WASHINGTON, April 13 - Admitting that corruption is "not going as smoothly as we'd like", White House spokesman Scott Stanzel announced today that Bush plans to name a high-powered 'corruption czar' to oversee all aspects of corruption in the executive branch. Stanzel acknowledged public disapprovel of the administration's corruption efforts, and said the new post is the centerpiece of a plan to "get corruption back on track."

Stanzel tried to emphasize the positive aspects of creating the post, noting the growing importance of corruption under the Bush administration. The federal corruption budget has expanded by 17,000% since early 2001, and insiders estimate that at least 47% of the executive branch payroll currently works full-time on corruption.

Still, in response to reporter's questions, Stanzel admitted that all is not well, a rare admission of fallibility by this administration.

"We have, what, 30 or 40 separate scandals, with essentially no coordination between them," Stanzel said. "That's the kind of situation where people make mistakes."

Asked for examples of mistakes, Stanzel cited White House staffers' use of Republican National Committee e-mail accounts for official business. "That should never have happened," Stanzel said. "The press never should have learned about it, and if we had the right systems in place, they wouldn't have."

Stanzel also emphasized that the corruption czar would help to resolve inter-departmental tensions in the administration.

"We'd like to avoid another Carol Lam situation," Stanzel said. "We've got people like Dusty Foggo over here, and we've got people in the DOJ over there, and if you think about it they're all working on corruption, but the problem is they're not working together. That's the kind of situation we're trying to avoid."

"Corruption is just too important for us to have a divided team," he added.

Asked about the adiminstration's difficulty finding a 'war czar', Stanzel said they expected no such problem with the 'corruption czar' post. "Applicants are literally lining up around the block," he added. He refused to name any possible candidates; early speculation revolves around former Representative Tom DeLay and former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Stanzel refused to comment when asked if Bush planned to pardon Abramoff to make him eligible for the job.

[Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]

The midterm elections are pretty much over. Now it's time to consolidate our gains.

Dean's 50-state strategy was clearly the smart thing to do--not just for its impact on the elections (which was almost certainly positive) but because it laid the groundwork for expanding our areas of influence in the future. Places where the party simply did not exist now have the beginnings of a party structure; people who had never heard from the party before have been visited and gotten involved.

What we need to do now is take the next step. We don't just need a 50-state party; we need a 365-day party.

A year ago, I wrote about the Republicans' use of the evangelical churches as a de facto permanent party structure...and the absence of any such structure on the Democratic side:

The Democrats, on the other hand, exist (as far as most people are concerned) only at election time....Come an election they'll ask you for money, they'll ask you to volunteer, they'll ask for your vote, but the rest of the time they might as well not exist. And that's the problem.

I argued that what we need most of all on the Democratic side is to develop a Democratic community--a party that is a permanent and positive presence in people's lives.

Since then, a number of articles have appeared that make me more convinced than ever that this is the way to go. In September, an article by Dana Fisher in The American Prospect highlighted the Democrats' use of paid canvassers to run GOTV operations...and how this defeats continuity and community on the progressive side. The piece explicitly contrasted the permanent, ideologically-driven party structure on the Republican side with the canvassing-for-hire approach of the Democrats.

On Friday, Neil the Ethical Werewolf discussed a 2000 study of the effects of various forms of voter contact; the study found that "personal canvassing increased voter turnout substantially; direct mail, slightly; and phone calls, not at all." The most effective medium is human contact--which the Republican party uses in abundance (through the evangelical churches), and the Democrats have barely begun to tap.

And Steve Teles wrote a great post on Monday about organizational mobilization, in which he made essentially the same argument I did:

I think the Democrats need to find ways, as part of Dean's state party building project, of rebuilding the Democratic party as a genuine source of solidaristic benefits at the local level--to make the Democratic party a more profond part of people's daily lives--more Democratic softball teams, drinking clubs, speed-dating scenes, church social issues discussion groups, hunting and fishing groups, etc.

This is exactly along the lines of what I'd like to see...as I'll discuss in some detail below the fold.

Ideally, I think the 365-day party would have semi-autonomous regional organizations that can tailor their operations to local preferences and issues--consistent, of course, with the broader values of the national organization. Each regional organization would sponsor a range of activities designed to build and sustain a community of Democrats. The specifics of these activities would vary from place to place, but everywhere would have three basic components.

