Author: Curmudgette

There’s a very clever graphic on the cover of The Huffington Post this morning. A Warholesque pattern of 122 images of ex-Gonazales aide Kyle Sampson. One for every memory lapse he reported on the Senate floor yesterday.  “I don’t remember.” Get used to that phrase. We’ll be hearing it a lot in the coming weeks and months.

Reagan did it with an actor’s flair, but it was Reagan who ushered in this age of executive exceptionalism. “I cannot recall,” he said over and over in his Iran-Contra testimony. And with that endearing little nod, that seemed to say, “Why I am just a simple man. A man of the people, baffled by these dark political machinations.”
I remember my grandfather cluck, cluck, clucking in disgust. “If he were the CEO of a company,” he’d say, “You know how long he’d be tellin’ that story? About as long as it took him to grab his things and walk to the front gate.” But my grandfather was one of those men in “gray flannel” Paul Krugman writes about. He was the product of that bygone era, when the buck actually stopped somewhere.

This is Reagan’s legacy. An era of unaccountability for those who achieve the requisite wealth and influence. A time when men of small skill, but excellent breeding, fail ever upwards and descend, when they do, on golden parachutes. An era when only the little people experience the consequences, not only of their personal failings, but of the colossal failings of their “betters.” When average workers of a company like Enron lose their livelihoods, their savings, their homes. But can only stare in rapt amazement as the wheels of justice grind slowly on, bringing few prosecutions and vacating that of a dead architect of corporate failure.

There is no “pound ’em in the ass prison” for even token prosecutions like Scooter Libby. That nice white boy shouldn’t see the inside of a jail cell says even his jury. He didn’t mean any harm. He was just so forgetful.

Crossposted from The Blogging Curmudgeon and the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance.

I was pondering just yesterday the plight of Mr. Buttle. How many of us are going to end up just like him; tortured to death because of a typo? See I can never decide what’s worse. The loss of our civil liberties or the mind numbing incompetence of the people in whom our precarious freedoms are entrusted.

Here’s what brought this to mind. Yesterday my internet service was out for most of the day. In my frustration, I called Verizon, who owns all the pipe around here, and keeps it functioning about as well as the duct-work in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.” But when I called them, a customer service rep (the lot of them are the bane of my existence) told me that he could not tell me anything, because when I told him the name on the account, he insisted that I was wrong. I explained, “A bill manages to find its way here every month and we pay it.” This confused him terribly. I asked him if the name on the account was the one for which we receive a myriad of calls; the previous owners of our dialing digits… yes. Well that explains why we’re getting so many wrong numbers six months later. So I was gaffed off because of a data entry error by the same company that left us without phone service for a month when they botched our order. I loathe Verizon.
I was inconvenienced yesterday because of bureaucratic ineptitude. But it will not be an inconvenience if I am, or someone like me is, secreted away to Egypt in a rendition program, because of typos, or any of the growing number of snafus that plague Americans daily.

This morning I learn from the Washington Post that the FBI has been abusing the Fourth Amendment even more heinously than previously known, in spite of growing concern from its own attorneys.

Under pressure to provide a stronger legal footing, counterterrorism agents last year wrote new letters to phone companies demanding the information the bureau already possessed. At least one senior FBI headquarters official — whom the bureau declined to name — signed these “national security letters” without including the required proof that the letters were linked to FBI counterterrorism or espionage investigations, an FBI official said.

The flawed procedures involved the use of emergency demands for records, called “exigent circumstance” letters, which contained false or undocumented claims. They also included national security letters that were issued without FBI rules being followed. Both types of request were served on three phone companies. . . .

A March 9 report by Fine bluntly stated that the FBI’s use of the exigency letters “circumvented” the law that governs the FBI’s access to personal information about U.S. residents.

The exigency letters, created by the FBI’s New York office after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, told telephone providers that the FBI needed information immediately and would follow up with subpoenas later. There is no basis in the law to compel phone companies to turn over information using such letters, Fine found, and in many cases, agents never followed up with the promised subpoenas, he said.

