Author: Zandar1

Expanding on BooMan’s Huckenfreude post, I see that the GOP is dropping the 800 pound gorilla on the Huckster: Oxy-Conan himself.

So everybody and their brother is listening to Rush today, wondering if he’ll take a shot at Huckabee after an unnamed Huckabee aide in DC criticized Limbaugh…

The first comment, moments into the show: “You want to whine like Mike Huckabee’s whining… I hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but it happened.”

Now he’s going after Rollins, for claiming Rush (and Rich) don’t like Huckabee simply because they didn’t foresee his rise.

Rush is now playing audio of him talking about “what if Mike Huckabee wins Iowa” from November 8…

“I saw it coming… and I now may be seeing it going.”

UPDATE: Rush is on fire.

Yeah, it seems for once, the NRO-bots and I are in agreement.  There’s something kind of midly creepy about watching Rush beat up on somebody using the power of his talk radio mind control beams, but it’s even better to see those beams trained on The Huckster.

What happens when Rush starts bashing the Christian Conservative poster boy?  Nobody in the noise machine is going to cross Rush…nobody.  Somehow in the last 24 hours, the guy has become the RINO poster child instead.

Hell, the righty blogs are enjoying the carnage, like Capn’ Crunch.

Had Huckabee not gone out of his way to slap at George Bush, people may have believed the denial, because attacking Rush makes no sense at all. Candidates who disagree with him would normally just avoid talking about it. No one needs the figurative 800-pound gorilla in the room stomping on them, and Rush has a much more powerful podium than any of the people in this race.

I’d think that the source will wind up being a lower-level operative with a big mouth. Still, the damage is done. Huckabee will have a hard time living this down, although maybe not so much in Iowa, where the caucusers tend to like populists. Expect this to sting most in South Carolina and the national numbers.

It’s amusing to see that Huck’s basically being treated like the strange relative from the Ozarks by the rest of the country club GOPers.  Before he was a “populist” (said with the same level of disdain as the words “Mormon” or “ethnic”.)  Now he’s the family idiot because he pissed Grampa off.

They really, really hate the guy.  And now that Rush has weighed in, it’s turning into that scene in Airplane! where people are lining up to smack the crap out of poor Huck, and the folks towards the end of the line have pipe wrenches and shit.

I said at the time this was a fight Huckabee didn’t want. The media is bound to pick it up giving it even more exposure than Rush is. And Huckabee’s bound to lose. You don’t pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel, or have three hours of air time every day. As I suggested below, I guess Huckabee really isn’t all that bright.

Hell, Malkinvania can barely keep her powder dry.

I was in the car listening to Rush Limbaugh responding to the Mike Huckabee campaign’s attack on him. What an unbelievably knuckle-headed move by Huckabee’s minions. Casting Limbaugh as part of the Beltway-Manhattan elite? Those who’ve been tuning in and listening closely know that Limbaugh has scrupulously avoided playing favorites with any of the GOP candidates. He’s been an equal-opportunity scrutinizer. What possible benefit could accrue from going after one of the conservative moment’s most popular figures?

I believe this Rush-bashing incident may turn out to be Huckabee’s Howard Dean scream moment.

Even the deadly mild Corndog Crusader is taking his shots.

LIMBAUGH GOES AFTER HUCKABEE: I told you attacking him was a bad idea. That would be like Hillary going after Oprah.

I do wonder how long it’s going to take the Huckabuddies to note that the rather nasty vitriol Rush is spouting today could easily be applied to any of them?

RUSH:  What this supposed Huck supporter… I’m not even sure it’s a Huck supporter. This sounds like something a Clinton person would say. You know, this is what the Clinton people believe, that Bill Clinton made my career, that all I want is somebody in office that can make me even bigger, and that I don’t think for myself. You people are just mind-numbed robots. I can’t believe there’s anybody on Huckabee’s staff that ignorant about what happens on this program.  If this is indeed Huckster forces attacking Rush, then he’s got some people on his staff that are going to cause him problems because that’s just simply idiotic.

But hey, our side is here to point and laugh at the monkeys fighting over the poo.

Rush plus Huck plus Us equals…Ruckus.  Yep.  This is gonna get goooooooooood.

Hell, this is turning into high school.

…because at least some news outlets are putting the blame where it needs to go:  squarely on the shoulders of Mitch’s crew.  With Congress wrapping up for the year, the 2007 in review articles are out, and while it’s nice to see the  GOP take the blame for once, it’s still the Dems’ responsibility to not vote FOR Bush’s blank checks and unchecked powers.

Lawmakers in Congress end the year with a few major accomplishments such as the energy bill, some failures such as the immigration overhaul, and a number of compromises and frustrations. Democrats, who took the reins of both the House and Senate in January, acknowledge feeling deeply frustrated by a Republican Senate minority that set a new record for filibusters this year, blocking much of the Democratic agenda.

