Like Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, many of us don’t watch the political debates. That’s too painful – the interesting stuff is buried in steaming piles of extraneous matter, in posturing. And it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the Republicans or the Democrats. There’s just too much “filler” – boilerplate posing. It’s best to let someone else collect the interesting stuff, if there is any.
Tuesday, June 5, CNN broadcast the second “debate” – such as it was – of the ten Republicans who would like their party’s nomination for the presidency, and the week before CNN broadcast the ten Democrats who want the same on their side. You’d think that Rick, who, with his wife, was a key person in starting CNN back in 1980, would watch out of professional interest. But no, and does anyone really know anyone at all who watched both from start to finish. You’d have to be mad.
It’s probably best, if you must know what was said, to glance at some video clips, and glance at the accompanying summary –
The third GOP debate is underway and the subject quickly moved to Iran and nuclear weapons. Candidate Duncan Hunter stated that he believes that the United States has the right to preemptively strike Iran to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons, using nuclear weapons, if necessary. While Rudy Giuliani thought conventional weapons would do the trick, he wouldn’t take any options off the table. Rudy then jumps off into fantasy land, claiming Iran can deliver a nuclear missile even though the studies from UN inspectors who have actually been in Iran have said that Iran is years away from having that capability. Then he bizarrely accuses the Democrats of living in the Cold War era of the 1990s. (Earth to Rudy: hard to give Reagan credit for ending the Cold War if we were still living it in the 90’s) Closing strong, Giuliani then attempts to link it all to the alleged “terror plots” at Fort Dix and JFK (see Keith Olbermann’s commentary for how valid the threats were) proclaiming it’s a real war, not a bumper sticker.
Sigh. Digby at Hullabaloo watched it all, and was not impressed –
Well, the debate has wound down and I’m still reeling from hearing about the dire threat from the Mexicans who are trying to steal our way of life. (Or was it the Muslims?) Anyway, the solution to the problem is to outlaw socialized medicine and Chinese New Year. Or something.
The rhetoric coming out of these guys is really quite extreme, even by GOP standards, but I guess that’s just because the front runners are all a bunch of flip-flopping hypocrites who have to fake some kind of red-meat qualifications for the base. They’ve opted for bullying machismo, which is actually quite smart. It’s the tie that binds. They certainly have given up on the “law ‘n order” platform with their nearly unanimous support for a Scooter pardon - especially the ex-federal prosecutor Giuliani who couldn’t stop whining and twisting his little lace hankie about how unfair it all was.
I think McCain did well tonight, with a little of his old fashioned patented “straight talk” about Bush screwing up the war and defending his unpopular stance on immigration. He sounded more like his old self. He apparently isn’t a racist and/or actually recognizes that the Republican Party is busily pounding nails in its own electoral coffins with their rather, shall we say, intemperate views on illegal immigration, considering just how big and growing the Hispanic population in this country is.
He’s still nutty as a fruitcake on Iraq and the GWOT (the “transcendent issues of our time”) which he and Giuliani both discussed with scary evocations of the half-baked, pathetic Fort Dix and JFK “plots,” which just proves how lam-o-rama their argument really is.
The rest, excluding Paul who is increasingly sounding out of place among the beasts, are just a bunch of … standard issue GOPers. Same old shit, different election. Reagan, Reagan, family, taxes, Jesus, Reagan, offense, defense, taxes, Reagan, Jesus. I’ve been listening to their rap for a quarter century, it hasn’t changed. They need an update. Badly.
I’m done. I need to find a shower and a very stiff drink.
Okay, the debate was held on the same day Scooter Libby was sentenced to thirty months in jail, and a quarter million dollar fine, for perjury and obstruction of justice – but he did his job. The CIA covert agent was “outed” in a fit of rage at her husband’s explaining the whole “Saddam is seeking yellowcake uranium in Africa” was a just crap, and that the administration knew it, or should have known it. Libby muddied the waters enough with his fibs and evasions that no one could prove the obvious – the vice president was behind it all. He ruined the woman’s career and stopped her work cold – and her work was stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons technology. But he put the fear of God into anyone else who might point out this or that just wasn’t true. Libby protected the man. It worked.
