Uncut

Salon.com

It’s finally time for Bush to answer questions about Libby
Why not start with releasing the transcripts of Bush and Cheney’s interviews with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald?
By Joe Conason

Jul. 13, 2007 | As far as George W. Bush is concerned, the case of Valerie Plame Wilson has “run its course.” Asked during his Thursday press conference about the morality of White House staff members who leaked Ms. Wilson’s CIA identity during the summer of 2003, he dismissed the issue as if he had never promised to punish those lurking miscreants.

“I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about the testimony that people throughout my administration were forced to give as a result of the special prosecutor,” he shrugged. “I didn’t ask them during that time [about their roles in the leak] and I haven’t asked them since.”

Offering a quip about his “fair and balanced” decision to commute the jail sentence of former vice presidential chief of staff and convicted perjurer I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, he concluded: “We’re going to move on.”

The White House press corps should not accept that puerile and facetious answer.

For four years, every reporter who asked the president or his press secretaries any question about the Wilson matter has received essentially the same non-responsive response: The president and the White House staff could not talk about the matter so long as the special counsel was actively pursuing the case. That tired excuse no longer works.

Now that the leak prosecution has ended with Bush’s silencing of Libby — the only potential stool pigeon who could implicate him and Vice President Cheney in the vicious and unpatriotic “outing” of Valerie Plame Wilson — he says instead that it is time to move on. Yet all of the lingering questions still require real answers.

Those questions began to pile up as long ago as September 2003, even before the Bush administration named U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the Wilson leak as special counsel. That was when Bush reportedly told his aides, including Karl Rove, who was later proved to have leaked Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity to Time magazine, “I want to get to the bottom of this.” Publicly the president complained about the leak and vowed, “If somebody did leak classified information, I’d like to know it, and we’ll take the appropriate action.”

That was also when Bush’s press secretary declared that the president considered the Wilson leak to be “a very serious matter” and stated that the president would fire any official found to be responsible for the leak. “If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration,” said Scott McClellan, then the president’s spokesman. “There’s been nothing, absolutely nothing, brought to our attention to suggest any White House involvement.”

Whether McClellan and Bush were lying back then or not — and they probably were — much information later came to the incurious president’s attention that demonstrated the dishonorable “involvement” of his staff beyond a reasonable doubt. Sworn testimony showed that the leakers included not only Libby, but former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, former press secretary Ari Fleischer, and of course Karl Rove.

All left public service under one circumstance or another, with their reputations dented or destroyed, except for Rove — who has suffered no consequences whatsoever for his role in revealing the identity of a covert CIA agent who devoted 20 years of her life to this country. Now that the president can no longer hide behind the “current prosecution” excuse, he deserves to be asked why Rove is still collecting a paycheck from the U.S. Treasury and continues to hold a security clearance.

Then there is the problem of Vice President Cheney, who obviously orchestrated Libby’s leak to New York Times reporter Judith Miller and the entire campaign against Valerie Plame Wilson. Plame Wilson was a casualty of Cheney’s vendetta against her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who dared to expose the lies and forgeries at the center of the argument for war against Iraq.

During the Libby trial, testimony and evidence indicated that Cheney oversaw the activities of his chief of staff, and later went so far as to order McClellan to “clear” Libby in a press briefing on the case. The defense brought into evidence a note in Cheney’s own handwriting, explaining why he insisted that the White House press staff should defend Libby just as vigorously as Rove — and implicating Bush in the scandal.

Cheney’s angry scribble said, “not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy this Pres. asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.” (That “incompetent” insult was intended for Rove, whom the vice president evidently blamed for the exposure of their conspiracy against the Wilsons.) Although Cheney had crossed out the words “this Pres.” and replaced them with the phrase “that was,” the reference to Bush remained legible and incriminating.

So now is the time to ask the president what Cheney meant when he wrote that little note. Why did the vice president write a note claiming that “this Pres.” had asked Libby to “stick his head in the meat grinder”? Did the president ask Libby to take the fall for others in the White House? Did he know the extent of the vice president’s involvement in the effort to ruin the Wilsons? When exactly did he learn what Cheney, Libby, Rove and Fleischer had done to advance that scheme?

The commutation of Libby’s prison term and the continuing prospect of a possible pardon for the felonious ex-staffer lend fresh relevance to those questions.

Now would also be a proper time to ask both the president and the vice president to release the transcripts of their interviews with Fitzgerald and his staff. According to published reports, the special prosecutor interviewed the president and the vice president during the summer of 2004. Even though Bush reportedly was not under oath during those sessions, to which he was accompanied by private counsel, both he and Cheney were still obliged to tell the truth. Did they?

If all those questions are ever answered, there will still be one more.

Joe and Valerie Wilson served this country faithfully and on some occasions heroically for more than two decades, he in the diplomatic corps and she in the intelligence service. They committed no crime or offense that justified the secret White House campaign to smear them and ruin their careers. Indeed, Joe Wilson continued to serve the interests of the United States when he corrected a crucial remark about Iraq’s pursuit of nuclear weapons in the 2003 State of the Union address — a statement that the White House later admitted to be false.

Why then has the president failed to apologize to them on behalf of himself, his staff and the government of the United States?

SHOVELING COAL FOR SATAN

Christopher Hitchens collects check from Microsoft, calls Moore a coward.
By Matt Taibbi

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental… Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.

—Christopher Hitchens,

Slate.com, on Michael Moore

Well, that’s rich, isn’t it? Christopher Hitchens crawling out of a bottle long enough to denounce Michael Moore as a coward. I can’t imagine anything more uplifting, except maybe a zoo baboon humping the foot of a medical school cadaver.

All journalists are cowards. Hitchens knows it, I know it, everybody in this business knows it. If there were any justice at all, every last goddamn one of us would be lowered, head-first, into a wood-chipper. Over Arizona. Shoot a nice red mist over the whole state, make it arable for a year or two. A year’s worth of fava beans and endive for the children of Bangladesh: I dare anyone in our business to say that that wouldn’t represent a better use of our rotting bodies than the actual fruits of our labor.

