Meet the New Boss...

Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald was out with another example of why he's the best political blogger on the internet. "Obama and Transparency: Judge For Yourself." It matches up Obama's promises to end Bush-era abuses with regard to government secrecy vs. the reality, wherein Obama has largely continued those policies. An article well worth a look.

It does give due consideration to the good things Obama has done in this area:

"Balanced against all of that, Obama complied with a court order directing the release of Bush-era OLC memos on torture; issued an Executive Order creating additional procedures before executive secrecy under FOIA could be asserted; and ordered his agency heads to interpret FOIA with a 'presumption' in favor of disclosure. It should also be noted that--as Think Progress documented yesterday--Obama's position in denying access to visitor logs is a direct violation of his statements about the Bush administration's practices in doing the same, and the same is true for his use of the Bush-era version of the state secrets theory."

The record is pretty bad, and, as Greenwald notes, this only deals with the matter of government transparency:

"...it's worth emphasizing that the above excerpts pertain only to transparency issues. None of this has anything to do with what The New York Times in May--referring to Obama's Bush-replicating policies on detention, rendition, denial of habeas rights, military commission and the like--described as 'how he has backtracked, in substantial if often nuanced ways, from the approach to national security that he preached as a candidate, and even from his first days in the Oval Office.' No matter how you look at it, this is quite a record."

As the song says, "Meet the new boss..."

--classicliberal2

Sarah Palin: Thin-Skinned Cretin, or How I Get Banished From Message Boards

Groucho Marx once said he wouldn't belong to any club that would have him as a member. When I took part in such things on a more regular basis, I got thrown off a lot of message boards, discussion lists, forums. It isn't that I'm particulary mean or unfair. I just have a low tolerance for stupidity and a poor track record of holding my tongue when confronted with some of the more extreme manifestations of it. I should probably know better, for example, than to go into a forum full of fellows who openly lust after Sarah Palin, to the point of posting lots of photoshopped images of the Alaskan governor's head transposed on to the nude bodies of porn stars for wanking purposes. I should know better. And I should definitely know better than to go there and post one of my modest, reasonable estimations of said governor's intellectual capabilities in the wake of her public fight with yet another comedian. But I did it anyway. And--big surprise--it was deleted by the Palin fan who runs the joint and who characterized it as inflammatory, while he replaced it with yet another of those much more respectable threads devoted to Sarah porn (to which no one could possibly object).

Such is life. I've sort of adopted an informal zero-tolerance policy toward this sort of thing, so I won't be back to that particular board and I suppose I can add it to the list of clubs from which I have, in effect, been excluded. Here, for posterity, is the post that did the deed:

I know it must be difficult to be as cretinous an imbecile as Sarah Palin. She's forever trapped in a world she can't understand. The simplest things appear to her to be great, unsolvable mysteries. That is no bar to success in the Republican party though, and she's made very clear she has ambitions. Can't she at least hire some handlers who, if incapable of explaining the facts of life to such a dullard, could at least tell her to stop when she's embarrassing herself so badly in public?

That's what she did during the election and that's all she's done since. Her interview with Katie Couric last year became a nationwide story when, asked what news sources she read, Palin was incapable of naming a single one. As bad as that is, she's then spent the last year whining about it, lying about it (describing it as a "gotcha' question") and trashing Couric personally. She dumped on Tina Fey for Fey's dead-on caricature of her on Saturday Night Live. She explained that she was a victim of these people, exploited by them. She's whined about her press coverage! A few weeks ago, she jumped into a public fracas with the father of her grandchild. Then, she became involved in a stupid public dust-up over a Republican fundraiser in Washington. And now, she's back to whining about yet another comedian, this time David Letterman.[*] Even after it was clear she was just embarrassing herself further, she kept right on, dragging the matter out for more than a week. In an attempt to diffuse the situation, Letterman has even apologized. Twice. In response, Palin issued a statement that sounds like some government press release from a Third World dictatorship, praising the brave American soldiers who defend the right of someone like Letterman to make jokes.

That last is interesting in another way, as Palin set forth her own, um... unique view of "free speech" during the campaign, when she said that press criticism of her amounted to an attack on her right to free speech.

It's one of the cardinal rules of politics that, when you want to pick a public fight, pick it with someone bigger than yourself. Palin has chosen a reporter, a teenager, and some comedians. Since she was picked by McCain in a vain, misguided effort to attract Hillary Clinton voters, Palin has been as incredibly popular with the Republican base as she has been a consistent embarrassment to them, their party and U.S. politics in general. Is this really what the Republican party has come to? Is this what American politics have come to?