But Fine’s report made no mention of the FBI’s subsequent efforts to legitimize those actions with improperly prepared national security letters last year.

But whose phone records is the FBI illegally obtaining? Mine or the previous owner of my phone number… Mr. Buttle’s or Mr. Tuttle’s?

I leave you with the latest from Bill Maher:

And finally, new rule: liberals must stop saying President Bush hasn’t asked Americans to sacrifice for the War on Terror. On the contrary, he’s asked us to sacrifice something enormous: our civil rights.

My good friend Renee has done the leg work and provides a full transcript of Maher’s remarks here.

Crossposted from The Blogging Curmudgeon and the Independent Bloggers Alliance.

As protesters rang in the fifth year of Operation Endless Bloody Occupation with demonstrations around the country, Fred Thompson lashed out at that favorite whipping-boy of all chicken-hawks: Mahatma Gandhi. To follow Gandhi’s example, he admonishes anti-war activists, would cripple our foreign policy. Like Dubya who recently tried to compare his quest to that of General George Washington, he is completely misunderstanding the lessons of history. Will these angry white men never stop painting themselves and the country they’ve commandeered as noble underdogs? Oh the righteous anger of the enfranchised!

What the “Law & Order” star doesn’t appreciate is that in any Gandhi analogy, we would be the British Empire, not India.
Here are some words of wisdom from the mediocre actor. (Yes. I’m still smarting from the loss of Steven Hill.)

The so-called peace movement certainly has the right to make Gandhi’s way their way, but their efforts to make collective suicide American foreign policy just won’t cut it in this country. When American’s think of heroism, we think of the young American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, risking their lives to prevent another Adolph Hitler or Saddam Hussein.

Gandhi probably wouldn’t approve, but I can live with that.

What both the right-wing hawks and the left-wing peace movement don’t get about Gandhi is that he was really a tactician and a master of asymmetric warfare. He knew India could never have defeated the British Empire in open combat and their violent uprisings were resulting needless deaths. Gandhi’s strategy made their deaths effective. It was a strategy with two major prongs: economic (boycotts) and military (peaceful civil disobedience). Passive resistance leveraged the morality of the British occupiers. You can only slaughter so many peaceful, unarmed people before your stomach starts to turn from the shame of it.

Thompson also misrepresents Gandhi’s role in WWII. While it is true that Gandhi recommended to the British:

I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions…. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.

He was also a pragmatist:

At every meeting I repeated the warning that unless they felt that in non-violence they had come into possession of a force infinitely superior to the one they had and in the use of which they were adept, they should have nothing to do with non-violence and resume the arms they possessed before. It must never be said of the Khudai Khidmatgars that once so brave, they had become or been made cowards under Badshah Khan’s influence. Their bravery consisted not in being good marksmen but in defying death and being ever ready to bare their breasts to the bullets. [emphasis added]

Lest we forget that Gandhi, ever the politician and tactician, was using his possible support of the British as a bargaining chip, twisting the arms of his nation’s occupiers.

After lengthy deliberations, Gandhi declared that India could not be party to a war ostensibly being fought for democratic freedom, while that freedom was denied in India herself. As the war progressed, Gandhi increased his demands for independence, drafting a resolution calling for the British to Quit India. This was Gandhi’s and the Congress Party’s most definitive revolt aimed at securing the British exit from Indian shores.

Bloody peacenik!

Fred Thompson should worry less about Code Pink’s identification with Gandhi. What should concern the war party would be the possibility that a leader of Gandhi’s stature and tactical acumen could emerge in Iraq.

Crossposted from The Blogging Curmudgeon and the Independent Bloggers Alliance.

Who replaced Hillary Clinton with an animatronic doll? I liked the old one better. The one who was a chronic Glamour-don’t, with the silly headband and doughty clothes. The one who made gaffes about not being Tammy Wynette. She was a real person. I could relate to her. Can we have her back, like in the execrable remake of “The Stepford Wives?” I fear this is like the chilling, original film and that the human Hillary is lost to us forever.

