Something To Ponder While We Wait for More Motivated Others To Go Through The 3000 Page Bush Administration US Attorneys Document Dump

If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is such a giant braggart that he felt the need to proudly confess to killing everyone (check to see if he fessed up to murdering your grandmother), then why the hell did we need to torture him? The famous two-and-a-half minutes of waterboarding, for instance. Pourquoi?

Conversely, given that we tortured him, what's with the "he's a great big braggart" media meme?

And that's the problem with torture.

Now, back to the PDF's of typo-ridden emails....

Condom? Never heard of him!

It's really too funny to pass up. John McCain has resuscitated the "Straight Talk Express," apparently with the intention of using it to sling the rankest bullshit. You really owe it to yourself to read the NY Times report on McCain's flim-flammery when asked by a reporter about his stance with regard to AIDS prevention. It's a riot. Evidently, McCain doesn't know; he has to wait for his aide to get back to him with a dossier on his position; he's not sure whether condoms help prevent HIV transmission; he's not sure if government money should pay for condoms, but he suspects not; he's pretty sure Tom Coburn has a position paper on it that he agrees with, or used to agree with; he's pretty sure he agrees with the president, though it's not at all clear that he knows what the president himself thinks.

I leave the parsing of the "Straight Talk" irony to others, since it's going to be a long campaign and I think it's pretty clear that there will be more than plenty future opportunities. For now, I'll just restrict myself to pointing out that, among the many, many stupidities revealed in this interview, by far the most ridulous is McCain's idea that he is going to endear himself to anyone by tying himself more closely to Bush.

Evidently, John McCain is under the serious misapprehension that his problem is with the religious base, who see him as a maverick, and don't much like it. I think it's much, much more likely that his problem is with the people who used to think he was a maverick, and liked it, and who now are getting a pretty clear object lesson in just what a conniving, crooked-talking, cynical ass-clown the man really is. The base aren't going to buy this kind of staring-at-the-ceiling, I-wonder-what-James-Dobson-would-say bullshit, so he's screwed for the primaries. And the 10% of swing voters all know that, whatever this crap is, it ain't mavericky. So, no general election.

However, I'm a generous spirit, so let me offer McCain some assistance with answering the AIDS/condoms question. Anyone who refuses to say that condoms help prevent AIDS transmission is a lying sack of shit. Anyone who nonetheless defends abstinence-only education -- let alone in Africa -- is simply saying that he cares more about the supposed purity of people's immortal souls than about the sanctity of their lives on earth. And anyone who claimed to be a "straight talker" would come clean on both. So, McCain could easily have pleased the base and told the truth, all at once, by saying that condoms prevent AIDS, but sinners deserve to die. There. Problem solved.

Who's On First?

Are you up on the US Attorneys scandal? Purgegate, as it is known in Blogland? Feeling a little confused about the whole thing? Yeah, well, join the club. I love Talking Points Memo, and I respect Josh Micah Marshall's work -- and really, watching him slowly tear this thing open, over the course of months, has been impressive. No TPM, no revelation of the scandal.

Everyone's talking about this, and yet I don't think we're all talking about the same things. To briefly sum up, 8 US Attorneys were fired by the Bushies for not being sufficiently single-minded in their pursuit of trumped up charges against Democrats, or for being excessively single-minded in their pursuit of legitimate charges against genuinely corrupt Republicans. Then, a couple of Justice Dept. officials lied to Congress about the whole thing, saying the attorneys were fired for "performance-related" reasons, which is obviously untrue, and so Gonzales's Chief of Staff resigned, to try to deflect attention from the inevitable embroilment of the White House and the Attorney General in the whole mess.

Ok, but what exactly is the goddamn scandal???? I mean, I know what it is from my point of view -- the naked manipulation of political appointments as a form of ideological blackmail, and the corruption of the justice system for the most cynically partisan ends. But that's not actually illegal, you know. It should be, God knows, and it's not traditionally done, and no, Clinton did NOT do it, no matter what Fox News may tell you -- but it doesn't appear that it's against the law. The Bushies know this, which is why they keep saying "the US Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President." And that's true, so...?

