NY Times Columnist Frank Rich (who has been an erudite source of great amusement for N4T of late) noted that Gramm Cracker had stated two weeks earlier in a Wall Street Journal profile, that

the former chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, was “probably the most exploited worker in American history” since he received only a $158 million pay package rather than the “billions” he deserved for his success in growing Southwestern Bell.

This kind of goes with the post before this, about Jane Meyer's outrageously selective amnesia about the actual history of American atrocities against so many, with no legal or legislative recourse. But Gramm's characterization of Whiteacre, who eventually ran Southwestern Bell into the toilet, is an exquisite nougat of how some voters "think". It's just scary that McCain told a Wall Street Journal columnist that Gramm was his economic guru in 2005.

There used to be a test for black people to determine if they had the wherewithal to vote. It went, how many jellybeans are in this jar? I suggest we resurrect this scheme for anyone who has ever voted for cretins like Gramm. Then Jane Meyer can type about it in The New Yorker, except she has to preface everything bad as 'white'. "White sites' for outlaw prisons like Gitmo. She can call the book "The White Side". And so on. I'm not claiming she made these ugly terms up all by herself. But her concern for suspected terrorists seems to have blinded her to easily available history of similar atrocities. The shit she's referring to is simply not new. I wish it were. That does not make it so.

Still, I'm willing to concede that hyperbole can bring not only the funny, but a peek into the innards of how little people know, who actually vote for these pricks. Well done, I guess, Phil Gramm. This is the sound of one hand saluting you, with the age-old symbol for having been cut off in traffic.

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MUDGE’s Musings

Frank Rich of the NYTimes eviscerated John McCain over both his supposed area of expertise, military affairs, as well as Sen. McCain's admitted area of weakness, matters economic. It wasn't pretty.

It’s the Economic Stupidity, Stupid

Op-Ed Columnist | By FRANK RICH | Published: July 20, 2008

THE best thing to happen to John McCain was for the three network anchors to leave him in the dust this week while they chase Barack Obama on his global Lollapalooza tour. Were voters forced to actually focus on Mr. McCain’s response to our spiraling economic crisis at home, the prospect of his ascension to the Oval Office could set off a panic that would make the IndyMac Bank bust in Pasadena look as merry as the Rose Bowl.

“In a time of war,” Mr. McCain said last week, “the commander in chief doesn’t get a learning curve.” Fair enough, but he imparted this wisdom in a speech that was almost a year behind Mr. Obama in recognizing Afghanistan as the central front in the war against Al Qaeda. Given that it took the deadliest Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul since 9/11 to get Mr. McCain’s attention, you have to wonder if even General Custer’s learning curve was faster than his.

Mr. McCain still doesn’t understand that we can’t send troops to Afghanistan unless they’re shifted from Iraq. But simple math, to put it charitably, has never been his forte. When it comes to the central front of American anxiety — the economy — his learning curve has flat-lined.

Rich follows similar economic criticism of McCain from Paul Krugman 12 days previously, before Phil Gramm elevated himself from has-been to economic advisor to get thee gone in just a few hours time.

Mr. McCain’s fiscal ineptitude has received so little scrutiny in some press quarters that his chief economic adviser, the former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, got a free pass until the moment he self-immolated on video by whining about “a nation of whiners.” The McCain-Gramm bond, dating back 15 years, is more scandalous than Mr. Obama’s connection with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Mr. McCain has been so dependent on Mr. Gramm for economic policy that he sent him to newspaper editorial board meetings, no doubt to correct the candidate’s numbers much as Joe Lieberman cleans up after his confusions of Sunni and Shia.

[By the way, the photo at the top of the column will hereby become Left-Handed Complement's official John McCain portrait.]

Carly Fiorina has picked up the economic cudgel from temporarily banished ex-Sen. Gramm. She comes with a wonderful track record: booted out of Hewlett-Packard after five years of big talk and miserable results.

Then Rich wanders into a long-time hobby-horse of this nanocorner of the 'Sphere©, Michael Bloomberg, positing him a potential vice president on the McCain ticket.

Mr. McCain reminds us every day how principled he is. That presumably means he’d risk a revolt by his party’s dwindling agents of intolerance and do everything in his power to persuade Mr. Bloomberg to join his ticket in the spirit of patriotic sacrifice. The politics could be advantageous too. A Bloomberg surprise could impress independents and keep the television audience tuned in to a G.O.P. convention that will unfold in the shadow of Mr. Obama’s address to 75,000 screaming fans in Denver.

Op-Ed Columnist - It’s the Economic Stupidity, Stupid - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

All this vice presidential speculation this year provides the usual column-inch filler during the summertime doldrums for the political junkies out here, but it's also particularly of interest, in a year of unusually vulnerable presidential candidates. (Hey, if Hillary can point it out, so can I. I'm going to hate myself in the morning, though.)

But, hey, Frank Rich! I want Michael Bloomberg for the good guys.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

--MUDGE

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* Precursive: this blog vestibule contains schlock specialize in as respects wikilinks and fretting dates(as long as issue's spring, cuz Himself intelligence ace'll let it pass howbeit this oversaturate was man-made in aftertime).

Dowd spends this column detailing some "Herculean" tasks that Obama needs to overcome in order to become president. Dowd frames her discussion around Obama's trip to the Middle East and Europe, where he has already seen Iraq Prime Minisiter Al Maliki endorse his 16 month withdrawal plan. She also opens up by comparing to Obama to one of her friend's that puts their serious significant others through trials with her family; another sign that Dowd wants to fuck the shit out of Obama, but is a truth that has nothing to do with national or foreign policy, so we'll ignore that part.