I don’t get people who think she’s a feminist icon. She’s amassed a lot of power, but she’s become the living antithesis of feminism; cautious, people-pleasing, self-monitoring… She apparently can’t state an opinion that doesn’t test well in 10 focus groups. To put it bluntly, she has no courage.
This morning I learned from Chris Durang on The Huffington Post, that she weaseled out of answering yet another direct question.

In the short article — part of a blog called “The Caucus” on the New York Times website — Hillary Clinton is asked if she agrees with General Pace that homosexuality is immoral.

What do you think she answered? “No, I don’t agree”?

No, what she answered was: “Well I’m going to leave that to others to conclude.”

Thanks, Hillary! Really brave. Really forthright.

How hard would it have been for her to say: “Well, I think it is not immoral, and I know many Americans don’t think it is and don’t want to interfere with consensual adult behavior. But I understand other people believe other things. I hope in time that will change.”

Isn’t that probably what she actually thinks? Wouldn’t that be taking a stand?

For Durang, who was talking straight about bisexuality long before it was cool, that’s got to rankle.

Somewhere along the line, beltway Democrats seem to have decided that nothing bad can happen to them if they can make themselves completely inoffensive. And they have not yet learned that when you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.

It’s a formula that works least of all for Hillary. She wasn’t born slick or charming and she can’t pull it off without appearing terribly inauthentic. She seems so afraid of being her natural, divisive self, she’s become positively insipid. She’s more and more like an overly airbrushed photograph, or a plastic surgery disaster. Her entire personality has become like a face immobilized and expunged of character by too much Botox.

Worse than her coy evasions, when asked directly if she thought homosexuality was immoral, is her politically calculated clarification.

“I should have echoed my colleague Senator John Warner’s statement forcefully stating that homosexuality is not immoral because that is what I believe,” her statement said.

In other words if  the big, strong, military, Republican man says it’s ok to gay, it must be safe to have that opinion. This from someone who wants to be the first woman President?! A woman who needs a man’s imprimatur to state an opinion? She might as well go back to baking cookies.

Crossposted from The Blogging Curmudgeon and the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance.

Make no mistake. I hate the n-word. I just hate censorship more.

New York’s resolution is not binding and merely calls on residents to stop using the slur. Leaders of the nation’s largest city also hope to set an example.

Other municipalities have already passed similar measures in a debate that rose to a fever pitch late last year after “Seinfeld” actor Michael Richards spewed the word repeatedly at a comedy club in Los Angeles.

At New York’s City Hall, supporters cheered passage of the resolution, with many of them wearing pins featuring a single white “N” with a slash through it.

Hip-hop pioneer Kurtis Blow Walker said blacks need to stop using the word so “we can elevate our minds to a better future.”

Others argue that use of the word by blacks is empowering, that reclaiming a slur and giving it a new meaning takes away its punch. Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx, for example, said he would not stop using the word, and did not see anything inappropriate about blacks using it within their own circles.

But in the uproar over Richards’ outburst, black leaders including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and California Rep. Maxine Waters said it is impossible to paper over the epithet’s origins and ugly history of humiliating blacks. They challenged the public and the entertainment industry to stop using the epithet.

And can we please take poor Michael Richards out of the stockade. That he has become the emblem for racism is, well… deeply indicative of the real problem.

I absolutely believed Michael Richards when he said he was not a racist. I think that’s why he upset people so much. He reminded us all of what lurks in our deep subconscious, in that dark place right next to our fears.  A friend of mine calls them “isms.” My friend is a gay man who speaks of his own subconscious homophobia. He points out that these are inculcated attitudes that we ideologically and intellectually deplore. They can snap to the surface when we’re triggered, as Richards was, by aggressive heckling.