Well, what about the lying to Congress? That is illegal, if you're under oath; but it's not clear yet that the Bushies are ready to admit it's a lie. As we speak, they are putting together dossiers on the 8 attorneys, trying to find a set of job performance issues to hang the firings on. And all of that scurrying -- be glad you're not a Justice Dept. intern right now -- is not because non-job performance related firings are illegal; it's just to cover their backs for the lying to Congress. How insane is this? Their actions, while gross and despicable, were not actually illegal, until the lying. Remind you of any recently convicted aides to a certain vampiric vice-president? Do they never learn?

But even the lying to Congress, if proven, only matters if it was done with the knowledge of the administration. And so we have the tortured logic of the whole thing. The AG may have to resign -- which I'm all for, 'cause that guy is a major problem -- but not at all clear for what. For...not knowing that his staff was lying to Congress? For lying to Congress himself? Even he doesn't seem to know. Witness this recent press conference, and tell me if anyone in the administration has any idea why they're in trouble:

QUESTION: What mistakes were made at the Department of Justice and specifically was there a mistake made in in considering the political performance of U.S. attorneys in evaluating them:

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALES: Well let me just say that one of the things that we discovered that we do not have, in my judgment, an adequate system of communication with our U.S. Attorneys around the country. When these U.S. Attorneys were advised that changes were going to be made, quite frankly they should have been told why those changes were being made, and I regret that that didn't happen. That should have happened in this particular case.

Yes?

QUESTION: -- Mr. Sampson drew up his list and are you now feeling like maybe they were removed without cause and that maybe it was an unfair removal since you were not aware of -- you're saying now you were not aware of the details of why he drew up this list?

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALES: I stand by the decision. Again, all political appointees can be removed by the President of the United States for any reason. I stand by the decision and I think it was the right decision. Thank you very much.

"Mistakes were made" he says -- but neither he nor the press seems to know what those mistakes were! Of course, he can't specify because at any moment something worse may come out. Like today, when we all learned about Gonzales' emails discussing a purge while he was still White House Counsel. Oops. He wasn't ignorant, he was complicit. In a non-crime. About which he lied himself into a likely resignation.

My dear God in heaven these people are stupid.

In Defense of Hillary

Oy. The presidential election is a year and a half away, and already I can't stand it. It's bad enough watching the wingnuts trying to decide who's the worst flip flopper among their oh-so-flip-floppy candidates. It's cringe-worthy to watch McCain making a serious run at the title. And tempting as it is to get seriously involved in the whole thing, I've been holding back. Until now.

God save me, I'm about to defend Hillary Clinton.

I used to love Hillary Clinton. She was so articulate, so capable, so knowledgeable. She spoke in full, clear paragraphs, totally off the cuff. This was when she was First Lady, and she was fantastic. She came to my alma mater to speak, and I sat in a bar to listen to her; the place was packed. I don't remember a word she said, except the general impression that it all made good sense, and that she was both personable and visibly, palpably smart.

Something has gone awfully wrong. And maybe part of it has gone wrong in Hillary -- she's human, after all, and as a human cannot possibly be immune to the pressure offered by her increased ambition and the near haloed status of her husband in comparison to her. She has a huge burden -- as the wife of a president that, let's face it, pretty much everyone to the left of the National Review desperately misses right now, and as a woman trying to stage herself for national office in the midst of a fucking cock-up of a disastrous war. She's certainly not the Hillary I remember....

But that's just it. I think she probably is the Hillary I remember, just not as I remember her. Those were comfortable times, and the rhetoric was different, no matter who was spinning it. I think a big part of the Hillary problem right now is that the kinds of things she has to talk about are not what she talked about in 1994, but it's not clear that, if you'd asked, she'd have said anything very different then.

She was always hawkish. She always preferred executive authority to congressional. She always was moderate in her social ideology. This is who she is, and was; but the communication of it now is coming through this national security lens that skews the entire picture. And the problem, clearly, is her Iraq war vote.

