Increasingly, there's an air of rhetorical desperation to the fear-mongering. Call me a wild-eyed optimist, but I (sometimes, not always) actually take this as a good sign. They can no longer count on the unquestioning acquiescence of a passive audience, which is why they are now forced to crank up the volume.

Yeah, that's probably way too optimistic.

Well Lieberman spouting that does not surprise me one bit. Just last week Marshall Whittman had this little gem in his July 27th post about Joe Lieberman:

"Radical Jihadism poses an existential threat to liberal civilization."

Existential threat. Um, okay. I'll agree with physical threat, but "existential threat" is just way out there.

But here we are with Joe Lieberman essentially suggesting the same thing.

As they say, Joe has either "completely lost the plot or he's spinning a line".

Either way, the guy is an idiot. I hope he has a lot more quotes like this over the next couple months, to show CT his true beliefs.

Just call these people pisspants. Scared of the shadows. Not manly enough.

If they are so easily scared, they should be easily intimidated, too :-)

i believe what the good senator means is this: "i've grown accustomed to being patted on the head by a bunch of right-wing crazies, and these head pats are deeply important to my self-esteem and in particular to my self-perception that i am a towering figure of integrity and bipartisanship at a time when integrity and bipartisanship are in decline, and in order to keep getting these head pats i'm going to babble ever more silly drivel incessantly."

Just last week the Washington Post came forth with a poll showing that in answer to questions regarding which political party was best prepared to deal with Terrorism, the Democrats crossed the 50% threashold and were 8 points ahead of the Republicans on this opinion dimension.

Don't you all think that poll put the fear of the lord into the inner reaches of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the RNC, and their enablers such as Lieberman? It has been their rock bottom winning point for nearly five years now, and opinion is apparently shifting. I would imagine they have their own internal polls that track this -- so yea, they are reacting and trying to change the direction of opinion.

For nearly five years now they have profited from vague definations of the enemy -- evil, bad, maybe a few other loaded but essentially scriptual and moral terms. In fact, they have never clearly defined the enemy, because inside the circle, they disagree. So with that not working they move on to Fascist and Jihadist -- again not terms clear to many Americans, but freighted with foreignness and evilness.

Let's play real politics for a change -- we need a realistic defination of the "real enemy" -- and then we need to challenge them to show how policy, strategy and tactics actually address that enemy. Don't let them fake it with fancy terms.

Is he talking about Ned Lamont?

Have questions about the Cafe? Try here.

I think you're seriously correct there, DanF. If you listen to Joe Lieberman enough (spare me!), you're listening to someone who thinks the world revolves around him or ought to. He and Miss Piggy would make a great pair. Actually, they sorta look alike...

Amen! And while we're at it, can we demand that they make list of the actual contingencies (like say, bombing Chicago), together with the severity (number of casualties plus physical and economic damage) and the likelihood of each happening. That way, we can compare them with other risks, like another hurricane, a nuclear strike on Seoul by N. Korea, a nuclear strike on Israel by Iran, total closure of Nigeria's oil production, etc. You know, introduce some facts and fact-based discourse into the discourse...

Taylor, your point really touches on how the Neocon/(true)fascists have such bloody hands. This is how they work with and create the conditions that lead to actual and/or virtual attacks on civilians by crazies. It's not really a grand conspiracy of Neocons and the likes of Osama (the perpetual straw man used to knock down a lot of conspiracy theories), rather it's the enhancment of and the playing of the likes of the Evil O. Set up enough conditions, such as not really trying to do real security, inflate the standing of the crazies, maybe take a vacation or two, fire up a couple of "disastrous wars", do a couple of infuriating diplomatic moves and voila' you are bound to have something happen. Nothing can ever really lead back to Washington because there really isn't any real connection.

It doesn't help though if you've got a bunch of real security folks out there running these things down and doing actual, bona fide, security work though If these folks are within the U.S. government you can silence/ stop them pretty easily (as has been shown), but outside... that's not so easy. But you can always hype technical solutions, especially exotic high tech ones (multiple gains there)that are pretty useless but have plenty of flash and glitz.

It's really not that big a mystery.

I don't attach any particular danger to any particular holder of nukes. Wait a minute, what I mean is that I don't think it's more dangerous for Al Qaeda to have nukes than the US -- which has shown itself capable of putting, say, Cheney within reach of the red telephone. Or Israel (smarting from insult and indignation at present). I'd like to see nukes in no one's hands.

I don't want Al Qaeda to get mad and have weapons but I don't want any rapturists, of whatever "faith," to have them either.

Altogether, measured against lung disease caused by pollution, cancer caused by a thinning of the ozone layer, crashing a car that missed a recall notice, obesity's toll, life on the streets in NOLA, I'd say Al Qaeda is a relatively small risk for a relatively small number of people and one which can and should be contained by a competent intelligence agency with useful ties to other intelligence agencies, and an international police force. That could make things unpleasant for Pakistan and Saudi, which is one reason, I think, the Bush administration has pulled its punches on going after these guys. It could also mean no more playtime with the military, and no more bonanzas for a dozen or more corporations supporting Our Glorious Leaders. Much better to have enemies and "serious" alerts and everyone scared and afraid to ask questions.

Now that you mention it, Joe does sound a little like Kermit...

This was precisely the issue I brought up with Bush's "Islamic Fascist" description yesterday. I'm quite used to hearing this sort of thing from Bush and conservative Republicans, but to hear it from a nominal Democrat...I think it neatly summarizes a pet theory of mine that many people inalterably changed their view of the world after 9/11 and, in the process, abandonned a part of their brains that allows them think rationally.

Terrorism is not, and never has been, a greater threat to civilization that organized military states like Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Not even close. In fact, the type of fear (distant drumbeats vs. sudden panic) associated with each is entirely different, but our present war mongers want general fear to be a rallying cry for decisive and patriotic action. This was appropriate during the Second World War and perhaps went a bit overboard during the Cold War but this rallying effect sustained the United States during difficult periods and created, undoubtedly, the superpower we are today.