One portion of her column in particular strikes a sad reality in America. In describing his trip to Europe, Dowd warns that he missed succeed without that success seeming "too European." This excerpt explains:

Even if Obama is treated as a superstar by W.-weary Europeans, some Obama-wary Americans may wonder what he’s doing there, when they can’t pay for gas, when the dollar is the Euro’s chew toy, when Bud is going Belgian and when the Chrysler Building has Arab landlords.

“I don’t know that people in Missouri are going to like seeing tens of thousands of Europeans screaming for The One,” a McCain aide snarked to The Politico.

Firstly, are the Republicans now admitting they are the bad guy, pitting themselves against Sen. Neo? That's the type of Cheneyism I like to see.

Regardless, in the wake of Rev. Jackson's controversial comments on Obama, I must ask, are the Republicans talking down to the people of Missouri? Do Missourians think it was really Europeans that caused the price of gas to go up? Was it the Europeans, with governments that would be called socialist here, that were responsible for the fall of the dollar? Are Missourians aurally allergic to foreign language, culturally resistant to Europeans' superior alcoholic beverages, and economically intolerant of a strong currency that is wisely taxed to support a higher quality of life?

Maybe, maybe not. Obama all-star Sen. Claire McCaskill eked out a win there in 2006, with strong support for stem cells. But even she couldn't help but get the all-American street cred of taking actions to try to stop the sale of Anheuser-Busch. Sometimes going against the inevitable is a safe strategy.

Regardless, the success of not appearing overly European along with the other tasks Dowd lays out are almost a certain barometer for Obama's success in this election. This election and its coverage is entirely predicated on Obama, because, as Frank Rich points out, the media simply refuse to do their job on reporting the colossal gaffes and absurd positions of John McCain.

Rich's article is written with decidedly less haughty diction than is typical of theatre critics. It is a near catalog of calamities that should sink any candidate, let alone one that has made his reputation on being a "maverick." Some of the highlights:

The McCain-Gramm bond, dating back 15 years, is more scandalous than Mr. Obama’s connection with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Mr. McCain has been so dependent on Mr. Gramm for economic policy that he sent him to newspaper editorial board meetings, no doubt to correct the candidate’s numbers much as Joe Lieberman cleans up after his confusions of Sunni and Shia.

Rich himself even commits an error of omission in describing the McCain-Gramm connection, failing to note that McCain himself has repeated that our problems are psychological. Here's the video proof:

I'll let Rich off the hook for that one, in only because he describes McCain's other would-be downfalls so brilliantly.

...his new No. 1 economic surrogate, Carly Fiorina — Mr. McCain is clueless. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, a supporter, said that Mr. McCain’s latest panacea for high gas prices, offshore drilling, is snake oil — and then announced his availability to serve as energy czar in an Obama administration.

One can read all about Fiorina's incompetence here, but in summation she was ousted as CEO of HP for halving the companies value. Inadvertently, Rich points out Schwarzenegger as going against McCain. I was surprised to see the Governator endorse McCain, although he pretty much had to. With more libertarian views on drug laws, progressive views on the environment and gay rights, and the ability to at some point win over bluer than navy California, one would think that Arnold may represent the only possible face for the future of the Republican party (although he can't run for president as an immigrant. Now that's irony). As Bush has proved, and McCain to some extent, neo-conservatism is bunk. It is curious then, what exactly is driving McCain if not a new brand of conservatism? Oh that's right, war.

Back to Rich:

In February Mr. McCain said he would balance the federal budget by the end of his first term even while extending the gargantuan Bush tax cuts. In April he said he’d accomplish this by the end of his second term. In July he’s again saying he’ll do it in his first term. Why not just say he’ll do it on Inauguration Day? It really doesn’t matter since he’s never supplied real numbers that would give this promise even a patina of credibility.

This is really one of the more egregious violations. While Obama continues to lay out plans, whether it be economical or in foreign affairs, McCain throws around conservative and military buzzwords, never saying how he'll actually accomplish anything. Unfortunately, this line of attack may be feeble against McCain, mostly because Hillary had similar criticisms of Obama. In that regard, it is truly a shame that Clinton supporters couldn't read a fucking website.

On Social Security, McCain is dizzying:

Mr. McCain’s plan for Social Security reform is “along the lines that President Bush proposed.” Or so he said in March. He came out against such “privatization” in June (though his policy descriptions still support it). Last week he indicated he isn’t completely clear on what Social Security does. He called the program’s premise — young taxpayers foot the bill for their elders (including him) — an “absolute disgrace.”

See now, McCain just almost went and got me to agree with him. If what he meant was that the "young Americans" aren't going to receive Social Security benefits because they will run out due to the stress Baby Boomers put on the system, then maybe I could get on board. But a) he didn't say that, and instead indicated he has no idea why and how social security has worked for so long and b) the problem is still solvable, and Obama has a plan for that as well that should work.

The last McCain mistake that I'll discuss in Rich's article is my personal favorite:

This month [Fiorina] said Mr. McCain wanted to require insurance plans to cover birth control medications along with Viagra, when in fact he had voted against it.

No, PUMA, my ass. If this and "cunt-gate" (which is the best "-gate" ever) don't swing the Hillary women Obama's way, what else will? Perhaps it'll just be McCain's opposition to the equal pay bill. Or that abortion will become illegal during his presidency. Or that he abandoned and cheated on his crippled first wife. Gee, I don't know.