No one among us is going to throw that first stone, though. Not even Chris Hitchens, a man who makes a neat living completing advanced Highlights for Children exercises like the following: “Denounce a like-minded colleague, using the words ‘Lugubrious’ and ‘Semienvious.’” Such is the pretense of modern journalism, that we are to be lectured on courage by a man who has had his intellectual face lifted so many times, he can’t close his eyes without opening his mouth. By a man who, if the Soviets had won the Cold War, would be writing breathless features on Eduard Shevardnadze for three bucks a word in Komsomolskaya Vanity Fair (“Georgia on His Mind: Edik Speaks Out.” Photos by Annie Liebowitz…).

Which is fine, good luck to him, mazel tov. Everybody’s got to make a living. But let’s not leave people confused out there. The idea that anyone in today’s media is either courageous or cowardly on the basis of what they write or broadcast is ridiculous.

Hitchens, like me and everyone else out there publishing, lives in a professional world where the idea of courage is submitting nice words about George Bush to the Nation, or maybe a “Rethinking Welfare Reform” piece to the Wall Street Journal. What Hitchens calls courage is really a willingness to offend one’s intellectual constituency, and what he really means by that is honesty—something very different from courage. It’s a nice quality, honesty, and the pundit out there who has it and still manages to make a living is, I guess, to be applauded. But again, let’s not confuse that with courage.

Courage is a willingness to face real risks—your neck, or at the very least, your job. The journalist with courage would have threatened to resign rather than repeat George Bush’s justifications for invasion before it began. I don’t remember anyone resigning last winter. The journalist with courage would threaten to quit rather than do a magazine piece about an advertiser’s product, his fad diet book or his magic-bullet baldness cure. It happens every day, and nobody ever quits over it.

If journalists had courage, they would form unions and refuse to work for any company that made decisions about editorial content based on the bottom line, on profit. Are there individual instances of reporters who quit over this issue? Sure, there are a few. Lowell Bergman walked out on 60 Minutes over this one. And there were those Fox TV reporters in Tampa, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, who famously (and expensively, as it turned out) fell on their swords rather than broadcast a bunch of cuddly bullshit about the Monsanto corporation.

Yes, there are a few isolated vertebrates out there in our business. But it wasn’t like the whole staff of WTVT in Tampa walked out in support of Akre and Wilson. Janitors stick up for each other. Steelworkers stick up for each other. Even camera operators and soundmen stick up for each other. But journalists just sit still in their cubicles with their eyebrows raised, waiting for it all to blow over, in those very rare instances when a colleague walks the plank.

I’ve been around journalists my entire life, since I was a little kid, and I haven’t met more than five in three-plus decades who wouldn’t literally shit from shame before daring to say that their job had anything to do with truth or informing the public. Everyone in the commercial media, and that includes Hitchens, knows what his real job is: feeding the monkey. We are professional space-fillers, frivolously tossing content-pebbles in an ever-widening canyon of demand, cranking out one silly pack-mule after another for toothpaste and sneaker ads to ride on straight into the brains of the stupefied public.

One friend I know describes working in the media as shoveling coal for Satan. That’s about right. A worker in a tampon factory has dignity: He just uses his sweat to make a product, a useful product at that, and doesn’t lie to himself about what he does. In this business we make commodities for sale and, for the benefit of our consciences and our egos, we call them ideas and truth. And then we go on the lecture circuit. But in 99 cases out of 100, the public has more to learn about humanity from the guy who makes tampons.

I’m off on this tangent because I’m enraged by the numerous attempts at verbose, pseudoliterary, “nuanced” criticism of Moore this week by the learned priests of our business. (And no, I’m not overlooking this newspaper.) Michael Moore may be an ass, and impossible to like as a public figure, and a little loose with the facts, and greedy, and a shameless panderer. But he wouldn’t be necessary if even one percent of the rest of us had any balls at all.

If even one reporter had stood up during a pre-Iraq Bush press conference last year and shouted, “Bullshit!” it might have made a difference.

If even one network, instead of cheerily re-broadcasting Pentagon-generated aerial bomb footage, had risked its access to the government by saying to the Bush administration, “We’re not covering the war unless we can shoot anything we want, without restrictions,” that might have made a difference. It might have made this war look like what it is—pointless death and carnage that would have scared away every advertiser in the country—rather than a big fucking football game that you can sell Coke and Pepsi and Scott’s Fertilizer to.

Where are the articles about the cowardice of those people? Hitchens in his piece accuses Moore of errors by omission: How come he isn’t writing about the CNN producers who every day show us gung-ho Army desert rats instead of legless malcontents in the early stages of a lifelong morphine addiction?

Yeah, well, we don’t write about those people, because they’re just doing their jobs, whatever that means. For some reason, we in the media can forgive that. We just can’t forgive it when someone does our jobs for us. Say what you want about Moore, but he picked himself up and did something, something approximating the role journalism is supposed to play. The rest of us—let’s face it—are just souped-up shoe salesmen with lit degrees. Who should shut their mouths in the presence of real people. o

The Domino Effect

The Family Values Team strikes again. My my, what a shock. But….”Clinton did it, too! neener neener neeeeeenerrrr!”

Only today, Florida state Representative Bob Allen (R), who is co-chairman of McCain’s Florida campaign, was arrested in a Titusville park restroom on charges of solicitation after he approached a plain clothes police officer and offered to perform oral sex on the officer for $20.

It’s conceiveable to me that with the recent news of McCain’s flagging campaign this is actually an attempt on the part of the Arizona senator to up the ante on Giuliani. As you know it was only Monday night when Giuliani Southern regional campaign chair, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) admitted to soliciting prostitutes.

In this case, McCain’s campaign is going beyond having a prominent supporter solicit prostitutes to actually having one who appears to be a prostitute, if perhaps only on a freelance basis.

This is a tit for tat that doesn’t seem likely to settle down soon. So let us know if you see any more breaking news.

Late Update: TPM Reader JP notes, perhaps not surprisingly, that the Rainbow Democratic Club, a Dem gay rights group in Central Florida gave Allen its “worst of the worst” rating for his votes on gay issues.