What’s worse. Richards’s meltdown — explained beautifully by Elayne Boosler — or this:

State Senators Robert Ford and Darrell Jackson are considered key black political leaders in South Carolina because they backed John Edwards in 2004 and managed to hand Edwards 37 percent of the vote in a state where half the primary voters are black.

For those of you who don’t understand why we keep harping on early primaries, it’s simple. If a presidential candidate wins an early primary state — like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — deep-pocket donors keep funding their campaigns.

The losing candidates are well on their way to becoming also-rans.

So you tell me why Ford and Jackson found it necessary to tell reporters that they were driving Miss Hillary so early in the game.

“It’s a slim possibility for [Obama] to get the nomination, but then everybody else is doomed,” Ford told a reporter with the Associated Press on Tuesday.

“Every Democrat running on that ticket next year would lose because he’s black and he’s top of the ticket. We’d lose the House and the Senate and the governors and everything,” he said. “I’m a gambling man. I love Obama,” Ford said. “But I’m not going to kill myself.”

This, from a man who claims in his bio that from 1966 to 1972, at the height of the civil rights movement, he was arrested 73 times as a staff member with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Here’s a tip. One has tangible consequences.

Anyone who thinks we can unwrite our “isms,” or thoughtcrimes, by excising a word from the lexicon is naive. We would do better to grab hold of teachable moments, like Richards’s outburst, and open a real dialog. Anything less is just sticking our fingers in our ears and going, “la, la, la, la!”

Crossposted from The Blogging Curmudgeon.

Will the Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief never tire of hiding behind our troops? Follow the pretzel logic if you will. We must attack Iran in order to “protect our troops.”

At Rice’s Senate appearance in January, Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, of Delaware, pointedly asked her whether the U.S. planned to cross the Iranian or the Syrian border in the course of a pursuit. “Obviously, the President isn’t going to rule anything out to protect our troops, but the plan is to take down these networks in Iraq,” Rice said, adding, “I do think that everyone will understand that–the American people and I assume the Congress expect the President to do what is necessary to protect our forces.”

That’s right. We must set Iran on fire, while our troops are sitting ducks in Iraq, in order to protect them. We must exhaust what’s left of our military supplies and hardware in order to protect them.  I fail to see how destroying our military readiness protects the troops or the country, for that matter.
This is where the rhetoric meets the road and shreds on contact. Protect the troops?! How does not giving them adequate body armor and up-armored vehicles protect them? How does warehousing our injured heroes in fetid squalor, complete with vermin and black mold protect them? How does an overburdened, underfunded VA protect the troops? How does announcing cuts in veteran’s health care, while they are busy dodging bullets and IEDs protect them? How does leaving them penniless and homeless protect them?

The Bush Administration gave up any authority to talk about “protecting the troops” when they put them in the most wrong-headed war in American history and allowed comments like this to issue from their cabinet:

As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

For this Administration to talk about “protecting the troops” is as Orwellian as their entire “war is peace” strategy. Sometimes I think their overarching strategy is to short-circuit the collective psyche of the American public with cognitive dissonance. They’ll just keep bombarding us with illogic until we shut down like the Mudd’s androids. Reading this latest from Sy Hersh, I am left feeling, once again, like I’m taking crazy pills.

“The Redirection” may be the most mind-melting expose of the Bush agenda yet. As near as I can tell, the goal is simply to make the Middle East as unstable as possible; just knocking over as many dominoes as they can to see if they form a pattern. That’s certainly what it looks like, as they progress with their impossible plans for attacking Iran. According to Hersh they themselves made this attack necessary by destroying the only viable check on Iran: Iraq. To paraphrase Colin Powell: They Broke it. We bought it.

It’s pretty clear to those of us who scrolled through the PNAC papers back in the day, that Iran was always in their sights. That Iraq is in a shambles, Afghanistan is erupting, and our military is nearly broken, doesn’t even slow the Bush juggernaut down. They have so little respect for our cognitive abilities that they don’t even bother to update their sales pitch. There are weapons of mass destruction! They’re over here. No they’re over here. Did I say that? Look over here.

