AIPAC and the 2012 US Presidential election - a report from Al Jazeera

What role does AIPAC play in US elections?

(click image or here to access video clip)

The American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in the US, is holding its biggest annual conference yet with around 13,000 delegates in Washington.

For all those bidding to become the next US president, it has become an essential campaign stop. The group has strong ties to the religious right and evangelical voters. And it is a very influential force in Washington politics.

Demonstrators from the occupy movement held a small protest outside the event urging no war on Iran and no US tax dollars for Israel.

On Sunday, Barack Obama, the US president, took to the stage and told the audience that Israel had never had a better friend in the White House. But he did not support Israeli military action against Iran's nuclear facilities - at least not yet.

"If Obama treated Israel like Reagan did, he'd be impeached. Former President Ronald Reagan's confrontations with Israel were harsh and personal, yet Republican conservatives revere him and the Jews remember him as a great friend."

- Chemi Shalev, an Israeli journalist and political analyst

Three of the four Republican candidates bidding to unseat the US president addressed the conference on the biggest day of the nomination battle so far - 'Super Tuesday'.

Rick Santorum flew in especially for the event before heading back to Ohio, while Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich appeared via satellite link.

A number of Republicans have sought to attack the US president over his administration's relationship with Israel. And the Republican presidential candidates have all tried to paint Obama as an undependable partner for Israel who is weak on Iran.

Mitt Romney said: "We've heard a lot of words from the administration. Its clear message has been to warn Israel to consider the costs of military action against Iran. I don't believe we should be issuing public warnings."

And Newt Gingrich said: "If an Israeli prime minister decides that he has to avoid the threat of a second holocaust through pre-emptive measures that I would require no advance notice to understand why I would support the right of Israel to survive in a dangerous world."

So what role do pro-Israel lobby groups, and AIPAC in particular, play in the US election and why are they courted by those competing to be the next US president? How do Barack Obama's dealings with Israel compare with those of his predecessors, including Republicans?

To discuss these issues presenter Anand Naidoo is joined by: John Mearsheimer, the co-author of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy; Larry Greenfield from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs; and Hillary Mann Leverett, a former White House and US state department official.

the u.s. is so in bed with israel...

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Glenn Greenwald - I agree completely with Marcy Wheeler

marcy notes that she rarely puts up a post that is entirely devoted to seconding someone else's post but is making an exception for glenn greenwald's put up yesterday in salon...

As has been voluminously documented here, one of the most notable aspects of the first year of the Obama presidency has been how many previously controversial Bush/Cheney policies in the terrorism and civil liberties realms have been embraced. Even Obama's most loyal defenders often acknowledge that, as Michael Tomasky recently put it, "the civil liberties area has been [Obama's] worst. This is the one area in which the president's actions don't remotely match the candidate's promises." From indefinite detention and renditions to denial of habeas rights, from military commissions and secrecy obsessions to state secrets abuses, many of the defining Bush/Cheney policies continue unabated under its successor administration.

Despite all that, there is substantial political pressure from all directions for Obama to reverse the very few decisions where he actually deviated from Bush/Cheney radicalism in these areas.

i spent the better part of 8 years decrying the bush administration's full-blown attack on civil liberties and the u.s. constitution and have been aghast to see bush policies affirmed and even extended by obama... it's bad enough that obama has recommitted the united states to endless war, has presided over the in-your-face looting of u.s. taxpayers by the super-rich elites, is allowing millions to remain jobless, and is carrying on with the destruction of the social compact by freezing the majority of domestic spending, but sanctioning continuing brazen assaults on our constitution and civil liberties is disturbing at a far deeper level...

the most interesting thing that greenwald has to say, as marcy rightly points out, is that the canonized saint of today's hang-'em-high crowd, ronald reagan, was solidly opposed to sacrificing our constitution and rule of law to combat "terrorism"... (yes, "terrorism" is in quotes because i'm not at all sure it isn't a fabrication created entirely to keep us peasants under our masters' thumbs...) in fact, reagan administration policy, carefully quoted by greenwald, stated that it was only by affirming our civil liberties, due process and the rule of law that we could remain whole as a nation...