–Josh Marshall

Orlando Sentinel July 11

UPDATE: One of the most revealing stories ever wri…

UPDATE: One of the most revealing stories ever written about Vitter was this lengthy profile by Mary Jacoby in Salon as Vitter’s election to the Senate in 2004 appeared certain. This is how Jacoby described Vitter and his campaign:

A family-values far-right conservative named David Vitter appears headed for victory on Tuesday in the U.S. Senate race in Louisiana. . . . He presents himself as a morally righteous, clean-cut family man, and his wife and three young children have become virtual campaign props. . . .
As for his background, she noted:
In Congress, Vitter became a reliable vote for the extreme right, earning a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union in 2002. He vowed to outlaw abortion in almost all cases, even when pregnancy results from rape or incest; his only exception was to save the life of the mother. And — with an eye on the governor’s office — he continued the crusade against gambling that he’d started in 1993 with the ethics complaint against Gov. Edwin Edwards.
But most amazing of all is this charming incident that occurred back in 1999, when Bill Clinton’s adultery was on the mind of every good, righteous, Southern Republican Christian Values Voter:
As Vitter geared up in 2002 to run for governor, his bitter race against Treen came back to haunt him. A Treen supporter, local Republican Party official Vincent Bruno, blurted out on a radio show that he believed Vitter had once had an extramarital affair.

The Louisiana Weekly newspaper followed up. Bruno told the paper that the young woman had contacted the Treen campaign in 1999 because she was upset that Vitter was portraying himself as a family-values conservative and trotting out his wife and children for campaign photo ops. Bruno, who declined to comment for this story, and John Treen interviewed the woman, who said she had worked under the name “Leah.”

But after nearly a year of regular paid assignations with Vitter, the lawmaker asked her to divulge her real name, according to Treen, citing the account he said she gave him. Her name was Wendy Cortez, Treen said. She said Vitter’s response was electric. “He said, ‘Oh, my God! I can’t see you anymore,” John Treen told me, citing the woman’s account to him and noting that Vitter’s wife is also named Wendy. And Wendy Vitter does not appear to be the indulgent type.

Asked by an interviewer in 2000 whether she could forgive her husband if she learned he’d had an extramarital affair, as Hillary Clinton and Bob Livingston’s wife had done, Wendy Vitter told the Times-Picayune: “I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary. If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.”

Indeed. The one group in this country most offended by Bill Clinton’s dalliances were the salt-of-the-earth Southern Christian conservative voters for whom family values and traditional marriages are the most pressing political issue. Jacoby also noted this in her article:
Vitter, Bruno and others interviewed the alleged prostitute several times in 1999. She also met with a respected local television reporter, Richard Angelico, the Louisiana Weekly said. But Angelico declined to run with the story after she would not agree to go on camera, the paper said. Vitter denied the allegations.

But shortly before the Louisiana Weekly was set to publish its story, he dropped out of the governor’s race, saying he needed to deal with marital problems. “Our [marriage] counseling sessions have … led us to the rather obvious conclusion that it’s not time to run for governor,” Vitter said at the time.

In Louisiana, Vitter carried on a year-long affair with a prostitute in 1999. Then ran for the House as a hard-core social conservative candidate, parading around his wife and kids as props and leading the public crusade in defense of traditional marriage. Then, in Washington, he became a client of Deborah Palfrey’s. Then he announced that amending the Constitution to protect traditional marriage was the most important political priority the country faces. Rush Limbaugh, Fred Thompson and Newt Gingrich supported the same amendment. Glenn Greenwald

It looks like another DOJ attorney is about to be …

It looks like another DOJ attorney is about to be politically terminated, I mean, fired for poor performance, I mean, removed so someone else can have a turn at bat, I mean…..

Bush justice is a national disgrace
By John S. Koppel (Koppel has been a civil appellate attorney with the Department of Justice since 1981)
The Denver Post: Article Last Updated: 07/05/2007 11:48:30 PM MDT

As a longtime attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, I can honestly say that I have never been as ashamed of the department and government that I serve as I am at this time.

The public record now plainly demonstrates that both the DOJ and the government as a whole have been thoroughly politicized in a manner that is inappropriate, unethical and indeed unlawful. The unconscionable commutation of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s sentence, the misuse of warrantless investigative powers under the Patriot Act and the deplorable treatment of U.S. attorneys all point to an unmistakable pattern of abuse.

In the course of its tenure since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has turned the entire government (and the DOJ in particular) into a veritable Augean stable on issues such as civil rights, civil liberties, international law and basic human rights, as well as criminal prosecution and federal employment and contracting practices. It has systematically undermined the rule of law in the name of fighting terrorism, and it has sought to insulate its actions from legislative or judicial scrutiny and accountability by invoking national security at every turn, engaging in persistent fearmongering, routinely impugning the integrity and/or patriotism of its critics, and protecting its own lawbreakers. This is neither normal government conduct nor “politics as usual,” but a national disgrace of a magnitude unseen since the days of Watergate – which, in fact, I believe it eclipses.

In more than a quarter of a century at the DOJ, I have never before seen such consistent and marked disrespect on the part of the highest ranking government policymakers for both law and ethics. It is especially unheard of for U.S. attorneys to be targeted and removed on the basis of pressure and complaints from political figures dissatisfied with their handling of politically sensitive investigations and their unwillingness to “play ball.” Enough information has already been disclosed to support the conclusion that this is exactly what happened here, at least in the case of former U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias of New Mexico (and quite possibly in several others as well). Law enforcement is not supposed to be a political team sport, and prosecutorial independence and integrity are not “performance problems.”

In his long-awaited but uninformative testimony concerning the extraordinary firings of U.S. attorneys, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales did not allay these concerns. Indeed, he faced a no-win situation. If he testified falsely regarding his alleged lack of recollection and lack of involvement, he perjured himself and lied to both Congress and the American people. On the other hand, if he told the truth, he clearly has been derelict in the performance of his duties and is not up to the job. Either way, his fitness to serve is now in doubt.