It’s a start, of course.  The Dems aren’t entirely without blame either.  But the Village Narrative up until now has consisted almost wholly of ledes like today’s WaPo knuckle rapping.

The first Democratic-led Congress in a dozen years limped out of Washington last night with a lengthy list of accomplishments, from the first increase in fuel-efficiency standards in a generation to the first minimum-wage hike in a decade.

But Democrats’ failure to address the central issues that swept them to power left even the most partisan of them dissatisfied and Congress mired at a historic low in public esteem.

And as usual, nowhere in the article is even a mention of the Republicans setting a record for number of filibusters in a Congress only halfway through the session.  In fact, the blame here goes to the Democrats.  It does mention at the end that the Democrats have a very minor majority, but it doesn’t mention why it needs more than that to get anything passed.  Only at the end of the article is the word filibuster even mentioned.

This has left many Democrats resorting to openly political arguments, picking up a theme that Republicans hurled at them — obstructionism — during their many years in the minority. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) conceded that it is time for Democrats to forget about trumpeting accomplishments that voters will never give them credit for — and time to change the message to a starkly political one: If you want change, elect more Democrats.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the Senate Democratic whip tasked with trying to find 60 votes for a filibuster-proof majority, acknowledged this week that Democrats’ biggest failure stemmed from expecting “more Republicans to take an independent stance” on Iraq. Instead, most of them stood with Bush.

Most of them are standing with Bush because it’s working, especially with the “liberal press” aiding and abetting by putting 90% of the blame on the Dems all the time, and then saying that the problem is that the Democrats need to compromise more.  Funny how that works.

But that’s been the Republican plan all along.  Let’s take a look at Chimpy’s press conference today.

President Bush plans to give his opinion of the work Congress completed this session during a year-end press conference Thursday.

“The president will talk about the good, bad and the unfinished when it comes to legislation,” White House press secretary Dana Perino told reporters in a conference call Thursday morning.

Of course, Bush will attack the Dems for not completely capitulating to his every whim as Caesar, but at least SOMEBODY’s noticed that the problem is the GOP’s de facto 60 vote limit in the Senate.

But all that does is highlight the village pundits and their incessant clucking about working together.

“Our politics today encourages confrontation over compromise,” Brownstein writes. “The political system now rewards ideology over pragmatism. It is designed to sharpen disagreements rather than construct consensus. It is built on exposing and inflaming the differences that separate Americans rather than the shared priorities and values that unite them.”

Brownstein puts primary blame on conservative Republicans for the rise of “warrior” politics, especially former Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Texas), Bush and his former guru, Karl Rove, and their allies on talk radio.

But he observes that Democrats are catching up in hyperpartisanship, flogged on by MoveOn.org and leftist bloggers. Mainstream media, too, encourage conflict over consensus. And the public has become ideologically “sorted,” as well, making the GOP more conservative, Democrats more liberal and moderates torn.

You see, we’re just as much of a “hyper-partisan problem” as Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Tom Delay to the Village, as well as Rush and Savage and the radio jocks.  The difference is of course all three of those guys are gone but the radio jocks and the lefty bloggers still stubbornly remain like the crazy old uncle at your holiday party, the one that won’t leave until he explains just what’s wrong with the damn government to everyone he can find.  Right wing bloggers get a pass of course.  No hyper-partisanship there!

It’s silly.  It’s a year into this Congress and only now is the village even reluctantly admitting that there might be something fishy going on with that 60-vote threshold in the Senate due to all the blockading going on, and they have to be bludgeoned into that.  All the while, they continue to blame the Dems with the “Well if you legislate like that, you’re just ASKING for it” reasoning.

Until the Dems stand up to this, it’ll just keep happening.

Seems our old friends the Russians are going ahead with the shipments of nuclear fuel to Iran for the Bushehr power plant.

Russia said Monday it has begun fuel deliveries to an atomic power station in Iran, which is at the center of international concerns that Tehran’s may be developing nuclear weapons.

 Atomstroiexport, Russia’s nuclear power equipment and service export monopoly, completed the first stage of deliveries Sunday, Russian nuclear officials said.

The Russian monopoly is building the $1-billion Bushehr plant under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The Russian foreign ministry and nuclear officials said the fuel delivery was under full IAEA safeguards.

Construction on the Russian-designed nuclear plant has continued despite pressure from the United States.

I expect things are going to be moving pretty quickly now.  Students of history will no doubt recall the last time a Middle Eastern country on the Israeli shit list tried to bring a nuclear plant online.

Osiraq, (French: Osirak; Iraqi: Tammuz 1), was a 40 MW light-water nuclear materials testing reactor (MTR) in Iraq. It was constructed by the Iraqi government at the Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, 18 km (11 miles) south-east of Baghdad in 1977. It was crippled by Israeli aircraft in 1981 in a surprise strike, Operation Opera, to prevent the regime of Saddam Hussein from using the reactor for the creation of nuclear weapons. The facility was completely destroyed by American aircraft during the 1991 Gulf War.