The first component is political action. This, I think, is fairly self-explanatory. Outside of election season, it could take the form of regularly-scheduled letter-writing or phone-banking sessions on issues of importance to the (local, state, or national) Democratic Party. There's always something worthy of action--some initiative that needs support or opposition, at some level. This could also take the form of outreach--going door to door and introducing ourselves to registered Democrats in the neighborhood. Making political action a regularly scheduled activity a) normalizes the idea of active involvement in politics, b) gathers a cadre of people to call on at election time, and c) trains them for service in the election. A lot of this can be done in conjunction with existing campaigns by advocacy organizations like the Sierra Club or NARAL, supplementing rather than duplicating their efforts; but whether co-branded or stand-alone, it's essential to have some kind of advocacy that is ongoing and Democratic-identified.

The second component is social events. Pub nights, softball games, hikes, dances, picnics, singles events, book clubs...whatever brings people together. The point here is that one of the greatest services you can provide to people is a social life. This is exactly what churches do. If you're an LDS member, for example, you can move to any city in America (and a lot of cities in other countries) and immediately plug into a full social schedule, with genuinely friendly people helping you find your way. (Conservative religious social networks, not incidentally, are essential to enforcing political conformity.) There is very little like this on the secular side; I would love to see a Democratic-identified effort to fill the void. Again, some of this could be in conjunction with existing social efforts like Drinking Liberally or Sierra Club events (where these are active), but the important thing is that it would bring Democrats together.

The third component is community service. The party would have regularly-scheduled community service days that dovetail with and reinforce the broader values we share: serving food at homeless shelters (compassion, economic justice), beach cleanups (environmental concern), volunteering at women's shelters (pro-gender equality, anti-domestic violence).

The idea here is that the party should be a force for good at the individual level as well as in government. For those who get involved, community service promotes solidarity and a sense of being useful to the community. For those who aren't involved, it creates a positive image of Democrats as people who walk their own walk...which potentially makes people more open to Democratic ideas. Imagine if, when someone asked you what Democrats believe in, you could answer: "Last month we helped plant trees, this month we gathered toys for homeless kids, and next month we're doing a food drive for military families...that's what we believe in." Churches do this kind of work all the time, and while we may not agree with a lot of what they consider 'service' it is one reason they are viewed positively by most Americans.

I am convinced that if the Democratic Party committed itself to building a community of members, and devoted the resources necessary to achieve this, we could become permanently--I won't say 'dominant', because permanent realignments tend to go the way of thousand-year Reichs, but we could be permanently competitive. At the same time, we would have a party that would be--would have to be--more responsive to its grassroots. We would have the best of both worlds, and a party we could be proud of.

[Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]

Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein warn that the administration is determined to attack Iran (or, more precisely, to use Iran in the midterm elections--the way they used Iraq), and that the Democrats had better figure out how to respond.

I think the best defense is an early and aggressive offense. Make it about their political maneuvering. Make the point early and often that anything the administration says about Iran has no purpose other than influencing the midterms. Recap 2002: the egregious distortions, the timing of the thing ("From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August"--thank you, Andy Card), disparaging the patriotism of people who didn't want us to get into what has turned out to be an epic clusterfuck. The whole story. Take their hubris and shove it right back down their smug little throats.

Handled right, this is an opportunity; handled wrong (or more likely, not handled at all) it's another Democratic defeat in the making.

Some might object that this is just a political strategy, and doesn't deal with...y'know...Iran. That's absolutely right. So what?

There are two things we know here. The first is that any Democratic strategy for dealing with Iran will not be implemented. We could say 'let's nuke the living shit out of those people' or we could say 'hey, let's just give them tactical nuclear weapons' and there would be no practical difference between the two because neither would have the slightest chance of being implemented. Nothing we propose will actually happen. So, sure, we should come up with some fatuous platitudes with which to counter the other side's fatuous platitudes, but given our position there's really no reason why we should have to come up with a real strategy.

The other thing we know, and we know this from the Iraq experience, is that whatever the administration does will have everything to do with using Iran as a political tool and nothing to do with how to contain them or stop them from getting the bomb (except to the extent that the latter, by purest chance, coincides with the former). In that context, it makes no sense to talk about Iran as if this bunch of clowns might actually consider doing something serious about it.