Make no mistake. We are in no way prepared to attack Iran. And that’s why the generals are balking.

A British defence source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the  Pentagon about a military strike. “All the generals are perfectly clear that  they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful  fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for  them.

The most damning part of Seymour Hersh’s newest piece of investigative journalism was highlighted over at Think Progress with video and transcript of Hersh’s interview with Wolf Blitzer. Put simply the Bush Administration is funding terrorists. I seem to remember something about the Patriot Act making that explicitly illegal. I wonder if they’ll be prosecuted. I won’t hold my breath. Bush probably exempted himself from the Patriot Act with a signing statement.

Yes. We are fighting a “war on terror” by funding terrorists.

Crossposted from The Blogging Curmudgeon.

Let us do a postmortem on the archetype of the warrior king. We shall have no more great leaders, tested in the cauldron of battle. Today’s leaders let the peasantry do all the fighting and the dying for the advancement of their empires. We live in an age of coddled boy kings, who avoid service in “Champagne Units” and mock the valor of inconvenient heroes.
Pity the Prince who wishes to fight alongside his men.

Newspapers are filling their pages about the security headache that a war zone assignment for Harry — who is third in line to the throne — could bring for the British army.

“Harry’s always wanted to be treated as an ordinary soldier,” the Daily Mail quoted an unidentified army source as saying. “He’s not an ordinary soldier, of course.”

When Harry, 22, left Sandhurst Military Academy last year, he became a second lieutenant and joined the Blues and Royals regiment of the Household Cavalry. At the time, the defense ministry said he could possibly be deployed to Iraq, but that there might be situations when the presence of a member of the royal family could increase the risk for his comrades.

Harry himself was having none of it.

“There’s no way I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst, and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country,” he said in a television interview to mark his 21st birthday.

The warrior king mythos is mocked when the Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief plays lets pretend with a caricature of our original warrior President. It is surely dead when he can say things like this with a straight face.

“It’s hard for me living in this beautiful White House to give you an assessment, a first hand assessment. I haven’t been there. You have, I haven’t. But I do talk to people who are and people whose judgment I trust and they would not qualify it as that. There are others who think it is.”

The warrior king was defined by his scars. The leader of the free world cannot even look upon the scars of others.

                Military amputee uninvited from Bush event because the press would see him with no legs                

                May these people fry in hell.  (This a portion of a much larger, second part of the expose in the Washington Post on Monday.)

Perks and stardom do not come to every amputee. Sgt. David Thomas, a gunner with the Tennessee National Guard, spent his first three months at Walter Reed with no decent clothes; medics in Samarra had cut off his uniform. Heavily drugged, missing one leg and suffering from traumatic brain injury, David, 42, was finally told by a physical therapist to go to the Red Cross office, where he was given a T-shirt and sweat pants. He was awarded a Purple Heart but had no underwear.

David tangled with Walter Reed’s image machine when he wanted to attend a ceremony for a fellow amputee, a Mexican national who was being granted U.S. citizenship by President Bush. A case worker quizzed him about what he would wear. It was summer, so David said shorts. The case manager said the media would be there and shorts were not advisable because the amputees would be seated in the front row.

” ‘Are you telling me that I can’t go to the ceremony ’cause I’m an amputee?’ ” David recalled asking. “She said, ‘No, I’m saying you need to wear pants.’ “

David told the case worker, “I’m not ashamed of what I did, and y’all shouldn’t be neither.” When the guest list came out for the ceremony, his name was not on it.

Bow your head in memory of the warrior king. He is no more.

Crossposted from The Blogging Curmudgeon.

Some years ago I worked with a woman, of Jamaican descent, who could have been fairly described as a light-skinned black woman.  She confided in me, one day, of the problem she was having with her family over her Haitian boyfriend. Her family was furious that she was dating a “black” man. This was my first acquaintance with the caste system of the West Indies. She explained to me that because her family had a good bit of “white” blood and was lighter skinned, they considered themselves of a higher social class.