The Israelis have been raving since the US NIE on Iran came out that the US is dead wrong and they believe Iran remains a nuclear threat.  So much of a threat, that at this point they are flat out saying war is coming.

Israel’s public security minister warned Saturday that a U.S. intelligence report that said Iran is no longer developing nuclear arms could lead to a regional war that would threaten the Jewish state.

In his remarks — Israel’s harshest criticism yet of the U.S. report — Avi Dichter said the assessment also casts doubt on American intelligence in general, including information about Palestinian security forces’ crackdown on militant groups. The Palestinian action is required as part of a U.S.-backed renewal of peace talks with Israel this month.

Dichter cautioned that a refusal to recognize Iran’s intentions to build weapons of mass destruction could lead to armed conflict in the Middle East.

He compared the possibility of such fighting to a surprise attack on Israel in 1973 by its Arab neighbors, which came to be known in Israel for the Yom Kippur Jewish holy day on which it began.

“The American misconception concerning Iran’s nuclear weapons is liable to lead to a regional Yom Kippur where Israel will be among the countries that are threatened,” Dichter said in a speech in a suburb south of Tel Aviv, according to his spokesman, Mati Gil. “Something went wrong in the American blueprint for analyzing the severity of the Iranian nuclear threat.”

And the clock is ticking.  The Osiraq plant the Israelis attacked in 1981 was done before the plant went live to prevent nuclear fallout from hitting civilians (and to secure Menachem Begin’s election as well).  The Bushehr plant is expected go live sometime this summer.

A statement on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s official Web site Monday said the Iranian side has provided additional written guarantees that the fuel can only be used at and for the Bushehr plant, and that the spent fuel will be returned to Russia for utilization and storage.

“The nuclear fuel is being delivered to Iran about six months ahead of the time when it will be actually used for producing energy, as stipulated by technical requirements,” the statement read.

The fuel deliveries will be made in several stages over two months, Russian nuclear officials said. The first stage was completed Sunday, officials said, when IAEA-certified fuel containers were delivered to a special storage facility, inspected by the IAEA, at the plant.

So, despite the warning from Israel that they will commit acts of war in order to stop nuclear “threats”, the Bushehr plant operation rolls on.  Both the Russians and the Iranians are practically daring Israel and the US to bomb Bushehr.

Bush has repeatedly said that he won’t allow Iran to have “nuke-u-lar technology”.  A working reactor would tend to expose him as a liar, and the Israelis are pissed off.  That plant will be on line in six months.

Will Israel go loose cannon again and attack the plant?  Will the US support the Israeli attack with one of their own?  How will Iran respond politically and militarily?  What about Russia?

Is this the event that will lead to war?

Now here’s something I never thought I would say.

“Oh please, please, prove in 2008 that the GOP is nothing more than a regional party for Southern racist bigot flat-earther fundie nutjobs and nominate Da Huckster.  Pleeeeeease.”

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has shot to the top of a new poll in South Carolina, leading Republican presidential candidates in the key Southern state.

Huckabee garnered 24 percent in the CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll, conducted by phone between Sunday and Wednesday. The survey was released Friday.

When the same poll was conducted in July, Huckabee was in the lower tier, with 3 percent of support from registered GOP voters.

I love it.  The guy pretty much represents everything wrong with the GOP as a whole today, and he’s the one the 33 percenters are flocking to in droves.  He’ll send all the brown people back to Mexico.  He’ll build a giant statue of Jesus on the White House lawn with Savior-tronic action!  He’ll destroy the damned heathen non-Christian secular liberal menace with the fireballs of righteousness from his own colon!  Praise the Lord and pass the caucus votes!

The survey suggested that Huckabee’s personality was among his strengths. In particular, he tops the list when likely GOP voters are asked to name the candidate who is most believable. The South Carolina poll showed Huckabee rocketing ahead of his GOP rivals, including the former front-runner in the state, ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani, who led the July poll with 30 percent, dropped to a tie for third with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, both at 16 percent. Romney’s showing was a big improvement over his 6 percent standing in the previous survey.

I can’t get enough of this.  The guy who says that evolution is a crock and removed it from textbooks in his state when Governor, thinks AIDS patients should be quarantined, thinks homosexuality is an immoral sin, wants to force rape victims to bear children of those rapes, and wants to deport 12 million folks out of the country and then let the immigration system process them at the speed of a couple hundred a year, is the most believable Presidential political candidate to these people.  There is no conceivable way this guy can win a general election.  The backlash against a man who has all of Bush’s worst qualities, only more of them, would be devastating come November of next year.

And yet the Republican Party is going to end up nominating him for the Presidency at this rate.  They really are.  What happens if he really does win in a landslide in Iowa, SC, and plays well enough in New Hampshire?  What happens if two months from now, the second wave of  primaries has this guy basically wrapping everything up despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Club for Growth wing of the GOP?