Nationalism, then, is intimately tied to fighting other nations. Forget about ideology. It doesn't matter if it's a right-wing or a left-wing totalitarian regime, what matters is that those regimes were nations opposed to our way of life in some general sense and we fought back and we won. The "war on terror," a misnomer from the get-go, has nothing to do with nationalism and everyhing to do with one of the most basic question of civilization: under what political regime shall we live? Plato asked "how ought it be?" and we're been debating it ever since. Machiavelli, Hobbes and others pushed the question aside. It's not how it ought to be, they argued, but rather this is how it is. Is this debate amongst political philosophers relevant to the war on terror? More so than you think.

When Sen. Lieberman says terrorism is an evil threat to our security and that there is only one appropriate response--his own--he is asserting not how things ought to be but rather that there is one remedy to the situation. Everyone else that criticizes the handling of post-9/11 foreign policy is asking, "is this how things ought to be?" And if Sen. Lieberman doesn't get that then yes, he is not qualified to be a US Senator.

I think the Moose and Lieberman both went off the deep end after 9/11. I think it's an emotional thing tied to their obsession with the safety of Israel. They conflate threats to Israel with threats to the US. They may do it quite unintentionally but they have absolutely lost all perspective, context, and proportion.

If you are Karl Rove, you do this to confuse the American people into an emotional, fear driven response so they'll vote for Republicans. That's entirely cynical. But the Liebermans are just plain hysterical. That's as good a reason as any for the defeat of Lieberman.

We have a huge need for people who can look at the terrorism issue rationally and without regard for short term political considerations. There are almost none of them around anywhere in either party.

We have a huge need for people who will fight back against the emotional desire to declare war on an entire civilization. I believe that this problem is so complex and culturally based that we probably aren't going to find a way out of it unless there are some rational future oriented Islamic leaders to lead the way. We aren't going to find them by bombing their villages.

If you needed any more proof that Joe Lieberman is now a default Republican, here it is. He's now one clearly visible Adam's apple away from being Ann Coulter.

Perhaps because he's Jewish, the most visible evil he can comprehend in his own mind and communicate is the Nazis. If that's the case, I would refer him to Dante's "Inferno", which introduced the idea of "levels of evil" some 800+ years ago.

OR, more than likely, he's padding his own ego by AGAIN calling everyone who disagrees with him an idiot in the most roundabout way possible. If this is the case, I would refer him to my extended middle finger.

The issue I keep hammering to my republican friends is exactly HOW do our wars fight terrorism. I am not aware of a single native Iraqi or Afgani committing a terrorist act outside their own country.

In the Spain train bombings it was local immigrants, the same with the London subway bombings. Did we invade England and Spain? This latest airplane plot was Pakistani in origin - Should we invade Pakistan? 9/11 was primarily Saudis' - yet we did nothing to our oil friends except have our President hold hands with them.

Islamic terrorism is a manageable problem to be solved with intelligence, police and special ops work. Invading countries like Iraq or Lebanon will not solve the terrorism problem only make it worse.

If Bush really believed the crap he spouts about war being the answer to terrorism, I want to see the US Navy moving up the River Thames tomorrow.

And did we ever get a reliable death toll from Katrina? If our government actually wanted to save lives it might even offer health care like a real first world country. All this fear is destroying our capacity to deal with other vital priorities.

I haven't seen it, at least not as clearly as I see Coulter's.

Exactly what interest of Al-Qaeda's would be advanced by detonating a nuke?

The history of those possessing nukes is caution, even when the control structures of the state are absent. During the Cuban Crisis, the Soviet commander with nuke codes did not pull the trigger. During exercises here, soldiers manning silos did not unanimously launch; (the number that balked is not public).

It is an assumption without any information to support it, that once AQ gets a nuke they will use it. We also have no foundation to assign probabilities to Soviet trigger-happiness. Our leaders assured us they were always looking for a chance to do so, and the record shows otherwise. The risk that truly concerned insiders was not policy but accident.

That said, no one I know is encouraging this situation, including me. Lock down those nukes and the "threat" drops to an annoyance to civilization. Mostly the threat is to those in power, that get accused of failing to protect citizens.

I have pointed this out before, but that won't stop me from doing it again:  possession of a nuclear warhead does not confer on one the ability to deliver that warhead to a target.  Perhaps some day the entity, if it even exists, called al Qaeda will find itself with a nuclear warhead in its possession.  The warhead will likely weigh over 100 pounds, and most likely a lot over 100 pounds.  So, what is "al Qaeda" going to do to get that nuclear warhead somewhere in this country where it can do some damage?  And, how will they be able to detonate it once it is here?

A state, having an airforce, or an artillery force can reasonably be considered a threat if it possesses a nuclear warhead.  But, a state is also a big target easily vaporized in retalliation, so that threat is minute.  But a rag-tag group of terrorists would have no idea about what to do with a nuclear warhead, and would probably try to sell or trade it for something much more manageable, such as a few bottles of peroxide and some nail polish.  </snark> 

Hoppy in Sacramento

Yeah, and after that army we're training in Iraq gets familiar with command and control and modern weaponry, it'll probably turn their knowledge against us. What are we really doing there, training Iraqi Democrats or turning Islamists into modern fascists? No wonder Bush is worried about Islamic fascists.

Let's see. Hitler wins, every Jew in the world is dead, and a totalitarian dictatorship spreads through all of Europe and North America. Stalin wins, and the Red Army sweeps through Europe, the Red Army occupies Washington, and a totalitarian dictatorship joins forces with the Asian dictatorship and rules the world. Jews do okay, sort of, in this one.

Osama bin Laden gets his caliphate, from Pakistan to Morocco, and there's a primitive Taliban-type rule; though it's more likely Iranian-type mullahs with some democratic elements. People live oppressive, medieval lives in this caliphate, and they probably put the oil price up whenever they're pissed at us.

It's bad news for Israel, I guess. But I think we'd still have enough force to protect them. But for the U.S. and Europe? Would they invade us and try to make the Infidels live according to sharia? Don't think so.