--classicliberal2

---

[*] And contrary to her claims, the joke wasn't even aimed at Palin's family. It was aimed at Alex Rodriguez. Palin falsely asserted it was aimed at her 14-year-old daughter, who, in reality, hadn't even been mentioned, and went around telling the press Letterman was a dirty old man making jokes about the sexual exploitation of underage girls.

Obama's Supreme Court Nominee

"Of the many responsibilities granted to a President by our Constitution, few are more serious or more consequential than selecting a Supreme Court justice."

So sayeth the Obama this morning. The current Supreme Court is, at present, a plane with one wing--of 9 justices, there are 7 conservatives/reactionaries, 7 of the 9 being Republicans. Their rule has been terrible indeed. So the Obama is not only right; what he said is particularly true in his case. And then he wheeled out his version of a quality U.S. Supreme Court nominee: A former corporate lawyer, appointed to the federal bench by George Bush Sr. and who, in her long judicial career, votes with her Republican-appointed court colleagues 95% of the time. No kidding. From talking points issuing forth today from the administration itself:

"Known as a moderate on the court, [appointee Sonia] Sotomayor often forges consensus and agreeing with her more conservative nominees far more frequently than she disagrees with them. In cases where Sotomayor and at least one judge appointed by a Republican president were on the three-judge panel, Sotomayor and the Republican appointee(s) agreed on the outcome 95% of the time."

I let readers draw their own conclusion about what this says about the nominee, the appropriateness of her nomination and about Obama and offer only a prediction: Republicans will paint Sotomayor as some wild-eyed radical "judicial activist" anyway.

--classicliberal2

"Liberal" Media Alert: The Speaker vs. The Dick (updated below)

The corporate press has been obsessed over the Nancy Pelosi non-story for two days now; full-bore saturation coverage. Hour after hour of "What did Nancy Pelosi know about Bush administration torture and when did she know it?"

The real question is "What difference does it make?" And the answer is "none at all." The entire matter is a meaningless sideshow being raised as a distraction from the real story, which is the behavior of the Bush administration, the fact that it tortured prisoners.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, we got confirmation of something those of us who have followed these matters have long suspected--that Bush administration war-hawks were instituting their squalid torture regime in part to manufacture a case against Iraq. It was reported by former NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem that, just after the Iraq invasion, when the fact that the administration had flat-out lied about WMDs was becoming painfully apparent, Dick Cheney's office suggested that captured Mukhabarat official Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi be put on a waterboard in order to get him to "confess" to an Iraq-al Qaida partnership. Two intelligence officers in the know confirmed this and Bush chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer confirmed he was asked to oversee this and rejected the idea as "reprehensible." Duelfer called it a political move and darkly notes that it was "ludicrous" to assume Dulaymi, given his position, would even have any knowledge of any such matters.

It's already a matter of public record that, in the lead-up to the Iraq war, Bush and his thugs were writing directly into their public pronouncements the nonsense being offered by those whom they were torturing. In the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, for example, Cheney ordered the prisoner tortured even after interrogators had reported that al-Libi was compliant and that such methods weren't necessary. When al-Libi started "confessing" to an Iraq-al Qaida partnership, the torture was discontinued and even though his interrogators were reporting that he was probably just making it all up in order to get the torture to stop, his words on the subject were , within months, coming right out of the mouth of the "President" and his top thugs as a rationale for an attack on Iraq. Al-Libi later recanted this, the CIA circulated an IC-wide disavowal of everything he'd said on the subject and al-Libi mysteriously died.

But the press has chosen to ignore this and give us, instead, saturation coverage of the Nancy Pelosi matter, something that is of absolutely no consequence, except to conservative Republicans trying to derail the torture story and protect the vile Bush administration.

The ever-vigilant Media Matters gives us the dismal particulars:

"Despite covering questions regarding what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) knew about the Bush administration's interrogation policies, none of the three major networks' evening news programs mentioned on May 14 that according to a May 13 report by former NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem, '[t]wo U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney's office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner ... who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.' All May 14 CNN and Fox News Channel evening shows, as well as all daytime shows available on the Nexis database, also ignored Windrem's story."

Just another example of our "liberal" press at work.

--classicliberal2



UPDATE (05/19/09) -- Yesterday, Media Matters followed up with print media, looking at coverage in five major national newspapers (the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today). Unsurprisingly, while all had extensively covered the Pelosi non-story, there wasn't a single mention of the Windrem scoop, much less a full-blown article about it, in any of those papers.