What happens when the rest of the country…the NON GOP voters…take a look at this guy and break out into guffaws and tears?

More importantly, if it’s clear Huckabee’s the front runner in late January or so, how is that going to affect the Democrats (knowing that the GOP has basically no chance of winning if he’s nominated?)  I mean let’s face it, if Hillary’s unelectable in a general election, Huckabee’s a dead man by comparison.  Any other candidate it just becomes a matter of the magnitude of the landslide, so how will THAT shake out?

How will the wingnuts react?  They despise the guy. Malkinvania, Cowardly Lion, Corndog Man, Cap’n Crunch, they all despise the man even more than most of us do here in BooLand.  They know that if he’s nominated, the GOP is fucked for a generation.

Given the lip service they pay to the lofty ideals of the Great Saint Reagan, you’d think they’d love him.  They say they aren’t convinced he’s the right man “fiscally” for the job (which actually, if Huckster does have a single redeeming quality, it’s that he actually sees something morally wrong with outrageous CEO pay, health care costs and company profits.)

But everything else makes him the perfect candidate for the early 19th century.  They should be lapping it up.  Will they bury the hatchet with him should he be the nominee, or will they bury him, period? Who would the guy pick for a VP?

What happens when the GOP basically gets exactly the candidate it deserves to have?

We may very well find out.

If anyone was wondering what the White House thought of the Senate Judiciary’s contempt citation for Rover and Bolthead this week, you don’t have to wonder much at all.

The vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee was largely along party lines, with only two of the nine Republicans on the panel, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Charles Grassley of Iowa, joining 10 Democrats to vote to send the contempt of Congress citations to the full Senate.

The Bush administration has cited executive privilege in its refusal to allow chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House aide Karl Rove to testify or provide documents to the committee for its investigation into the Justice Department’s firing last year of nine federal prosecutors.

Majority Democrats believe partisan politics was behind the dismissals, while the White House argues the firings were performance-related.

Yeah yeah, “performance-related” like cutting players from a roster.  The DoJ is a lot like the NFL, only without as many lockers.

The committee chairman, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, said it is important for his panel to enforce its subpoenas in an effort to carry out oversight of the executive branch.

“Having been directed to comply with the committee’s subpoenas, they have not done so, now we must take the next steps to enforce the committee’s subpoenas. It is not a step I wanted to take. In fact I have tried for many months for ways to work with the White House to avoid such confrontation,” he said.

Senator Specter, the top Republican on the committee, agreed, although he noted that the issue would likely land in federal courts and not be resolved until after President Bush leaves office in January 2009.

“I vote for the contempt citations knowing that it is highly likely to be a meaningless act because it takes a long period of time to enforce the process and have a judicial determination. But I think in this context we have no alternative but to proceed to do that,” he said.

A meaningless act. Oversight, to this man, is a meaningless act. Great. But…these are finally moving forward.  The White House response?

At the White House, spokeswoman Dana Perino called the committee action “a futile effort.”

“The Department of Justice would not require a U.S. attorney to convene a grand jury or otherwise pursue a prosecution of an individual who carries out a president’s instruction not to provide documents or testimony on the basis of the president’s assertion of executive privilege,” she said.

The House Judiciary Committee also has approved contempt resolutions against chief of staff Bolten and former White House lawyer Harriet Miers.

Ahh.  So the response is a carefully crafted and politely measured “fuck you and your subpoenas, there’s not a damn thing you can do to us.”

Got that Congress?  The White House’s official response is that Bush can tell Congress to go intercourse itself whenever he wants to for the sole reason that Bush can tell Congress to go intercourse whenever he wants to.

Your puny human laws do not apply to Bush.  Bush is above it.  His executive privilege trumps the rule of law and the Constitutional role of Congress because Bush gets to decide what the constitution means.

Bush not only chooses to enforce the law as Executive.  Bush issues signing statements to enforce only the laws he wants to enforce as actual laws, he is Legislative.  Bush interprets the laws in the way he wants to interpret them, and he decides if it is fair or not, he is Judiciary as well.

He is Maximum Leader.  That’s what Bush is saying here.  That’s what is at stake.  The American people need to know that and a lot of them do.  They want somebody to stop Bush.

But impeachment is off the table.  Power is useless if you refuse to exercise it.  So Bush is right by default.  Two hundred thirty years of democracy have been a “futile effort” if Congress does not move to impeach Bush now.

But they won’t.  It’s a “futile effort”.
 

Well, the other shoe has dropped on the NIE/Tapegate and we see the neocons play their hand…the CIA dared to embarass Dear Leader and they must burn for it.  Calling the CIA’s actions “mutiny” and calling them “traitors” Christopher Hitchens rolls right out there with this week’s wingnut spit take.