What this means for us is that any response to any administration proposal must be focused on damaging them politically; we cannot fall into the trap of trying to talk seriously about what should really be done. That sounds like political cynicism, but here's the thing: this really is the best thing we can do about Iran anyway. Whatever the administration proposes is pretty much guaranteed to make things much worse; doing nothing at all is also bad, but vastly preferable to anything they might do. Stopping them--which is to say, making action by them politically infeasible--is our best possible outcome, substantively as well as politically.

Disaster looms, for the world as well as for the Democrats. I hope this time we have the sense to avoid it.

[cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]

In a comment to my post on Operation Emily Litella (at my other blog, If I Ran the Zoo), Master Gunner takes issue with my characterization of the captured weapons cache as 'not all that much':

It doesn't sound like much to you, because you don't see the big picture. 300 Pieces of weaponry is incredibly significant. If you would have read your own source, they said rockets and mortars were captured, as well as IED making equipment. I would assume you have never been rocketed, mortared, or been hit with an IED....You should check out the MNF-I website. You would be amazed at exactly how successful an operation Swarmer really is/was.

It's a fair point--I am not by any stretch of the imagination a military expert, and my sense that it wasn't a big deal was more gut than anything else. So I thought I'd do a reality check.

The two basic measures of how big a success this was are a) how much did they get compared to other seizures, and b) has it really impaired the operational capability of the insurgents. I did a Google search and found tons of prior stories on weapons cache seizures; here are excerpts from the top hits:

Fox News, 10/23/03:

Military officials are still tallying the cache but have retrieved at least 317 4-foot rockets and 220 anti-tank mines. Fox News had exclusive access to the military during the operation about 45 miles south of Baghdad.

Washington Times, 11/26/04:

The weapons cache, described by the U.S. military as the largest uncovered so far in Fallujah, was discovered Wednesday....Troops found small arms, artillery shells, heavy machine guns, and anti-tank mines inside the mosque, the U.S. military said.

U.S. forces also uncovered what may have been a mobile bomb-making factory as well as mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, launchers, and parts of surface-to-air weapons systems elsewhere in the mosque compound, the military added.

Defend America, 7/1/05:

“Finds like this are important,” said Air Force Staff Sgt. Michael Becker, 506th Air Expeditionary Group, Explosive Ordnance Detachment. “We've seen signs that terrorists are running low on ordnances to use on roadside improvised explosive devices and vehicle-borne improvised explosive device attacks. This [find] makes it harder for [the terrorist], especially when we take out a major weapons cache.”

Navy Times, 12/20/05:

Working on a tip from an informant, soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division on Tuesday dug up more than a thousand aging rockets and missiles wrapped in plastic, some of which had been buried as recently as two weeks ago, Army officials said.

MNF-Iraq, 2/1/06:

Explosive ordnance disposal teams from the ISF and 3rd Battalion, 16th Field Artillery Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, recovered 60 122-millimeter white rockets and four unidentified missiles.

So this one, in which they got 300 pieces of weaponry, looks like it's bigger than some and smaller than others--somewhat sizable but not really outstanding. It pales in comparison to, for example, the 380 tons of HMX and RDX that went missing right after the invasion. By that standard, then, it hasn't paid off the way it was initially hyped.

But surely this is a blow to the insurgency, right? Maybe. Same with all the prior seizures. On the other hand, it's only going to really matter if there's a weapons shortage, which doesn't appear to be the case; as I understand it, everything that was seized could be replaced without much difficulty. Given the continuing U. S. military casualties, that looks like exactly what happened after all the previous seizures. In the end, weapons cache seizures look like as false a metric as enemy body count.

So, with all due apologies to the cheerleaders, I remain distinctly unimpressed by Operation Emily Litella.

Update: spreadsheet link was broken; it's now two separate .pdf files, and the links seem to be working.

Given that a dozen or so states are preparing to follow South Dakota’s lead (Tennessee, Alabama, Missouri, andIndiana (among others) all have bills pending; states like Mississippi and Nebraska won’t be far behind), it would sure be nice if we could make an example of some of the South Dakota legislatures to discourage them.