Not as bad a threat, in my mind. It's a pan-Arab, nationalistic force, for the most part. Hitler made a grab for North Africa. North Africa doesn't have any designs that I can see on Europe. What do other people think?

Time to unleash the War on Bathtubs? It's quite obviously in the interest of national security.

Great point about defeating terrorism. Bush and bin Laden are each other's best friends - if they didn't exist, they'd have to invent one another.

Note that the capture of the British 21 this week was a victory for criminal prosecution, not war. The Republicans like to make fun of Democrats for advocating criminal prosecution of terrorists rather than war. Maybe that's why the Brits, rather than the Republican-controlled US government, actually succeeded in stopping a possible terrorist attack. Criminal prosecution works. War just creates terrorist breeding grounds like Iraq.

You have now made me thing of Joe Lieberman in a miniskirt. The horror. The horror. Oh, the humanity!

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

This is one point that I've been giving a great deal of thought about. There is one thing that Republicans have used to manipulate the debate and shape the arguments - a common enemy.

This has always united the country and kept control of the dialog. When the wall and communism fell we lost our common enemy. Now Rove and the conservative media have managed to create another common enemy.

Brilliant!  

Thanks so much for pointing me to this.  I've bookmarked it and sent it to people on my mailing list.  Get over and read the whole thing, everyone.  It's all quotable and prescient.  Mueller could be talking about Lieberman when he says

A problem with getting coherent thinking on the risk of terrorism is that reporters and politicians find extreme and alarmist possibilities so much more appealing than discussions of broader context, much less of statistical reality. That is, although hysteria and alarmism rarely make much sense, politicians and the media are often naturally drawn to them.

What makes this even more powerful is the source.  The Cato Institute can hardly be called a Democratic Party Think Tank.  If an organization which describes itself as espousing "market liberalism" and claims that term "liberal" has been "corrupted by contemporary American liberals" espouses views like Mueller, the radical right can hardly accuse the left of being "soft on terrorism".  

aMike

or at least from Dan Gerstein or Lanny Davis. Imagine if a line like that were in the 238th comment in a thread on DailyKos? They'd be all over it.

We simply need to shrink our bathtubs down to the size where we can drown them with sheer government.

And Jews hardly did "okay" under Stalin. He would have matched Hitler if he hadn't died in 1953, just months after he'd launched the "struggle against cosmopolitanism." Read up on the so-called "Doctor's Plot."

But this is an assessment of what Bin Laden would LIKE to do. He has nowhere near the capability necessary to achieve this goal. I'd like to have a 100 million dollars. I'm not going to have it though.

This is the key point. The Nazi/Soviet scenarios were realistic based on the power and size arrayed behind the goals. Bin Laden is essentially a network of a couple thousand people who can't publicly operate and whose ideology is fringe-like even amongst Islamists.

So what does it mean about all you people calling him an idiot that if something had turned out the way you hoped it would, this idiot would be in the sixth year of his vice presidency?

The key point is that terrorism is the refuge of the weak. The strong don't need it because they have armies, tanks, bombers, submarines, and ICBMs.

Tens of thousands of Polish Jews owed their lives to Stalin because they were found to be "enemies of the people" and sent in 1940/41 to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Of course, "doing okey" is a relative term here.

All very interesting, and almost all. both Mr. Schmitt and the commenters right as rain. And maybe, just maybe, the American people are waking up to this.

Still, it would be nice to see one serious politician, as opposed to mere internet bloggers and blogreaders daring to make these points the centerpiece of their campaigns. After five long years of this bullshit, maybe it's time.

In other words, how about a new approach? Not "we are, too, serious about security", but "we are serious about security AND YOU'RE NOT. We want to use the appropriate tools of intelligence to track and apprehend the people trying to harm us. You just want to scare the hell out of the American people to keep yourself in power."

If our political leaders are afraid to say things like that, they're not doing us any good, they're not leaders. The War on Terror is a crock.

Wait... I don't get it... the terrorists are commies? Now I'm suddenly worried about the domino theory...

What nonsense.

Cold War's over. WWII was over long before. Shouldn't we move on?

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Funny how disenchantment with what Joe became and with how he is bent on trying to retain some power is being construed.

Yes some people who would have been tolerating him as VP are now calling him stupid but that is more an indication of what he has become than what he was or how much those people have changed.

Are Republicans as a whole happier with George now than they were when he took office? Joe got 48% of the Democratic vote in a liberal state. I wonder what George's numbers in Connecticut would be? The way Republicans make it sound you'd think Joe is wonderful. I think that was the impression most Republicans had in 2000 too.

Somehow I don't think Republicans need to look up disingenuous.

Joe's comments are absolute crap and he should go back to giving a damn about something real and speaking from his heart instead of this blathering dyspepsia.

A plague of god-fearing Ay-rabs is coming to rape the white women in their comfortable suburban homes.

"You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor." – George Wallace

Fear has a new face.

Now Rove and the conservative media have managed to create another common enemy.

You mean themselves?

;>
Sheila in CT

Re: Osama bin Laden gets his caliphate, from Pakistan to Morocco

Iran would be outside any revived Caliphate just as it was outside the last one (the Ottoman Empire). The Iranian are Shi'ites and they believe the legitimate Caliphate ended with the martyred Ali centuries ago. So a restored Sunni Caliphate would be at major enmity with Iran, much as the Soviets and China were in the Cold War.

Here and elsewhere around the internet, and now, out of the President of the United States himself, one reads the word Fascism over and over.  I have some problems with this, mainly because the more indiscriminately the term is applied the less the term actually means.  Language gets debased this way, and the more language is debased, the less sure anyone is that his/her partner in debate is talking about the same thing.

This is NOT to say that the term does not apply.  It IS to suggest that it would be useful for people to refresh their memories and make direct references to HOW the philosophy of Fascism applies in each instance.   