It seems flabbergastingly improbable that President George W. Bush learned of the National Intelligence Estimate concerning Iranian nuclear ambitions only a few days before the rest of us did, but the haplessness of his demeanor suggested that he might, in fact, have been telling the truth.

Pause to wipe monitor.  This of course means the President is indeed a clueless chucklehead if he’s right, which is even more disturbing.  Resume.

After all, had the administration known for any appreciable length of time that the mullahs had hit the pause button on their program in late 2003, it would have been in a position to make a claim that is quite probably true, namely, that our overthrow of Saddam Hussein had impressed the Iranians in much the same way as it impressed the Libyans and made them at least reconsider their willingness to continue flouting the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

More paper towels, for that’s exactly what the neocons are saying, thank you.

(Given that the examination of the immense Libyan stockpile also disclosed the fingerprints that led back to the exposure of the A.Q. Khan nuke-mart in Pakistan, the removal of Saddam from the chessboard has had more effect in curbing the outlaw WMD business than it is normally given credit for.)

Yes, because we scared the crap out of Pakistan, and made it instead a humble beacon of democracy.

Nobody seems entirely sure what caused our intelligence agencies to reverse their opinion, but it seems rather likely that the defection and/or abduction of Brig. Gen. Ali Reza Asgari, Iran’s former deputy minister of defense, in February of this year, has something to do with it. Asgari’s ostensibly principal job had been that of liaison with Hezbollah in Lebanon, but his debriefing could also have helped confirm pre-existing surmises about Iran’s reining-in of its nuclear ambitions.

Which is the most that can be said about those ambitions. It is completely false for anybody to claim, on the basis of this admitted “estimate,” that Iran has ceased to be a candidate member of the fatuously named nuclear “club.” It has the desire to acquire the weaponry, it retains the means to do so, and it has been caught lying and cheating about the process. If it suspended some overtly military elements of the project out of a justifiable apprehension in 2003, it has energetically persisted in the implicit aspects–most notably the installation of gas centrifuges at the plant in Natanz and the building of a heavy water reactor at Arak. All that the estimate has done is to define weaponry down and to suggest a distinction without much difference between a “civilian” and a “military” dimension of the same program. The acquisition of enriched uranium and of plutonium, for any purpose, is identical with the acquisition of a thermonuclear weapons capacity. Iran continues to strive to produce both, neither of which, as it happens, are required for its ostensible civilian energy needs.

All nuclear programs are inherently dangerous, unless they are allies of the US, then it’s okay.  Ask India or Pakistan.  Wait, bad example.

Ahh, but it gets worse.  The wingnuts have latched onto this just like abolishing the Department of Edumacation, which morphed into No Child Left Thinking.  Take it away, Cap’n And Tenille!

At one time, this proposal would have sounded ridiculous. How could we contemplate ridding ourselves of the turbulent priests of Langley in the middle of a war that focuses on intel and covert action more than any other we’ve fought? However, the agency’s performance over the last twenty years — and its blatant politicking and incompetence over the last few years — has changed the question to whether we can hope to win this war with the CIA we have.

Yes, that’s it.  It’s not Bush’s fault we fouled up Iraq by cherry-picking intel and then making stupid policy decisions based on what Cheney wanted to hear, it’s the CIA’s fault for not realizing that this is their job, the partisan hacks!

The 9/11 Commission had an opportunity to address this issue, and it punted. Rather than insist on a consolidation of all intel efforts and a streamlining of management, they proposed a structure that kept all of the existing agencies as separate entities and slapped two more layers of management on top. It was a bureaucratic solution conceived by bureaucrats to solve a problem created by bureaucracy, as I wrote many times, and Congress bought it.

And it’s Congress’s fault too, the partisan hacks!  You know, those damn Democrats who were in charge of the GOP-lead Congress in 2004!

Please take a big ol’ swig and get out the Brawny.

It’s time to reconceive intelligence in a post-Cold War world. Given that it serves to defend our nation, it should fall under military command.

Pause to wipe off monitor again.  Yes, because the best way to reward those who misused our civilian intelligence gathering capabilities with little or no civilian oversight in order to gin up a needless war is to get rid of the civilian intelligence altogether and make it a purely military operation!  Brilliant!

That may not be the most elegant solution, but clearly the supposed benefits of civilian management have not made themselves apparent in either accuracy or efficiency. The laws that govern military intelligence and covert operations would therefore extend to all of our efforts, and failures to abide by those laws would have secure methods of correction.

Because it’s not like this administration has abused the laws that govern military intelligence or covert operations in the efforts of say, Valerie PLame, Joe Wilson, Scooter Libby, etc.  Again, we should TRUST Dear Leader, he’s earned it.

That would also bring intelligence efforts into the non-partisan world of the Pentagon.

Dammit Ed, I just refilled my drink!

