Just Above Sunset

Wednesday, October 17, and no one expected it, but we got the dreaded Press Conference by the President (the link is to the transcript).  But then, we should have expected it –

Bush’s job approval rating fell to 24 percent from last month’s record low for a Zogby poll of 29 percent. A paltry 11 percent gave Congress a positive grade, tying last month’s record low.

“There is a real question among Americans now about how relevant this government is to them,” pollster John Zogby said. “They tell us they want action on health care, education, the war and immigration, but they don’t believe they are going to get it.”

No one believes anyone in office can do much of anything, about anything.  And to put the president’s numbers in perspective, Richard Nixon’s approval rating in the summer of 1973 – the middle of the Watergate scandal – was 39 percent, but the overall disapproval rating for this second George Bush is now sixty-seven percent, so we’re in record territory –

The highest unfavorable rating for any President is earned by Richard Nixon. Sixty percent (60%) of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the only President to resign from office. Thirty-two percent (32%) have a favorable opinion of the man who famously went to China… Lyndon Johnson (42%) and Bill Clinton (41%) are the only other Presidents viewed unfavorably by at least 40% of Americans.

This seems to be an achievement of some sort.  And as the Zogby fellow said, the issue is relevance.  Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post explains why we had a press conference on this particular date in Bush: “I Am Relevant” –

A defensive President Bush insisted that he was still relevant this morning in a news conference dominated by his bitter complaints about the Democratic Congress.

Asked how he found himself vetoing a children’s health insurance bill that had passed Congress with bipartisan support, Bush insisted that using a veto is “one way to ensure I am relevant.”

When a reporter followed up and asked Bush if he felt he was losing leverage and relevance, Bush replied: “I’ve never felt more engaged and more capable of getting the American people to realize there’s a lot of unfinished business.”

Which, let’s be blunt, is hard to believe.

What a guy to do?  The president did say that “now it’s time to put politics aside and seek common ground.”  But then the New York Times reporter, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, asked an obvious follow-up –

This morning, you gave us a pretty scathing report card on Democrats…. I’m wondering, how would you assess yourself in dealing with Democrats this past year? How effective have you been in dealing with them on various issues? And do you think you’ve done a good job in finding common ground?

The answer was to point to all the instances where the Democrats caved in and gave him what he asked for.  They fund they war, and they know they’re dead if they oppose warrantless wiretapping and all the rest.  This is an odd concept of “finding common ground” – it used be called capitulation – but it will do.

And he did say he’s still relevant, as he said he vetoes bills to “ensure that I am relevant” (video at link) –

That’s why the president has a veto. Sometimes the legislative branch wants to go on without the president, pass pieces of legislation, and the president can then use the veto to make sure he’s a part of the process. And that’s what I fully intend to do. I’m going to make sure. And that’s why when I tell you I’m going to sprint to the finish, and finish this job strong, that’s one way to ensure that I am relevant. That’s one way to ensure that I’m in the process. And I intend to use the veto.

The short form – even though Congress seems to be doing what it sees as best, he can still mess anything up, he can stop it cold, even if it’s a good idea.  No one will cut him out.  Like the hapless player cut by the team, he can still sabotage the team bus, or something.  That pleases him.

And you can sense his mood from this –

Reporter: Mr. President, following up on Vladimir Putin for a moment, he said recently that next year, when he has to step down according to the constitution, as the president, he may become prime minister; in effect keeping power and dashing any hopes for a genuine democratic transition there …

Bush: I’ve been planning that myself.

Tim Grieve – “It was a joke (we think).”

Newsweek’s Richard Wolffe asked the question Froomkin says he would have asked –

QUESTION: Thank you, sir. A simple question.

BUSH: Yes?

QUESTION: What’s your definition of -

BUSH: It may require a simple answer.

(LAUGHTER)

QUESTION: What’s your definition of the word torture?

BUSH: Of what?

QUESTION: The word torture, what’s your definition?

BUSH: That’s defined in U.S. law, and we don’t torture.

QUESTION: Can you give me your version of it, sir?

BUSH: No. Whatever the law says.

Froomkin –

Bush has consistently refused to say what he means when he says “we don’t torture,” rendering the phrase essentially meaningless. Saying “whatever the law says” doesn’t clear things up at all. It just means that if we do it, his lawyers have found a way not to call it torture.

It’s a bit of a joke now.  No one much believes anything he says.  He was preening and petulant.  The press seemed uninspired – what’s the point?  But then, for the first time in public, the president specifically warned of the risk of “World War III” if Iran gets nuclear weapons.  That’ll get people’s attention –

I believe that the Iranian - if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace. It would - this is - we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. And I take this very - I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously.