I don’t know exactly how to accomplish this, but here are tables with information on South Dakota House and Senate members (including vote on the abortion ban, phone and fax numbers, party registration in their districts, and 2004 election results). Maybe someone more politically savvy than I am can put it to good use. At first glance, it doesn’t look promising; the districts tend to vote overwhelmingly one way or the other, and swing districts are few and far between.

Below the fold, I’ve listed Democrats voting in favor of the ban (primary challengers, anyone?), districts where Republicans got less than 60% of the vote¹ (could be vulnerable--who knows?), and Republicans running unopposed (even a token challenge would force them to spend money). For more info, check out the SD Legislature website and the SD Elections website.

House

Democrats Voting for the ban:

Gassman, David District 8

Gillespie, Margaret District 16

Glenski, Mary District 15

Hargens, Dale District 22

Kroger, Michael District 25

Lange, Gerald District 8

Miles, Kathy District 15

Vulnerable (?) Republicans

Boomgarden, Jamie District 17

Deadrick, Thomas District 21

Dykstra, Joel District 16

Haverly, Jeffrey District 35

Heineman, Phyllis District 13

McCoy, Alice District 35

Peters, Deb District 9

Rausch, Val District 4

Schafer, Donna District 17

Republicans Running Unopposed

Brunner, Thomas District 29

Davis, Justin District 23

Hackl, Tom District 23

Hunhoff, Jean District 18

Hunt, Roger District 10

Jerke, Gary District 19

Klaudt, Ted District 28B

Krebs, Shantel District 10

Michels, Matthew District 18

Olson, Ryan District 24

Putnam, J.E. "Jim" District 19

Rhoden, Larry District 29

Rounds, Tim District 24

Wick, Hal District 12

Senate

Democrats Voting for the ban:

Bartling, Julie District 21

Kloucek, Frank District 19

Koetzle, Gil District 15

Moore, Garry District 18

Peterson, Jim District 4

Sutton, Dan District 8

Vulnerable (?) Republicans

Bogue, Eric District 28

Earley, William District 12

Hansen, Tom District 22

Kelly, Dick District 13

Koskan, John District 26

Smidt, Orville District 7

Republicans Running Unopposed

Abdallah, Gene District 10

Apa, Jerry District 31

Broderick, Mike District 16

Duenwald, Jay District 23

Gray, Bob District 24

Schoenbeck, Lee District 5

¹House elections are a little odd. Apparently, each district elects two House members; each party nominates (up to) two candidates, then they all run against each other (i.e., you vote for just one). For the House worksheet, I used the total of both Republican candidates.

Today's Chronicle has a front-page article that exemplifies all the worst attributes of journalistic 'balance', squeezing the facts into a Procrustean bed of moral equivalence.

First, here's the part of the story that's worth reading--the part that should be the lead:

The Bush tax cuts will total about $2 trillion over the next decade according to the Congressional Budget Office....And by failing to restrain spending, Bush has made his tax cuts unsustainable without draconian spending cuts that neither the White House nor Republicans in Congress support.

In a sense, Bush's tax cuts, which are set to expire within five years, are a phantom, analysts said, paid for with borrowed money that portends much steeper taxes after he leaves office....

[T]he biggest parts of the Bush tax cuts directly benefit wealthy taxpayers. These include reduced rates on the upper-income brackets, the capital gains and dividends tax cut and phasing out the estate tax....

The problem for Republicans is that while cutting taxes, they have allowed spending to surge. Brian Riedl, a Heritage Foundation budget analyst, calculated that federal spending under Bush has risen twice as fast as under former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

Now let's look at the story as it actually ran.

Start with the headline:

Dems, GOP give tax cuts political twist Both sides spin issue in effort to gain edge in election year

Both sides spin, and both sides twist. It's a terrible headline from a factual standpoint, but I give them credit for capturing the tone of the story.

And here's how the article begins:

A clash over the domestic crown jewel of the Bush presidency -- the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, with looming expiration dates -- has emerged as a central theme of the Democrats' campaign to retake control of Congress this November.

Children, widows, the elderly, farmers, veterans, students, working mothers -- every vulnerable group short of puppies -- is to be sacrificed at the altar of the Bush tax cuts that benefit America's richest citizens, Democrats claim. "Democrats will fight the president's anti-widow and anti-children agenda," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, announced last week.

