Timing Bad News for Minimal Impact

It’s sometimes comes down to timing the news.  Yes, it was about something else, but in these pages last May, while suggesting on hot political stories the whole idea is to see the pattern – there was a reference to the usual Friday afternoon dump of what you really don’t want in the news cycle, what you hold until the reporters and commentators have gone off for the long weekend.

 

At that time the issue was shutting down the cases brought against the government for wiretapping just about everyone, secretly, without any warrant of any kind. The president authorized it, and that was supposed to be sufficient, even if it was clearly illegal. The administration held off on telling everyone that they had just moved to stop to courts dead in their tracks by claiming even discussing that there might be such a program would reveal state secrets (and thus endanger everyone’s life, one supposes). No one wants to say you’re simply shutting down the courts. It looks bad.  It sounds bad.  You announce it late on Friday. And at that time, it worked pretty well. By the following Monday other matters had filled the news cycle, and no one was much commenting how there would be no day in court on any of these matters. Everything had moved on.

 

So political junkies do wait for late Friday, to see if there’ll be another Friday “news dump” – something outrageous or amazing, the stuff those in power want to bury in the pleasant weekend, hoping other news will shift it to the insignificant past by Monday. And this weekend they have the college basketball going for them – half of America has bets down on that.  But those of us who went to Duke and now don’t care about such things – the Blue Devils were gone in the first round – kept an eye on the news.  And Friday, March 23, we saw the new double-dump.

 

The first was just depressing, with something about officers blamed for Tillman case errors – “A Pentagon investigation will recommend that nine officers, including up to four generals, be held accountable for missteps in the aftermath of the friendly fire death of Army Ranger Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, senior defense officials said Friday.”

 

This is no way to deal with the families of troops -

 

Dozens of soldiers – those immediately around Tillman at the scene of the shooting, his immediate superiors and high-ranking officers at a command post nearby – knew within minutes or hours that his death was fratricide.

 

Even so, the Army persisted in telling Tillman’s family he was killed in a conventional ambush, including at his nationally televised memorial service 11 days later. It was five weeks before his family was told the truth, a delay the Army has blamed on procedural mistakes.

 

But the administration milked his “heroic death” and threw it in the faces of those who questioned the “wage war everywhere to keep us safe here” way of dealing with the world that the administration had told us was, is and will be the only sensible way to deal with most anything (the remainder can be fixed by tax cuts for the wealthy).  It did make good press – the professional football player here walked away from that glory and went off to fight to keep us all safe.  Late on a Friday we learn we were, shall we say, being manipulated, by some top level people. Oh well – UCLA and USC were still in the running for the basketball championship as the weekend began.

 

Monday it will seem insignificant, as will items like this -

 

Eventually the rocket shrapnel was removed from (Spc. Jon) Town’s neck and his ears stopped leaking blood. But his hearing never really recovered, and in many ways, neither has his life. A soldier honored twelve times during his seven years in uniform, Town has spent the last three struggling with deafness, memory failure and depression. By September 2006 he and the Army agreed he was no longer combat-ready.

 

But instead of sending Town to a medical board and discharging him because of his injuries, doctors at Fort Carson, Colorado, did something strange: They claimed Town’s wounds were actually caused by a “personality disorder.” Town was then booted from the Army and told that under a personality disorder discharge, he would never receive disability or medical benefits.

 

Town is not alone. A six-month investigation has uncovered multiple cases in which soldiers wounded in Iraq are suspiciously diagnosed as having a personality disorder, then prevented from collecting benefits. The conditions of their discharge have infuriated many in the military community, including the injured soldiers and their families, veterans’ rights groups, even military officials required to process these dismissals.

 

They say the military is purposely misdiagnosing soldiers like Town and that it’s doing so for one reason: to cheat them out of a lifetime of disability and medical benefits, thereby saving billions in expenses.

 

Cheat? Maybe it’s just being fiscally responsible.  If our first CEO President (he does have that MBA) is running this place like a corporation, he seems to be replicating how most HR departments work – cost containment comes first. Benefits subtract from profits.  One must contain benefit costs, reducing benefits to just ever so slightly above the point where people walk off the job en masse.  It’s tricky.

 

But the major “Friday night news dump” was something else entirely -

 

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales approved plans to fire several U.S. attorneys in a November meeting, according to documents released Friday that contradict earlier claims that he was not closely involved in the dismissals. The Nov. 27 meeting, in which the attorney general and at least five top Justice Department officials participated, focused on a five-step plan for carrying out the firings of the prosecutors, Justice Department officials said late Friday.

 

There, Gonzales signed off on the plan, which was crafted by his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson. Sampson resigned last week amid a political firestorm surrounding the firings.

 

The five-step plan involved notifying Republican home-state senators of the impending dismissals, preparing for potential political upheaval and naming replacements and submitting them to the Senate for confirmation.

