush and Cheney's Trojan Horse, but we're falling for the ones constructed by monopolies again and again and again.

-Wisco

The Good Fight

I want to share a fun fact; the vast, vast majority of people think George W. Bush sucks. And there's this guy who's running for president who's close to Bush. This is a problem for that guy:



Yeah, it's not the newest poll, but that's kind of the point. Rev. Wright is a dead issue -- George W. Bush is not. And, while people may not like Jeremiah Wright, there aren't many who would argue that he's screwing up the country. Wright is not a national disaster, Bush is. In fact, Bush is such a disaster that the GOP was stuck with a little bit of a problem -- how to deal with him in their national convention?

They had to have him speak. It would be huge -- and counterproductive -- news if he weren't to address the convention. So they decided to hide him. Bush will address the RNC on the day most people won't be watching. Bush is scheduled for Labor Day evening -- a massive media black hole. The only way to get fewer viewers would be to have him speak on Christmas.

Bonus, they can hide Cheney in the same hole. So, of course, they did. There was some question as to whether Darth Cheney would address the convention at all, but -- like Bush -- it turned out that the bigger story would be to not feature him. The only place to hide Bush and Cheney was out in the open.



All of this is good news for Democrats for more than one reason. Allowing the Republican National Convention to come immediately after the Democratic National Convention was a mistake. In any debate, the final position is stronger, being the rebuttal. There's a reason that our legal system allows the defendant to make the second argument -- it's much easier to argue against than to argue for. In the conventions battle, Democrats lost the high ground.

On the other hand, the rebuttal forces negativity -- which will highlight Obama's positive message. People already think of the GOP as the party of darkness. There's a broad gray line between good and evil, with a lot of elbow room in between. But with kidnapping and spying and killing and torture, the Bush administration has dragged the Republican party all the way across that line. Allow me a poetic turn of phrase here, but where a neocon goes, death and sorrow follows. These are not good people. In fact, they're almost cartoonishly evil.

That's their eventual failing. Evil seems powerful because it's not limited by morals or ethics or law. What we call evil is basically a shortcut, crossing lines and breaking barriers that are pretty much conceptual. Goodness, at its most basic, means always making the same choice, always following the same road. Evil takes whatever path serves it best. Evil doesn't do evil for evil's sake, it does evil for expediency's sake.

Evil is, at its most basic, lazy. And that's why it doesn't endure. We are a relentless species that knows the future exists. What we've built took generations, people who helped build our world lived and died with no hope of ever seeing this. People fought for this and died for this and it's still a work in progress. Perfection isn't possible, but that's our bar.

So don't fool yourself. The Democrats aren't good either. It's said that all it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing and today's Democratic party is a great example of that. By refusing to punish evil, they allow it. By refusing to fight evil, they become de facto allies.

But this is a long fight that is never done. As I said, goodness is a matter of always making the same choice. So you can start being good at any time. And you can stop being good at any time. This is the time when we can choose good. Every day is the time when we can choose good.

If history shows us anything, it's that humanity is constantly improving. That the right choice is made more often than the wrong one. We become a little wiser with each generation and shed our evils -- we're better than we were when we had slaves, better than we were when we burned witches, better than we were when we believed the world was flat. We've made the right choice more often than not -- perhaps barely more often -- and that's been enough to improve our world immensely.

The GOP can try to hide their evil on Labor Day, to display Bush and Cheney when the fewest cameras will be rolling, but they can't hide them altogether. The evil at the heart of their party will be there until they make the right choice and drive it out.

All of this talk about good and evil is done without hyperbole, by the way. I think that when people embrace torture, when they celebrate needless war, when they abandon law, they have become literally evil. We may not live in a nation with a good guy party, but we inarguably live in one with a bad guy party.

The party beginning their convention tonight aren't the bad guy party. They aren't the good guy party either. But they're the ones in the best position to take down evil. Once they do that, we can make the right choice once again and fight them too.

And we'll win -- eventually. History shows that. If evil is lazy, good is relentless.

-Wisco

Rule of Law? What Rule of Law?

Big news. Last night, Rep. Dennis Kucinich presented articles of impeachment against George W. Bush. Thirty-five counts in all. Big, big news...

Except it's not. Flipping through the channels this morning, I saw nothing about this. As far as the mainstream media is concerned, it never happened. We watch crime after crime after crime revealed, but holding the criminal accountable is completely out of the question.

The Democratic leadership likewise looks the other way, declaring impeachment "off the table" for political reasons. Far from holding the administration accountable for their undeniable crimes, the media would rather pretend they don't exist and cover the horse race of the election, while congressional leadership pretends that hearings without consequences and empty expressions of outrage are punishment enough. The truth is, that's not punishment at all. Bush and the rest of the bloodsoaked neocon crew, with shreds of the Constitution still hanging from their fingers, are going to get a stern talking-to, believe you me Buster and no two ways about it. They won't avoid the wagging congressional finger, the Harry Reid letter of miffedness, the Nancy Pelosi statement of irk, but any actual lasting consequence for their actions is completely out of the question. At this point, it could be revealed that Bush and Cheney have Iraqi children for breakfast every morning and all that would happen would be that they receive a letter respectfully asking them to stop -- please, if they feel like it.