[W]hat was once the most basic and defining American principle -- the State must charge someone with a crime and give them a fair trial in order to imprison them -- has been magically transformed into Leftist extremism.

To see how radical our establishment consensus in this area has become, just consider two facts. First, look at the Terrorism policies of what had previously been the most right-wing administration in America's history: the Reagan administration. In this post yesterday, Larry Johnson does quite a good job of documenting how Terrorism by Islamic radicals had been a greater problem in the 1980s than it is now. There was the 1983 bombing of our Marine barracks in Lebanon, a 1982 and 1984 bombing of Jewish sites in Argentina, numerous plane hijackings, the blowing up of a Pan Am jet, the Achille Lauro seizure, and what the State Department called "a host of spectacular, publicity-grabbing events that ultimately ended in coldblooded murder" (many masterminded by Abu Nidal).

Despite that, read the official policy of the Reagan Administration when it came to treating Terrorists, as articulated by the top Reagan State Department official in charge of Terrorism policies, L. Paul Bremer, in a speech he entitled "Counter-Terrorism: Strategies and Tactics:"

Another important measure we have developed in our overall strategy is applying the rule of law to terrorists. Terrorists are criminals. They commit criminal actions like murder, kidnapping, and arson, and countries have laws to punish criminals. So a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are -- criminals -- and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against them.

It was also Ronald Reagan who signed the Convention Against Torture in 1988 -- after many years of countless, horrific Terrorist attacks -- which not only declared that there are "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever" justifying torture, but also required all signatory countries to "ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law" and -- and Reagan put it -- "either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution."

yes, it's stunning is it not...? ronald reagan is now a "leftist extremist" for advocating the rule of law and the protections embodied in our constitution... beam me up, scotty...

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A crime against the soul of a nation

caroline myss in the huffpo...

A conscious effort to "dumb down" the education of this nation qualifies as a crime against the soul of America. And dare I say this? If there was something as grievous as a mortal sin committed by a group against its own people, then the Republicans -- with Reagan at the helm -- and all the Democrats who stood by, or worse, backed this catastrophe -- committed that sin when they choreographed how they would dismantle the intellectual power and potential of our own children. (You should check your age -- you could be a product of this crime.)

[...]

There comes a time when we have to just stand up to these carnies (slang for carnival barkers) and tell them to stop polluting the soul of America with their constant and endless transmission of psychic free radicals in the form of lies, negative press, ridiculous criticism, overall lack of intelligent ideas and comments, and complete absence of creative thought. We should just blast them with emails and tell them to stop polluting the soul of our nation. Just stop it. We've had enough. I know I have. And I deeply believe the soul of our nation can't take much more of their strategy of deliberate division against the people of their own nation. That is a true crime -- and perhaps their greatest crime -- against the soul of this great nation.

as i sit in the food court of the airport on the first leg of the long trip back to afghanistan, a trip that will be punctuated by the next three nights in d.c., i'm surrounded by my dumbed-down fellow citizens, all sitting under the watchful eye of fox news, spewing worthless inanity in a constant reinforcement of our deteriorating collective mental capacity... what's supremely ironic is that, as i type this, fox is airing more of the completely bogus and manufactured controversy surrounding obama's address to the nation's schoolchildren...

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Happy Labor Day...? Not so much... A holiday outpouring of truth...

here's some of the juicier parts of juan cole's labor day rant... it's a beaut and i strongly suggest reading the whole thing... it captures what should be the essence of this day and places it firmly in the context of our present, sad reality...