At the same time, MM also looked into how those same papers had covered a May 15 McClatchy article about Dick Cheney's claims that prisoners tortured at Guantanamo had provided evidence of an Iraq-al Qaida partnership. They didn't. And the big papers buried that one, too.

New Old Paperwork on Bush's Dictatorial Assault on the U.S. (updated below)

Those who have directed static my way for noting the dictatorial character of a lot of George W. Bush's rule have long ago been corrected by history, if they paid it any attention, and now, there's something else to add to that rarely-examined pile we broadly call "the historical record." New documentation on Bush's assertions of anti-constitutional dictatorial powers. Not much new; it's just good to have in writing that administration's assertions that it had the power to freely do things like illegally spy on Americans, illegally kidnap people, send soldiers storming into private residences without warrant or any legal procedure and crush free speech and press rights at will. They flatly assert, in short, that Bush could operate a military dictatorship within the U.S., entirely free of constitutional or legal restraint. These positions aren't theoretical either--they were official Bush policy until only a few months before the administration left office.

Those in the corporate press have maintained a 10 year practice of smelling what they seem to consider the pleasant, rosy aroma of Bush's breath via the noses they've kept tightly jammed up his ass--a rather roundabout way of getting at it, it must be said--and nothing, it seems, has changed about this with the change of administrations--the "liberal media" have largely refused to report most of this. Par for the course.

--classicliberal2

UPDATE: 03/05/09:
"We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship."
--Harper's Scott Horton, on the newly-released "legal opinions"

"This is a theory of presidential dictatorship. These views are outrageous and inconsistent with basic principles of the Constitution as well as with two centuries of legal precedents. Yet they were the basic assumptions of key players in the Bush Administration in the days following 9/11."
--Yale law professor Jack Balkin
"Reading these memos, you've gotta almost conclude we had an unconstitutional dictator. It's pretty deadly and pretty serious, what's in these materials."
--Former White House counsel John Dean

Obama Being Schooled On Rodney King-ism

Were I in a better humor of late, the mess that has become the "stimulus bill" would be something in which I'd find a great deal of amusement. Obama talked up admiration for Dr. King but adopted Rodney King politics ("can't we all just get along?"). I've written much about the pernicious effects of this sort of thing. It's a subject that has probably made up most of this blog since I launched it.

Rodney King politics is the folly of fools in this day and age. That's something too many Democrats never seem to learn. Today's conservatives and Republicans are going to oppose anything of any substance a Democratic administration tries to do. Even if they agree with the policy in question, they'll do this. If the Clinton years taught Democrats anything, it should have taught them this. Instead, Obama is the latest in a long string of "Democrats" who think that, if you give up half of what you want right up front, the other side will be equally accommodating.

They won't.

Did Obama genuinely think that if he appointed a gaggle of rightists to run his administration, then proposed a stimulus bill that was nearly half tax-cuts of the sort favored by Republicans, the Repubs would simply fall in line behind it? It certainly looks that way. At present, it seems he's being schooled on that point.

Whatever stimulus bill eventually passes will have to be rammed through on a party-line or mostly-party-line vote. Given this, why not just create a bill you'd like to see passed and think would be effective instead of wasting time and political capital on a doomed effort to be accommodating? If the Repubs want to filibuster, let them. The economy is going to be in the dumper no matter what passes. Let them be the ones to stand in the way of any effort to alleviate the pain.

Government is always a circus. In the U.S., it's a particularly pathetic circus. The transition from Bush to Obama is like a transition from evil-intentioned not-so-bright children running the government to apparently not-so-bright adults. A huge step up, perhaps, if one wants to call that "progress," but when it promises so little, is it really enough to call it progressive? It just looks so much better because of what came before. And so, by the way, would just about anything. Intuitively, one would assume that taking over from one of the worst presidents in the history of the Republic means there's nowhere to go but up. There's still the Grand Canyon between that and good.

Obama finds himself playing catch-up on the stimulus bill now. Today, he held a town-hall meeting and a prime-time press conference, with more to come, but Republicans have already managed to effectively demonize the package. He didn't accomplish anything by larding up the bill with Repub-friendly tax-cuts (which every serious economist says is far less stimulative than the spending provisions), except to ensure that the final bill, which will pass--if it passes--without any substantial Republican support (if any at all), is full of these sorts of expensive, less stimulative measures.