Although not criminal in any legal sense, one issue where the Bush administration's moral criminality is most apparent is on the 21st Century GI Bill. Bush and Cheney are constantly hiding behind soldiers and veterans, constantly telling us that disagreeing with their stupid and pointless war in Iraq is somehow abandoning the troops. Bush is the military, any criticism of Bush is magically transformed into "not supporting the troops."

Meanwhile, Bush does absolutely jack for soldiers in the field and even less for those who come home. Bush and Cheney can't be bothered with funerals -- in fact, for a while there, they'd rather pretend there were no casualties at all, barring any photos of returning caskets. For the Bush administration, war is like crime -- neither has any consequence at all. Soldiers are pawns in every situation; when war crimes are ordered, the soldiers who carried out the orders are convicted -- those giving the orders go on talking head shows to be asked polite questions. If they can't fight anymore, they're warehoused in moldy VA hospitals. If veterans make up a significant percentage of the homeless, then that's just too bad -- there's nothing anyone can do. If the Army is experiencing an epidemic of suicides, prepare a press release about all the stuff you're going to to do address the problem -- then prepare a nearly identical one for next year when the token measures you implemented did absolutely nothing to address the problem. Do as little as you can get away with -- and, with a weak-kneed opposition party leadership, that's a pretty much limitless category -- and demand everything of them. Sacrifice is, after all, a one way street, leading in the opposite direction of the White House. The administration proposes, but the soldier disposes. And all the lost and ruined lives the White House leaves in their wake are irrelevant. It's the cost of freedom and it's a cost that someone other than the neocons pay.

"The day will come when the mission he served has been completed and the fighting is over, and freedom and security have prevailed," President Bush said in giving a posthumous Medal of Honor to Private First Class Ross Andrew McGinnis. "America will never forget those who came forward to bear the battle. America will always honor the name of this brave soldier who gave all for his country, and was taken to rest at age 19."

Yeah, about that...

Army Times:

The father of the nation’s latest Medal of Honor recipient has publicly called for President Bush to endorse a veterans’ education benefits bill being negotiated in Congress.

“I feel there is someone out there more important than [my wife] Romayne and I, and that is the troops who are still active,” Tom McGinnis said as he thanked family and friends for their support. “It’s important that we show them our appreciation … so that they are reminded that they are appreciated and will be welcomed when they come home.”

[...]

Spc. Ross McGinnis used his body to smother a grenade that had been thrown into his Humvee while on patrol Dec. 4, 2006, in Adhamiyah. Ross McGinnis, 19, was killed in the blast, but his actions saved the lives of the other four soldiers in the truck.

"I could talk about it to my friends all I want,” McGinnis said. “What good is that going to do? If I didn’t do it when I was down there at the Pentagon or the White House, one of the two, when will I ever have the chance to make an impact? I did what I felt was right, whether it was right or not."

The provision "covers the full cost of tuition and fees at any four-year public college or university and provides a monthly living allowance and an annual payment to cover books and supplies." Bush has promised to veto it. Remember, we expect everything from the soldier and nothing from Bush. That's the way things work these days.

The good news is that the 21st Century GI Bill is extremely popular. About 80% of Americans say that veterans are getting a raw deal under the old GI BIll and about 90% think we should update it.

But the Bush administration is joined by John McCain in opposing the bill, saying it would provide an incentive for troops to leave the service and go to college. It's a stupid argument -- what incentive is there to enlist in the first place? What Bush and McCain seem to envision is a military where people enlist and nearly 100% make it their career. It's not an extremely realistic vision, but visions rarely are. You'll notice that Bush didn't make the military his career, but walking the walk and talking the talk are two different things.

Of course, it looks like a veto would be overridden. An override is an almost sure bet in the Senate and a good bet in the House. But Bush, who's established long ago that he's above the law, could conceivably ignore the override. He's used "signing statements" as an unconstitutional stealth veto, which allows him to interpret the law any way he wants to. Bush could sign the 21st Century GI BIll into law and add, "Yeah, but we don't have to do any of that."

And then what would happen?

The wagging congressional finger, the Harry Reid letter of miffedness, the Nancy Pelosi statement of irk. Break the law all you want, Mr. President, but don't expect to get away without a lecture you can go ahead and ignore. The President of the United States has become a lawless position, with no danger of ever paying any price for the office's crimes. Nancy and Harry have seen to that.

Until there's some sort of consequence for the crimes Bush has committed, he has no incentive to ever obey the law. Token resistance from the lawmaking body makes sure of that. Future executives will be able to point to the Bush administration and say there's no such thing as an impeachable offense -- that precedent will have been established by Pelosi and Reid.

So cheer on legislation that Bush doesn't want. Just don't expect him to obey those laws or to implement their requirements. There's no reason him to.

Well, other than the rule of law, which has been allowed to degenerate into a quaint and ancient pretense. The justice and oversight muscle, unused, has been allowed to atrophy.

-Wisco

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