The unemployment rate as a write is inching toward 10 percent nationally, and that is only counting people who were still looking for a job recently. A vast bank robbery by the corrupt on Wall Street has robbed them of the credit that made the economy go. Labor Day was passed by Congress under Grover Cleveland to celebrate not only the individual American laborer but the labor movement-- yes, unions, workers' parades, hard hats and blue jeans (before the youth movement of the 1960s appropriated them, blue jeans were working class clothing, and my working class relatives upbraided me for wearing them as an undergraduate) . It is to celebrate all those icons that shills for the barracuda billionaires, such as Glenn Beck, now castigate as "fascist" and "communist."

[...]

The closest we get to celebrating the workers who built this country is when we talk about "working families," an odd locution, since aside from the idle rich who defrauded the country into bankruptcy last fall, wouldn't that be everyone?

[...]

Fewer effective unions have left American workers at the mercy of predatory company policies. Government has, since Ronald Reagan (who hated organized workers the way the devil hates holy water), also socially-engineered the tax laws so as to throw enormous further wealth at the wealthy. As a result, the average wage of the average worker in the United States has not increased since 1970 (in 2004 the bottom 60% of the population was actually making less in real terms per capita each year than in 1979). In contrast, the top 1% of the population by income now takes home nearly 20% of the country's annual income. The top 1%, about 3 million persons, has gone from owning 25% of the privately held wealth in the 1950s under Eisenhower to owning over a third today. The top 10 percent of Americans own almost all the country's privately-held property.


[...]

Reagan-Cheney between 1980 and 2008 created a new American aristocracy, a small sliver of super-rich, who buy and sell legislators, create whole "news networks" to present far right wing fantasies as "news," have their lackeys invade and occupy whole countries, hold themselves above the law, falsify financial statements, and suffer little or no punishment for stealing billions from the pensions of "working families" (i.e. those of us about whom P.T. Barnum remarked, "one is born every minute".) The Republican Party has come to represent these super-rich. Since .1% of the population couldn't actually win elections, they ally with other groups in society. About two-thirds of evangelicals have joined up with them, about a third of Latinos, significant numbers of mid-western rural families, and obviously large numbers of white southerners. In some cases these are lower middle class people on the make, who want to hitch their wagons to the brightest stars in the sky. In others, they share with the super-rich various resentments of the federal government. This alliance of odd bedfellows (think of Paris Hilton married to Joe Sixpack) is what produces the wackiness of Republican Party politics and media. They can't come out and say that they want the country run for the benefit of 300,000 multi-millionaires and billionaires (almost all of them white), so they say they are all in favor of guns, apple pie, Jay-sus and the Confederacy.

[...]

represents the poor schmucks who make up the 80 percent of the population that has been reduced to peasants by our new dukes, viscounts and princesses who have captured the lion's share of the country's wealth and income. Obviously, elements in the top 20% (and even more so in the top 1%) are not happy about any outbreak of democracy.

oh, god forbid we should even FLIRT with real democracy...

professor cole closes with this and a quote from carl sandberg's poem, chicago...

I celebrate today the organized workers, the ones who can push back against the crooks in pinstripe:

Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young
man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.
and under his ribs the heart of the people

i see our new class of peasantry wherever i look these days - immigrant labor mowing lawns, joe sixpacks driving fedex delivery vans, stooped, elderly women ringing up purchases at walmart, young teens taking orders at fast food restaurants, middle-aged men manning security guard posts... we're all falling into line, taking our places in the service economy, eating highly processed, unhealthy food, going home to a house with an underwater mortgage to relax in front of our new giant, flat-screen tv that we bought on credit last december...

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Fair is Fair

This story from OpEdNews.



Headlined on 3/23/08:
Obama's Minister "Hates America" But When My Father Said the Same Sort of Things He Became a Hero To The Republicans

by Frank Schaeffer

When Senator Obama's preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father--Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer--denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.

Every Sunday thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father's footsteps) rail against America's sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the "murder of the unborn," has become "Sodom" by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, "under the judgment of God." They call America evil and warn of immanent destruction. Obama's minister's shouted "controversial" comments were very much like things pastors on the right say too.

[...]