Of course, there is something that is kinda off-putting about Rich's article, other than when contrasted to Dowd's. It sounds kind of familiar. I at least credited Max Bergmann, no love from Frank to either me or Bergmann. Regardless, the more recognition these mistakes get, the more this election becomes Obama's to lose. Still one help but feel that forces bigger than ourselves will continue to push for a close election, if not a McCain victory.

 
Frank Rich used his column in the NYTimes today to slam John McCain... hard.  Focusing primarily on McCain's lack of economic knowledge and experience, Rich essentially makes the case that our economy can't afford a McCain Presidency.

“In a time of war,” Mr. McCain said last week, “the commander in chief doesn’t get a learning curve.” Fair enough, but he imparted this wisdom in a speech that was almost a year behind Mr. Obama in recognizing Afghanistan as the central front in the war against Al Qaeda. Given that it took the deadliest Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul since 9/11 to get Mr. McCain’s attention, you have to wonder if even General Custer’s learning curve was faster than his.

As detailed, and brutal, as his attacks on McCain are, I think I most enjoyed the two paragraphs devoted to McCain's top economic surrogate, Carly Fiorina.

Ms. Fiorina, the ubiquitous new public face of McCain economic policy, adds nothing to the mix beyond her incessant display of corporate jargon, from “trend lines” to “start-ups.” Before she was fired at Hewlett-Packard, its stock had declined 50 percent during her five-plus years in charge. She missed earning projections — by 23 percent in one quarter — much as she now misrepresents both the Obama and McCain records. This month she said Mr. McCain wanted to require insurance plans to cover birth control medications along with Viagra, when in fact he had voted against it.

Ms. Fiorina received a $42 million payout (half in cash) from H.P., according to a shareholders’ subsequent lawsuit. With this inspiring résumé, she now aspires to be Mr. McCain’s running mate. So does the irrepressible Mitt Romney, who actually was a business whiz before serving as Massachusetts’s governor. Beltway wisdom has it that the addition of such a corporate star will remedy Mr. McCain’s fiscal flatulence.

This column is a powerful argument against John McCain.  Read the whole thing, and then give a copy to any friends that say they are going to vote for McCain.

• UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown says he prefers Obama's plan for Iraq and Afghanistan and will allocate UK troops accordingly.
• WaPo: Iraqi government spokesman's statement came after the U.S. Embassy in Iraq called the Prime Minister of Iraq's office and complained about his interview in Der Spiegel. So much for respecting the sovereignty of the democratically elected Iraqi government.
• Iraqi government spokesman's odd statement that Maliki's interview with Der Spiegel was misinterpreted due to a translating error was issued by the U.S. Dept of Defense, CentCom, which is very unusual for an Iraqi government press release. The statement was very vague as to what part of Maliki's interview was misinterpreted. Meanwhile, Der Spiegel stands by its story, saying there was no translation error.
• 538: Says there was a palpable sense of overconfidence at the Netroots Nation conference this weekend that's not supported by the tight polling. I'm not surprised. I've also heard some vicious critics of Obama from the Left argue that they basically have a free shot to take him down a notch or two and hold back on contributions, because he's going to win anyway. That's dangerously naive. The 2000 and 2004 elections should have taught Dems one thing: it's not over till it's over.
• Obama gives exclusive interview to CBS News's Lara Logan about Afghanistan and Iraq - video link here.
• Frank Rich blasts McCain's economic policy personified by Phil Gramm.
• McCain senior adviser, Randy Scheunemann, tied to Bush/Payne/presidential library foreign cash-for-access scandal.
• Benedict Lieberman says he's willing to "pull a Zell Miller" and speak at the RNC if asked. He had promised Connecticut voters when he ran as an "independent" after losing the Democratic primary that he would support the Democratic nominee for president in 2008.

• Boston Globe: Obama's paid staff in the states dwarfs McCain's.
• Top Biden foreign affairs aide is traveling with Obama on Middle East trip. Tea leaf readers go wild.
• NY Times's Nagourney profiles the ongoing Veep courting by McCain and Obama.
• Obama meets with Afghan leader Karzai in Afghanistan:

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Frank Rich, The real-life '24' of summer 2008, IHT

I was, admittedly, a little taken aback when I first read this sentence in an article by Frank Rich in the International Herald Tribune. (I am an old-fashioned fan of printed newspapers.) But, reflecting on the subject matter of the article, it seems apt. There is a certain incredulity which resonates throughout the piece, as Rich compares 'The Final Days' of the Nixon administration with 'The Dark Side' of the outgoing Bush administration. That this incredulity should find its voice in mixing three metaphors seems an accurate reflection between the argument of the piece and the form of the piece - it draws attention, an attention which the subject screams for.

{For the origins of the word 'scapegoat', which is a mistranslation from Hebrew into English of the word/name of a fallen angel, Azazel, see here.}

In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. (emphasis added)  

[snip]

 While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious (emphasis added)  than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.

More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the world he’s championing democracy even as he strangles it. 

[snip] 

The sole point was to give cover to our habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially those who control the oil spigots) and to our own government’s embrace of warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert our values.

[snip]

Rather than set a democratic example, our president has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior.... (emphasis added

[snip]

....earlier this year a senior Pentagon official, since departed, threatened America’s major white-shoe law firms by implying that corporate clients should fire any firm whose partners volunteer to defend detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. For its part, Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department did not round up independent-minded United States attorneys and toss them in prison. It merely purged them without cause to serve Karl Rove’s political agenda.

[snip]

Last January, Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress that “there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal. (emphasis added)

This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it.

[snip]

What makes the Democrats’ Mukasey cave-in so depressing is that it shows how far even exemplary sticklers for the law like Senators Feinstein and Schumer have lowered democracy’s bar.