Seriously, people still consider the Pentagon non-partisan?  With the whole effort to evangelize the US military, the attempts to use them as shields to deflect criticisms of the President and the   efforts of military leaders like General Petraeus to act as GOP proxies?

Sadly, Ed’s not kidding.  The Pentagon is his idea of a non-partisan agency for running the country’s entire intelligence gathering efforts.  Of course, that would include those focused on American citizens as well.

That culture would help minimize the apparent political efforts of analysts and managers at the CIA/ODNI. It would also consolidate intelligence efforts into a well-established command structure, one with a lot more discipline than seen at Langley since its inception.

Yep, because again, the Pentagon shows discipline (it’s those pesky military contractors that lack discipline.)

Before now, Congress and the Democrats could afford to ignore the crippling bureaucratic infighting between the CIA and the administration. Now, however, it has spilled over into Capitol Hill’s turf, and everyone has a reason to oppose the CIA’s continued loose-cannon antics. This provides us the best moment since the 9/11 Commission’s punt to re-think intelligence and create an effective and responsible mechanism with which to win this war.

Because after all a loose cannon Presidential administration doesn’t need to be addressed in the least.

It’s pretty clear that the wingnuts are lining up around the block to pin the complete failure of Bush’s foreign policy on the CIA’s back like a huge Purge Me sign.

Yeah, the CIA is full of some ugly ass sins.  But let’s assign blame where it needs to go, to the guy at the top making the policy decisions for the country.  Everything must be subsumed into the Cult of the Leader for these guys.  

Will the Dems play along?

As I see that UBS is writing off $10 billion (with a b) in subprime losses and almost certainly will write off more bad losses in the months to come, something caught my eye that doesn’t add up.

Swiss banking giant UBS AG said Monday it will write off a further $10 billion on losses in the U.S. subprime lending market and will raise capital by selling substantial stakes to Singapore and an unnamed investor in the Middle East.

The hell?  I can understand a predatory capital group in the US trying this (throwing good money after bad is how this got started after all), but Singapore’s national investment fund and an “unnamed investor in the Middle East?”
What gives?  Surely people in other countries are smart enough to see that the global financial system isn’t exactly profitable right now.  The bloodbath is only getting started, so why invest now?

Tony Tan, deputy chairman of GIC, said the 9 percent stake does not mean Singapore is seeking control of the Swiss bank.

“GIC is now the single largest investor in UBS and this is the largest investment GIC has made in any company,” Tan said during news conference in Singapore. “We did not make it a condition that our investment should have a representation (on UBS’s board.) We have no desire to control the business of the bank.”

It was the first time that the publicity-shy GIC, which manages Singapore’s foreign reserves, has revealed a major investment.

Western banks have lost billions of dollars from their exposure to U.S. subprime loans, and cash-rich sovereign wealth funds have been stepping in to help them boost their capital. Last month the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the sovereign investment fund of the Gulf Arab state, acquired a 4.9 percent stake in Citigroup Inc., the nation’s largest bank, for $7.5 billion.

UBS said it attracted about 30 billion Swiss francs in new money from clients in October and November. Ensuring a strong capital base will allow the bank to continue to make acquisitions to further expand its wealth management business, when such opportunities arise, UBS Chairman Marcel Ospel told a conference call.

“Our losses in the U.S. mortgage securities market are substantial, but could have been absorbed by our earnings and capital base,” Ospel said in a statement.

“The write-downs and capital raising represent a dramatic U-turn from guidance given by Chief Financial Officer Marco Suter just three weeks ago,” said analysts Matthew Clark and Vasco Moreono of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Ltd.

The fact that the capital-raising outweighs the write-down makes it appear that UBS is trying to draw a line under its subprime woes, Clark and Moreono said.

In other words, people are continuing to throw good money after bad in an attempt to keep the global financial system from imploding with a planet-rending bang.  The problem is we can’t read the numbers on the countdown timer.  We don’t know when it’s going to explode.

I’m thinking the system is so overly leveraged that these foreign reserve funds and wealthy oil investors have no choice but to prop up the banks with their own cash, because once people figure out that the cash that banks have on hand are less than a fraction of the 1% of what they hold on paper, the bank runs will begin in earnest and the system will go belly up.

Therefore these funds are doing everything they can to keep the shell game going.  They have to, because they have an awful lot of paper losses to go poof (especially these sovereign investment funds managing foreign reserves of entire countries).

The US can’t officially bail out the banks.  But that’s apparently not stopping everybody who is NOT the US from doing so.

So when the system does go bang, it’s going to take down a lot more than just the US.

There’s still the major issue of why the Iran NIE was allowed to see the light of day, and while I believe it was deliberate, WHY it was deliberate is a separate issue.

Josh Marshall has a theory…

There are, oversimplifying, two threads going around, one that the ‘Iran doesn’t have an active program’ preliminary finding was circulating in the Administration in late ’06 (Hersh, etc), and the other that Bush was told about the upcoming finding in August by McConnell, after which he changed his characterization so as not to be so obviously lying about the nature of the threat (all the while still intentionally leaving a grossly misleading impression).