The hypocrisy of the right attacking Obama, because of his minister's
words, is staggering. When my late father and I were the guests of Jerry Falwell at Liberty Baptist College, Falwell said to us quite casually and seriously, while speaking of the "homosexual problem," that: "If I had a dog that did what they do I take it out and shoot it." And when it came to saying God was damning America he and Pat Robertson sided with the 9/11 hijackers by saying the terrorist's actions served America right and were God's punishment. Yet John McCain went to Liberty Baptist College and spoke for Falwell, in order to "mend fences" with the Religious Right. He said he no longer believed that Falwell was "an agent of intolerance." And Rudi Giuliani gladly accepted Robertson's endorsement. So much for the Republican "mainstream."

This cuts left too. Fair is fair. So where are the clips--playing incessantly next to Hillary Clinton's picture--of her antiwar friends and Bill Clinton's fellow draft dodger members of the New Left, cursing and damning America during Vietnam War protests and since? The company that Bill and Hillary kept in the late 1960s through the 1970s was defined by damning America and sometimes by rooting for the North Vietnamese. Clinton said he "loathed" the military. We still made him commander in chief.

[...]

Want to play this smear-by-association game? Okay, while McCain was a prisoner of war a bishop in his church was rooting for McCain's torturers. Episcopal Bishop Moore, in his autobiography, Presences: A Bishop's Life in the City, wrote that the end of the Cold War had left the United States "like a wounded rooster crowing on the top of the dung heap." Blaming "corporate greed and lust" as well as "unbridled
nationalism" for manufacturing causes for war, Moore cursed America as often as he served communion.

If we want to get really silly let's ask this: McCain is an Episcopalian so where are the clips of the anti-American rantings of Bishop Moore and not a few other Episcopalian pastors and bishops, next to McCain's picture? How can McCain be a member of that denomination?

[...]

I think Obama is worth fighting for. History has thrown America an unlikely lifeline. Do we have the decency, the sense, the last glimmer of sanity needed to open hearts to change?

Obama offers civility in the midst of a national bar fight. Obama speaks in complete sentences, well-turned paragraphs, offers thoughts with intellectual depth, nuance, humility and compassion. Obama is a reasoned essay cast before sound-bite swine who seem ready to tear anything that falls into their sty to shreds.

What's good for the goose, is good for the gander.

Thanks, and a tip o' the hat to Betmo, at Life's Journey.

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Bush mocks teenagers

In an act of monumental hypocrisy, Bush mocked teenagers, in a speech, Tuesday. (from ABC):

The president said Congress is like "a teenager with a new credit card" for wanting to spend $22 billion more than the White House would allow on nonwar-related funding bills."

Bush took the cheap shot at teenagers perhaps because he regards them as essentially powerless to object, as they are still largely denied suffrage and in most cases, cannot vote.

Bush seems to have overlooked better and much-closer-to-home examples of profligate spending such as that by those members of his own party, so notorious for sheer pork-style spending, such as that of Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska's infamous Gravina Island "Bridge to Nowhere".

Bush did manage to avoid invoking the standard and shopworn cliché of "spending like drunken sailors". Presumably, most sailors can vote.

Bush seemed to ignore his own record deficit spending while showering his wealthy and elite supporters, again and again, with fabulous tax breaks. He didn't mention the billions and billions of dollars which have virtually gone missing in his war and on his watch. He didn't mention his affinity for doling out no-bid contracts so generously to his powerful friends, either.

It remains interesting that many prominent people such as HBO's comedian Bill Maher loudly call for amending Section 5 of Article II of the Constitution to allow for Austrian-born, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to run for President. The argument advanced, goes the same as by those that insisted that the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution should be repealed, in order to allow Ronald Reagan to run for a 3rd term: "The People should be allowed to choose anyone they want to be their president."

And yet if these same proponents were intellectually honest, they would include calls for repeal of the age requirement clause in Section 5 of Article II as well. But bigots in general do not often rise above hypocrisy. As evidenced by Bush's speech as recently as Tuesday, Ageism is still as popular as ever as rampant bigotry.