The Iraq war vote is devestating -- if you believe, as everyone seems to, that it was a vote of political expediency in the first place, now being defended in a second and even more hypocritical action of political expediency. It is fashionable on the Left right now to pretend that if only she would apologize, she would be forgiven. But I think Hillary actually is the Hillary I remember, and she's too smart for that shit. She knows perfectly well that no forgiveness will be granted from the Left, and a new rain of hypocrisy accusations will fall from the Right. Which makes it six of one/half dozen of the other -- except for the fact that, in all honesty, I don't think her Iraq vote was a matter of political jockeying, or at least not demonstrably so. I used to think so, but then I examined my own assumptions, and realized I'd been suckered by my own partisanship.

Why assume Hillary knew the Iraq war was a crock of shit? She was a hawkish senator immediately post-9/11, one who felt that congress should defer to presidential authority. She's held that line, and the assumption is that she's done so in defense of her original vote -- but I tend to think she's done so, in the most cynical case, because that's how she thinks presidential authority ought to work, and she's married to one president and would like to become another herself. She's to the right of left. She's a centrist. And in other countries, she'd be a right-of-centrist. But that's not dishonest; it's who she is. Fight her on the merits of that political position if you're so inclined, but give her the credit of her convictions, which as far as I can see are perfectly clear.

My point here -- and brace yourselves, because I intend to harp on a lot more about this in the future -- is that we all need to be careful about how we talk about Hillary Clinton. We have a very murky idea of her, and into all the cracks of our misunderstanding creep the sexism. The most disgusting example of this right now is Andrew Sullivan, who's developing a seriously repulsive habit of invecting against her while saying that he doesn't know what bothers him about her, she just bothers him. Often, this criticism comes down to her voice, and method of delivery -- and, as Sullivan said the other day, the idea that if he has to see her on his TV for the next few years he'll kill himself.

Really? Presumably George W. Bush's voice struck Sullivan's ear euphoniously enough to win his endorsement in 2000; I can't find Sullivan's endorsement online, but I'll bet anything it mentioned some excellent personable quality that spoke of leadership potential. If Sullivan were to vote for someone whose voice he didn't like, could we maybe get a president who won't send us into a giant, multi-faceted national tailspin? Can we just once not be the dumbest, most shallow country on earth and listen to what a person says, and assess his or her record simply on its merit, and then make a decision? I'm not defending Hillary's Iraq war vote, and I'll happily argue her or anyone else on the wisdom of it -- but I sure as shit am defending her right to be viewed as a serious candidate, with a pretty goddamn consistent record, and the chops to be listened to, no matter how much you find her voice grates on you.

Think how much we women are sick of listening to men pompifying at us, and settle down for a good, long listen.

Memo From the Fact-Checking Department

Would it kill the Right to be accurate, just once, just for a change? Roger Ailes (no, not that Roger Ailes -- Roger Ailes the hilariously punchy blogger) advises that we all toddle over to The Corner, the National Review's group blog, to witness what he calls the "500 year dumbassery" of wingnut reaction to the Libby verdict. As always, Ailes was right; it's quite a show. A particular bit of dumbassery of the lying variety struck my eye when I found this kernel of putative analysis:

As we know, a segment of the left views Cheney as some sort of scheming, flame-breathing demon who runs around torturing cats with a Halliburton-made pitchfork—or at the very least, a heartless war-mongering political machine. Too often, the political press forget that the politicians they cover are, well, people, so it's nice to see the New York Times recognize, at least for a moment, that Cheney's an actual human being with a life outside of the role he's usually assigned as Purveyor of War and Evil.

It aggravates the hell out of me that I have to interrupt my busy day of navel-gazing to correct this drivel. First of all, the Times suggested no such thing. They merely quoted someone suggesting that Cheney's heart was broken over the Libby conviction; they never said that they themselves had verified that Cheney had a heart to break (mechanical equipment does not count as a heart). Second of all, get it straight, meatheads -- we don't think that Cheney is a "scheming, flame-breathing demon"; we think he is a vampire. There is a world of difference here, because the important point is that Cheney is the opposite of "flame-breathing" -- he is icy cold. The chill of the grave clings to him. It clings because he is Undead. Also, we liberals are very clearly on record that we do not accuse Cheney of torturing cats. It's puppies, goddamn it, and he doesn't merely torture them -- as everyone knows, he bites off their fluffy little heads and drinks their blood. Christ, how hard is it to get this shit straight?