Tellingly, in his congressional testimony, D. Kyle Sampson (the junior aide to whom the attorney general delegated vast authority) expressed the view that the distinction between “performance” considerations and “political” considerations was “largely artificial.” This attitude, however, is precisely the problem. The administration that Sampson served has elided the distinction between government performance and politics to an unparalleled extent (just as it has blurred the boundaries between the White House counsel’s office and the attorney general’s office). And it is no answer to say that U.S. attorneys are political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president. The point that is lost on those who make this argument is that U.S. attorneys must not serve partisan purposes or advance a partisan agenda – which has nothing to do with requiring them to promote an administration’s legitimate policy priorities.

As usual, the administration has attempted to minimize the significance of its malfeasance and misfeasance, reciting its now-customary “mistakes were made” mantra, accepting purely abstract responsibility without consequences for its actions, and making hollow vows to do better. However, the DOJ Inspector General’s Patriot Act report (which would not even have existed if the administration had not been forced to grudgingly accept a very modest legislative reporting requirement, instead of being allowed to operate in its preferred secrecy), the White House-DOJ e-mails, and now the Libby commutation merely highlight yet again the lawlessness, incompetence and dishonesty of the present executive branch leadership.

They also underscore Congress’ lack of wisdom in blindly trusting the administration, largely rubber-stamping its legislative proposals, and essentially abandoning the congressional oversight function for most of the last six years. These are, after all, the same leaders who brought us the WMD fiasco, the unnecessary and disastrous Iraq war, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, warrantless domestic NSA surveillance, the Valerie Wilson leak, the arrest of Brandon Mayfield, and the Katrina response failure. The last thing they deserve is trust.

The sweeping, judicially unchecked powers granted under the Patriot Act should neither have been created in the first place nor permanently renewed thereafter, and the Act – which also contributed to the ongoing contretemps regarding the replacement of U.S. attorneys, by changing the appointment process to invite political abuse – should be substantially modified, if not scrapped outright. And real, rather than symbolic, responsibility should be assigned for the manifold abuses. The public trust has been flagrantly violated, and meaningful accountability is long overdue. Officials who have brought into disrepute both the Department of Justice and the administration of justice as a whole should finally have to answer for it – and the misdeeds at issue involve not merely garden-variety misconduct, but multiple “high crimes and misdemeanors,” including war crimes and crimes against humanity.

I realize that this constitutionally protected statement subjects me to a substantial risk of unlawful reprisal from extremely ruthless people who have repeatedly taken such action in the past. But I am confident that I am speaking on behalf of countless thousands of honorable public servants, at Justice and elsewhere, who take their responsibilities seriously and share these views. And some things must be said, whatever the risk.

The views presented in this essay are not representative of the Department of Justice or its employees but are instead the personal views of its author.

The Invincible President How the supposed "uni…

The Invincible President

How the supposed “uniter” consolidated his power by fostering division.

Ezra Klein | July 5, 2007 | web only

“President Bush’s decision to commute the sentence of I. Lewis Libby Jr. was the act of a liberated man,” wrote The New York Times. “A leader who knows that, with 18 months left in the Oval Office and only a dwindling band of conservatives still behind him, he might as well do what he wants.”

If the Buddha and Machiavelli had a child, this would be the type of liberation he’d speak about: Liberation from the suffering imposed by democratic checks and balances. It is a liberation George W. Bush has pursued with a single-minded vigor. From the beginning, he has consciously sought to govern from division, realizing early on that popularity can actually constrain an administration, and consensus is just another word for compromise.

And now, in the latter half of his second term, at 20-some percent in the polls, he has achieved full liberation from shackles of public opinion and congressional approval. In his solitude, he is virtually invincible.

Among the first to notice this strange strategy was The Prospect’s own Mark Schmitt. Back in 2004, despite the GOP’s control of all three branches of government, he observed that they seemed to be passing legislation by surprisingly slim margins.

“Hastert and DeLay’s insight,” wrote Schmitt, “seems to be that a bill that gets 218 votes in the House is just as much the law as one that gets 430. And for every vote they add on to the necessary minimum majority, they might have to compromise in some unnecessary way, whether with Democrats or their own fiscal conservatives. In other words, they see every vote over a bare majority as the equivalent of leaving money on the table or overbidding in an auction.”

This was a radical shift. It used to be that the parties sought consensus, seeking safety in popularity. If the opposition had bought into your bill, they couldn’t campaign against it. What the Republican Party, under the leadership of Bush and Rove, realized, was that they didn’t have to campaign on their legislation. They could campaign on the perfidy of the opposition.

And if that was to be your strategy, there was no sense in letting the other party sign onto your legislation — that would actually undermine your electoral appeal. So bills that could have garnered Democratic votes were twisted until no Democrat could, in good conscience, say “aye.” Perhaps the best example of this strategy was the Department of Homeland Security, a Democratic idea that the White House first opposed, and then inserted a union-busting provision into, so Democrats had to fight against a broadly popular idea that they, at base, supported. That bill could have passed with overwhelming support. It was a conscious decision to make it a partisan issue so it could be used as a cudgel in the 2002 elections.

That, however, was a majoritarian strategy. The 2006 elections marked the end of its usefulness. Now that Democrats held the committee chairmanships and wrote the legislation, the White House couldn’t freeze them out of the process and create bills they’d oppose. But there were still multiple paths open to the increasingly unpopular president. One was to begin working, in a serious and bipartisan way, with the Democrats. This is what Ronald Reagan often did with his Democratic Congress, and it led to some genuinely decent advances in public policy, including the 1986 tax reform, which hugely expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit and raised rates on corporations, and the bipartisan Greenspan Commission, which gave Social Security a $165 billion bailout and established the trust fund financing system that’s sustained the program ever since.

After the Democrats took Congress, George W. Bush could have done the same. Indeed, he could have pushed further, as he was already in his second term, and didn’t need to worry about reelection. He could have resolved to spend his final years pushing policy forward, and created genuinely bipartisan commissions to resolve Medicare’s financing crisis, to clean the tax code and reform the Alternative Minimum Tax, and to end the war in Iraq. Instead, he did precisely the opposite.