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Thom Hartmann interviews Paul Craig Roberts

i really didn't need to read this before i hung it up for the night...

"Americans think their danger is terrorists," said Roberts. "They don't understand the terrorists cannot take away habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. ... The terrorists are not anything like the threat that we face to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution from our own government in the name of fighting terrorism. Americans just aren't able to perceive that."

Roberts pointed out that it's old-line Republicans like himself, former Reagan associate deputy attorney general Bruce Fein, and Pat Buchanan who are the diehards in warning of the danger. "It's so obvious to people like us who have long been associated in the corridors of power," he said. "There's no belief in the people or anything like that. They have agendas. The people are in the way. The Constitution is in the way. ... Americans need to comprehend and look at how ruthless Cheney is. ... A person like that would do anything."

Roberts final suggestion was that, in the absence of a massive popular outcry, "the only constraints on what's going to happen will come from the federal bureaucracy and perhaps the military. They may have had enough. They may not go along with it."

the full interview can be downloaded here...

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Vintage Taliban

They were for them before they were against them...

Proclamation 5034—Afghanistan Day, 1983
March 21st, 1983

By the President of the United States of America
A Proclamation

The tragedy of Afghanistan continues as the valiant and courageous Afghan freedom fighters persevere in standing up against the brutal power of the Soviet invasion and occupation. The Afghan people are struggling to reclaim their freedom, which was taken from them when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December of 1979.

In this three-year period the Soviet Union has been unable to subjugate Afghanistan. The Soviet forces are pitted against an extraordinary people who, in their determination to preserve the character of their ancient land, have organized an effective and still spreading country-wide resistance. The resistance of the Afghan freedom fighters is an example to all the world of the invincibility of the ideals we in this country hold most dear, the ideals of freedom and independence.

We must also recognize that the sacrifices required to maintain this resistance are very high. Millions have gone into exile as refugees. We will probably never know the numbers of people killed and maimed, poisoned and gassed, of the homes that have been destroyed, and of the lives that have been shattered and stricken with grief.

It is, therefore, incumbent upon us as Americans to reflect on the events in Afghanistan, to think about the agony which these brave people bear, and to maintain our condemnation of the continuing Soviet occupation. Our observance again this year of Afghanistan Day on March 21, the Afghan New Year, will recall for all the world America's unflagging sympathy for a determined people, its support for their refugees and commitment to achieving a political settlement for Afghanistan which will free that country from tyranny's yoke.

The Congress, by Senate Joint Resolution 65, has designated March 21, 1983 as "Afghanistan Day" and has requested the President to issue a proclamation in observance of that day.

Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby designate March 21, 1983 as Afghanistan Day.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-first day of March, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and seventh.

RONALD REAGAN

[Filed with the Office of the Federal Register, 3:10 p.m., March 24, 1983]

Note: The proclamation was not issued in the form of a White House press release.

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Wolfie revises history and lies through his teeth about El Salvador

the only one he has to convince is himself... as for the rest of us, it's plain that he's just trying for a different treatment in the history books...

WOLFOWITZ: Maybe it was — look, maybe I could have done it differently. Maybe I could have consulted more. Maybe if it weren’t me and somebody else doing it, look, I’ve said from the beginning…

ROSE: Somebody who’s not an architect of the war, and all that.

WOLFOWITZ: I’m not an architect of anything, but somebody who is not so closely associated with a controversial Iraq policy, yes.

stand up and take it like a man, you sorry sack of shit... and, while you're at it, stay the hell away from the airwaves so we don't have to experience your barely-concealed pose as victim... you were in the thick of it and, if there is any justice in this world, you will be called to account...

and, oh, by the way, how dare you present the horrible slaughter in el salvador, perpetrated by a military that received its training at u.s. hands (see below), as something that turned out for the better...