[snip]

In a Times OpEd article justifying his reluctant vote to confirm a man Dick Cheney promised would make “an outstanding attorney general,” Mr. Schumer observed that waterboarding is already “illegal under current laws and conventions.” But then he vowed to support a new bill “explicitly” making waterboarding illegal because Mr. Mukasey pledged to enforce it. Whatever. Even if Congress were to pass such legislation, Mr. Bush would veto it, and even if the veto were by some miracle overturned, Mr. Bush would void the law with a “signing statement.” That’s what he effectively did in 2005 when he signed a bill that its authors thought outlawed the torture of detainees.

[snip]

Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the right track. That’s almost as low as the United States’ rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent).

Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.

Yesterday, he essentially detailed how the coup d'etat is playing out and how we, the people (remember that quaint phrase) are being played as pawns while the country continues to die. This column is now blogrolled, as well. The actions of Geroge W Bush and Richard Cheney are clearly treasonous under the US Constitution.  It is also just as clear that the Constitution has become impotent as the elected members of Congress, the president and the members of the Supreme court have refused to defend, protect and uphold it.

If the people refuse to remove offenders from office and to effectively demand that offenders are charged and prosecuted, then the US Constitution is meaningless and is indeed, as Bush sneered, "just a goddamn piece of paper."

The vote is the very last thing and the only thing which stands between absolute fascism - a corporate state of dictatorship - and some semblance of a self-governed republic. The people have no other means absent a military revolution to restore the republic. The corporations have stripped the earnings and financial worth from the people.  They have insinuated themselves into the government, and they control the use of the vast military power of the US.

Nixon parallels take us only so far, however. “The Dark Side” is scarier than “The Final Days” because these final days aren’t over yet and because the stakes are much higher. [snip]  In Ms. Mayer’s portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless. [snip]

But are we safe? As Al Qaedaand the Taliban surge this summer, that single question is even more urgent than the moral and legal issues attending torture.

On those larger issues, the evidence is in, merely awaiting adjudication. Mr. Bush’s 2005 proclamationthat “we do not torture” was long ago revealed as a lie. Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated detainee abuse for the Army, concluded that “there is no longer any doubt” that “war crimes were committed.” Ms. Mayer uncovered another damning verdict: Red Cross investigators flatly told the C.I.A. last year that America was practicing torture and vulnerable to war-crimes charges.

[snip]

After Mr. Sands previewed his findingsin the May issue of Vanity Fair, Mr. Feith protestedhe had been misquoted — apparently forgetting that Mr. Sands had taped the interview. Mr. Feith and Mr. Sands are scheduled to square off in a House hearing this Tuesday.

[snip]

Ms. Mayer’s book helps cement the case that America’s use of torture has betrayed not just American values but our national security, right to the present day.

In her telling, a major incentive for Mr. Cheney’s descent into the dark side was to cover up for the Bush White House’s failure to heed the Qaeda threat in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the F.B.I.’s Osama bin Laden unit until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was “all preventable.”

[snip]

After 9/11, our government emphasized “interrogation over due process,” Ms. Mayer writes, “to pre-empt future attacks before they materialized.” But in reality torture may well be enabling future attacks. This is not just because Abu Ghraib snapshots have been used as recruitment tools by jihadists. No less destructive are the false confessions inevitably elicited from tortured detainees. The avalanche of misinformation since 9/11 has compromised prosecutions, allowed other culprits to escape and sent the American military on wild-goose chases.

[snip]

The biggest torture-fueled wild-goose chase, of course, is the war in Iraq. Exhibit A, revisited in “The Dark Side,” is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an accused Qaeda commander whose torture was outsourced by the C.I.A. to Egypt. His fabricated tales of Saddam’s biologicaland chemical W.M.D. — and of nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda — were cited by President Bush in his fateful Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech ginning up the war and by Mr. Powell in his subsequent United Nations presentationon Iraqi weaponry. Two F.B.I. officials told Ms. Mayer that Mr. al-Libi later explained his lies by saying: “They were killing me. I had to tell them something.”

[snip]

Yet once again terrorism has fallen off America’s map, landing at or near the bottom of voters’ concerns in recent polls. There were major attacks in rapid succession last week in Pakistan, Afghanistan (the deadliest in Kabul since we “defeated” the Taliban in 2001) and at the American consulate in Turkey. Who listened to this ticking time bomb? It’s reminiscent of July 2001, when few noticed that the Algerian convicted of trying to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on the eve of the millennium testified that he had been trained in bin Laden’s Afghanistan camps as part of a larger plot against America.

In last Sunday’s Washington Post, the national security expert Daniel Benjamin sounded an alarm about the “chronic” indecisiveness and poor execution of Bush national security policy as well as the continuing inadequaciesof the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Benjamin must feel a sinking sense of déjà vu. Exactly seven years ago in the same newspaper, just two months before 9/11, he co-wrote an article headlined “Defusing a Time Bomb” imploring the Bush administration in vain to pay attention to Afghanistan because that country’s terrorists “continue to pose the most dangerous threat to American lives.”

And so we’re back where we started in the summer of 2001.... [snip]

This, no less than the defiling of the Constitution, is the legacy of an administration that not merely rationalized the immorality of torture but shackled our national security to the absurdity that torture could easily fix the terrorist threat.

That’s why the Bush White House’s corruption in the end surpasses Nixon’s. We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the punishment could rain down on us all.