To understand how, it’s necessary to appreciate George Bush’s almost unique circumstances. There are generally a couple democratic checks on a president’s power: his desire to retain political capital with Congress in order to pass legislation; his need to retain popularity in order more effectively advocate for his agenda; and his wish to improve the fortunes of his party and ensure the ascension of his vice-president.

Bush is constrained by none of those. He has largely given up on passing legislation through Congress, preferring instead to focus on those portions of his agenda that require relatively little in the way of congressional involvement — notably the continuation of the Iraq War, where Democrats would effectively need a veto-proof majority to stop him.

When he does go through Congress, he’s been attaching “signing statements” to direct courts to interpret the legislation in a way contrary to the text and favorable to the president. This has so enraged some senators that Republican Arlen Spector is now sponsoring legislation to stop it.

Bush has embraced this descent into unpopularity, eschewing even a hint of compliance with public preferences for withdrawal, or even drawdown, in Iraq. His vice-president isn’t running to succeed him, and as the immigration debacle proved, he’s grown uninterested in the future of the Republican Party.

All of which means he is completely free. Save for impeachment, he is utterly liberated from the natural democratic checks on executive behavior. There is nothing that congressional Democrats or the electorate can take from him that he has not already taken from himself. And, perversely, that gives him extraordinary freedom of movement. Not on all issues — he will never fix Medicare or solve the immigration crisis. But on Iraq, he is virtually untouchable. And in the arrogation of power to the executive — a longtime Bush and Cheney obsession, which ranges from secret wiretapping without FISA approval to the commutation of Libby’s sentence — there is nothing standing before their consolidation of authority.

Bush, as has so often been remarked, is a uniter, not a divider. He has united the country against him. But he has found power in division, in lonesomeness, in unpopularity. He realized that a narrow loss in the 2000 election meant he didn’t need to govern so as to retain a robust majority. He understood that legislation didn’t need as many votes as possible, it merely required as many votes as necessary. And he figured out that a lame duck president who polls in the 20s need never make another compromise — and so need never kowtow to a disagreeable electorate.

This will be his legacy, as it was, in the end, his genius. While Nixon famously pursued the Southern strategy because he realized that if he broke the country into pieces, his piece would be bigger, Bush broke the country into pieces, and embraced the smaller half, and then a mere quarter. He made the executive branch the minority party, and in doing, freed himself from many of the constraints of democracy. Truly, he has achieved a Machiavellian enlightenment, a state of perfect zen-like detachment from democracy.

Honestly, I would have preferred if he’d simply been raptured up to heaven.

The Unsung Gods-of-Rock: It’s Spinal Tap

The Unsung Gods-of-Rock: It’s Spinal Tap

Live Earth Pledge 1.To demand that my country joi…

Live Earth Pledge

1.To demand that my country join an international treaty within the next 2 years that cuts global warming pollution by 90% in developed countries and by more than half worldwide in time for the next generation to inherit a healthy earth;

2.To take personal action to help solve the climate crisis by reducing my own CO2 pollution as much as I can and offsetting the rest to become “carbon neutral;”

3.To fight for a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store the CO2;

4.To work for a dramatic increase in the energy efficiency of my home, workplace, school, place of worship, and means of transportation;

5.To fight for laws and policies that expand the use of renewable energy sources and reduce dependence on oil and coal;

6.To plant new trees and to join with others in preserving and protecting forests; and,

7.To buy from businesses and support leaders who share my commitment to solving the climate crisis and building a sustainable, just, and prosperous world for the 21st century.

Weekend Reading – The Late David Halberstam

The History Boys

In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush and his inner circle have been feeding the press with historical parallels: he is Harry Truman—unpopular, besieged, yet ultimately to be vindicated—while Iraq under Saddam was Europe held by Hitler. To a serious student of the past, that’s preposterous. Writing just before his untimely death, David Halberstam asserts that Bush’s “history,” like his war, is based on wishful thinking, arrogance, and a total disdain for the facts.
by David Halberstam August 2007

We are a long way from the glory days of Mission Accomplished, when the Iraq war was over before it was over—indeed before it really began—and the president could dress up like a fighter pilot and land on an aircraft carrier, and the nation, led by a pliable media, would applaud. Now, late in this sad, terribly diminished presidency, mired in an unwinnable war of their own making, and increasingly on the defensive about events which, to their surprise, they do not control, the president and his men have turned, with some degree of desperation, to history. In their view Iraq under Saddam was like Europe dominated by Hitler, and the Democrats and critics in the media are likened to the appeasers of the 1930s. The Iraqi people, shorn of their immensely complicated history, become either the people of Europe eager to be liberated from the Germans, or a little nation that great powerful nations ought to protect. Most recently in this history rummage sale—and perhaps most surprisingly—Bush has become Harry Truman.

Illustrations by Edward Sorel.
We have lately been getting so many history lessons from the White House that I have come to think of Bush, Cheney, Rice, and the late, unlamented Rumsfeld as the History Boys. They are people groping for rationales for their failed policy, and as the criticism becomes ever harsher, they cling to the idea that a true judgment will come only in the future, and history will save them.

Ironically, it is the president himself, a man notoriously careless about, indeed almost indifferent to, the intellectual underpinnings of his actions, who has come to trumpet loudest his close scrutiny of the lessons of the past. Though, before, he tended to boast about making critical decisions based on instinct and religious faith, he now talks more and more about historical mandates. Usually he does this in the broadest—and vaguest—sense: History teaches us … We know from history … History shows us. In one of his speaking appearances in March 2006, in Cleveland, I counted four references to history, and what it meant for today, as if he had had dinner the night before with Arnold Toynbee, or at the very least Barbara Tuchman, and then gone home for a few hours to read his Gibbon.