Comparing Iraq to El Salvador, Wolfowitz said, “El Salvador fought a terrible, terrible civil war for more than 10 years. … And today El Salvador is one of the most successful economies in Central America.”

the denial and outright lying are positively breathtaking... but, brace yourselves... this is revisionist history at its finest and there'll be a lot more comin' atcha...

here's what REALLY took place in el salvador...

The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States changed American policy in El Salvador dramatically. The new U.S. administration worried about Communist expansion in Central America and viewed the El Salvador military government as a potential barrier against Communism. The Reagan administration substantially increased both military and economic aid to El Salvador.

The civil war raged on in El Salvador, fueled by U.S. aid to the Salvadoran military. The government harshly repressed dissent, and at least 70,000 people lost their lives in killings and bombing raids waged against civilians throughout the countryside. The country's infrastructure had crumbled, and the nation appeared to be no closer to its goals of peace, prosperity and social justice than when the process began. Then, in 1989, the murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter at the University of Central America shocked the international community into action.

and, i wouldn't exactly say that el salvador is among "the most successful economies in central america" either... for one thing, they've got a terrible gang problem, fueled by the deportation of numerous salavadoran gang members from the u.s...

Gang violence continues to be the No. 1 security threat in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. According to official sources, mara activity represents up to 90 percent of all crimes committed, including homicides, kidnappings and extortions.

Officials from these three countries have long complained that U.S. deportation policy exacerbates the gang problem. Poor cooperation and information-sharing has made it impossible to know whether deportees, arriving by the planeload, are criminals or not. There are known cases of notorious criminals passing through the revolving door of deportation that, if anything, gives them the chance to acquire new identities and evade prosecution.

yep, wolfie is quite skilled at talking out of his asshole and expecting our dumbed-down citizenry to buy it...

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Ronald Reagan - Hair Rock

there's nobody quite like hunter when he gets wound up...

Reagan was made for the era: in the time of hair rock, when talent was completely and utterly indistinguishable from fashion, Ronald Reagan was the hair president. His coif was one of destiny: his hair glistened in ways that his soul never quite could. He was a handsome actor of middling quality at a time in American life when being a handsome actor of middling quality was the very best thing you could possibly be, in any profession, in any situation, in any corner of the national zeitgeist. And excesses of both rock and presidency were evolutions from what previously were dark days indeed -- while the fashions and rock of the eighties rapidly were evolving into clothes and hair so expansive that they required elaborate scaffolding, steelwork and cocaine to support them, the seventies had previously been so monstrous that the fashion-humiliated country was not only prepared but vaguely grateful for the gratuitously shallow (but nevertheless high-drama) change.

Ditto on the presidency, in which after two fairly lackluster transitional presidents Reagan and Reagan's glistening coif took over the conservative mantle from the disgraced, now-let-us-never-speak-of-him-again Nixon. Reagan succeeded in bringing the hard-right conservatives back into power, allowing them freer rein than Nixon himself ever did, and Reagan even managed to eclipse Nixon in the very, very important conservative presidential duty of doing something completely frigging illegal, extra-constitutional, and blasphemous against the very concept of America, giving seed to a new crop of conservative felons and near-felons to be worshiped as martyrs by the far right.

Nixon provided the movement with G. Gordon Liddy; Reagan gave us Oliver North. You can find them both, along with others, on Fox News and other conservative outlets to this day, neatly packaged reformed crooks, which in conservatism passes for nobility. And Reagan himself, of course, maintained plausible deniability, which from the multiple Bush eras we have now learned is the entire difference between conservative presidential hero and conservative presidential chump.

i positively SOAR with his verbiage... it's long, it's articulate, it's FUN to read... go enjoy...

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"A cataclysmic fight to the death" over congressional subpoenas

yes, yes, i know... i've been beating this dead horse for weeks, but... we MUST NOT FORGET that the bush administration laid out its unequivocal strategy for how it would respond to any congressional attempts at exercising oversight or exacting accountability BEFORE the november elections...