So, with out further ado, three versions of Mussolini and Gentile's 1932 essay, "What is Fascism?":

1. An Abridged Version.  Courtesy of the Modern History Source Book. This and the companion History Sourcebooks are exemplary of the way the Internet can be used to disseminate accurate primary materials.  Pall Hallsall and Fordham University deserve a vote of thanks.
2. The Whole Thing. Courtesy of World Future Fund.
3. A Version including the Decalogue of Fascism:  Courtesy of the History Guide Organization. 

So here's the intellectual puzzle:  What elements of classical Fascism can be applied to the contemporary situation:  to whom, and how?  Maybe one of the powers that be around here  might like to start a post on this topic.

aMike

An excellent description of what's wrong with the Republican approach to mobilization (based on fear).

But if the response to that is merely to reinforce the general feeling that something is wrong and these people are no longer to be trusted, believed then that is even worse.

What's needed is a positive program that mobilizes people on the basis of confidence in the future instead of either Republican fear or Democrat cynicism.

Thanks, Mark, for calling attention to Lieberman’s laughable use of hyperbole. You have focused attention on a very important question that Americans need to start pondering thoughtfully: just how evil are the Islamic “Terrorists” who are trying to kill Americans and Israelis?

It seems rather indisputable that Islamic militants are judged to be evil by Western observers because they have intentionally targeted innocent women and children in their attacks. Is this indictment sufficient cause for us to say without ambiguity that any group of combatants that targets innocent civilians is evil? You just might want to think about this question for a bit before answering…

Consider the fact that during WWII, American bomber crews were ordered to intentionally slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese women and children in firebombing raids. Back then it was called “terror bombing” by the British. The intent of this military strategy was to terrify the civilian population into no longer supporting their leaders' war-making efforts. Was it an immoral strategy? Was it evil? A war crime? The answer is yes. But is it really fair to conclude from these facts that the American people in general are truly evil and utterly devoid of any hint of virtue? No, it is not.

The overarching truth that Joe Lieberman and George Bush and Condi Rice do not want the American people to know is that it is entirely possible for a people to pursue a truly moral end through means that are morally repugnant. America was truly justified in waging war against the Japanese and the Germans during WWII. But that indisputable truth does not mean that every action we took in pursuit of victory was morally justified. Indeed, American soldiers and commanders committed many, many war crimes during WWII. In spite of the many acts of evil "we" were guilty of, it is nevertheless true that our cause was just.

Lieberman, Bush, and Rice do not want the American people to be aware of this important distinction because they want us to see the ‘Muslim Extremists’ as purely evil people because they intentionally kill innocent civilians. It would ruin everything they are trying to accomplish if the American people were to wake up to the fact that the cause the Islamic Terrorists are pursuing is 100% justified, even though they have used means to pursue it that are 100% immoral.

As our own history has shown us, when we discuss the relative ‘evilness’ of the people that our leaders have called our enemies, we need to make a distinction between the means these people use to pursue their ultimate ends, and the ends themselves. Are both immoral? Or could it actually be the case that their cause is just, even though they have used immoral means in order to pursue a moral outcome? If the latter is true, then it would be logical for us to give the Islamic militants credit for the cause they are pursuing while at the same time condemning their terror attacks on civilians as morally reprehensible.

Could we please bring the discussion around to these particulars? Sometimes things just aren’t as black and white as our incompetent leaders would have us believe.

Why Are People So Cruel?

"I don't think it's more dangerous for Al Qaeda to have nukes than the US"

Why the Republicans will win again in 2008, in a nutshell.

This was one of the arguments put forward in a long piece in the Washington Post that reviewed the Clinton Adminstration's efforts against Al Qaeda. From the killing of U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu, to the first bombing of the World Trade Center to the bombing of the two American embassies the Clinton Administration was very aware of the existence and activities of Al Qaeda and their location in Afghanistan.

However, they also knew both as a political matter and as a matter of resources that relatively few Americans died as a result of acts of terror, and therefore it would be very difficult to justify an all out assault on Afghanistan in 1993. They treated acts of terror as a growing criminal menace.

However, they knew it was a serious problem and given all the warnings they gave to the incoming Bush Administration they believed the matter was going to get
worse.

Sadly it did. The killing of 3,000 Americans on U.S. soil obviously changed the equation. Had this current effort succeeded thousands more would have died. What is a shame is that Bush and Lieberman would rather play politics with the issue that lead a serious effort against the problem.

I will confess to be unclear what this entire thread is saying as well.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

The conservative sneer is:

"A conservative is a liberal that's been mugged."

Except this doesn't seem to apply to New Yorkers. The very folks that experienced the terror and loss are those that are utterly unimpressed with the "War" and enraged at the incompetence.

The vast majority of those salivating at the idea of total war have experienced nothing but TV.

Now I want to channel Chomsky for a moment. The firebombing at Dresden was terrorism. The Blitz was terrorism. Agent orange and napalm were chemical weapons used in terrorist attacks. Just because states have guys in uniforms doesn't make broad-based attacks on civilian populations in order to induce fear and disruption doesn't make those acts any less terrorist.

Please can we leave this nonsense.

All the Dems are inzisting is that the admin follow the FISA rules and get warrants. The latest exampel from Britain shows that using established processes works fine.

It is an interesting point.
I would also point out that this administration chooses to mix and match the terms "islamic facism" and "totalitarian ideology" as though they are the same thing. I think a further point of inquiry should be how and why President Bush's chosen terminology misrepresents accepted definitions of both "totalitarianism" and "facism."
Does this illustrate a misunderstanding of the nature of the threat that we face?
Or, does this illustrate a rhetorical strategy in which the President throws out emotional buzzwords to inflame passions?
Or, neither.

In denial Schmitt, or is it perhaps that you rationalize some hate, some particular prejudice and oppression, censorship and propaganda?

Do you have a problem addressing the hatred and zealotousness that exists in the Arab world towards Jews, and towards others when they aren't singling them out? Do the diatribes espoused by many in the Arab world about wiping Israel off the face of the earth, and murdering all who do not convert to Islam somehow just fly above your radar? Perhaps you just write that off as being somehow different from what the Nazi's and the Marxist zealots perpetuated, perhaps to you it's less offensive?