I am deeply suspicious of these presidential seminars. We have, after all, come to know George Bush fairly well by now, and many of us have come to feel—not only because of what he says, but also because of the sheer cockiness in how he says it—that he has a tendency to decide what he wants to do first, and only then leaves it to his staff to look for intellectual justification. Many of us have always sensed a deep and visceral anti-intellectual streak in the president, that there was a great chip on his shoulder, and that the burden of the fancy schools he attended—Andover and Yale—and even simply being a member of the Bush family were too much for him. It was as if he needed not only to escape but also to put down those of his peers who had been more successful. From that mind-set, I think, came his rather unattractive habit of bestowing nicknames, most of them unflattering, on the people around him, to remind them that he was in charge, that despite their greater achievements they still worked for him.

He is infinitely more comfortable with the cowboy persona he has adopted, the Texas transplant who has learned to speak the down-home vernacular. “Country boy,” as Johnny Cash once sang, “I wish I was you, and you were me.” Bush’s accent, not always there in public appearances when he was younger, tends to thicken these days, the final g’s consistently dropped so that doing becomes doin’, going becomes goin’, and making, makin’. In this lexicon al-Qaeda becomes “the folks” who did 9/11. Unfortunately, it is not just the speech that got dumbed down—so also were the ideas at play. The president’s world, unlike the one we live in, is dangerously simple, full of traps, not just for him but, sadly, for us as well.

When David Frum, a presidential speechwriter, presented Bush with the phrase “axis of evil,” to characterize North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, it was meant to recall the Axis powers of World War II. Frum was much praised, for it is a fine phrase, perfect for Madison Avenue. Of course, the problem is that it doesn’t really track. This new Axis turned out to contain, apparently much to our surprise, two countries, Iraq and Iran, that were sworn enemies, and if you moved against Iraq, you ended up de-stabilizing it and involuntarily strengthening Iran, the far more dangerous country in the region. While “axis of evil” was intended to serve as a sort of historical banner, embodying the highest moral vision imaginable, it ended up only helping to weaken us.

Despite his recent conversion to history, the president probably still believes, deep down, as do many of his admirers, that the righteous, religious vision he brings to geopolitics is a source of strength—almost as if the less he knows about the issues the better and the truer his decision-making will be. Around any president, all the time, are men and women with different agendas, who compete for his time and attention with messy, conflicting versions of events and complicated facts that seem all too often to contradict one another. With their hard-won experience the people from the State Department and the C.I.A. and even, on occasion, the armed forces tend to be cautious and short on certitude. They are the kind of people whose advice his father often took, but who in the son’s view use their knowledge and experience merely to limit a president’s ability to act. How much easier and cleaner to make decisions in consultation with a higher authority.

Therefore, when I hear the president cite history so casually, an alarm goes off. Those who know history best tend to be tempered by it. They rarely refer to it so sweepingly and with such complete confidence. They know that it is the most mischievous of mistresses and that it touts sure things about as regularly as the tip sheets at the local track. Its most important lessons sometimes come cloaked in bitter irony. By no means does it march in a straight line toward the desired result, and the good guys do not always win. Occasionally it is like a sport with upsets, in which the weak and small defeat the great and mighty—take, for instance, the American revolutionaries vanquishing the British Army, or the Vietnamese Communists, with their limited hardware, stalemating the mighty American Army.

There was, I thought, one member of the first President Bush’s team who had a real sense of history, a man of intellectual superiority and enormous common sense. (Naturally, he did not make it onto the Bush Two team.) That was Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush’s national-security adviser. Scowcroft was so close to the senior Bush that they collaborated on Bush’s 1998 presidential memoir, A World Transformed. Scowcroft struck me as a lineal descendant of Truman’s secretary of state George Catlett Marshall, arguably the most extraordinary of the postwar architects of American foreign policy. Marshall was a formidable figure, much praised for his awesome sense of duty and not enough, I think, for his intellect. If he lacked the self-evident brilliance of George Kennan (the author of Truman’s Communist-containment policy), he had a remarkable ability to shed light on the present by extrapolating from the the past.

Like Marshall, I think, Scowcroft has a sense of history in his bones, even if his are smaller lessons, learned piece by piece over a longer period of time. His is perhaps a more pragmatic and less dazzling mind, but he saw all the dangers of the 2003 move into Iraq, argued against the invasion, and for his troubles was dismissed as chairman of the prestigious President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

I. The Truman Analogy
Recently, Harry Truman, for reasons that would surely puzzle him if he were still alive, has become the Republicans’ favorite Democratic president. In fact, the men around Bush who attempt to feed the White House line to journalists have begun to talk about the current president as a latter-day Truman: Yes, goes the line, Truman’s rise to an ever more elevated status in the presidential pantheon is all ex post facto, conferred by historians long after he left office a beleaguered man, his poll numbers hopelessly low. Thus Bush and the people around him predict that a similar Trumanization will ride to the rescue for them.

I’ve been living with Truman on and off for the last five years, while I was writing a book on the Korean War, The Coldest Winter [to be published in September by Hyperion], and I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between Truman and Bush and their respective wars, Korea and Iraq. Yes, like Bush, Truman was embattled, and, yes, his popularity had plummeted at the end of his presidency, and, yes, he governed during an increasingly unpopular war. But the similarities end there.

Even before Truman sent troops to Korea, in 1950, the national political mood was toxic. The Republicans had lost five presidential elections in a row, and Truman was under fierce partisan assault from the Republican far right, which felt marginalized even within its own party. It seized on the dubious issue of Communist subversion—especially with regard to China—as a way of getting even. (Knowing how ideological both Bush and Cheney are, it is easy to envision them as harsh critics of Truman at that moment.)

Truman had inherited General Douglas MacArthur, “an untouchable,” in Dwight Eisenhower’s shrewd estimate, a man who was by then as much myth and legend as he was flesh and blood. The mastermind of America’s victory in the Pacific, MacArthur was unquestionably talented, but also vainglorious, highly political, and partisan. Truman had twice invited him to come home from Japan, where, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, he was supervising the reconstruction, to meet with him and address a joint session of Congress. Twice MacArthur turned him down, although a presidential invitation is really an order. MacArthur was saving his homecoming, it was clear, for a more dramatic moment, one that might just have been connected to a presidential run. He not only looked down on Truman personally, he never really accepted the primacy of the president in the constitutional hierarchy. For a president trying to govern during an extremely difficult moment in international politics, it was a monstrous political equation.