In fact, when it comes to deploying its Executive power, which is dear to Bush's understanding of the presidency, the President's team has been planning for what one strategist describes as "a cataclysmic fight to the death" over the balance between Congress and the White House if confronted with congressional subpoenas it deems inappropriate. The strategist says the Bush team is "going to assert that power, and they're going to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court on every issue, every time, no compromise, no discussion, no negotiation."

you can go to the bank on the fact that bushco will be doing exactly what they said they were going to do, henry waxman notwithstanding...

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) sought yesterday to pressure the Bush administration into divulging sensitive policy information, scheduling a committee vote for Wednesday on his plan to issue four subpoenas for the information.

[...]

"I never found it necessary to issue subpoenas to either President Bush's father's Administration or the Reagan Administration," Waxman said in a statement. "We were always able to reach an accommodation that respected our legitimate interests. I hope that will continue to be the case with this White House" and the information will be provided voluntarily.

mr. waxman's hopeful sentiment is touching, but surely he knows there are only two scenarios that are likely to transpire here... one, his committee will issue the subpoenas and they will be ignored by the white house (or justice department or the state department or whatever other executive branch agency they're directed to)... that will force a consideration to declare contempt of congress, a judgment that would require enforcement by the justice department... since the justice department is peppered with bushco infiltrators, that won't happen, and the case would eventually have to be pushed up to the supreme court, another bushco enclave, with a positive outcome equally unlikely... the other scenario is that the subpoenas won't be issued and waxman will continue to huff and puff and nothing will be accomplished...

so, what's a body to do...? hell if i know... what i keep hoping is that, subpoenas or not, several truly damning revelations (there would have to be more than one) backed by hard evidence come into the possession of one or more house or senate investigative committees that will blow the whole bushco criminal enterprise wide open... this business of working piece-meal with condi, gonzo, rove, et al, may be good for chipping away at the power base of these arrogant criminals, but, by the time such efforts bring down any walls, 20 january 2009 will be upon us, and the damage done between now and then may very well be irreversible...

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Claiming executive privilege might lead the American public to suspect a cover-up

but, given the outrages perpetrated by bushco for over 6 years and the collective yawns elicited from the american public in response, i'm not so damn sure... yeah, for those who are paying attention, claiming executive privilege in the justice department scandal stinks to high heaven, but, for my esteemed fellow citizens...? unfortunately, most of them are still watching american idol and praying to win the lottery...

President Bush is not only taking on legal precedents, but historical ones as well. When Congress has pressed for testimony, presidents have generally agreed, however reluctantly. Bruce Fein, the conservative legal commentator, urged Mr. Bush to cooperate, noting that President Ronald Reagan waived executive privilege in the Iran-contra inquiry and let national security advisers and cabinet secretaries testify.

This administration could try to delay by challenging the subpoenas in court, a step that could be a drawn-out process. But it would then have another court to worry about: the court of public opinion. Monica Goodling, the Justice Department’s liaison to the White House, has already invoked her constitutional right against self-incrimination. If top advisers start to claim executive privilege, the American public is likely to suspect a cover-up.

if the "court of public opinion" wasn't asleep at the switch, bush and his criminal posse would have been tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail a long time ago...

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A helpful summary of current wingnut thinking

honestly, i don't know how this crap keeps ending up in my inbox, but, nonetheless, i'm finding it to be instructive reading... it's from move america forward... no link... you'll have to go dig it out on your own...

The past few days have been very instructive in realizing the stakes in the war on terrorism. Sometimes people in this country try to tell us that there really isn't a war going on - it's just lies by our Commander in Chief, or an intrusive American foreign policy butting our noses where it doesn't belong.

However, we know better. We know for example that the Iranians were able to take 15 British sailors hostage and then the Iranians taunted the world not to put too much pressure on them, or else we could all guess the consequences. The Iranians meanwhile terrorized the British hostages, making them believe they were going to be executed and telling them that if they would only lie and say they were in Iranian waters, they could go home.