I know that for you, there seems to be two rules.. one for you, and one for everybody else. So perhaps you have no problem when Islamic extremists do what Bush does?

Just to play the devil's advocate for a moment: the litany of possible means to inflict terror on us is almost endless and anyone who thinks we can actually cover all our bases in that regard is seriously delusional. So if you can't prevent every single possible act of terrorism then why should you not just use the excuse that you are fighting terrorism to achieve goals that would otherwise come under the suspicion of being...well let's just say imperialistic? Makes total sense to me.

Fortunately, unlike the Kaiser who served for life, Bush has only two years and few months left in office. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. Even if another GOPer is elected he will necessarily be an anti-Bush and probably not very conservative either as one of Bush (and Cheney and Rove's) main victims has been conservatism as a respectable and attractive ideology. It remains to be seen whether the damage also brinsg down the Republican party.

Bush as a slow-witted Kaiser, I like that. You know he wishes he could dress up in lots of different shiny uniforms like a petty German princeling.

I remember when the Right would have listened to generals rather than hothouse academics when planning a military operation.
I remember when a Republican administration, when asked what sacrifices American citizens should make in a time of war, had a more substantive response than "Hug your children, go to Disneyland" and "The American way of life is a blessed one" [translation, Jeebus wants us to drive Hummers!!].
I remember when the Right would have been scandalized at a Defense Secretary who refused to give troops the equipment and protection they needed to fight a war, then blamed the troops themselves for any problems in the conduct of the war ["You go to war with the Army you have, not with the Army you wish you had"].
I remember when the Right would have been scandalized if, following an attack on US civilians in New York City and Washington, a Republican President responded with a war on a country that had nothing to do with that attack.
I remember when the Right claimed to be the people who supported and defended the Constitution of the United States of America.

To refer to it as Hegelian, and including the "leader principle", may not be so far off. It's true that a particular subset of totalitarianism, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, adopted the Fuehrerprizip, but the behavior was similar under Stalin and a host of other merry men.

There are rumors that someone tried to brief GWB on it, but he thought they said "Kegel" and headed off to see a gynecologist, dragging Laura behind.

Is "leader" really that different from "decider"?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Well, hell, I lived in DC in 2001 and have been living in London since last Summer. You do the math. A bus blew up two blocks from my office. And yet I haven't run screaming and whimpering to the bed-wetting Bushites.

Somebody whose response to being shown a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in United States" is "OK, you've covered your ass" provides me very little in terms of security. Also I remember his deer-in-the-headlights expression on 9/11 and his general cluelessness whenever he goes beyond scripted situations.

It must be extremely emotionally grueling to try to keep faith in this pathetic man.

Do you think Mgmax hasn't heard that explanation before? He's just being obtuse. I think it's better to belittle him than to try to patiently explain reality to him in small words that he might understand.

Channeling Chomsky in reverse, no. There's no rational reason to call Agent Orange a terror weapon, since it had no immediate effects, then killed plants, and, many years later, it was found that dioxin contamination from one manufacturer was responsible for cancer and birth defects. Chemically pure agent orange, without the dioxin, is not especially toxic.

If we are going to attempt to follow international law and convention, napalm and other incendiaries are not listed by the Chemical Weapons Convention, which certainly was aware of them. There are indeed certain Geneva Convention protocols, not ratified by the US, which argue against the direct use of incendiaries on human beings.

By your definition, all war is terror. To go back to Sun Tzu (400 BC), the greatest general is the one that wins wars without fighting. Having the perception that the other side has awful weapons can and does deter war, as in the unpleasant but apparently effective Mutual Assured Destruction concept that prevented nuclear use during the Cold War.

If everything becomes terror, if every chemical reaction becomes a chemical weapon, the words lose any meaning. They apply to everything and nothing.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Mgmax: I have no problem in believing that people who execute 13-year-old girls for the crime of having been raped, and wish to extend this policy to all the world, are evil and need to be killed when they keep trying to kill us.

And what of the men who rape a 13-year-old girl? And what of the men who kill her mother and sister and blow up their house to cover their crime? Are they evil, even when they are representing America as soldiers? Is it evil to invade and occupy that girl’s country, and facilitate its destruction in the first place? But wait, you say, those few soldiers killing innocent people do not represent America. They are not we. People can’t hold us up as evil because of the actions of a minority of us. I agree.

"It remains to be seen whether the damage also brinsg down the Republican party."

Dems are the ones kicking people out of their party left and right (well, only right), and you think the Republicans are on the verge of coming apart and permanent minority status?

Reports have it this way: somebody told the police right after the subway bombing last year that something was wrong. A British Muslim good citizen. The British eavesdropped, and did good police work on what is, after all, standard practice when an ongoing conspiracy is found: you surveil, and try to find all the ties, associates and friends. You try to find whatever they're up to. When it seems apparent that they're putting it action, you pull the string and round them up. What more could they have found out if they didn't ask for a warrant, and if they just went blasting away at information in the raw? Nothing.

Also, by rumor, the Brits asked for NSA help with some monitoring. We helped out. Nothing illegal there, by British law or American law. In fact, the legal strictures wouldn't have stopped a thing.

In fact, using probable cause is not only respectful of the law, it gives you maximum efficiency in investigations. If you just scoop up "evidence" by the boatful, it isn't evidence, it's crap that police have to wade through. It's a waste of time.

Oddly enough, it's like using torture in interrogations. Illegal, and immoral, and completely useless from the intelligence point of view. Oh, it's okay if your goal is to terrorize a population, like the Nazis did to all of Europe back then.

Eric Rudolph's victims, Timothy McVeigh's victims, a doctor who was shot for performing abortions, Paula Yates's children.

I can think of a few people who were killed by fundamentalist Christianity.

1. "Reports" not only might not show the whole picture, it's practically guaranteed that they don't. There are many different good reasons why everyone involved-- police, the Bush administration, diplomats, Pakistan, etc.-- don't want to give too many details, and might choose to fudge some of the ones they do reveal.