Truman had been forced into the Korean War in 1950 when the Chinese authorized the North Koreans to cross the 38th parallel and attack South Korea. But MacArthur did not accept the president’s vision of a limited war in Korea, and argued instead for a larger one with the Chinese. Truman wanted none of that. He might have been the last American president who did not graduate from college, but he was quite possibly our best-read modern president. History was always with him. With MacArthur pushing for a wider war with China, Truman liked to quote Napoleon, writing about his disastrous Russian adventure: “I beat them in every battle, but it does not get me anywhere.”

In time, MacArthur made an all-out frontal challenge to Truman, criticizing him to the press, almost daring the president to get rid of him. Knowing that the general had title to the flag and to the emotions of the country, while he himself merely had title to the Constitution, Truman nonetheless fired him. It was a grave constitutional crisis—nothing less than the concept of civilian control of the military was at stake. If there was an irony to this, it was that MacArthur and his journalistic boosters, such as Time-magazine owner Henry Luce, always saw Truman as the little man and MacArthur as the big man. (“MacArthur,” wrote Time at the moment of the firing, “was the personification of the big man, with the many admirers who look to a great man for leadership.… Truman was almost a professional little man.”) But it was Truman’s decision to meet MacArthur’s challenge, even though he surely knew he would be the short-term loser, that has elevated his presidential stock.

George W. Bush’s relationship with his military commander was precisely the opposite. He dealt with the ever so malleable General Tommy Franks, a man, Presidential Medal of Freedom or no, who is still having a difficult time explaining to his peers in the military how Iraq happened, and how he agreed to so large a military undertaking with so small a force. It was the president, not the military or the public, who wanted the Iraq war, and Bush used the extra leverage granted him by 9/11 to get it. His people skillfully manipulated the intelligence in order to make the war seem necessary, and they snookered the military on force levels and the American public on the cost of it all. The key operative in all this was clearly Vice President Cheney, supremely arrogant, the most skilled of bureaucrats, seemingly the toughest tough guy of them all, but eventually revealed as a man who knew nothing of the country he wanted to invade and what that invasion might provoke.

II. The New Red-Baiting
If Bush takes his cues from anyone in the Truman era, it is not Truman but the Republican far right. This can be seen clearly from one of his history lessons, a speech the president gave on a visit to Riga, Latvia, in May 2005, when, in order to justify the Iraq intervention, he cited Yalta, the 1945 summit at which Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill met. Hailing Latvian freedom, Bush took a side shot at Roosevelt (and, whether he meant to or not, at Churchill, supposedly his great hero) and the Yalta accords, which effectively ceded Eastern Europe to the Soviets. Yalta, he said, “followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.”

This is some statement. Yalta is connected first to the Munich Agreement of 1938 (in which the Western democracies, at their most vulnerable and well behind the curve of military preparedness, ceded Czechoslovakia to Hitler), then, in the same breath, Bush blends in seamlessly (and sleazily) the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the temporary and cynical agreement between the Soviets and Nazis allowing the Germans to invade Poland and the Soviets to move into the Baltic nations. And from Molotov-Ribbentrop we jump ahead to Yalta itself, where, Bush implies, the two great leaders of the West casually sat by and gave away vast parts of Europe to the Soviet Union.

After some 60 years Yalta has largely slipped from our political vocabulary, but for a time it was one of the great buzzwords in American politics, the first shot across the bow by the Republican right in their long, venomous, immensely destructive assault upon Roosevelt (albeit posthumously), Truman, and the Democratic Party as soft on Communism—just as today’s White House attacks Democrats and other critics for being soft on terrorism, less patriotic, defeatists, underminers of the true strength of our country. Crucial to the right’s exploitation of Yalta was the idea of a tired, sick, and left-leaning Roosevelt having given away too much and betraying the people of Eastern Europe, who, as a result, had to live under the brutal Soviet thumb—a distortion of history that resonated greatly with the many Eastern European ethnic groups in America, whose people, blue-collar workers, most of them, had voted solidly Democratic.

The right got away with it, because, of all the fronts in the Second World War, the one least known in this country—our interest tends to disappear for those battles in which we did not participate—is ironically the most important: the Eastern Front, where the battle between the Germans and Russians took place and where, essentially, the outcome of the war was decided. It began with a classic act of hubris—Hitler’s invasion of Russia, in June 1941, three years before we landed our troops in Normandy. Some three million German troops were involved in the attack, and in the early months the penetrations were quick and decisive. Minsk was quickly taken, the Germans crossed the Dnieper by July 10, and Smolensk fell shortly after. Some 700,000 men of the Red Army, its leadership already devastated by the madness of Stalin’s purges, were captured by mid-September 1941. The Russian troops fell back and moved as much of their industry back east as they could. Then, slowly, the Russian lines stiffened, and the Germans, their supply lines too far extended, faltered as winter came on. The turning point was the Battle of Stalingrad, which began in late August 1942. It proved to be the most brutal battle of the war, with as many as two million combatants on both sides killed and wounded, but in the end the Russians held the city and captured what remained of the German Army there.

In early 1943, the Red Army was on the offensive, the Germans in full retreat. By the middle of 1944, the Russians had 120 divisions driving west, some 2.3 million troops against an increasingly exhausted German Army of 800,000. By mid-July 1944, as the Allies were still trying to break out of the Normandy hedgerows, the Red Army was at the old Polish-Russian border. By the time of Yalta, they were closing in on Berlin. A month earlier, in January 1945, Churchill had acknowledged the inability of the West to limit the Soviet reach into much of Eastern and Central Europe. “Make no mistake, all the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be Bolshevized, and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for Poland either.”

Yalta reflected not a sellout but a fait accompli.