My one and only quibble with Rich is his notion that BushCheneyCorp went on "wild goose chases".  All of those actions - invading and occupying Iraq, taunting Iran and North Korea, etc. - are not wild goose chases at all.  They are carefully crafted, cunningly calculated corporate strategies to enable stakeholder profits in big oil, increase private military industrial contracting, promote mercenary company development and market share growth in overall war profiteering. 

It's essentially all done via insider trading, led by Cheney, directed by Bush and implemented by the cabinet of Rice, Gates, Chertoff, Bolton, Hadley, Leavitt, Chao, Paulson, et al. The CEO presidency is just that - a criminal corporation of global proportion, and the American public is being used as fuel and fodder for the unending wars, as the consumers for the toxic and poisonous fruit of the Bush Cheney tree, and as the enablers of that tainted and treasonous action to continue via the vote.

Not many people actually still read books – no one has time and our attention spans have shortened – but if you find yourself in an airport shop looking for something to read while jammed in an aluminum tube with a few hundred odd people thirty-five thousand feet over Kansas, this book may do the job of keeping you from feeling both absurd and outraged at where you find yourself.

Or this book may just make you feel things are inherently absurd and you ought to be outraged. It seems that on the back or on one of the flaps you'll find this:

In the days immediately following September 11th, the most powerful people in the country were panic-stricken. The radical decisions about how to combat terrorists and strengthen national security were made in a state of utter chaos and fear, but the key players, Vice President Dick Cheney and his powerful, secretive adviser David Addington, used the crisis to further a long held agenda to enhance Presidential powers to a degree never known in U.S. history, and obliterate Constitutional protections that define the very essence of the American experiment.

THE DARK SIDE is a dramatic, riveting, and definitive narrative account of how the United States made terrible decisions in the pursuit of terrorists around the world - decisions that not only violated the Constitution to which White House officials took an oath to uphold, but also hampered the pursuit of Al Qaeda. In gripping detail, acclaimed New Yorker writer and bestselling author, Jane Mayer, relates the impact of these decisions - US-held prisoners, some of them completely innocent, were subjected to treatment more reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition than the twenty-first century.

THE DARK SIDE will chronicle real, specific cases, shown in real time against the larger tableau of what was happening in Washington, looking at the intelligence gained - or no - and the price paid. In some instances, torture worked. In many more, it led to false information, sometimes with devastating results. For instance, there is the stunning admission of one of the detainees, Sheikh Ibn al-Libi, that the confession he gave under duress - which provided a key piece of evidence buttressing congressional support of going to war against Iraq - was in fact fabricated, to make the torture stop.

In all cases, whatever the short term gains, there were incalculable losses in terms of moral standing, and our country's place in the world, and its sense of itself. THE DARK SIDE chronicles one of the most disturbing chapters in American history, one that will serve as the lasting legacy of the George W. Bush presidency.

Republicans and those who buy into the neoconservative vision of an imperial America that can do no wrong – imposing its will on the world to keep our exceptional culture pure and safe – and the eighteen percent of Americans who believe this country is indeed headed in the right direction and the last eight years have been just peachy, will read that, feel the bile rising, and pick up a good mystery novel. Maybe it is preaching to the choir – all of what Mayer documents may well be true, but it doesn't matter. For the rest of us it is also just documentation – confirming, specifically, that America has become something no one ever wanted it to become, led by – if we face the simple facts – war criminals. The question is whether the facts matter, or how they matter. Maybe some things just had to be done, as they say. More people will now be saying no, some things did not have to be done, and what was done made things worse.

There will never be an agreement on that, but there is the documentation. And this investigative reporter for the New Yorker, Jane Mayer (brief bio here), is known to get things right – she doesn't make things up, she doesn't speculate, she just reports. And she's been here before. See her piece, Outsourcing Torture: The Secret History of America's "Extraordinary Rendition" Program (The New Yorker, February 14, 2005). That caused quite a stir. She seems to think there are thing we all ought to know.

In a long, impassioned piece in Salon, Glenn Greenwald discusses what is going on this time and offers a quick tour of what you'll find in the new book:

"Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes."

"A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite incarceration."

"[A] top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees' cases … 'There will be no review,' the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. 'The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.'"

"[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp's detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions - up to half - were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda."

"[T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were 'categorically' torture, which is illegal under both American and international law".

"[T]he Red Cross document 'warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.'"

Greenwald lumps this together with the FISA warrantless wiretapping business, where Congress just said maybe the Fourth Amendment doesn't much matter much these days so the president can break the law, and comments:

This is what a country becomes when it decides that it will not live under the rule of law, when it communicates to its political leaders that they are free to do whatever they want - including breaking our laws - and there will be no consequences. There are two choices and only two choices for every country - live under the rule of law or live under the rule of men. We've collectively decided that our most powerful political leaders are not bound by our laws - that when they break the law, there will be no consequences. We've thus become a country which lives under the proverbial "rule of men" - that is literally true, with no hyperbole needed - and Mayer's revelations are nothing more than the inevitable by-product of that choice.

And he has a warning:

If the rule of law doesn't constrain the actions of government officials, then nothing will. Continuous revelations of serious government lawbreaking have led not to investigations or punishment but to retroactive immunity and concealment of the crimes. Judicial findings of illegal government behavior have led to Congressional action to protect the lawbreakers. The Detainee Treatment Act. The Military Commissions Act. The Protect America Act. The FISA Amendments Act. They're all rooted in the same premise: that our highest government leaders have the power to ignore our laws with impunity, and when they're caught, they should be immunized and protected, not punished.

When our political and media elite aren't defending the Bush administration's lawbreaking, they're dismissing its importance.