Added Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.: "After creating record deficits and debt with his budget-busting tax breaks, the president is asking our seniors, our students and our families to clean up his fiscal mess."

Okay, then. Let's stipulate that 'anti-widow and anti-children' is a little hyperbolic. With that qualification, is it wrong? Are widows and children, students and seniors, not disproportionately affected by Bush's proposed budget? Ms. Lochhead doesn't tell us, instead moving on to the Competing Claim:

President Bush, who is struggling to extend the capital gains and dividends tax cuts while paring the budget, countered that his tax cuts are essential to the economy and keeping Democrats' hands off taxpayers' money. He waved off budget concerns.

"If Congress doesn't act, your taxes are going to go up, and you're not going to like it," Bush told a New Hampshire business group last week. "You will hear the argument during the budget debates -- you know, all the noise coming out of Washington -- that you need to raise taxes in order to balance the budget. I've been there long enough to tell you that's not the way Washington works. They're going to raise your taxes, and they're going to find new ways to spend your money."

Interestingly enough, that isn't how it happened the last time we raised taxes to deal with the deficit. (Of course, we had a Democrat in office then...so it's really an unfair comparison.) Once again, though, there's no independent assessment of the claim. True? False? Truthy? Falselike? Who the hell knows, based on this story? All we really know is that Democrats claim one thing, and Republicans claim another.

Most of the rest of the story continues in this vein:

Underneath the flamboyant talk, budget experts say, both parties are teeing up their constituents for a nasty surprise....

Democrats actually like many specific Bush tax cuts, even as they trash them in the aggregate. Democrats also are fighting to roll back taxes on the same upper-income voters whom they claim should be paying more -- those earning between $200,000 and $500,000 a year. But these rich live in the blue states Democrats dominate like California and New York.

Reversing the Bush tax cuts alone cannot restore fiscal balance, analysts agree. This will require the very spending restraint that Democrats daily condemn....

"The Democrats tend to say, 'Well, if we just repeal these tax cuts, our problems are solved,' " said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "False. Republicans tend to say, 'Geez, if we have these dividends and capital gains, we'll grow our way out of it.' Also false....No one plays that game straight in my view," Holtz-Eakin said....

The top 50 percent of income earners pay almost all the individual income tax, and the top 5 percent pay more than half of it -- 53.8 percent -- according to the Treasury. That means any income tax cut will chiefly benefit top earners.....To offset this effect, the Bush tax cuts included an expensive array of tax breaks for the poor and middle class, including a new 10 percent bracket, a child tax credit, a refundable earned income tax credit, a savers' credit, marriage penalty relief and other tax breaks Democrats strongly endorse.

Democrats also favor fat business tax breaks such as the research and development credit....

The underlying problem for both parties is that the government is deep in red ink on the eve of the Baby Boomers' retirement. When these 76 million people stop paying taxes and begin collecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, starting in two years, they will swamp the government's resources and could provoke a financial crisis, analysts predict. [emphases added]

Get the picture? The Democrats are part of the problem. It's everybody's fault. Both sides are being less than honest. When you come right down to it, they're really all the same.

This sort of lazy, facile pseudo-analysis avoids asking any questions that would undermine the assumption of Democratic-Republican equivalence. Questions like: what is the size of Bush's 'tax breaks for the poor and middle class' relative to the total? What Democrats 'daily condemn' spending restraint? Who's actually responsible for the current situation? If it isn't the party controlling congress and the Executive branch, why not? Didn't Clinton's policies generate surpluses that were designed to avoid exactly the crisis this article warns about?

The byline on the story is Carolyn Lochhead; longtime Chronicle readers may remember her (as I do) for writing aggressively skeptical stories about Clinton pretty much from the first day of his presidency. Ironically, if you do a Google blog search you'll find that it's mostly wingnuts complaining about her nowadays. To be honest, I don't really know if she has some ideological agenda she's pursuing (but if she does I'm pretty sure it isn't a liberal agenda). I don't think that's the problem with this story. The problem is the unstated assumption that 'balance' means assuming moral equivalence even when one party is being relatively reasonable and the other has gone completely off the deep end.

[Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]

Feinstein appears to be satisfied. Kennedy is more skeptical, but then Alito doesn't need Kennedy. And on the right...nothing. If anyone is reacting negatively to Alito's backpedaling, I haven't seen it (not from the most prominent wingnuts, and not from the right-wing blogs). It's as if as far as they're concerned, he never said anything at all.

It's a willing suspension of disbelief.

People like Feinstein are so disturbed by the prospect of an ugly nomination fight that they eagerly accept any rationalization, no matter how lame, that allows them to avoid conflict. The wingnuts seem to be focusing not on Alito's backpedaling but on the criticism that forced him to it, adopting (in effect) the position that anyone so poorly treated by People for the American Way must be somebody we want on the Supreme Court. Everybody sees what they want to see.

Ultimately, what makes this possible is the absence of any broadly accepted reality in this country--or, to put it another way, the existence of an alternative reality with an alternative epistemology based on assuming the correctness of right wing ideology and finding (or inventing) the facts to support it. (And yes, there is something of a parallel effort on the left; but liberals, on the whole, are still much more tethered to the idea that there are objective truths independent of ideology.) In a world of objective truth, Alito has to be one thing or the other--determined to overturn Roe v. Wade, or willing to let it stand--and either possibility has to alienate people he can't afford to alienate. In a world of competing ideological realities, Alito can have it both ways; the comments that appease the moderates simply don't exist in the reality where they could damage his chances.

[cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]

And the thing about a community is that it is a powerful tool for propagating and, more to the point, reinforcing beliefs. If your church family is overwhelmingly pro-Bush, odds are that you'll pretty much agree with them; odds are even stronger that if you disagree, you won't say much about it. The enormous practical benefits of belonging to a community far outweigh such abstractions as political philosophy. If the people you know and love and trust happen to love and trust and think they know Bush, then he must be okay.

This is what the GOP has going for it. By propagating Republican beliefs among their congregations, the evangelical churches form a kind of permanent party.

The Democrats, on the other hand, exist (as far as most people are concerned) only at election time. The rest of the time the party might as well be in mothballs in the attic. Come an election they'll ask you for money, they'll ask you to volunteer, they'll ask for your vote, but the rest of the time they might as well not exist. And that's the problem.

The second smartest thing Dean did--in the long term, possibly the smartest, but only if the party expands on it--was to create communities of supporters. The Dean Meetups added a social function, an element of fun and a sense of community, to the business of campaigning. People met and talked and had a good time and formed networks of friends and probably fell in love sometimes and campaigned for Dean.

What I would love to see is a permanent Democratic Party--an organization that exists in tangible ways providing tangible benefits at the local level. An organization that has regular events--not just campaign events but social events, charitable events, recreational events, public service days. An organization that people can point to and say 'they throw an awesome party' and 'they do real good in the community'. An organization reaching into the reddest of the red counties where Democrats feel like mute isolated freaks, emboldening them to speak up with the knowledge that they are after all part of a community.

A permanent party.

Only within the last 10 years or so is something like this even feasible...but it is feasible now, and at (relatively) reasonable cost. The Republicans already have their version; this is our chance to even the odds, and if we grab it we could build a majority that would last for decades.

Team B's conclusion that the CIA was indeed soft on the Soviets was leaked to sympathetic journalists and generated public support for a new round of military spending, particularly on missiles. Team B's conclusions turned out, years later, to be false.

"In retrospect, and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B's criticisms ... proved to be wrong," Raymond Garthoff, a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria, wrote in a paper for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence three years ago. "On several important specific points it wrongly criticized and 'corrected' the official estimates, always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and threat." [emphasis added]

None of this is news to readers of Josh Marshall or Sy Hersh, but the article does an excellent job of fitting the current atrocity into a pattern of intelligence manipulation by the same basic group:

The path to Plame's outing also led through Baghdad, this time via Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, who had been abandoned by the CIA in the late 1990s as too troublesome, unreliable and corrupt.

Among Chalabi's key supporters were Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz. When the three came back into power in January 2001, the CIA and State Department still refused to back Chalabi.

*

*

*

Over at the Pentagon, however, Rumsfeld was reprising Team B by creating his own intelligence shop. The Chalabi organization's alarmist reports on Hussein's nuclear weapons, which later proved to be false, bypassed the CIA and went directly to the White House.