--classicliberal2

Obama's Carnival of Beasts Continues

"The politics of common ground will not be found on the far right or on the far left. That is not where most Americans live. We will only find it in the firm middle ground of common sense and shared values."
--Barack Obama, approvingly quoting Tom Daschle (11 Dec., 2008)

As Obama now speaks approvingly of the vile triangulation tactics pioneered during the Clinton regime, his carnival of beasts continues. One right-wing pick after another. A few liberals have turned up among them, but they're being given token roles of little real importance. All the big slots are going to the conservatives--after running on "change," Obama has assembled a team that runs the ideological gamut from A to B, from Republican-lite to Republican-outright. It has been a dreadful thing to behold.

His just-announced choice to deliver a benediction at his inauguration is "Pastor" Rick Warren, a reactionary scumbag of the Religious Reich variety who compares legalized abortion to the Holocaust and compares homosexual marriage to incest and pedophilia. This election season, Warren crusaded in favor of California's noxious Prop. 8, which stripped away such marriage rights to gay couples. This is one of the first voices Americans will hear from this administration when Obama is sworn in.

Getting to offer a benediction at an inauguration is a relatively minor thing, of course. Symbolically, though, it's an atrocity, particularly after the last 8 years, and an open insult to every decent, liberal American, after Obama has already dished out to them one insult after another via his choices to run his administration. Whatever his other shortcomings, Obama has always given the impression of being quite intelligent. His choices since election, however, give the impression of a degree of stupidity bordering on the cretinous. What is to be gained by giving a creature like Warren such a prominent national stage? It can only give him greater prestige and that is to the detriment of the United States and everyone in it. The only point seems to be a vain, stupid, doomed effort to curry favor with the right.

After they politically bury him, perhaps they'll send him some flowers.

--classicliberal2

How Offensive!!!

When he chucked his shoes at "President" Bush this week, Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi proved he understood the key to getting lots of press: give good visuals. The cable news networks are running to ribbons the footage of his shoe-throwing protest. It's one of the most entertaining things many of those programs have ever aired. Less entertaining is some of the reaction the incident has drawn in the U.S..

Reg Henry, who isn't a Bush supporter, had this to say about it (writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette):

"...when anyone, especially a foreign national, physically attacks the president of the United States, be it with shoes, sandals, socks, bras, jockstraps, cream pies or anything else absurd or smelly that comes to hand, then it is an assault on the dignity of all of us, even if some of us are not very dignified.

"This rule applies to any president and I will brook no opposition on this point. The office demands respect even when the person doesn't."

Juan Williams isn't a liberal, but he plays one on TV. He's one of the regular stable of faux lefties imported onto such programs to give a phony sense of balance. In one such appearance on Bill O'Reilly's wretched Fox News freak-show, this was his reaction to the flying footwear affair:

"...how many American lives have been sacrificed to the cause of liberating Iraq? How much money has been spent while they’re not spending their own profits from their oil? American money. So I just think it’s absolutely the act of an ingrate for them to behave in this way. Just unbelievable to me."

Ah, the voice of Offended Empire... "Those ungrateful darkies! And after all we've done for them!"

Of course, what Bush really did for them was concoct a noxious faragoo of lies to rationalize a massive campaign of slaughter inside their country, the home of Muntader al-Zaidi. What a grave national insult it is that this fellow--failing to realize he's only supposed to think badly of that sort of behavior when it comes from brown people with funny names like Saddam Hussein--took offense at it and committed the unpardonable sin of throwing a shoe at our brave Maximal Leader! Even our "liberal" commentators say so!

Bush and his lies murder thousands; a fellow throws a pair of shoes. Outrageous!

My own reaction: Too bad it wasn't a brick.

--classicliberal2

Liberals Argue Over the Merits of Disappointment

On MSNBC's COUNTDOWN last night, Keith Olbermann said Obama's foreign policy apparatus, publicly rolled out yesterday, isn't just a "team of rivals"--it amounts to "a coalition government."

Bad news for those who thought they'd be getting "change" from an Obama administration.

But some people are loving it. Jeremy Scahill has a good piece out today noting that Obama's picks are finding much favor on the right:

"Karl Rove, 'Bush's Brain', called Obama's cabinet selections, 'reassuring', which itself is disconcerting, but neoconservative leader and former McCain campaign staffer Max Boot summed it up best. 'I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain,' Boot wrote. The appointment of General Jones and the retention of Gates at defence 'all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with dictators and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign.'

"Boot added that Hillary Clinton will be a 'powerful' voice 'for "neoliberalism" which is not so different in many respects from "neoconservativism."' Boot's buddy, Michael Goldfarb, wrote in The Weekly Standard, the official organ of the neoconservative movement, that he sees 'certainly nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush in his second term.'"