That last observation is followed by a lot of quotes, from the political and media elite. No one wants to say our leaders have made themselves felons, domestically, and war criminals, internationally – bad for the ratings, you see. Americans do not want to hear that. We've had enough trouble – the Clinton impeachment was far too much for everyone.

There's only the evidence. It can be glossed over. No one likes a whiner, or someone who seems a left-wing nut on his moral high horse – you minimize it, or explain in. So sweet reason it will be – even if the evidence sits there like a steaming, fresh turd on the living room floor. Perhaps if we all ignore it then it really won't smell at all – just stay cool and polite. Don't make a fuss.

Of course, on Sunday, July 13, in the New York Times, Frank Rich made a fuss, with The Real-Life "24" of Summer 2008 – and you have to love his set-up:

We know what a criminal White House looks like from "The Final Days," Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's classic account of Richard Nixon's unraveling. The cauldron of lies, paranoia and illegal surveillance boiled over, until it was finally every man for himself as desperate courtiers scrambled to save their reputations and, in a few patriotic instances, their country.

"The Final Days" was published in 1976, two years after Nixon abdicated in disgrace. With the Bush presidency, no journalist (or turncoat White House memoirist) is waiting for the corpse to be carted away. The latest and perhaps most chilling example arrives this week from Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, long a relentless journalist on the war-on-terror torture beat. Her book "The Dark Side" connects the dots of her own past reporting and that of her top-tier colleagues (including James Risen and Scott Shane of The New York Times) to portray a White House that, like its prototype, savaged its enemies within almost as ferociously as it did the Constitution.

But he gets down to what strikes him as significant – that in 2004 two conservative Republican Justice Department officials had become "so paranoid" that "they actually thought they might be in physical danger." They spoke to each other in code, and that would be Ashcroft's deputy attorney general, James Comey, and an assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith. They told Cheney and his chief of staff David Addington that what they were doing was circumventing the Geneva Conventions and making torture the covert law of the land – and that seems to have been a real bad idea.

But it wasn't really like the last days of Nixon:

Watergate was all about a paranoid president's narcissistic determination to cling to power at any cost. In Ms. Mayer's portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless. Possessed by the ticking-bomb scenarios of television's "24," all they want to do is protect America from further terrorist strikes.

So what if they cut corners, the administration's last defenders argue. While prissy lawyers insist on habeas corpus and court-issued wiretap warrants, the rest of us are being kept safe by the Cheney posse.

It's just that we may not be any safer. The bad guys love that we made ourselves the nasty villains in this passion play, and that does wonders for recruiting. But Rich is amazed at something else Mayer found:

In her telling, a major incentive for Mr. Cheney's descent into the dark side was to cover up for the Bush White House's failure to heed the Qaeda threat in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the FBI's Osama bin Laden unit until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was "all preventable." By March 2000, according to the CIA's inspector general, "50 or 60 individuals" in the agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects - soon to be hijackers - were in America. But there was no urgency at the top. Thomas Pickard, the acting FBI director that summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, "I don't want to hear about that anymore!"

The word that may fit here is overcompensation, but as always with overcompensation, it's counterproductive:

After 9/11, our government emphasized "interrogation over due process," Ms. Mayer writes, "to pre-empt future attacks before they materialized." But in reality torture may well be enabling future attacks. This is not just because Abu Ghraib snapshots have been used as recruitment tools by jihadists. No less destructive are the false confessions inevitably elicited from tortured detainees. The avalanche of misinformation since 9/11 has compromised prosecutions, allowed other culprits to escape and sent the American military on wild-goose chases. The coerced "confession" to the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to take one horrific example, may have been invented to protect the real murderer.

And that's not the half of it:

The biggest torture-fueled wild-goose chase, of course, is the war in Iraq. Exhibit A, revisited in "The Dark Side," is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an accused Qaeda commander whose torture was outsourced by the C.I.A. to Egypt. His fabricated tales of Saddam's biological and chemical WMD - and of nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda - were cited by President Bush in his fateful Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech ginning up the war and by Mr. Powell in his subsequent United Nations presentation on Iraqi weaponry. Two FBI officials told Ms. Mayer that Mr. al-Libi later explained his lies by saying: "They were killing me. I had to tell them something."

The whole war was based on information obtained by torture? We assumed to make the pain stop the bad guy would tell us only the gospel truth? What were we thinking?

It is madness, and Rich closes with this:

We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the punishment could rain down on us all.

And in comparison to excusing warrantless spying on everyone, while there are in both issues of who most follow the law, Andrew Sullivan notes that there are differences:

Needed post-9/11 adjustments to our surveillance and intelligence policies could always have been made with the cooperation of the Congress and the courts, in line with existing or revised law and treaty obligations. Democracies can adjust to new threats and retain their balance - if their leaders want to do so.

But a new war and security regime was instead enforced by executive diktat, as a deliberate, conscious attempt to use 9/11 to establish Schmittian precedents for an extra-legal executive branch. It was so far out there even executive enthusiasts like Jack Goldsmith drew a line. Warrantless wire-tapping was part of it - only recently brought under the law … But at least the intelligence procured by this illegality might have been useful and reliable. What was procured through torture is definitionally unreliable, and capable of creating an Imaginationland feedback loop in which tortured false confessions raise threat levels which justify more torture - all with no capacity for self-correction.

And Sullivan notes other things Mayer points to:

The ICRC report on CIA interrogation techniques concluded categorically that they were "torture" - not "tantamount to torture" as previously reported - and issued an explicit warning to the US Administration that the use of these techniques was a war crime which might subject U.S. leaders to criminal prosecution. This is the real potential headline maker from the book.