Well, the guy wants to be a newsmaker, even if, as Matthew Yglesias in the Atlantic says, he’s just defining world wars down –

Two points. One: This is inane. World War III? Against Iran? Really? Because Iran seems a lot like a medium-sized middle income country with few military capabilities rather than a near peer-competitor of the sort against which you might fight a world war.

Two: Note where Bush has placed the goalposts here. Not preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon. Preventing Iran from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. I’m not sure what the significance of that switch is, but it seems significant.

And there’s Yglesias’ clarification –

Okay, did some research and reporting into Bush’s statement that Iran must be denied not nuclear weapons, but the “knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” This isn’t an entirely new position from the White House, but it had kind of gone missing from administration rhetoric, so its return to prominence is potentially significant. Specifically, I’m told that the crux of the matter is that there’s no evidence of an active Iranian nuclear weapons program. There is, however, a uranium enrichment program that could at some point be used as part of a weapons program.

But basically were you to want to use military force against the Iranian nuclear weapons program tomorrow, you’d run into the problem that there’s nothing there. If you define the threshold down to some kind of war on knowledge, however, you put yourself in a position where maybe you can define the centrifuges Iran already has as constituting the knowledge they must be denied or at least a program to obtain the knowledge. Thus you have, on the level of rhetoric though not international law or sound diplomacy, the justification for military action.

On the other hand, perhaps Bush just screwed up and doesn’t know what he’s talking about and there’s nothing to worry about. Alternatively, maybe he knows exactly what he’s talking about and we ought to worry. Or maybe we ought to worry that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. At a minimum, I’m kind of worried.

That matches the video.  And Cesca adds his points –

1. Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon, and if they ever developed one, they’d be smart enough to know (despite how we caricaturize Ahmadinejad) that using it would invite their own destruction a thousand times over. Thus, there is no Iranian nuclear threat.

2. Yet the administration is drawing up plans to illegally and preemptively attack anyway, based on the lie that Iran is a nuclear threat.

3. Congress, despite the president’s 24-percent approval rating, won’t stop the White House because of, 1) The Fear, and 2) because Congress has allowed the president and vice president to seize unprecedented power which almost entirely circumvents Article I of the Constitution (among other things).

4. Meanwhile, if we do attack, it appears as if Pooty-Poot might bring Russia in on the Iranian side.

5. And there you go. Knee slapping boners all around. Milk just came out of my nose.

Oh well.  It’s just world war –

Just like so many powerful men, he appears to be able to switch off his conscience (if one exists in the first place). It’s the same switch that allows him to say “we don’t torture,” or to smirk and laugh while discussing Iraq casualties and World War III. … The rest of us - unless we can find a way to stop this Iran drumbeat - won’t be laughing so much.

But perhaps we should lighten up.  And with this particular president, you have to understand he doesn’t like details.  What he probably would have said, if he thought we deserved to know how he was reasoning, was that the man who represents Iran, but doesn’t actually rule the country, has made comments that Israel shouldn’t exist as it is currently configured, and should at some point in the future Iran develop a nuclear weapon they could use it on Israel, if the ayatollahs who run Iran agree to do that, which would assume they’re big on having the rest of the world wipe Iran off the map.  Israel would launch its nukes in retaliation.  Pakistan would launch its nukes as a counter, and then India would nuke Pakistan, and so on.  Russian might nuke us, just to be in the game, and then we’d have to nuke Russia.  So, since you don’t want any of that, Iran must not even have the knowledge of how to build a crude nuke, which they already have, even if they don’t have the means yet to do so.  So we must act now, and stop them from doing what they might be doing, and erase their memories, just like Tommy Lee Jones did to folks who saw too much in that movie Men in Black.

Maybe it’s best he didn’t go into detail.  He wouldn’t be the one giggling.

Anyway, detail-minded people are a bother. Tim Grieve at salon.com pointed out that just days after he was seen on television saying that Americans probably aren’t any safer today than they were when the war in Iraq began, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center has announced his resignation.  That would be Vice Admiral John Scott Redd – he’s been putting off his knee surgery, and he wants to spend more time with his family.  Maybe he’s just fed up.  It’s hard being an appointee in this administration.  You attend to details and you’re gone.

And we got, the days of the odd press conference, one of those “ultimate” appointees –

The Bush administration again has appointed a chief of family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who has been critical of contraception.