“When I look in the mirror,” she told me, ” I see a black woman.” Thus did she dismiss her family pressure, and continue her relationship with her dark-skinned Haitian boyfriend. And good on her.

In the midst of this insane debate over whether Obama is black enough, or white enough, to pass as human enough, he seems to have reached a similar conclusion.

I’m not sure I decided it. Uh, I think, uh, you know, if you — if you look African-American in this society, you’re treated as an African-American, uh, and, uh, when you’re a child in particular, uh, that is how you begin to identify yourself.

To which Rush Limbaugh brings the following inisight:

So are we to conclude here that he didn’t define himself as black, that the way he looks does? (Sigh.) Okay. We’ve got Obama’s wife in here. We’ve got John Howard from Australia coming up, but, “I’m not sure I decided it”? Well, if you didn’t decide it, then how did it happen?

Well, when you look like that, that’s what you are.

Well, renounce it, then! If it’s not something you want to be, if you didn’t decide it, renounce it, become white!

This of course follows Glenn Beck’s bizarre pronouncement that he’s “colorless.” The entire transcript from his radio show is worth reading and can found here, but here are the salient bits:

Yeah, I — you know, I was driving in today, and I was seeing — because I saw this piece with him on 60 Minutes — and I thought to myself, he is — he’s very white in many ways. . . .

And I thought to myself: Gee, can I even say that? Can I even say that without somebody else starting a campaign saying, “What does he mean, ‘He’s very white?’ ” He is. He’s very white. . . .

When he says — yes. When he said, you don’t notice his color, as a white guy — and I don’t know if African-Americans feel the same way — but for whites, I think he’s colorless. You don’t notice that he is black. So he might as well be white, you know what I mean? . . . .

OK, until he starts talking about race issues and he says things, like on this 60 Minutes piece last night, he said, “When I hail a cab.” And I thought, “What?” And then all of a sudden, I noticed his color. . . .

So when I say — I mean, he’s colorless — or, for whites, he might as well be white, he’s white. And yet, I guarantee you, there will be blogs today that will have me being a racist because I say that. . . .

Gee! Ya think?!

I suppose it’s possible that this isn’t just a preemptive shot, aimed at distracting us from his evident racism; that in fact Mr. Beck doesn’t see his ruminations on whiteness as racist at all.

What Limbaugh and Beck seem too obtuse to recognize is that the implicit message of these rants is that it is obviously preferable to be white. That Obama should take these opportunities to trade up; to pass.

I, for one, will be glad when the media moves on to more important issues, like his wardrobe.

Crossposted from The Blogging Curmudgeon.

A few weeks ago, I almost fell out of my chair when I heard Hilary Clinton tell Keith Olbermann that she had opposed preemptive war with Iraq at the time. Not only did she say it with a straight face, she breezed through the comment with the same light, dismissive tone she always uses when she’s talking about the debacle she co-created.

Via TPM‘s “Election Central,” a story that gives a little more context to Hillary’s apparent lie. In her interview with New Hampshire Union Leader, Hilary explains:

“I have taken responsibility for that vote. It was based on the best assessment that I could make at the time, and it was clearly intended to demonstrate support for going to the United Nations to put inspectors into Iraq.

“When I set forth my reasons for giving the President that authority, I said that it was not a vote for pre-emptive war,” the former first lady said.

A Clinton campaign spokesman later noted that on the Senate floor on Oct. 10, 2002, Clinton stated that her vote for the resolution “is not, however, a vote for any new doctrine of pre-emption, or for unilateralism, or for the arrogance of American power or purpose – all of which carry grave dangers for our nation, for the rule of international law and for the peace and security of people the throughout the world.”