In response the British government told the American Navy to stand down in our naval exercises in the region (that were pre-planned and in response to Iran's development of nuclear weapons). A top Iranian terror operative was released in Iraq in a move that the British government insists was not a quid-pro-quo but which many analysts view as exactly that.

The UN did not punish Iran. The European Union did nothing to show Iran that they would face consequences for their actions.

And in this country, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi along with pro-Palestinian Congressman Darrell Issa (a Republican who has been accused of supporting Yasser Arafat and terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah) were in Syria, appeasing the state sponsor of Islamic terrorism.

This has not been a good week for the free nations of the West. Radical, pro-Islamic terrorist factions managed to win on a variety of fronts by showing strength and intimidating the British government and the likes of Nancy Pelosi to bow down to them in submission.

Ronald Reagan once fought against the Communist appeasers in the U.S. by saying that true "peace" could only be found through strength - PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH.

it's fascinating to me how, in a few short paragraphs, literally EVERYONE - Iran, Islam, Britain, Syria, Hezbollah, Palestine, the U.N., the EU, Nancy Pelosi, and Republican Darrell Issa - is characterized as either the enemy or as an enemy appeaser... what a marvelous worldview...

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Authoritarianism is the means, money and power are the ends

i swiped this snippet whole from lukery at wot is it good 4, but digby says it so well, i simply couldn't resist...

I've watched this creeping authoritarianism for more than 30 years now. It's not a figment of my imagination and I'm damned tired of jaded political pundits telling me to lighten up. These same people told me that it didn't matter if Ronald Reagan had a secret government working out of the basement of the white house (Oliver North is so awesome in his uniform!) and it didn't matter if George Bush Sr pardoned all the criminals in that scandal and it didn't matter if a partisan congress impeached a president over sex. We were told to "get over it" when Bush's henchmen manipulated every political lever they could find in his brother's and father's political machinery to take office in 2000 --- and then decided to govern as if they'd won in a landslide. Then came illegal war, torture, spying on citizens, denial of habeas corpus and all the rest. Excuse me, but I'm not going to sit around and chuckle knowingly that this is "just the way it is." It isn't. History proves that very bad things can happen to good countries. Only fools pretend that great nations can't go down the wrong road.

The public is waking up and hopefully they will deny the Republicans power for a while. But until this authoritarian zombie is finally killed, the country is in danger of more of these "misbegotten, stupid, ill-advised wars" and imperial presidencies each time the Republicans manage to sully the Dems sufficiently to regain power.

I know that such silly, naive righteous indignation amuses the chattering classes to no end. That's exactly why so many people believe they are a big part of the problem.

well, digby, it isn't just authoritarianism... it's the wholesale dedication of the infrastructure of the entire country and all of the countries that the u.s. impacts to money and power, and damn anyone who gets in the way... authoritarianism is simply the tool that's used to accumulate both...

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The "main components of a police state"

i posted last week on joe conason's new book, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush... here's another excerpt, this one from alternet, that highlights leading republicans who see strong reason to be more than a little bit concerned with the megalomaniacal tendencies of the bush administration...

Former Republican congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, who served as one of the managers of the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the House of Representatives, has joined the American Civil Liberties Union he once detested. In the measures taken by the Bush administration and approved by his former colleagues, Barr sees the potential for "a totalitarian type regime."

Paul Craig Roberts, a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal and a former Treasury official under Reagan, perceives the "main components of a police state" in the Bush administration's declaration of plenary powers to deny fundamental rights to suspected terrorists. Bruce Fein, who served as associate attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, believes that the Bush White House is "a clear and present danger to the rule of law," and that the president "cannot be trusted to conduct the war against global terrorism with a decent respect for civil liberties and checks against executive abuses." Syndicated columnist George Will accuses the administration of pursuing a "monarchical doctrine" in its assertion of extraordinary war powers.

yep, i'm bangin' the drum - again... george has to go... they ALL have to go...

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