Susan Orr, most recently an associate commissioner in the Administration for Children and Families, was appointed Monday to be acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. She will oversee $283 million in annual grants to provide low-income families and others with contraceptive services, counseling and preventive screenings.

There’s a photo at the link.  She’s pleasant-looking woman.  But in a 2001 The Washington Post, Orr cheered a Bush proposal to stop requiring all health insurance plans for federal employees to cover birth control.  Her words at the time – “We’re quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease.”  The item reminds us that no one was happy with the appointment last year of Eric Keroack, a physician who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that opposed the use of birth control, and he resigned in March.  So here we go again.

Amanda at Think Progress notes Orr has called contraceptives of any sort  part of the “culture of death” and Orr will “oversee HHS’s $283 million reproductive-health program, a $30 million program that encourages abstinence among teenagers, and HHS’s Office of Population Affairs, which funds birth control, pregnancy tests, counseling, and screenings for sexually transmitted diseases and HIV.” 

But there will be no birth control – no pills, no condoms, no nothing.  People just shouldn’t “do it” (unless they’re married and God tells them they really have to) – it’s nasty, and there all those possible diseases.  And the item also point out that Orr has also referred to child protection services as “the most intrusive arm of social services.”  Kids – making them is nasty, and once they’re born they’re nasty, and abusive or indifferent parents may really be onto something.  However theologically correct, some might see this as quite mad.  It doesn’t matter.  She’s in.  Score one for the true Christians.

But then, the same day, one other appointment got oddly out of control.  Michael Mukasey, the president’s nominee for attorney general, to replace the hapless Alfredo of Yore, testified about torture –

Mukasey also sharply criticized a Justice Department legal opinion issued early in the Bush administration, and since rescinded, that narrowly defined the acts that constitute torture and laid the legal groundwork for the use of harsh interrogation techniques on U.S. detainees.

Calling the memo “a mistake” and “unnecessary,” Mukasey said that torture violates U.S. laws and pointed to the role of American troops in liberating Nazi concentration camps following World War II. “We didn’t do that so we could then duplicate it ourselves,” he said.

Kevin Drum – “Good for him. It’s refreshing to hear some genuine moral clarity from a high-ranking Republican these days.”

Over at Talking Points Memo you get this summary –

The Bybee memo is “worse than a sin, it’s a mistake,” Mukasey said. He referenced the photographs taken by U.S. troops who liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1945 to document the “barbarism” the U.S. opposed. “They didn’t do that so we could duplicate what we oppose.”

“Duplicate what we opposed?”  That would be Nazi concentration camps, wouldn’t it?   That, to Andrew Sullivan, sounds familiar –

In a Senate floor speech Tuesday, [Senator Dick] Durbin cited an FBI report describing Guantanamo Bay prisoners chained to the floor in the fetal position without food or water and sometimes in extreme temperatures.

“If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control,” he said, “you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings.”

Durbin had to apologize for that, and Sullivan sees the change – “Is it not clear that Mukasey’s and Durbin’s point is exactly the same? And do you recall, as I do, the phenomenal blog-storm and Fox News conniption and outrage from every other pro-torture platform on the web?”

It won’t happen now.  Or maybe it will happen.  It’s hard to tell.

And one of Sullivan’s readers tells Andrew not to get all excited –

I wish I could be sanguine about Mukasey’s testimony that you highlight, but it seems more artful than committal.  Mukasey never alleges - or even implies - that the United States practices torture.  What he offers is an avowal that we don’t torture - without a definition of the term.  He denounces the Bybee memo as faulty but doesn’t address whether the memos or policies that replaced it were valid.  When asked about information obtained by waterboarding, Mukasaey claimed “I don’t know what’s involved in waterboarding” - which is either implausible or, if true, inexcusable.  He adds that he’d be “uncomfortable” with any evidence that was “coerced” without saying whether waterboarding would amount to coercion. Yes, he talks about the horrors of Nazi camps and how we came to understand the importance of not duplicating such horrors, but he never suggests that that’s what’s happened; in fact, all he’s doing is setting an incredibly low bar.

Sullivan says he hopes he himself was naive.  On the other hand, it was one of those days where you take what you can get.

And a bit of intelligent humor helps.  Barack Obama’s brilliant and deadpan response to the news that he is distantly related to Dick Cheney – “Every family has a black sheep.”

Ha! – on any number of levels.

And that saved the day from being a total embarrassment.  The problem is that in the thirteen or more months of the current administration there will be more appointments, and more press conferences.