The bit about "a heartless, war-mongering political machine" is less an inaccuracy than a radical understatement, but in the context of the aforementioned, I'll take it as a direct misrepresentation nonetheless.

When You Wish Upon A Star...

Apologies for being out of touch for a while. First, there was a conference. Then, there was a series of deadlines for my job with Reader J (da Boss). Finally, there was the soul-sucking ennui of my purposeless existence, and the fuck-it-all attitude that periodically prevents me from doing my duty.

Fortunately, the rest of the world rolled merrily along, and from my lonely peak I observed the to-and-fro below, and drew my inferences. I have thoughts. I have opinions. I will now roll them out in a series of posts ushering in a new era of Bacondom.

Apparently, it's not nice to say that one wishes Dick Cheney had died in the attack on Bagram in Afghanistan. It's so not nice, in fact, that Arianna Huffington pulled down comments on the Huff Po expressing...well, strong disappointment. Strong and somewhat expletive-spiked disappointment. It was generally felt that it was bad behavior for liberals to speak desirously of the death of anyone, even the Dark Lord, and that it gave the Party a bad name. All the major bloggers weighed in, and even when they thought it was all a tempest in a teakettle, or, more acutely, rather hypocritical coming from the "kill the fags and torture the terrorists" wing of politics -- still, there was always a sentence beginning something like, "While I don't condone the comments...."

Well, all I can say is that if I'm going to hold the line on this, then Cheney is going to have to stop teasing me with these near death experiences. Today he has evidently developed a blood clot in his leg. A potentially dangerous blood clot. A potentially fatally dangerous blood clot of doom. What's a responsible liberal supposed to think? Bagram, or blood clot, or neither? Is it ever ok to root for the Veep to die?

Any student of the second world war has pondered the pivotal moment in July of 1944 when the Stauffenberg group very nearly assassinated Adolph Hitler. We even celebrate the people who nearly pulled this off -- this being the assassination of a sovereign ruler of a sovereign government. How many lives might have been saved had those bombs met their target! Regret, to the extent that it can be attached to such distant events, circles entirely around the failure of the attack rather than its essential immorality. There are times, we all know, when a death is a blessing. We don't like to say it; but it's true. So why can't we say it now?

The outcome of the Libby trial, however you want to parse it, boils down to the open acknowledgment that the VP's office went after Joe Wilson, and his wife, because of the VP's personal knowledge that the nuclear evidence on Iraq was thin to fraying point. It's not about outing a CIA agent -- treasonous though that is -- it's about the lies that got us into a war. A war in which over 3,000 Americans have died, and over 20,000 have been wounded, some so severely that they may as well have died. Shall we count Iraqi lives? Those numbers -- over 60,000 by a conservative estimate -- can be folded into the mix, if you're so inclined. But these things are done, and nothing that happens now is going to undo them; though they are certainly the source of the rage of the Huff Po commenters, they are not a sufficient justification for wishing the man dead now. After all, as all death penalty opponents know, vengeance is by definition not justice.

So here. I wish that Cheney had had a blood clot in his leg in the spring of 2002. I wish that, back then, that blood clot had broken loose and gone straight to his dark heart and killed him. Or -- why be fussy? -- at any time before the spring of '02. After that it's too late, the damage is done and that's that. That's the thing -- the Stauffenberg moment, the plot you want to succeed, is by definition always in the past. It's a form of nostalgia. To wish for such things in the current moment is to think that someone deserves to die for what they've already done, since what they will do is unknowable.

I think we can all be happy Cheney didn't die in Afghanistan, not because I like the man, but because I can't even bear to imagine the nationalist rhetoric we'd face in this country if a sitting vice president, however vampiric, were murdered by terrorists. If you think we're violating the Geneva conventions now, you would really not like the future. But as to my audacity to hope for the blood clot's potential success...well, that all depends on whether Cheney is going to convince Bush to bomb Iran, doesn't it?