Read the whole thing--it's worth it.

[cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]

But as the noose tightens I recall the deep sense of anxiety we felt at the time, right up to the resignation. We knew Nixon was in trouble, and we knew the rest of the country was coming around to what we had known all along; what we didn't know was how far he would go to hang on to power. We knew he would go pretty goddamn far; the Saturday Night Massacre gave us a solid basis for wild speculation about Nixon declaring martial law. We could hope, but we just didn't know.

I'm feeling a similar anxiety today...and judging by these posts, I'm not the only one. Lurking beneath the pony boom is the unsettling question: how far will they go to hang on to power?

Because these people aren't the Nixon administration--they're far more ruthless. Because the first lesson they took away from Watergate is that Nixon didn't cover up enough, and it's no stretch to speculate that they second lesson they took away is that Nixon fell because he lacked the will to hang on. Because we're at war, because 9/11 changed everything, because we are led by a man who combines an aristocrat's sense of entitlement with the disposition of a petulant bully with messianic delusions about being the savior of his nation.

The first phase, the war against the prosecutor, has already started...and it's going to get really vicious when (and if) indictments are issued. What happens if it gets closer to the top, though--if it threatens Cheney or Bush? These people have carefully laid down the ideological groundwork for an executive branch above the law, immune to oversight from any quarter; they have demonized the judiciary and neutered Congress; what are the odds that, when push comes to shove, they will fail to fall back on that?

I am not immune to the giddy optimism; I've been hoping for the best just like everybody else. It's just that whatever optimism I feel is tempered by the knowledge that it will get ugly, and that the ugliness will be in direct proportion to how justified we are in our optimism.

[cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]

Looking at the letter alone, the evidence seems inconclusive. Juan Cole, who had argued that the salutation was a religious impossibility, has withdrawn that objection and now questions its authenticity on narrower grounds. Expert opinions seem mixed; Michael Scheuer buys it, which gives it some credibility, but then

Ken Katzman, a terrorism expert with the Congressional Research Service -- the in-house think-tank of the U.S. Congress -- said the letter contained elements that raised doubts about its authenticity.

So who knows. And maybe, who cares?

But as billmon demonstrates, the letter cannot be considered in isolation; we have to consider it in the context of Bush's desperate plea for better poll numbers (the same day the letter was released), the New York subway terror hoax (pushed by DHS in the days before Bush's speech), and the supposed terrorist plots we 'disrupted' (which turned out to be less than Bush claimed in his speech).

More to the point, it has to be seen in the context of the Plame investigation, the DeLay indictments, the catastrophic failures in Iraq, and polls that have dropped below 40%.

So the specific question of the letter's authenticity is ultimately secondary. The bigger picture is the exploitation of terror fears in a desperate scramble to change the subject. And the better question is: why would anyone believe anything these people say?

And derision is no substitute for policy. We need weighty thinkers thinking weighty thoughts about how we'd do things if we ran the zoo. We need cunning strategists telling us how to tailor our message to appeal to people too feeble to distinguish the difference between Bush and reality, and well-connected political insiders telling us when and in what order the next 25 Republicans are going to be indicted. Derision accomplishes none of these.

And yet derision has value. Derision is necessary, and here's why: to respond to Bush supporters with sober and well-reasoned argument, to treat them as if they were serious people with serious ideas serious about governing, is to be complicit in a lie. It is to argue that the Emperor's suit is ugly, or that its stitching is imperfect, or that its finery is a wasteful extravagance--when in fact the Emperor is naked. Buck bare-ass jaybird September-Morn birthday-suit let-it-all-hang-out totally-nude naked.

Which is why sites like tbogg and Sadly, No!, The Poorman and World O'Crap, are so very necessary: not because they make us feel better (which they do, because as long as we laugh we aren't crying, most of the time anyway), but because they are true. Because when Brad DeLong tells us that only Fafblog can deal with the Bush administration on the appropriate level, he's not being facetious; he's reporting incontrovertible fact.

And because, as a wiser man than I once said, ridicule is the best disinfectant.