The obvious problem at the debate was what to say. Perjury and obstruction of justice aren’t that bad? That Libby was a fine fellow and that ought to count for something, but perjury and obstruction of justice are, of course, really bad things. Do you say loyalty to the leader or the cause is more important than breaking any silly old laws? That Saddam Hussein did have a nuclear program and really was buying uranium for it, and all the overwhelming evidence that that is just not so is just wrong? It was a trap. So you support a pardon for Libby, but you try not to say why. They all did support a pardon for Libby. No one had a good reason why, but you say what you think you must. The liberals were picking on one of our guys, after all.
As for the Ron Paul fellow, who last time around, on MSNBC when they hosted the first event, had the temerity to suggest American foreign policy, particularly our post-1991 attacks on Iraq, was a factor behind al-Qaida’s attacks on the United States (discussed previously here), and was excoriated by the manly Rudolph Giuliani, one of CNN’s commentators, Paul Begala, had this to say –
… most policy experts, including the former head of the bin Laden unit, said, in fact, Congressman Paul was right; Mayor Giuliani was wrong.
Rudy does have this knack, shall we say, this proclivity for giving sort of sanctimonious speeches, especially about these horrific emotional events - 9/11 not the first. In 1997, a Palestinian man with a gun shot seven people at the observation tower of the Empire State Building, killed one, wounded six.
Rudy was the mayor. He gave one of those emotional, sanctimonious speeches, calling for - get this - licensing every gun owner in America and - and outlawing every assault weapon, popular, maybe, among liberal Democrats, but death among conservative Republicans.
It’s all silliness. Politicians say what they think they must. Why watch?
Josh Marshall offers one among many reasons why New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg has no future in the national Republican Party. Here he quotes this, on Monday Bloomberg commenting on the JFK bomb plot – “the one where a few Trinidadian ne’er-do-wells who didn’t understand how the jet fuel pipelines worked thought they’d blow up the whole city” –
There are lots of threats to you in the world. There’s the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can’t sit there and worry about everything. Get a life. You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist.
Politicians say what they think they must. When you’re rich beyond the dreams of avarice (as Doctor Johnson put it), and you’re not running for anything, you can say what you want, even things that are true.
As for the Tuesday Ten, discussing how the war in Iraq was a fine idea and maybe we really should nuke Iran while we’re at it, perhaps they should pay attention to the real Tuesday news –
While most observers are focused on the U.S. Congress as it continues to issue new rubber stamps to legitimize Bush’s permanent designs on Iraq, nationalists in the Iraqi parliament - now representing a majority of the body - continue to make progress towards bringing an end to their country’s occupation.
The parliament today passed a binding resolution that will guarantee lawmakers an opportunity to block the extension of the UN mandate under which coalition troops now remain in Iraq when it comes up for renewal in December. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose cabinet is dominated by Iraqi separatists, may veto the measure.
The law requires that any future extensions of the mandate, which have previously been made by Iraq’s Prime Minister, be approved by the parliament. It is an enormous development; lawmakers reached in Baghdad today said that they do in fact plan on blocking the extension of the coalition’s mandate when it comes up for renewal six months from now.
Amazing. The Nouri al-Maliki government is being neutered and the folks who step in could very well soon tell us we’re there illegally – no mandate – and they expect us to leave, immediately. Oops. It didn’t come up at the debate.
And there wasn’t much discussion of the events at Guantanamo, but the legal scholar, Dahlia Lithwick, explains those events -
What do John Ashcroft, Michael Luttig, Alberto Mora, David Petraeus, Robert Gates, Peter Brownback, and Keith Allred have in common? They are all lifelong conservatives and/or belt-and-suspenders, longtime military officers who were willing to both follow and, in their own ways, lead President Bush’s “war on terror.” Until, at least, each in his own way felt compelled to say, “Enough.”
By far, the most stunning aspect of the dismissed charges against Omar Khadr and Salim Ahmed Hamdan - the only two Guantanamo detainees staring down the barrel of a military trial - was that the two military judges in the cases (not one but two, mind you) dismissed them sua sponte, that is to say, without significant briefing or argument from the defense. …. That two military officers - Brownback and Navy Capt. Keith Allred - devised their own rationales for dismissing the charges is an astonishing development. They could have readily allowed these two trials to go forward; it would not have been difficult for them to construe the Military Commissions Act to provide them jurisdiction, especially if they had simply deferred to President Bush’s 2002 determination that all associates and agents of al-Qaida are automatically “unlawful” enemy combatants. Instead, the two judges took it upon themselves to tell the Pentagon to go back to the drawing board and prove that these defendants were not only combatants, but that they had acted unlawfully - or else the tribunal does not even have jurisdiction to go forward with their war-crimes trials.