She provides a number of grueling examples of the application of the techniques including the brutal murder of Manadel al-Jamadi, the placement of prisoners in closed coffins for prolonged periods, and one instance in which a below-the-knee amputee with a prosthesis who had his prosthesis taken away and was forced to stand for hours on one foot, hanging from a rail.

She traces the development of the torture techniques to the work of two contractors, Mitchell and Jessen, and disclosed the specific techniques they developed. She notes that the techniques rely heavily on a theory called "Learned Helplessness" developed by a Penn psychologist Martin Seligman, who assisted them in the process. All of this was done under the thin pretext of being a part of the SERE program. Seligman is a former president of the American Psychological Association. This helps explain why the APA alone among professional healthcare provider organizations failed to unequivocally condemn torture and mandate that its members not associate themselves with the Bush Administration techniques.

But these, in particular, stand out:

She describes an internal CIA investigation by IG Helgerson which concluded that the program violated the Geneva Conventions and U.S. criminal law. Vice President Cheney intervened directly, calling Helgerson directly into his office and speaking with him, after which the CIA report was stopped in its tracks.

Steven Bradbury at DOJ was asked to resolve this by crafting opinions that gave CIA full latitude to torture, with no restraints- - setting aside the opinions crafted by Dan Levin which authorized techniques only within narrow constraints. After Bradbury rendered opinions exactly as solicited on his "probation," Bush personally expressed his pleasure with Bradbury's performance and nominated him to head OLC [Office of Legal Council]

According to James Comey, AG Gonzales repeatedly told him that he fully appreciated that the CIA program was torture and was criminal but he couldn't oppose or block it because "Cheney wants it."

There's much more.

And elsewhere, Sullivan adds this:

Some of you have wondered how my passionate opposition to torture can be reconciled with my tolerance of the new FISA regime. And the invasion of our correspondence and communications by the government is indeed a threat to liberty; and there is no denying that our liberties have been seriously eroded by the last few years in this respect. I just understand that some loss is defensible in the war we now fight, and wire-tapping, if monitored by the Congress, a FISA court, as well as the executive is a price we may have to pay to keep our intelligence accurate. Torture, on the other hand, is a far more invasive attack on liberty, a threat to reliable intelligence, a danger to our own troops, a violation of treaty obligations, and an act of human cruelty inimical to the core meaning of the West.

And as to that last point, Sullivan points to what he wrote three years ago in The New Republic:

Torture is the polar opposite of freedom. It is the banishment of all freedom from a human body and soul, insofar as that is possible. As human beings, we all inhabit bodies and have minds, souls, and reflexes that are designed in part to protect those bodies: to resist or flinch from pain, to protect the psyche from disintegration, and to maintain a sense of selfhood that is the basis for the concept of personal liberty. What torture does is use these involuntary, self-protective, self-defining resources of human beings against the integrity of the human being himself. It takes what is most involuntary in a person and uses it to break that person's will. It takes what is animal in us and deploys it against what makes us human.

And this:

The very concept of Western liberty sprung in part from an understanding that, if the state has the power to reach that deep into a person's soul and can do that much damage to a human being's person, then the state has extinguished all oxygen necessary for freedom to survive.

That is why, in George Orwell's totalitarian nightmare, the final ordeal is, of course, torture. Any polity that endorses torture has incorporated into its own DNA a totalitarian mutation. If the point of the U.S. Constitution is the preservation of liberty, the formal incorporation into U.S. law of the state's right to torture - by legally codifying physical coercion, abuse, and even, in Krauthammer's case, full-fledged torture of detainees by the CIA - would effectively end the American experiment of a political society based on inalienable human freedom protected not by the good graces of the executive, but by the rule of law.

Well, good-bye to all that.

Also see Matthew Yglesias – "No one could have predicted that methods copied from a report entitled "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War" would wind up eliciting false confessions."

Yeah well – it must have sounded good at the time, unless they wanted false confessions for their own ends – but we should not get all conspiracy crazy here. It sure is tempting.

But here, with a photo, Yglesias is puzzled that you can buy a t-shirt that says "I'd Rather Be Waterboarding" in big bold letters:

I saw this for sale at a conservative t-shirts website. I'm not necessarily one to say that torture is a subject about which we shouldn't joke. Torture-related satire and other forms of torture humor are, I think, a clear way of coming to grips with the horror of what our government have become. It's a difficult subject to contemplate, and express a view on, without resorting to humor on some level.

But that of course isn't what's happening here. Instead we see conservatives deciding to embrace torture as constitutive of conservative identity. If you're a conservative, you like torture. If you're against torture, you're not a conservative.

And if you're a conservative you don't buy the Mayer book.

© Enruta | Dreamstime.com

MUDGE'S Musings

Those looking for the smoking guns on torture and the mishandled war on terrorism within the Bush administration seem to have found them.

Frank Rich has a must read column in today's NYTimes, reviewing "The Dark Side" by Jane Mayer, to be published July 15.

Seems like the book is going to be a must read, also.

The Real-Life ‘24’ of Summer 2008

Op-Ed Columnist | By FRANK RICH | Published: July 13, 2008

WE know what a criminal White House looks like from “The Final Days,” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s classic account of Richard Nixon’s unraveling. The cauldron of lies, paranoia and illegal surveillance boiled over, until it was finally every man for himself as desperate courtiers scrambled to save their reputations and, in a few patriotic instances, their country.

“The Final Days” was published in 1976, two years after Nixon abdicated in disgrace. With the Bush presidency, no journalist (or turncoat White House memoirist) is waiting for the corpse to be carted away. The latest and perhaps most chilling example arrives this week from Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, long a relentless journalist on the war-on-terror torture beat. Her book “The Dark Side” connects the dots of her own past reporting and that of her top-tier colleagues (including James Risen and Scott Shane of The New York Times) to portray a White House that, like its prototype, savaged its enemies within almost as ferociously as it did the Constitution....