2. "Also by rumor, the Brits asked for NSA help with some monitoring. We helped out. Nothing illegal there"-- again, how do YOU know? And remember, they arrested a couple of them in Pakistan and that helped them roll up the ones in England. But I'm sure you know for an absolute fact that the Pakistanis did everything by the American book.

3. "Oddly enough, it's like using torture in interrogations. Illegal, and immoral, and completely useless from the intelligence point of view." First of all, how do you know that torture-- whatever else it might be-- is useless? Again, you seem to be claiming perfect knowledge of what's going on in every aspect of this investigation, including the parts in Pakistan. This actually looks like it might very well be a real-life example of the ticking-bomb scenario-- Pakistan arrested some guys and got info out of them and we didn't want to know how, but it got us what we needed to arrest others and foil the plot in time.

Secondly, so you say the kind of surveillance recently objected to, in which we listen to phone calls originating in the US and going overseas (or vice versa), is "like using torture"? And this thread is about Lieberman overstating his case?

You seem very determined to close the book on the possibility that anything the ACLU could possibly object to could possibly have been of any use in this investigation. Neither of us really know, though, do we? If we're honest, don't we have to admit the possibility that some of the things that Dems and the NY Times have objected to so strongly are exactly what played a part-- large or small-- in helping to save thousands of lives this week?

White House sought to divert funding

Congress denied call to redirect money meant for explosives detection

11:58 PM CDT on Friday, August 11, 2006

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – While the British terrorism suspects were believed to be hatching their plot, the Bush administration was quietly seeking permission to divert $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year on developing new explosives detection technology.

Congressional leaders rejected the idea, the latest in a series of steps by the Homeland Security Department that has left lawmakers and some of the department's own experts questioning the commitment to create better anti-terrorism technologies.

Homeland Security's research arm, called the Sciences & Technology Directorate, is a "rudderless ship without a clear way to get back on course," Republican and Democratic senators on the Appropriations Committee declared recently.

"The committee is extremely disappointed with the manner in which S&T is being managed within the Department of Homeland Security," the panel wrote June 29 in a bipartisan report accompanying the agency's 2007 budget.

Rep. Martin Sabo, D-Minn., who joined Republicans to block the administration's recent diversion of explosives detection money, said research and development is crucial to thwarting future attacks. And there is bipartisan agreement that Homeland Security has fallen short.

"They clearly have been given lots of resources that they haven't been using," Mr. Sabo said.

Homeland Security said Friday that its research arm has just gotten a new leader – Rear Adm. Jay Cohen, a former Navy research chief – and there is strong optimism for developing new detection technologies.

"I don't have any criticisms of anyone," said Kip Hawley, the assistant secretary for transportation security. "I have great hope for the future. There is tremendous intensity on this issue among the senior management of this department to make this area a strength."

Lawmakers and recently retired Homeland Security officials say they are concerned the department's research and development effort is bogged down by bureaucracy, lack of strategic planning and failure to use money wisely.

The department failed to spend $200 million in research and development money from past years, forcing lawmakers to rescind the money this summer.

The administration also was slow to start testing a new liquid explosives detector that the Japanese government provided this year. Japan has been using the detectors in its Narita International Airport in Tokyo.

I think by far the greatest threat to America is the internal one posed by the arrogant ignorance of the right wing.

Tom

And how strange it is to hear the man whose cadres stormed Florida elections offices like brownshirts in 2000, who has protesters forcibly removed when he makes a public appearance, and whose supporters characterize liberals as deadly enemies, use the word, "fascist". When they hear someone say, "multicultural", they reach for their Brownings.

There's a fairly high snark factor in some of this, but I may throw out some observations.

"Oddly enough, it's like using torture in interrogations. Illegal, and immoral, and completely useless from the intelligence point of view." First of all, how do you know that torture-- whatever else it might be-- is useless?

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

If we're honest, don't we have to admit the possibility that some of the things that Dems and the NY Times have objected to so strongly are exactly what played a part-- large or small-- in helping to save thousands of lives this week?

No. “Dems and the NY Times” have never called for weakening necessary tools to investigate and police terror groups. In fact, in spite of this being a British investigation, it confirms that it is entirely unnecessary to toss out the Bill of Rights and illegally spy to thwart terror plots. According to Unclaimed Territories, the British are required to have warrants and it’s been reported that this was the case here. Besides this WaPo article, the beloved Bill O'Reilly says the U.S. obtained FISA warrants for our part. Are you calling Bill O’Reilly a liar? Of course, we can never completely know what goes on within secretive government agencies and if you wish to smear U.S. and British Intelligence with performing illegal acts, that’s fine, but it doesn’t appear to be the case.

My apologies for misunderstanding what I read, I have been unable to locate an article I read about the difficulties investigators reported with FISA and paraphrased it from memory inaccurately, but in a sense this goes to my point-- people are claiming things about this investigation without direct information in most cases, saying what they wish it to be.

In your case you seem to have direct experience, but I note that in your general argument-- which is certainly logical enough, investigators need to investigate, and supervisory authority approve, investigations that have clear promise, not whatever they please-- you did not address the specific instances that the WSJ raised as failures of FISA.

Nevertheless, I certainly give you more credit than those who insist that it's settled that Bush has violated FISA when in fact there's a substantial case that FISA violates presidential authority in the way it's applied to exactly these sorts of cases. The thrill of ginning up an impeachment blinds people to the fact that the existence of the crime itself is very much in doubt.

Your partial quote of the above post is idiotic and dishonest.

If you want to disagree, please do so intelligently.

Thanks.

CSPAN junkies visit http://spannerbackup.ipbhost.com

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, (1907)

I would agree that efforts to kill abortion providers is terrorism and does seem to be Christian, or at least claimed to be Christian, based. Just as the Israeli settler Goldstein ( I forgot his first name) going into a Mosque with an automatic weapon and opening fire was a religious based act of terrorism.