The two threads can be reconciled. The basis for the findings had, indeed, been circulating beginning in late 2006, and ever since. One has to assume that Cheney and his forces marshaled full fire on those findings, and successfully suppressed them, preventing their release. That effort, however, eventually failed, probably due to intelligence and Pentagon unwillingness to take the fall for another war.

What happened in early August was not that Bush learned of the findings, but that McConnell informed him that the NIE containing the findings would be released. Those on the side of releasing them (which had to have included Gates) simply won the battle, and either faced down Cheney, threatened to resign if they lost or utilized whatever other strategy required. It was not the discovery of the underlying truth of the findings that caused the change in rhetoric (becoming more vague on Iran’s nuclear status, but more bellicose on Iran generally). It was the realization that the NIE would become public.

I think this theory has some serious merit.  One one side you have SecDef Gates and Admiral McConnell, on the other is Dick Cheney.  Somehow, Gates and McConnell won and the NIE was released.  Whether or not it was to keep us out of another war I don’t know.

But McConnell’s the one paying the price.

Republicans who accepted with open arms the 2002 assessment of Iraq’s weapons capabilities — which was later shown to be flawed — that led to a US invasion of that country have suddenly grown skeptical of a newly released report on Iran that is seen as tamping down calls for military action there.

Legislation is expected in the Senate next week that would establish a bipartisan, political commission to examine the conclusions of this week’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iran and evaluate the raw intelligence that formed it, the Washington Post reports Friday.

That WaPo report makes it clear the target is the intel community.

Senate Republicans are planning to call for a congressional commission to investigate the conclusions of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran as well as the specific intelligence that went into it, according to congressional sources.

The move is the first official challenge, but it comes amid growing backlash from conservatives and neoconservatives unhappy about the assessment that Iran halted a clandestine nuclear weapons program four years ago. It reflects how quickly the NIE has become politicized, with critics even going after the analysts who wrote it, and shows a split among Republicans.

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) said he plans to introduce legislation next week to establish a commission modeled on a congressionally mandated group that probed a disputed 1995 intelligence estimate on the emerging missile threat to the United States over the next 15 years.

“Iran is one of the greatest threats in the world today. Getting the intelligence right is absolutely critical, not only on Iran’s capability but its intent. So now there is a huge question raised, and instead of politicizing that report, let’s have a fresh set of eyes — objective, yes — look at it,” he said in an interview.

Ensign’s proposal calls for Senate leaders to put an equal number of Republicans and Democrats on a panel to study the NIE and report back in six months. “There are a lot of people out there who do question [the NIE]. There is a huge difference between the 2005 and 2007 estimates,” he said. The 2005 intelligence estimate reported that Iran was still working on a clandestine military program, and the new assessment basically says the previous judgment was wrong on a key point.

So what’s going on?  People have crossed Dick Cheney before, generals and intelligence officials have disputed that Iran is a threat.  They’ve been in the background, but they’ve prevented any military action against Tehran so far.

What’s going on here is the Israeli/AIPAC lobby is now throwing its full weight behind discrediting not only the NIE but those in the Pentagon and intel communities who are against another war.  The Likudnik branch of Israel’s government and the powerful lobby that works for them in the US wants Bush to hit Iran, period.  Nobody in Washington crosses this lobby lightly, and the result is that those who may have prevented a war with Iran — a war that could possibly involve nuclear weapons — are now in the crosshairs of the hawks on both sides of the aisle.

Not more than 72 hours after John Bolton demanded a congressional witch hunt into burying these whistleblowers, we have the Senate Republicans demanding a bi-partisan commission to go after those responsible for the NIE.  There’s plenty of things the Democrats would be able to investigate about the CIA over the last 7 years, but suddenly the GOP is all gung-ho about attacking everything the CIA has done.

“If it’s inaccurate, it could result in very serious damage to legitimate American policy,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). As recently as July, he noted, intelligence officials said in congressional testimony that they had a high degree of confidence that Iran was intent on developing the world’s deadliest weapon. “We need to update our conclusions, but this is a substantial change,” he said in an interview.

That takes the cake of course.  Senator Sessions is suddenly worried about how our Middle East intel might be “inaccurate” almost six years after our invasion of Iraq based on…inaccurate intel.  It was inaccurate because it was in some cases completely manufactured…but because this assessment doesn’t give us carte blanche to bomb Tehran, NOW we have to worry about intel accuracy?

And the crazy part of this is that the legislation to form the committee will certainly pass, casting enough doubt on the intel community to discredit those would stop us from going into war with Iran.

Many folks have wondered why the Iran NIE saw the light of day in the first place if it so obviously contradicts the neocon “all war, all the time” position.  Several theories are out there, ranging from it being a counter stroke by the concerned US intel community to it being rolled out by the administration as an excuse to back down from Iran.