In the name of defending against terrorism, the Bush administration has systematically violated the law, and the evidence is finally exposed to the light of day.

Nixon parallels take us only so far, however. “The Dark Side” is scarier than “The Final Days” because these final days aren’t over yet and because the stakes are much higher. Watergate was all about a paranoid president’s narcissistic determination to cling to power at any cost. In Ms. Mayer’s portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless. Possessed by the ticking-bomb scenarios of television’s “24,” all they want to do is protect America from further terrorist strikes.

So what if they cut corners, the administration’s last defenders argue. While prissy lawyers insist on habeas corpus and court-issued wiretap warrants, the rest of us are being kept safe by the Cheney posse.

But are we safe? As Al Qaeda and the Taliban surge this summer, that single question is even more urgent than the moral and legal issues attending torture.

Thus the illustration at the top of this post. In fact, some top administration officials, past or present, have been warned publicly not to travel outside the U.S., due to international war crimes court exposure!

Top Bush hands are starting to get sweaty about where they left their fingerprints. Scapegoating the rotten apples at the bottom of the military’s barrel may not be a slam-dunk escape route from accountability anymore.

No wonder the former Rumsfeld capo, Douglas Feith, is trying to discredit a damaging interview he gave to the British lawyer Philippe Sands for another recent and essential book on what happened, “Torture Team.” After Mr. Sands previewed his findings in the May issue of Vanity Fair, Mr. Feith protested he had been misquoted — apparently forgetting that Mr. Sands had taped the interview. Mr. Feith and Mr. Sands are scheduled to square off in a House hearing this Tuesday.

And, as Rich points out, while apparently highly competent in the arts of torture, the Bush-Cheney cabal has shown very little competency actually controlling America's terrorist threat, beginning in the early days, well before 9/11.

Op-Ed Columnist - The Real-Life ‘24’ of Summer 2008 - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Folks, it's not just unreconstructed peace-niks who recognize that the Iraq war has been not only incompetently prosecuted, but was sold to this nation as a result of incompetently vetted, even criminally biased, intelligence reports.

And, terrorism, the supposed target of that Iraq folly, as well as a mission rapidly becoming unaccomplished in Afghanistan?

Flourishing, and very possibly more dangerous than ever.

So there are two pressing priorities, and they needn't nor shouldn't wait for January 20, 2009:

1. Start paying attention to what's been happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and start committing political and military assets toward putting an end to the threats.
2. Let's start prosecuting the criminals infesting the Bush administration. Impeachment of our corrupt vice president would be an excellent beginning.

Wake up, people!

It’s it for now. Thanks,

--MUDGE

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Frank Rich, The New York Times, July 13, 2008

We know what a criminal White House looks like from “The Final Days,” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s classic account of Richard Nixon’s unraveling. The cauldron of lies, paranoia and illegal surveillance boiled over, until it was finally every man for himself as desperate courtiers scrambled to save their reputations and, in a few patriotic instances, their country.

“The Final Days” was published in 1976, two years after Nixon abdicated in disgrace. With the Bush presidency, no journalist (or turncoat White House memoirist) is waiting for the corpse to be carted away. The latest and perhaps most chilling example arrives this week from Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, long a relentless journalist on the war-on-terror torture beat. Her book “The Dark Side” connects the dots of her own past reporting and that of her top-tier colleagues (including James Risen and Scott Shane of The New York Times) to portray a White House that, like its prototype, savaged its enemies within almost as ferociously as it did the Constitution.

Some of “The Dark Side” seems right out of “The Final Days,” minus Nixon’s operatic boozing and weeping. We learn, for instance, that in 2004 two conservative Republican Justice Department officials had become “so paranoid” that “they actually thought they might be in physical danger.” The fear of being wiretapped by their own peers drove them to speak in code.

The men were John Ashcroft’s deputy attorney general, James Comey, and an assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith. Their sin was to challenge the White House’s don, Dick Cheney, and his consigliere, his chief of staff David Addington, when they circumvented the Geneva Conventions to make torture the covert law of the land. Mr. Comey and Mr. Goldsmith failed to stop the “torture memos” and are long gone from the White House. But Vice President Cheney and Mr. Addington remain enabled by a president, attorney general (Michael Mukasey) and C.I.A. director (Michael Hayden) who won’t shut the door firmly on torture even now.

Nixon parallels take us only so far, however. “The Dark Side” is scarier than “The Final Days” because these final days aren’t over yet and because the stakes are much higher. Watergate was all about a paranoid president’s narcissistic determination to cling to power at any cost. In Ms. Mayer’s portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless. Possessed by the ticking-bomb scenarios of television’s “24,” all they want to do is protect America from further terrorist strikes.

Read More Here

-  It has been quite a week for celebrity divorces (Christie Brinkley & her former bozo), allegations (A-Rod and Madonna)  and deaths (Tony Snow & Dr DeBakey) that some of the news that should be front page gets scrambled. I turn your attention to some of those important things.

-  A new book, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," by Jane Mayer, claims that Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the CIA’s interrogation methods for high level al-Qaida prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes. Countdown's Rachel Maddow and Constitutional lawyer and professor, Jonathan Turley (one of my new favorites) discuss Bush & Co concerning war crimes and possible prosecution. It is a fascinating 6 minutes that will open your eyes and make you think. Frank Rich also addresses this issue today.