 

No, that cannot be.  Less than two weeks ago, Alberto Gonzales said something else -

 

But again, with respect to this whole process, like every CEO, I am ultimately accountable and responsible for what happens within the department. But that is in essence what I knew about the process; was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on. That’s basically what I knew as the Attorney General.

 

… I just described for Pete the extent of my – of the knowledge that I had about the process. I never saw documents. We never had a discussion about where things stood. What I knew was that there was ongoing effort that was led by Mr. Sampson, vetted through the Department of Justice, to ascertain where we could make improvements in U.S. attorney performances around the country.

 

He’s toast. 

 

Or maybe he isn’t. But why did he have to mention that CEO thing – using the same defense Ken Lay trotted out in the Enron trail, there a “conspiracy” waged by short sellers, rogue executives, and the news media, while here we get just rogue executives like Kyle Sampson, Gonzales’ chief of staff who resigned in a flash the week before.

 

The three of four thousand pages of internal emails on the matter that had been dumped on the congress the previous Friday afternoon (another classic) didn’t work out that well. Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall called on his thousands of readers to help plow through those – the new face of investigative reporting. They found a gap – between November 15th and December 4th of last year no emails at all. Conventional reporters started asking questions of Tony Snow in the daily White House press briefing.  Snow said it was probably due to people at the Justice Department taking a long Thanksgiving break – no big deal. The press corps laughed out loud.  That wouldn’t fly.  So release the missing emails on a Friday evening.

 

The idea that the While House is making generous offer to allow key players here – Karl Rove and Harriet Miers – to explain it all to congress, as long as they can do so in private, and not under oath, and with no transcript and no one taking any notes, doesn’t exactly seem so generous now.  The administration is not exactly building trust here.

 

But is this a big deal?  The president has the right to fire anyone he appoints, and he need not explain.  It just looked like he fired folks to stop ongoing prosecutions of actual crimes by key Republicans.  He says no, it was something else – but what that something else might have been keeps changing, as do explanations of who was involved.

 

Over at Time Magazine, Michael Kinsley argues we should all relax – liberals are being dishonest and that if the shoe were on the other foot they would be defending a Democrat in Bush’s position. He riffs on some things David Brooks at the New York Times had been saying – the current defense of all this, that it’s no big deal.

 

But Kinsley adds a kicker about all the apparent lying going on -

 

… one thing does bother me … I seem to have displayed a cavalier attitude about official lying. I stand by my description of the administration as “comically mendacious” – anyone who hasn’t been entertained by the tango of mid-course corrections is missing a real treat. But it’s also serious. I do tend to think that the solution is in electoral politics – punish liars by voting against them – and not in subpoenas and hearings and special prosecutors and impeachment talk and all the other paraphernalia of scandal.

 

Fine, but Digby at Hullabaloo has a different take -

 

This scandal didn’t occur in a vacuum. It’s not as if it is the first instance of this executive branch running wild and doing whatever they want regardless of the rules or the law. This is, after all, an administration that secretly legalized torture. I don’t think it’s wrong to make a fairly knee-jerk assumption that they have an agenda that is not readily apparent and which might run afoul of normal government practices. Every time someone finally manages to turn over a rock they find a fetid pile of corruption and abuse.

 

The Republican Party has become authoritarian and unethical to an extreme. The lessons they have taken from the constitutional usurpation they attempt every time they gain the presidency are clear: they believe they have nothing to lose, at least long term, by abusing the power of their offices. They know that the Democrats will rail ineffectually until they win the presidency, at which point the Republicans will use the tools of scandal against them, even if they have to blow up watermelons in the back yard to do it. There are always some unsavory elements in government, but in the modern era this kind of institutional corruption started in the Nixon administration and then escalated through Reagan and Bush II. (Bush I only played really rough when it looked like he was going to lose his election.) Each of those presidencies had serious scandals concerning abuse of presidential power. I don’t think it’s paranoid to see a pattern.

 

These current scandals are about some fundamental, constitutional issues, not just delicious tabloid investigations into the current sex life or past penny ante financial dealings of the president that allegedly illuminate some vastly important facet of his “character.” Even if the Republicans are conveniently pursuing power for its own sake and are more than willing to jettison all their beliefs about executive privilege and the prerogatives of the “commander in chief” when the shoe is on the other foot, the underlying battle is real. The presidency of the United States is the most powerful office on the planet and determining the boundaries of that power is important, regardless of how droll you find all the political posturing that goes along with that.

 

If Kinsley truly believes that the way to deal with this kind of thing is simply to win elections (and I assume lead by example) then it’s doubly important to rein in this authoritarian impulse and establish with the public that they will not play the game this way. It is not enough in our cynical time to simply say that they will turn over a new leaf. They must show how far the other side has gone and ensure that they are held responsible for it.