I am convinced however that the NIE was released with express intention of paving the way towards an attack on Iran.  The vehement response from the neocons, the Village Idiots, the President and especially from Israel indicates very strong opposition to the notion that Iran isn’t a threat.
But it’s who this vehement response is being directed against that indicates the true thrust of the maneuver.  Iran, for sure.  But the most scorn is being heaped upon our intelligence agencies themselves.

This morning’s screed from The Walrus in WaPo is a strong clue as to how this will shake out.

Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the “intelligence community” on issues such as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly.

All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than “intelligence” analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function.

Note that in John Bolton’s world, the intelligence world’s proper function is not to tell the truth, but to shape it to the President’s needs.  Playing politics with information and cheery picking it for the White House is “analysis”.  Telling the truth in order to try to prevent a catastrophic war is “policy formulation”.

Consider these flaws in the NIE’s “key judgments,” which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified.

First, the headline finding — that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 — is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between “military” and “civilian” programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran’s “civilian” program that posed the main risk of a nuclear “breakout.”

Same old song:  you don’t have to have nuclear weapons to “have nuclear weapons.”

The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs’ motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.

Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of “intelligence.”

Your job is to regurgitate, not cogitate.  Oh, and out invasion of Iraq is now wholly justified if this NIE is right (only it’s not, so what does that mean?)

Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was “possible” but not “likely” that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from — of all places — an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that “we are more skeptical. We don’t buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran.” When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda.

Our intel experts are wrong, you see.  Iran is going to have nukes at any time now and they will bomb Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Des Moines, it’s just a matter of time.  Because nothing is 100%, that remaining sliver of a percentage is worth going to war over.  Cheney’s One Percent Doctrine in action, again.

Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. In the bureaucracy, where access to information is a source of rank and prestige, ramming home policy changes with the latest hot tidbit is commonplace, and very deleterious. It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis.

Fifth, many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran’s nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as “intelligence judgments.”

That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this “intelligence” torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.

In other words, this is payback for Scooter Libby.  Bolton attacks the CIA, State Department, and anyone who is in his eyes is stupid enough to believe Tehran isn’t going to try to nuke Israel into the stone age.  To him, these rational realists are the biggest threat to US national security and the safety of the world.  And they will not be allowed to stop the coming attack on Iran.

The NIE was leaked with the express purpose of it being discredited to the point where the call for a Stalinist purge of the intelligence community would be “prudent”.  Having been burned once already by Valerie Plame, the neocons have decided to take the intel community out of the fight for good rather than risk somebody depth-charging their plans to bomb Tehran.  As an added bonus, with the intel community “damaged goods” the warmongers can now safely stovepipe the intel they do want.

As I’ve saide before, we’re one border incident away with war with Iran.  The plan by the neocons and their Likudnik backers in Israel is to make it happen.

A couple days ago I remarked that the Iran NIE was nothing more than a base to be spun into a pretense for war.  Subsequent reactions from the Bush administration, the neocons, and Israel have all but confirmed this: if anything, war with Iran is even more likely now than it was last week.
How is that possible?  Well, simply put, the NIE never mattered to the neocon plan to attack Iran.  It was released, and subsequently spun like a washing machine on  a roller coaster.  But the Bushies were never counting on the nuclear angle to attack Iran.  The NIE directly disputes the “serious Village wisdom” about Iran, i.e. Tehran being an imminent threat of a nuclear holocaust.  But the reasons we’ll attack Iran are going to be different.

The casus belli for the coming strikes on Iran have been and will continue to be Iran’s interference in Iraq.  We’re one border incident away (much like the Israeli-Lebanon conflict) from war with Iran.  The NIE has done nothing to alleviate that. If anything because the neocons so badly want war with Iran, efforts will now be more focused than ever on provoking that border incident.

The nuclear threat that Tehran supposedly possesses (and now has been dismantled) was always secondary to questions of a direct international act of war.  That’s always been the plan, as Bush’s inept foreign policy team has been unable to solicit more than sanctions against Iran for enriching uranium.  China, Russia, and France have been reluctant to take any further action other than token gestures.

The real fear is that now, with the NIE out having completely sandbagged the nuclear angle, the increasingly desperate neocons will now turn to the “border incident” theory in earnest.  With the curtain closing on the administration and the economy stalling out, power is slipping away from the neocons.  They’re getting more restless and more angry, and the pressure from both the neocons and the Israel hawks is ramping up from both inside and outside the administration.

The result may be a redoubling of efforts for a manufactured “Gulf of Tonkin” incident that the US will have “no choice” but to respond to with deadly force.  There’s still more than enough time for that.

And even if Iran manages to not get hit under Bush, his successor may still choose to do so, especially should it be Giuliani or Hillary.

This NIE may actually be very bad news indeed.