Most of Scahill's comments are dead on target but there is one puzzler in the pile. Consider this passage:

"We were told repeatedly during the campaign that Obama was right on the premiere foreign policy issue of our day--the Iraq war. 'Six years ago, I stood up and opposed this war at a time when it was politically risky to do so,' Obama said in his September debate against John McCain. 'Senator McCain and President Bush had a very different judgment.'"

Obama has been an opponent of the Iraq war since before he entered the Senate and that campaign rhetoric was consistent with his record. Try to make that passage fit with this though:

"...it is also disingenuous to act as though Obama is engaging in some epic betrayal. Of course these appointments contradict his campaign rhetoric of change. But move past the speeches and Obama's selections are very much in sync with his record and the foreign policy vision he articulated on the campaign trail..."

Scahill's judgment that "there is not a single, solid anti-war voice in the upper echelons of the Obama foreign policy apparatus" is a correct one. How can that be "in sync" with his previous record and his campaign rhetoric?

A few days ago, I slammed Glenn Greenwald for feigning bewilderment at liberal disappointment with Obama's appointments to date. He was, in my view, grossly overstating his case and he, himself, must have eventually come to the same judgment of what he'd written, because he returned a few days later with a new piece in which he outlined Obama's liberal Senate record and campaign rhetoric on subjects such as the use of torture, the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, trial by "military commissions," illegal surveillance and other items, and noted that Obama has recently shown "some conflicting signs" on these issues "that create some uncertainty." What does Greenwald see as "conflicting signs"? In almost every case, it's Obama's choice of rightist appointees who completely contradict his own views on these subjects.

It seems a little disappointment is in order after all.

--classicliberal2

The CIA & Obama's Would-Be "Cure" For It

Until recent days, John Brennan, who has been Barack Obama's top advisor on intelligence matters, had been the President-elect's assumed choice to head the CIA. Brennan is a vile rightist, one of George Tenet's long-serving hecubi who spent a few years as Deputy Executive Director of the CIA during the outgoing Bush's administration. Among other things, he has supported and defended the Bush administrations' use of torture and of "rendition" (shipping people to foreign countries where they can be horribly tortured with impunity) pimped for Bush's illegal wiretapping scheme and for immunity for telecoms who collaborated with Bush without regard to the law or their customers' rights. After a minor firestorm of controversy erupted over Brennan's potential appointment, he wrote a letter to Obama on Nov. 25 withdrawing his name from any potential intelligence-related post.

The real story isn't that he has now withdrawn. It's that he was ever even a contender in the first place.

The CIA is a mess at the moment. It has been subject, under the Bush administration, to the same sort of ideological purge as was the Justice Department and other agencies. Quality intel pros--those charged with gathering and making sense of the data necessary to, among other things, protect the U.S. from terrorist attacks were given the heave-ho because they weren't "loyal" enough, or conservative enough. The corporate press has virtually ignored this but Porter Goss was named by Bush to head of the agency with explicit instructions to carry out such a purge. From Newsday, in 2004:

"The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.

"'The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House,' said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to the agency and to the White House. 'Goss was given instructions... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda.'"

This was done and in very ugly fashion. As it progressed, one senior administration official told Knight-Ridder that the purge "appears to be directed at 'everybody who said there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaida and everybody who they think leaked information that undercut what the administration was claiming.'"

"This is a classic case of shooting the messenger," said one senior official. 'Unfortunately, they're the same messengers we're counting on to warn us of the next al-Qaida attack.'" 

Robert Dreyfuss has been one of the few journalists who tracked this sorry affair in any detail:

"Since Goss took over, between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, according to various sources, some fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants. Others, unable to retire, have stayed, but only to mark time at the agency. Morale, already low after several years during which the CIA was accused of a series of intelligence failures related to September 11 and Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, is now at rock-bottom. The agency's vaunted Near East Division, in particular, which served as the 'pointy end of the spear,' as one CIA veteran put it, in simultaneous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the 'global war on terror,' has been decimated."

That entire Dreyfuss article is worth a read.

Within only months of Goss's appointment, nearly the entirety of the senior management of the clandestine services--the branch which handles the spies--had been fired or had quit.

Goss eventually left. The purge, unfortunately, didn't. Under Michael Hayden, his successor, the CIA inspector general launched an investigation into the administration's detention and "interrogation" practices. Hayden's response was the launch an investigation of the inspector general.

This is what's been happening at CIA. Longtime, high-ranking intel pros being eliminated in a political purge and replaced with Bush yes-men. This is the agency that will confront Obama when he is sworn in.

And Brennan was his solution? 

--classicliberal2