However, the contrast with Muslim suicide bombers killing themselves as they kill children on school buses, or people in pizza parlors or discoteques seems to pale. Whether it is throwing Leon Klinghoffer over the rail of the Achille Lauro or murdering Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972 also does not fit into the same catagory.

Nor does the bombings in London and Madrid seem to be the same as one lone fanatic trying to kill one doctor. YOu also ignore that had the World Trade Center been a bit more crowded how many more thousand beyond the 2,500 would have been killed? Did Bin Laden, acting in the name of his version of Islam, care how many people died? Didn't he was to commit as large a mass murder as possible?

This latest plot that was stopped also seems to be in a catagory quite unlike the acts by Rudolph. Had the plot succeeded how many thousands would have died?

It is true that some neo-Nazi and the like the websites celebrated the destruction of the World Trade Center thinking that particularly Jews were killed. However, cheering from the sidelines may be despiccable but it is not the same as committing suicide and you murder as many people as possible.

There may always be people who are so certain in their knowledge of God that they will tolerate no opposition and will kill others. That is not the same as movements willing to use suicide in order to commit mass murder.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Why are we not surprised.

Tom

Well,

We had the Huns to worry about in WWI, anarchists before that, Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, & immigrants from Eastern Europe. This stuff is right out of Orwell. Today's military-industrial complex needs a constant state of war to get the funding it needs. So simply replace those old bogeymen with the Cold War and when that fades use a never ending war on terror.

Tom

The executive has implicit authority but almost zero specific authority beyond following orders (legislation). The one specific Power is that of granting pardons in non-impeachment cases. Power of appointment is only that of nominating.

In contrast, Congress has many specifically listed Powers, including the power: "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof." Sounds like Congress can decide how the Executive is run, doesn't it?

Arguments for "inherent powers" are wishful thinking.

Not losing the war is a consideration that matters to me.

Preventing further attacks on western soil is a consideration to me.

There's no prize for good behavior after you've been conquered.

you did not address the specific instances that the WSJ raised as failures of [the] FISA [court].

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

In Israel, there is a town named Megiddo. Perhaps some might want to look at the origin of the current term for the ultimate war, and hope that Israel makes sure Megiddo never contains anything that would make it a military target.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

It's Baruch Goldstein, who, as a physician in the IDF, refused to treat non-Jews. It has been alleged he was threatened with court-martial for this violation of the Hippocratic oath (he probably rejected anything associated with a Greek pagan, regardless of its current usage) and the Helsinki Declaration on Human Rights.

I fail to see the difference between what he did, hefore he was killed in hand-to-hand combat, and a suicide bomber in a cafe. The death tolls of many cafe bombings are comparable to Goldstein's score of 29 killed and 125 injured.

Besides being a Jew of the extremist Kach movement, now banned by Israel, I fail to see any real difference between Goldstein, who had no reasonable expectation of surviving his act, and

committing suicide and you murder as many people as possible.

hat they will tolerate no opposition and will kill others. That is not the same as movements willing to use suicide in order to commit mass murder.

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Sorry, dismissing the WSJ as partisan is not the same as addressing the SPECIFIC cases they talk about.

Your other points answer each other-- yes, the Administration said FISA didn't need updating, and yes, the Administration decided to keep Congress out of the picture and do what it pleased. Those aren't contradictory, they're complementary.

"it is my belief that the Administration, for undisclosed reasons, preferred to violate the doctrine of separation of powers"

The reason is hardly undisclosed. The administration believes that FISA violates the separation of powers.

Can we agree that Gen. Eisenhower was quite thoroughly in charge of the WWII fighting yet had no authority to ignore law? Similarly the Pres. is in charge of the military but that does not mean he can ignore law. The most obvious interpretation of the Commander-in-Chief clause is that the civilian has authority over the military, not that the civilian authority can use the military as he sees fit.

I remind you that the first, and longest Article, is that describing Congress and its many Powers. I take that to mean it is the most important branch. Also, since all authority derives from Congress, in that it both decides elections and can impeach, obviously Law rules the Executive. Anything else makes no sense. How could the Executive impeach Congress? If the Executive has "inherent" power that overrides Congress that is dictatorship.

Funny how people that ally with "originalist" justices also find all sorts of nebulous and undefined "inherent" powers in Article II. Read it again.

Your reference to 1861 is misleading in that Lincoln got approval from Congress, eventually, to suspend habeas corpus (during an inarguable all-out war).

If you want a Pres. that has no obligation to follow law because he announces a war, may I ask if you would have liked that to apply to President Clinton? Since we were attacked by Al Qaeda three times in the 90s he could have declared a similar war. Then he could have fired Ken Starr ("unitary executive"). He could have surveilled anyone he wished ("inherent powers").

Sound like fun? If the snarky tone offends you, it is satisfaction on my part because you offend with the insult of Democrats suggesting "war should be fought by, say, Nancy Pelosi or Charlie Rangel".

Just what, besides Saddam's regime and security apparatus, do you think is in worse shape really than it was before the invasion?

Um...off the top of my head:
1) The power grid. Bagdhad has about 25% of electricity production compared to prewar levels.
2) Oil production
3) the morgues
4) the murder rate all over the country
5) the favorable opinion of Americans among Iraqis

But you're right, there are a lot of things in Iraq that are stronger than they were before the invasion:
1) the Iranian government's influence
2) al-Qaeda
3) Islamist extremists in general
4) the time-honored institution of "honor killings" and enforcement of shari'a law by freelance death squads; a greengrocer was killed last week because a local mullah thought his vegetables were presented in a sexually suggestive manner.

Do you ever read or watch the news out of Iraq?

I concede your Agent Orange point. Thanks for straightening me out. What's your view on the use of white phosphorous in Iraq?

But I stand by the claim that targeting civilian populations is terrorism, regardless of whether it is done by a state or by non-state actors. It is decidedly not true of all wars that civilians are targeted. WWI did not include the targeting of civilians, to give just one example.