I know I probably shouldn't be piling on Richard Cohen for writing the dumbest column ever...and really, I was going to resist the temptation...until I got to this bit:

I have no idea what Fitzgerald will do. My own diligent efforts to find out anything have come to naught. [emphasis added]

Well, that's what this is all about, isn't it? Ken Starr was spoon-feeding the press corps tender juicy gossip nuggets every goddamn day, but this guy has the temerity to take all that grand jury secrecy shit seriously. Hell, it's almost as if Fitzgerald thinks the press corps aren't part of the club.

Cohen is really making two related points here. The first is that yes, goddamnit, the world does revolve around my ability to get inside gossip.

The second, more crucial point is that if the Washington press corps doesn't write about something it has no value or importance, and that by failing to keep his investigation in the news (by strategically leaking information) Fitzgerald has rendered it trivial.

This, as Bob Somerby keeps reminding us, is really how these people see the world.

To exercise her "right" to a refund of her political dues, under the terms of a U.S. Supreme Court decision (Hudson), which applies to public employees, Sandra has had to do the following:

-- Resign from the CTA, which she did not want to do because she forfeits her $1 million professional liability policy and her right to hold union office or to vote for union leaders or on the collective-bargaining agreement.

-- Submit a written request -- valid only if she does so during the month of September -- for return of her political dues. Silence, inaction or missed deadlines on her part is interpreted as consent to the use of part of her dues on politics.

Well, now, that sounds awfully tough on Ms. Crandall. If she doesn't want to fund the work the union is doing to get her the salary and benefits she gets, she has to give up one of her benefits. Oh, and she doesn't get to be part of the union leadership if she isn't in the union. Or, if she chooses to stay in the union, she has to fill out some paperwork.

That is, like, so unfair.

How anyone can write this nonsense with a straight face is beyond me. What Ms. Crandall wants is what old-fashioned people like myself used to call 'having it both ways' (this was, of course, before the Post-Modern Presidency raised that from a derogatory comment to an art form...but I digress). She wants the benefits the union brings without actually supporting the union. More to the point, this measure isn't about the 'hardships' suffered by the Sandra Crandalls of the world; it's about crushing the political power of public employee unions.

Call me a cynical bastard (my parents do), but I was a little dubious about this Sandra Crandall character. So I Googled her--and found that Graphesthesia had already done the legwork, in response to a September 18 article on Prop 75 (also in the Chronicle) that got quotes from Crandall. Crandall, as it happens, is on the board of directors of the National Right to Work Committee, an organization dedicated to eliminating union money from politics.

So...not just a simple kindergarten teacher. More of a...how to put this...right-wing activist. And coincidentally, she happens to be the teacher newspapers go to for those 'balancing' quotes in favor of Prop 75.

And the author of the piece? One Lewis K. Uhler, described in this profile as an "an unapologetic McCarthyite and a former member of the John Birch Society whose hard-right ideology has taken him to the fringes of American conservatism." The profile goes on to describe one of Uhler's finest moments:

Although Uhler has mostly operated behind the scenes, he served as Reagan's point man in 1970 to torpedo California Rural Legal Assistance, writing a report that accused its staff, among other transgressions, of engaging in ideological campaigns instead of representing the poor....A panel of retired judges appointed by the Nixon administration investigated the charges and found that the Uhler report "in many instances ... misrepresented the facts" and that the allegations against CRLA were "totally irresponsible."

One meets such lovely people in politics...

[cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]

Cunningham picked up a house and a yacht

D is DeLay, who makes Congress stay bought

Earle is the guy put DeLay in the dock

F is for Frist, who shorted his stock

G is for Gannon, the media whore

H is for Halliburton, ready to score

Illegal acts, way too many to mention

J is for Judy, fresh out of detention

K is for Kidan, who paid for a hit

L is for Libby, a traitorous shit

M is for money, and laundering same

N is for Ney, whose excuses were lame

O is Ohio, where Coingate rages

Pombo paid family extravagant wages

Q is for Norquist, involved in it all

R is for Rove, who is due for a fall

S is Safavian, procurer for Jack

T is for Taft, whom the voters would sack

U is unheard-of corruption and vice

V is for Vast Right Wing Scam--ain't it nice?

W's the one all his cronies have carried

X marks the spot where his bodies are buried

Y is for you--they all think you're so dumb

Z is the zoo that our government has become

[cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]