The whole thing is coming apart, even if one of the Republican Ten, Senator Brownback, say if he becomes president he will double the size of Guantanamo and no one accused of anything will ever get a lawyer.
The other Brownback, and the Allred guy, the military judges, are going the other way –
… they are among the many, many highly conservative legal and career military professionals once willing to follow this president wherever he led them, until suddenly one day when they were not. And just as John Ashcroft and James Comey have recently become the very unlikely poster boys for going toe-to-toe with this president, my guess is that Brownback and Allred were similarly using yesterday’s proceedings to draw a line in the sand.
As evidence Lithwick offers this, an anonymous Air Force veteran characterizing the rulings as a “revolt by career military officers, especially military lawyers, who have previously compromised their integrity and oath of office to support a President and Administration who lied and violated US and international law to take the nation to war and keep it mired there for years.”
And she adds this comment –
Whether or not “revolt” is the right word in this context, it’s a word that’s been used before to describe the flight of loyal conservatives from the senior ranks of the Justice Department.
We may never know what it is that prompted Brownback and Allred to take matters into their own hands; perhaps nothing so dramatic as a late-night hospital visit to rough up the critically ill. But we can speculate as to what about these tribunals led two handpicked military judges to pull the plug. So, a few theories to chew over, starting from the supposition that Allred and Brownback seemingly went a long way toward gumming up a whole lot of future trials at Guantanamo, even as they left the door open for these trials to begin anew.
Yeah, thirty senior Justice Department officials wanted to quit over that late-night hospital visit to get the woozy Ashcroft to sign off on something he had earlier, when thinking clearly and not sedated in intensive care, decided was illegal. That was ugly.
But why this push-back now? Here’s the analysis –
For one thing, they may have simply become disillusioned with a process that is so clearly ends-driven as to have been described as “rigged” by one of the three prosecutors who eventually quit, rather than proceed with the trials. It’s no secret that Defense Secretary Robert Gates wanted to see Guantanamo shut down, or that he was overruled by Vice President Dick Cheney. Why wouldn’t two military men side with Gates in that fight?
That rift between the Defense Department and the Bush administration would only have been compounded by the small-fry cases brought yesterday. If the tribunals exist to try the 9/11 ringleaders, what were the judges to do when faced with Osama Bin Laden’s chauffer and a guy who was 15 when he was picked up on the battlefield?
Why would these judges have believed that the tribunals exist to try the 9/11 ringleaders? Because, as professor Marty Lederman pointed out yesterday, that’s what they’d been promised. Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 commission and until recently a close adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said in a widely publicized speech this April that after 2006, the worst excesses of the president’s anti-terror programs had been cut back. He indicated that the United States had made a “comprehensive adjustment in its approach to the conduct of the armed conflict and associated operations against violent Islamist extremist groups such as al Qaeda.”
So they were going to close Guantanamo, maybe. But at least they’d try only the worst of the worst –
And who did Brownbeck and Allred see in their courtrooms yesterday morning? Osama’s driver. And a Canadian kid who allegedly threw a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier. What must it feel like to be handpicked to pass judgment over the “worst of the worst” and instead find yourself confronted with the worst of the tweens?
These military commissions were intended to try major war criminals, not battlefield combatants. The kid didn’t have a uniform. The other guy was a driver. It seems the definition of major war criminal here was a bit too broad. Actually it was joke. The two judges in this case just had had enough.
Lithwick says the obvious –
It’s not merely that Guantanamo Bay is not helping us in the war on terror. It hurts us in the eyes of the world, every single day that it continues to operate. Jerry-rigged trials there hurt us even more so. That’s why Gates and Rice wanted Guantanamo shut down. They were overruled by the president and Dick Cheney, who cannot seem to understand the difference between refusing to acknowledge a mistake and continuing to make it over and over again.
But there’s something else –
Allred and Brownback may be reminding the president what it means to be a professional. It’s no coincidence that the most vocal rebels around the president’s wartime excesses have come from the ranks of his own military and legal advisers. Regardless of personal ideology or politics, they have devoted their careers to mastering systems and procedures that are greater than the ends sought by the president. Lawyers balk when laws are broken or interpreted beyond all recognition. And soldiers get queasy when the rules are bent in ways that can hurt other soldiers
And overall –
You can characterize these mini-revolts as the far right pushing back against an executive branch that has almost literally lost its mind. Or you can more accurately see it as the professionals ultimately putting their training and principles back into the service of the law or the war, as opposed to the service of this presidency. Bush’s military tribunals, while possessing their own charming “I’ll sew the costumes, you paint the barn” quality, were a mistake from the outset. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that more and more serious professionals are backing away from them. We should merely be amazed that anyone is still prepared to support them at all.