In Baghdad, a city of 6 million, there are typically 20-40 killed every day. If we presume your figures of 53 per 100K in N.O. is for the whole year, then the same statistic for Baghdad is (let's say) 30, avg., times 365, divided by 60 (6 mil. pop div. by 100K) to yield 182.5 per 100,000. Averaging in all Iraq reduces that, but it would also reduce it for the US. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Rate Data, there were 5.5 homicides per 100,000 in the US in 2004.

King was comparing non-comparables, an old trick. A typical homicide yearly toll for a big US city is in the hundreds. In Baghdad they are getting hundreds in a couple of weeks.

I was editing on the fly to make sure the numbers were right. Just saw your answer.

The rate that compares properly is either the national average, 5.5 for us and 25.7 for Iraq, or our worst city with Iraq's, 53 to 182.

You cannot say "it is demonstrably less violent than many parts of America" any more than you can say Iraqis, on average, are smarter than many Americans, or richer, or whatever. Non-comparables are just that.

It only compares properly because you say so! I can compare anything I damn well please. My comparison is, places that the media and posters like you do or do not get their underwear in a tizzy about.

Very well. A couple more of those comparable figures, same source:

Violent death rate per 100,000:

Iraq: 25.7
Venezuela: 31.6
Jamaica: 32.4
South Africa: 49.6
Colombia: 61.7

That's right, the imperialist hell of Iraq is safer than Hugo Chavez's worker's paradise.

I note Chavez is doing considerably better than our friends the Colombians.

If we exclude Kurdish Iraq, since it has not really been part of Iraq since the 90s, the rate would be higher.

I don't yield on the trickery of comparing Iraq as a whole to a city in the US. I was opposed to invading and I'm not impressed with the results.

Sure. As you may know, as a relatively junior officer, Eisenhower was assigned to the Phillipines. When asked if he had served under MacArthur, he replied "I studied dramatics from him for three years."

Eisenhower was not the original choice for the invasion of Europe. Marshall, whose calm and emotionlessness was worthy of a Stoic philosopher or a Zen master, desperately wanted the job. The idea was that Marshall and Eisenhower would swap jobs. FDR regretfully told Marshall that he could not sleep if Marshall wasn't in Washington.

That relationship has been mentioned in various ways. In the invasion of Panama, Max Thurman, who held the theater command, told Carl Stiner, the operational commander, "Me Marshall. You Eisenhower. Understand?" In Desert Storm, Powell had the Marshall role, although Schwarzkopf was infinitely more dramatic and impulsive than Eisenhower.

Thurman and Powell were greatly respected in the Army. They both had very real authority, which they could delegate. In contrast, during Viet Nam, Army Chief of Staff Harold Johnson and Chairman of the JCS "Bus" Wheeler had their authority usurped by LBJ's immediate advisors, which, after Maxwell Taylor left as a special advisor, had no military experience. According to HR Masterman's Dereliction of Duty, Army CoS Johnson especially agonized about resigning and criticizing the war, but came to a decision he had more effect from the inside. He went public about this near his death.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Re: Dems are the ones kicking people out of their party left and right (well, only right), and you think the Republicans are on the verge of coming apart and permanent minority status?

If the GOP does not run hard and fast away from Bushism by 2008 it will indeed do long term damage to its political future. George Bush is the Jimmy Carter of the Republican Party.

You and King did the pleading, comparing Iraq to some US cities.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

You may regard that as the only salient point if you wish, but it doesn't speak well of your seriousness.

Aside from changing the subject, I wouldn't go there, given there was legislative authority for mobilization and lend-lease. In any event, FDR did not, to the best of my knowledge, simply state he chose not to follow legislation that he signed. GWB directly confronts Congressional authority. Attempting to pack the Supreme Court indeed was a political move, but he accepted the loss.

Conditions are also different with respect to Presidents. While I don't think he was impaired as president by his paralysis, the media essentially conspired to hide it. Lucy Mercer also managed a low key.

Do you want to stay on topic, or shall I bring up the relevance of William Howard Taft getting stuck in a bathtun, at least on a par with choking on a pretzel?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I don't know definitively, but I saw some reports about improvised munitions used against trenches, but it was not clear how they would delivery them. One description of adding WP to a HE mortar round -- which is strange because there is a WP mortar round -- would, in the opinion of every soldier I know who saw the description, either explode in the mortar, or go FOOF-KERPLUNK a few feet away from the mortar.

Other incendiaries may have been used, such as the Mark 77 Mod 5 thickened gasoline bomb, or thermite. There are no thermite bombs or shells in the inventory. TH comes in a container looking like a smoke grenade, but you typically use it to destroy things in direct contact. For example, if you found a mortar you wanted to destroy, you'd put it nest to the firing pin at the bottom, pull the pin, and the steel of the weapon would melt.

Is there a specific issue about WP versus other incendiaries?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Yes, it has been acknowledged. Let me point out, however, that burning to death for any reason is not pretty. In battle, that can come from burning fuel in a vehicle, incendiaries of several types, ammunition heating, etc.

For some reason, WP has taken on a mystique that it's more horrible than other incendiaries, and is also a chemical weapon. As opposed to thermite, which isn't used against people, it needs oxygen to burn, just as does jellied gasoline. Cover it with water, and it goes out. I suppose whether burns are horrible depends on how many burns, from various sources, you have seen. It's not evil magic. Any burn covering a large part of body surface area, which is full-thickness (formerly called third-degree) looks ugly.

Numerous claims have been made that it's a chemical weapon, and that simply makes no sense. The Chemical Weapons Convention, which has an explicit list of chemical agents, does not list it. The smoke (phosphorus pentoxide) is not especially toxic -- I've breathed some and it made me cough. Yes, if you eat WP, there is a nasty poisoning, but this isn't a usual effect of weapons use. The poisoning cases in the medical literature generally were from suicidal or homicidal ingestion when it was still used as rat poison.

Killing people is generally not a good way to gain hearts and minds of the relatives and friends of the people killed. I can think of a number of ways of dying in battle that are as bad as burns.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Perhaps we can agree that statistics are like a bikini: what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*