 

I’ve watched this creeping authoritarianism for more than thirty years now. It’s not a figment of my imagination and I’m damned tired of jaded political pundits telling me to lighten up. These same people told me that it didn’t matter if Ronald Reagan had a secret government working out of the basement of the white house (Oliver North is so awesome in his uniform!) and it didn’t matter if George Bush Sr pardoned all the criminals in that scandal and it didn’t matter if a partisan congress impeached a president over sex. We were told to “get over it” when Bush’s henchmen manipulated every political lever they could find in his brother’s and father’s political machinery to take office in 2000 – and then decided to govern as if they’d won in a landslide. Then came illegal war, torture, spying on citizens, denial of habeas corpus and all the rest. Excuse me, but I’m not going to sit around and chuckle knowingly that this is “just the way it is.” It isn’t. History proves that very bad things can happen to good countries. Only fools pretend that great nations can’t go down the wrong road.

 

The public is waking up and hopefully they will deny the Republicans power for a while. But until this authoritarian zombie is finally killed, the country is in danger of more of these “misbegotten, stupid, ill-advised wars” and imperial presidencies each time the Republicans manage to sully the Dems sufficiently to regain power.

 

I know that such silly, naive righteous indignation amuses the chattering classes to no end. That’s exactly why so many people believe they are a big part of the problem.

 

There are, then, bigger issues, or as John Dean, who knows about such things from his days in the Nixon White House suggests there’s that issue of something like creeping authoritarianism -

 

And this conflict, in the end, is all about presidential power. Moreover, underlying the Administration’s defense of unchecked power, is a term that has not been heard since Justice Alito’s confirmation hearings: “the unitary executive theory.” Once, conservatives rejected a strong presidency. Today, however, the opposite is the case, and the unitary executive theory is central to their argument.

 

Clashing institutions make good news copy. But understanding why two co-equal branches of our government each have such strong feelings about their need to prevail in this conflict, may help to get to the heart of the matter.

 

That item is long, but worth a look.

 

On the other hand, Josh Marshall makes it simple -

 

First, is this about firings? Kinsley is still mulling over whether this is comparable to Bill Clinton’s entirely normal dismissal of US Attorneys when he came into office. Would it be as big a deal if the Bush White House had fired all the US Attorneys at the start of the second term, as folks at the White House first seemed to have considered?

 

The firings were not the offense. They were the clue that suggested the offense. As the Congressional Research Service has shown, over the last twenty-five years only ten US Attorneys have been dismissed other than at the beginning of a new president’s term of office. And of those eight were for clear cause. For instance, one of them bit a stripper on the arm in a night club. And that, not surprisingly, led to his ouster.

 

He covers the first firing, and then the others -

 

And then on one day, secretly and with no explanation, seven get canned. And several are involved in corruption investigations targeting Republicans. The first public explanation is that they were fired for poor performance. But then it turns most were among the highest performing US Attorneys in the country. Add in the fact that one of the eight was overseeing one of the broadest ranging and historic public corruption cases in US history and … well, it all got our attention.

 

Then, only a little digging revealed clear evidence that two of the US Attorneys were dismissed for not pursuing bogus claims of Democratic ‘voter fraud’.

 

Now, Kinsley seems to have bought in to David Brooks artfully ladled line that some of the firings seem to have been for partisan political reasons (bad) while others were for policy political reasons (not necessarily bad). But with all due respect, like history repeating itself, it only looks that way to those who don’t know the details.

 

One point not many have yet noticed is that the Justice Department actually singled-out David Iglesias for his expertise on voter fraud issues and selected him to train other US Attorneys on voter fraud issues – so great was their confidence in his grasp of the issue and his approach to it on the policy level. The only reason he got canned was because he didn’t indict specific Democrats who Republican operatives and officeholders wanted indicted.

 

With Carol Lam, looking closely even at the emails the White House has allowed the Justice Department to release and it’s clear that most of the Justice Department’s dealings with Lam were coordinating with her on defending the policies she was pursuing against outside criticism. Given that this is being proffered as the after-the-fact excuse for her firing it is surpassingly curious that there appears not to be a single email showing anybody at the Justice Department or the White House asking her to change anything she was doing. The emails that show DOJ and White House officials brainstorming after the fact to come up with reasons for why they fired different prosecutors.

 

It’s not that Lam was fired for not following administration policies on immigration. It’s simply the one instance where the Attorney General and the White House are trying hardest to make that case. And it’s just not convincing.

 

There are many people in this conversation trying to avoid the issues, confuse the issues or just ignore them. And more than a few people are just plain confused. But it’s not that complicated. Administration officials have repeatedly and demonstrably lied about the firings. And there is now abundant evidence of a pattern of using the president’s power to hire and fire US Attorneys to stymie public corruption investigations of Republicans and use the Justice Department to harass Democrats by mounting investigations of demonstrably bogus ‘voter fraud’ claims. It’s really that simple.

 

No one wants to say you’re simply shutting down the courts.  It looks bad. It sounds bad. And it seems to have turned into a habit.

 

But by the end of the weekend it may not matter.