All the guys at the debate thought they were just fine. So be it.
And simultaneous with the debate, the president spoke in Prague - at a conference of democratic activists from around the world.
He renewed his call for “the end of tyranny.” He proclaimed that countries on the “path to freedom … will find a loyal partner in the United States.” To those suffering under tyranny he offered this - “We will never excuse your oppressors, and we will always stand for your freedom.”
Very stirring – but what about our massive aid, including military aid, to Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia? He congratulates Kazakhstan for its political progress, and then he holds a state dinner for the leader of Albania. What is he talking about?
You’ll find a complete analysis here, including this –
Today’s Prague speech is, at best, delusional. “Freedom can be resisted, and freedom can be delayed, but freedom cannot be denied,” Bush said to applause. A noble notion, but no student of history or politics would seriously claim that it’s true.
Then again, if it were true, if - as Bush has said on numerous occasions - freedom is God’s gift and hence the natural state of mankind, then its flowering would be inevitable, and no mere mortal, not even the president of the United States, would have to lift a finger to make it so.
There’s much more, but this too stands out –
“And we stand firmly behind the people of Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq as they defend their democratic gains against extremist enemies.”
Let us examine that last paragraph. One big problem in Lebanon is that, at the start of last summer’s cease-fire, the Western leaders did nothing to help Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s government build his authority in order to neutralize Hezbollah and stave off the influence of Syria and Iran.
As for Iraq, which “extremist enemies” is Bush talking about - the Sunnis that the Shiite militias are battling, the Shiite militias that the Sunnis are battling, the handful of foreign jihadists that both of those militias are sometimes battling, sometimes abetting? In other words, as he has so often in the past, Bush reduced a complex mixture of multiple sectarian conflicts and low-grade civil wars to a black-and-white struggle of freedom fighters versus terrorists.
At one point in his speech, he noted that some critics of his freedom agenda claim “that ending tyranny will unleash chaos,” citing the violence of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon. “But,” Bush said, in rebuttal, “look at who is causing that violence - it’s the terrorists.”
He has a point in Afghanistan - though even there, he fails to note how the Taliban have carved out a position, though opportunistically, in Afghan society. But in Lebanon, even if Hezbollah were the only force unleashing chaos, it must be recognized that they form not only an outlaw militia but also a popular political party with seats in the parliament. In other words, to see electoral democracy and terrorism as incompatible forces - much less to see electoral democracy as the cure for terrorism -is to misunderstand the dynamics of these societies.
Oh heck, there’s no point in applying logic. It’s just words. And the debate was more of the same.
This sort of thing led the Wall Street Journal’s dreamy ultraconservative, Peggy Noonan, who wrote a good chunk of all the speeches Ronald Reagan delivered as president, the week before, to say this –
The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.
What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom - a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don’t need hacks.
One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they’d earned it and could do with it what they liked…
Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.
But you see, she is also personally offended –
The White House doesn’t need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don’t even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.
If this feeling is general, what is a Republican hopeful to do? You can’t promise more of the same, and you cannot call your president an idiot, as that would make those who supported him idiots too.
Mark Levin, addressing the president directly, simply feels betrayed –
You expanded the federal role in education, and we held our nose because of the war. You signed McCain-Feingold in the dead of night, and we held our nose because of the war. You expanded Medicare by adding prescription drugs, and we held our nose because of the war. You increased farm subsidies, and we held our nose because of the war.
Today you disparage us for opposing a massive amnesty program that endangers our economy and national security. Today you even embrace the religion of global warming, a stunning shift from prior policy…
What’s a conservative to do?
James Wolcott has the answer –
We know what conservatives will do. They’ll twine themselves around some other salvation figure - Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson - and convince themselves that they are trailblazers along the One True Way and then feel betrayed all over again when their appointed god turns out to be a passenger in Corporate America’s hip pocket just like all the other fallen messiahs.
In the meantime, I’m enjoying all this gnashing and thrashing on the right as they wake up to reality after having spent so many years in bubble wrap hopping in place.
Yeah, but you can bet he didn’t watch the debate. Watching ten old white men in bubble wrap hopping in place, still, is just depressing.