She said the Bush administration forced an end to the final round of weapons inspections and invaded prematurely. The administration is responsible for the status of the war, she said, and for being “grossly misinformed” or for having “twisted the intelligence to satisfy a pre-conceived version of the facts. [emphases mine]

I was mistaken. Hillary was not lying to Olbermann. Everything she’s said was factually accurate, but it makes her neither a good Senator, nor a good Presidential candidate.  Nor has she demonstrated remotely that she has taken “responsibility.”

In his self-described “polemic,” “Worse than Watergate,” John Dean explains in detail how the authorization granted by Congress to wage war in Iraq, was no “blank check.” Rather the President subverted the will of Congress by dispensing with key conditions of that authorization.

The heart of Dean’s argument is that the congressional authorization — far from being the “blank check” that war critics such as former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean have claimed — actually had some stringent and important conditions attached to it, and that Bush simply cast them aside.

According to John Dean, the resolution required Bush to certify that diplomacy had failed, and that there was no longer any way other than war to resolve the “continuing threat” posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Bush also had to certify that war against Iraq was consistent with the ongoing struggle against terrorism, specifically “the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” Needless to say, it was Bush who walked away from the diplomatic efforts that the UN was still engaged in over Iraq’s alleged WMD. As for ties between Iraq and the terrorists of 9/11, there weren’t any, despite Bush and Cheney’s numerous insinuations to the contrary.

So how did Bush get around these conditions? The tack he took was so cynical that Dean seems scarcely able to believe it. Included in the original authorization were a few “whereas” clauses specifying that Iraq had WMD and ties to international terrorism; the language had been inserted at the suggestion of the White House. Then, when the time came for Bush to certify that the conditions for war had been met, he simply regurgitated that same language. “Bush, like a dog chasing his tail who gets ahold of it, relied on information the White House provided Congress for its draft resolution; then he turned around and claimed that this information (his information) came from Congress,” Dean writes incredulously. [emphases mine]

So the so called “blank check” actually required good faith diplomatic efforts and proof of the key arguments the White House was using to justify war. And the White House’s response was to play what Dean describes as an “absurd game” with Congress.

Dean concludes that this is one of many egregious offenses, meriting impeachment. All that was missing was the political will to apply the law. Even with the Democrats back in control of Congress, that political will is still MIA. To Hillary, this subversion of the Constitutional process merits a tut-tut-tutting that sounds more like a mother scolding her teenager for failing to clean up his room, than an epically undermined Senator calling a criminal President to account.

As of this writing, we have lost 3,123 troops, US, since the inception of this nightmare. The thousands of dead Iraqis will never be properly accounted for. And we appear to be careening towards yet another unjustified, illegal, military action. We need Senators and Presidential candidates who understand the seriousness of the stakes. Not politicians mouthing weaselly justifications of a vote that, fairly or not, has landed this nation in the greatest military blunder in our nation’s history.

Hillary joked recently that she’s had experience dealing with “evil”  and “bad” men. She has. From the vast right wing conspirators to an entire administration of audacious criminals.  The punchline is that her track record on confronting that evil isn’t good.

Crossposted from The Blogging Curmudgeon.

The New York Daily News is one of a handful of news venues to pick up on a key revelation in the New Yorker’s recent profile of “24”. The show was approached by military and FBI leaders, who asked them to stop glorifying torture.

The grossly graphic torture scenes in Fox’s highly rated series “24” are encouraging abuses in Iraq, a brigadier general and three top military and FBI interrogators claim.

The four flew to Los Angeles in November to meet with the staff of the show. They said it is hurting efforts to train recruits in effective interrogation techniques and is damaging the image of the U.S. around the world, according The New Yorker.

“I’d like them to stop,” Army Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan, dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, told the magazine.

Finnegan and others told the show’s creative team that the torture depicted in “24” never works in real life, and by airing such scenes, they’re encouraging military personnel to act illegally.