President Bush lives in a world where in effect it is always the summer of 1945, the Allies have just defeated the Axis, and a world filled with darkness for some six years has been rescued by a new and optimistic democracy, on its way to becoming a superpower. His is a world where other nations admire America or damned well ought to, and America is always right, always on the side of good, in a world of evil, and it’s just a matter of getting the rest of the world to understand this. One of Bush’s favorite conceits, used repeatedly in his speeches, is that democracies are peaceful and don’t go to war against one another. Most citizens of the West tend to accept this view without question, but that is not how most of Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East, having felt the burden of the white man’s colonial rule for much of the past two centuries, see it. The non-Western world does not think of the West as a citadel of pacifism and generosity, and many people in the U.S. State Department and the different intelligence agencies (and even the military) understand the resentments and suspicions of our intentions that exist in those regions. We are, you might say, fighting the forces of history in Iraq—religious, cultural, social, and inevitably political—created over centuries of conflict and oppressive rule.

The president tends to drop off in his history lessons after World War II, especially when we get to Vietnam and things get a bit murkier. Had he made any serious study of our involvement there, he might have learned that the sheer ferocity of our firepower created enemies of people who were until then on the sidelines, thereby doing our enemies’ recruiting for them. And still, today, our inability to concentrate such “shock and awe” on precisely whom we would like—causing what is now called collateral killing—creates a growing resentment among civilians, who may decide that whatever values we bring are not in the end worth it, because we have also brought too much killing and destruction to their country. The French fought in Vietnam before us, and when a French patrol went through a village, the Vietminh would on occasion kill a single French soldier, knowing that the French in a fury would retaliate by wiping out half the village—in effect, the Vietminh were baiting the trap for collateral killing.

III. The Perils of Empire
You don’t hear other members of the current administration citing the lessons of Vietnam much, either, especially Cheney and Karl Rove, both of them gifted at working the bureaucracy for short-range political benefits, both highly partisan and manipulative, both unspeakably narrow and largely uninterested in understanding and learning about the larger world. As Joan Didion pointed out in her brilliant essay on Cheney in The New York Review of Books, it was Rumsfeld and Cheney who explained to Henry Kissinger, not usually slow on the draw when it came to the political impact of foreign policy, that Vietnam was likely to create a vast political backlash against the liberal McGovern forces. The two, relatively junior operators back then, were interested less in what had gone wrong in Vietnam than in getting some political benefit out of it. Cheney still speaks of Vietnam as a noble rather than a tragic endeavor, not that he felt at the time—with his five military deferments—that he needed to be part of that nobility.

Still, it is hard for me to believe that anyone who knew anything about Vietnam, or for that matter the Algerian war, which directly followed Indochina for the French, couldn’t see that going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet’s nest in the world. As in Vietnam, our military superiority is neutralized by political vulnerabilities. The borders are wide open. We operate quite predictably on marginal military intelligence. The adversary knows exactly where we are at all times, as we do not know where he is. Their weaponry fits an asymmetrical war, and they have the capacity to blend into the daily flow of Iraqi life, as we cannot. Our allies—the good Iraqi people the president likes to talk about—appear to be more and more ambivalent about the idea of a Christian, Caucasian liberation, and they do not seem to share many of our geopolitical goals.

The book that brought me to history some 53 years ago, when I was a junior in college, was Cecil Woodham-Smith’s wondrous The Reason Why, the story of why the Light Brigade marched into the Valley of Death, to be senselessly slaughtered, in the Crimean War. It is a tale of such folly and incompetence in leadership (then, in the British military, a man could buy the command of a regiment) that it is not just the story of a battle but an indictment of the entire British Empire. It is a story from the past we read again and again, that the most dangerous time for any nation may be that moment in its history when things are going unusually well, because its leaders become carried away with hubris and a sense of entitlement cloaked as rectitude. The arrogance of power, Senator William Fulbright called it during the Vietnam years.

I have my own sense that this is what went wrong in the current administration, not just in the immediate miscalculation of Iraq but in the larger sense of misreading the historical moment we now live in. It is that the president and the men around him—most particularly the vice president—simply misunderstood what the collapse of the Soviet empire meant for America in national-security terms. Rumsfeld and Cheney are genuine triumphalists. Steeped in the culture of the Cold War and the benefits it always presented to their side in domestic political terms, they genuinely believed that we were infinitely more powerful as a nation throughout the world once the Soviet empire collapsed. Which we both were and very much were not. Certainly, the great obsessive struggle with the threat of a comparable superpower was removed, but that threat had probably been in decline in real terms for well more than 30 years, after the high-water mark of the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962. During the 80s, as advanced computer technology became increasingly important in defense apparatuses, and as the failures in the Russian economy had greater impact on that country’s military capacity, the gap between us and the Soviets dramatically and continuously widened. The Soviets had become, at the end, as West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt liked to say, Upper Volta with missiles.

At the time of the collapse of Communism, I thought there was far too much talk in America about how we had won the Cold War, rather than about how the Soviet Union, whose economy never worked, simply had imploded. I was never that comfortable with the idea that we as a nation had won, or that it was a personal victory for Ronald Reagan. To the degree that there was credit to be handed out, I thought it should go to those people in the satellite nations who had never lost faith in the cause of freedom and had endured year after year in difficult times under the Soviet thumb. If any Americans deserved credit, I thought it should be Truman and his advisers—Marshall, Kennan, Dean Acheson, and Chip Bohlen—all of them harshly attacked at one time or another by the Republican right for being soft on Communism. (The right tried particularly hard to block Eisenhower’s nomination of Bohlen as ambassador to Moscow, in 1953, because he had been at Yalta.)

After the Soviet Union fell, we were at once more powerful and, curiously, less so, because our military might was less applicable against the new, very different kind of threat that now existed in the world. Yet we stayed with the norms of the Cold War long after any genuine threat from it had receded, in no small part because our domestic politics were still keyed to it. At the same time, the checks and balances imposed on us by the Cold War were gone, the restraints fewer, and the temptations to misuse our power greater. What we neglected to consider was a warning from those who had gone before us—that there was, at moments like this, a historic temptation for nations to overreach.

David Halberstam was a Vanity Fair contributing editor and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Best and the Brightest and The Fifties. He was killed in a car accident on April 23.