In sharp contrast to the military and FBI brass: “24” creator Joel Surnow. He’s pretty sure torture is a good idea. From the New Yorker:

In a more sober tone, he said, “We’ve had all of these torture experts come by recently, and theysay, `You don’t realize how many people are affected by this. Be careful.’ They say torture doesn’t work. But I don’t believe that.

So how does Surnow know so much more than actual military and FBI interrogators? I wanted to know a little more about his background. From Wikipedia:

Surnow was born in Michigan, however his family moved to Los Angeles when he was ten years old. His father was an itinerant carpet salesman. He graduated from Beverly Hills High in 1972 and attended UC Berkeley before transferring to the UCLA School of Theater Film and Television in 1975.

Soon after graduation, he began writing for film; he then switched to television. His breakthrough came when he began writing for “Miami Vice,” in 1984. By the end of the year, Universal Studios, which owned the show, put Surnow in charge of his own series, “The Equalizer,” about a CIA officer turned vigilante.

He has five daughters, two from a previous marriage and three with his current wife.

Impressive resume but something seems to be missing… Oh I know. Any mention of a military background, or police work, or any martial training whatsoever, that would qualify him to make pronouncements on the efficacy of torture. Yet Surnow concludes that he knows more than the people who face these realities every day and disregards the nervous nellies who worry about trifles like the safety of our troops.

Surnow is the chicken-hawk’s chicken-hawk; rubbing shoulders with draft-dodgers like Rush “Boil On His Butt” Limbaugh, Karl “Dubious College Deferment” Rove, and the psychotic wife of Dick “5 Deferments” Cheney, who describes herself as “an extreme ’24’ fan.”

The show with its prominently featured torture porn has become a rallying point for neo-conservatives.

In fact, many prominent conservatives speak of “24” as if it were real. John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who helped frame the Bush Administration’s “torture memo”–which, in 2002, authorized the abusive treatment of detainees–invokes the show in his book “War by Other Means.” He asks, “What if, as the popular Fox television program `24′ recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?”

But the “ticking time bomb” device that the show uses week after week, is truly a fictive construct. Torture as interrogation method is known by experts in the field to be unreliable and ineffective.

But Navarro, who estimates that he has conducted some twelve thousand interrogations, replied that torture was not an effective response. “These are very determined people, and they won’t turn just because you pull a fingernail out,” he told me. And Finnegan argued that torturing fanatical Islamist terrorists is particularly pointless. “They almost welcome torture,” he said. “They expect it. They want to be martyred.” A ticking time bomb, he pointed out, would make a suspect only more unwilling to talk. “They know if they can simply hold out several hours, all the more glory–the ticking time bomb will go off!”

That these “enhanced” measures would be embraced by chicken-hawks, in direct contradiction of pragmatic reality should come as no shock. After all, living vicariously through bizarrely idealized visions of the martial experiences of others is what they do. And like cossetted Romans at the colliseum, the gorier the spectacle, the more the enjoy it.

Laura Ingraham, the talk-radio host, has cited the show’s popularity as proof that Americans favor brutality. “They love Jack Bauer,” she noted on Fox News. “In my mind, that’s as close to a national referendum that it’s O.K. to use tough tactics against high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we’re going to get.” Surnow once appeared as a guest on Ingraham’s show; she told him that, while she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, “it was soothing to see Jack Bauer torture these terrorists, and I felt better.” Surnow joked, “We love to torture terrorists–it’s good for you!”

Real military commanders like Finnegan worry that life is beginning to imitate art, and that it is becoming increasingly difficult to teach cadets to adhere the laws of war, because of the pervasive influence of shows like “24.” But Surnow did not hear out his concerns. Just as he did with any kind of military service, Surnow avoided the meeting.

Several top producers of “24” were present, but Surnow was conspicuously absent. Surnow explained to me, “I just can’t sit in a room that long. I’m too A.D.D.–I can’t sit still.” He told the group that the meeting conflicted with a planned conference call with Roger Ailes, the chairman of the Fox News Channel.

Crossposted from The Blogging Curmudgeon.